Patrick Carney and Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys reject industry trends, calling Grammy voting arbitrary and streaming metrics flawed—like Rihanna’s outsized royalties or Spotify’s equalized payouts. Their DIY ethos, from $145 Akron rent to Radio Shack microphones, contrasts with exploitative label practices, like Warner Brothers dropping Carney’s uncle for selling just 5,000 copies. Early touring struggles, including payphone reliance and girlfriend drama, forged their bond, while Carney’s panic attacks—hypnotized away but still triggered by chaos—highlight the toll of fame. They critique festivals like Woodstock’s commercialism and Twitter mobs’ immaturity, emphasizing artistic integrity over metrics or gimmicks. [Automatically generated summary]
I know, but I had a baby coming and I just set a date.
No books, no anything, no pills.
I set a date and I bought a 12-pack of beer and four packs of cigarettes and went into my studio and just smoked every cigarette and drank every beer and just felt like shit on purpose knowing that I wouldn't want a cigarette and I never smoked a cigarette.
I mean, chicken parmesan tastes a lot better when you're not smoking cigarettes.
It's like, you know, I don't know, you have kids.
I had my first kid last year and you end up, you go through that, you know, I think most people go through it and you just realize like, oh shit, like I'm almost, I'm 39, I gotta stick around for this kid and cut the bullshit.
I feel like every once in a while, it'll be in a situation where I'm like, oh man, I actually really do...
Want a cigarette, but instantly I'm like, that will mean for me buying a whole pack, being right back on it.
Although I was like, well maybe I'll give myself one weekend a year and just torture myself and allow myself to look forward to that one weekend a year, smoke some cigarettes.
I mean, and then it's like, it's because it's fun, and if I could do it for one weekend, it'd be less harmful than every day.
Yeah.
I mean, everybody has addictions.
Everyone's full of addictions.
Whatever it is, like, I'm addicted to sleep.
I think that's my biggest addiction.
I'm like, that was my biggest fear, really, about having a child.
Like, how am I going to sleep?
What the fuck?
You know what I mean?
Like, freaking out.
And to this day, I'm like, I get up to take my stepdaughter to school at, like, 7, and then I'm like, I come back in the house, and I just sneak back into bed.
And I try to avoid having to wake up to take care of the baby.
The cigarette one's so weird, because if you think how many people are doing it right now, listening to this, smoking a cigarette, and all of them know it's bad for them.
But everyone's just drawn to it.
It's just so weird, and it kind of represents that you're having fun.
It represents that you're, you know, you're free, doing whatever the fuck you want, smoking a cigarette, I know it's bad, shut up.
But it is like, okay, it's like, I'm telling myself and everybody around me, like, fuck off for however long I have this time to myself.
You know what I mean?
So it is like, there's that aspect to it.
And I don't know.
I mean, I think that if you marketed cigarettes right, man, you could get every motherfucker smoking because you could just say, like, it's like the new cacao nib.
I'm just saying, man, that the thing about the Tesla and all these electric cars is I think that they're really smart and cool, but the idea of having to filter all these rare earth minerals into one place, not much.
Well, because you're filtering the heaviest metals down.
I don't know if you've ever been to...
There's a town, what's it called?
Yeah.
Jerome, Arizona.
My wife's from Sedona.
And near there, there's this little mining town called Jerome.
It's a really cool touristy spot.
But there's this giant slag hill.
I mean, it's massive.
And it's just like all of the shit that wasn't copper or gold or silver, but was heavier and sinking to the bottom when they're looking for that stuff.
And then they throw it.
And that's the kind of shit that's the rarest mineral stuff that they make, you know, cadmium and whatever else, lithium.
My grandpa was a landscaper, and he had a plastic bucket, and he would take the pesticides, and he'd fill the bucket with water, put the pesticide in, mix it with his hand every day.
Well, I've also heard that lung cancer, a lot of it, a lot of it is caused from, actually, the fertilizer used, which is, and when you, it's like a plummonium, the same shit they use to kill the Russian.
And the woman, literally the woman that was beating my heart, like, I can't get this other...
I think I got it right.
The EKG thing.
I was like...
So, my heart looks good.
It looks really good.
And then I did some blood work, and I'm like, yeah, it looks really good.
There's some high levels of this and that.
I was like, what's that?
We don't really know.
But just, we'll check in in a couple months.
And I was like, came back.
I'm like, yeah, I think you've just gained some weight, but we're not really sure.
Like, basically, I don't know.
I mean, I've seen medicine save people's lives before.
And then I've seen also, like, it'd be like, you know, Basically, it feels like they still don't know what the fuck is happening in your body a lot of times.
Because, look, I had this person be like, look, if there's something that you really need to be stressing out about, I'll let you know.
But otherwise, I'll stress out for you.
I'm like, that's not how I work.
If I know that there's one thing that...
And like, you know, someone really close to me had a really severe life-threatening episode earlier this year that was very fucking traumatic for everybody involved, including myself.
And I ended up gaining like 20 pounds in a month, basically.
15 pounds from this.
And I haven't really been able to shake it.
And that's what led me to get this physical.
But watching this thing happen to this person, who's very close to me, was like...
I was like, what?
The bedside manner was just like insanity.
Because it was the first time I'd been in a real, someone that wasn't, didn't have like a long-term illness, just like life, it's life or death.
And it was like, there was no, there was no comforting.
It was like, oh yeah, at any minute, this person could die for like five days.
Man, for me, it's all about just being in the right headspace.
Yeah.
I mean, like, when we first started playing, we would play these indie rock clubs, you know, because we come from that background, like, I guess what they would call now hipster shit or whatever.
And that was just people who liked, you know, really passionate about certain types of music that wasn't massively appreciated, you know, which is still kind of what we're into.
But because of that, most of the people that would come into our shows were, like, the high-fidelity type record store clerk.
You know, you're playing a show, and it's just like...
Arms crossed.
Afterwards, pretty good.
We'd be 22-year-old kids, and the gatekeepers were like 30, 32-year-old.
Now I would look at them as maybe being like...
You know, more supportive, but at the time it felt more like judging.
So if I get in the wrong headspace, then I'm out on stage and I'm like, oh man, everyone's here to judge us or something.
You know what I mean?
Like if you're looking at this big crowd, but then I ultimately do, I ultimately tell myself, I was like, the worst band of all time has probably played to more, you know, like some terrible menudo has played to more people.
You know what I mean?
Like, this isn't that many people.
Like, tonight we're playing the Wiltern.
There's like 3,000 people.
It's like, let's be honest, like, the worst stand-up comedian, like, I don't know.
I don't know, man.
Like, the fifth Jonas Brother could sell 5,000 tickets in L.A. probably.
No, I read this thing that Captain Beefheart, one of our favorite musicians, said, and it was like, if you think about what you're doing, you've already lost...
The battle.
The reality is that I don't need to think about, and I know Dan doesn't, we don't need to think about what we're doing.
So because we're not thinking about what we're doing, like, the trick is to stay in the moment with the music, but I can play and not think about it, and then I start thinking, like, what's that person fucking thinking about out there?
You know what I mean?
It's like, I'm like, I got this other conversation happening here, I'm like...
Dude, I didn't know what to do, because I didn't, like, a couple friends, and I'm like, man, just get some beta blockers.
Get some Valium.
Drink some beer.
I can't do any of that shit before I go on.
I can't be relying on that before I play.
So I was like, I got a recommendation to go see this hypnotist who specializes in quitting smoking and fear of flying and also stage fright.
There's a lot of actors who are going to do plays for the first time.
So I went to go see Carrie.
At his house, and we were playing some shows at the Palladium, and he did this thing, hypnotized me, and the second night, like, I went that first night we played, it was, like, better.
The second night we played, it was, like, pretty much gone, and then I woke up in the hallway of the Roosevelt Hotel in the stairwell in my underwear at, like, 7 in the morning.
And I'm literally in the staircase in my underwear at 7 in the morning.
I was like, okay, I had these thoughts that it was probably bullshit, or it's for people who have weak minds.
But it's a state that they can talk you into.
And someone who's really good, like Vinny, can talk you into this state, and then you're totally conscious, but you're definitely in this weird tunnel where you feel safe, like mentally safe.
But it was like, at the time, it just seemed like unnecessary stress.
And then, like, this whole...
All this, I think...
I had a couple of issues about the Grammys because the first time we ever went, we won two Grammys.
This is the weird thing.
We go and the awards that we're nominated for were given away at the pre-telecast.
This is the first time we were nominated for Grammys.
This is on our record Brothers.
So we're there like February 2011. And my brother Michael was nominated for a Grammy for a record cover of the year for our record.
So Mike wins a Grammy first, right off the bat, first award of the day, record cover.
Mike wins.
It gets down to the rock category.
We win rock performance of the year or something.
We go in the Staples Center conference area, wherever we go, collect our award, and we're standing on the side of the stage, and they say, next up are the rock song of the year.
They list all the nominees, including us.
So we stay there because we're all nominated for this award.
And also Neil Young for whatever song.
So Neil Young wins that.
And they're like, this is Neil Young's first Grammy Award.
And at that moment, I was like, what the fuck?
My brother Michael has had a Grammy longer than Neil Young.
I'm like, that's so fucking crazy.
I'm like...
Us two knuckleheads have too.
And then we go and we win a Grammy right after him.
We win Alternative Album of the Year.
So now we have more Grammys than Neil Young within 10 minutes.
Jesus.
And I was like, this is all kind of fucking insane, isn't it?
Like, none of it makes sense.
I started looking, none of my favorite bands have fucking Grammys.
Because this is what the apprehension I have about the Grammys is like this day ended with us going back to the hotel we were staying at, which at the time was the Chateau, Marmont.
And TMZ was there.
And it popped out.
Like we tried to like just avoid the – Warner Brothers has a party there.
We're trying to avoid all of that stuff just to go hang out with our friends.
And a camera little like bumps out at the liquor locker right there on the corner.
And the guy asked me, he's like, how do you feel about Justin Bieber not having a Grammy?
And I was just like, I'm sitting there thinking about the Clash.
You know what I mean?
And like Justin Bieber, he's got – I'll like – I'll sell him my Grammys for all the money he has.
Basically what I'm trying to say is like the motherfucker should be happy just to have a fucking career.
I said something like that.
And I wasn't, it was just like, I'm not, you know, it wasn't even like necessarily a knock on Justin Bieber.
It's just like, that's my response to the question.
I'm thinking about something else and I'm getting in the car and we leave and then the next morning I wake up to a tweet.
This is right at the height of the anti-bullying shit too, which is like, you know, Justin Bieber like, don't bully motherfuckers.
He's like, the drummer from the Black Keys should get slapped.
Our record advance for this record was less than that.
So I was like, if Dan and I were just on our own record label, we could give ourselves $5 per ticket and we just take the money from the right hand to the left hand, give you a link, if you counted it, we get the sale, we keep the money.
That's basically what the fuck was going on.
You know what I mean?
And it's all based on fear, like all of this shit.
It's like, do you want to be relevant?
You know, that's basically a conversation that is basically being had.
Not that direct, but it's like, as an artist, you better try to get good numbers, get that first week up there.
And Dan and I are basically like, fuck that.
Fuck it.
It doesn't even fucking matter.
People are going to come to the shows or they're not going to come to the shows.
We're going to make records.
People are going to buy them or they're not going to buy them.
And I think that it's detrimental to the music industry.
To pay too close attention to certain metrics, man, the whole system right now with these majors is signing shit that has the most social media interaction, the most streaming.
And I was like, you know what?
When I was nine years old, I bought Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby.
And I listened to that shit, I'm not joking, like 250 times in a week.
Like a fucking idiot.
I think that's who's listening to this shit that's getting a billion streams in a month.
It's like fucking nine-year-old morons.
I like to think that our fans have like, you know, they got like...
150 albums that they listen to on a sort of rotation, at least.
And ours may be one of them a month.
You know what I mean?
So it's a different fucking audience.
You know what I mean?
You look at Instagram and you see these certain people.
But that's the problem, is that there are two different things at play here.
There's the music industry itself, which is like, certain people who work in the industry, high ups, are like, we need to sell records, we need to We need, like, this pop producer to work with this writer and this artist, and we need streaming numbers.
And then there's certain people, you know, like the old guard, like the Lenny Warnaker or Seymour Stein or, you know, even lots of younger guys, too.
But, you know, they're like, actually, what we're doing is curating art that we really like.
And it's either going to sell or it's not going to sell.
And a lot of the records that we grew up listening to, most of them, We're records made by these kind of insanely eccentric, weirdo people that never sold records, but have literally changed our lives.
And Captain Beefheart being one of them.
Tom Waits has sold some records, but still, it's a much different type of commercial viable thing.
But these artists are why we make music.
It has nothing to do with this shit.
It's like the difference between the Vogue's, you know what I mean?
And the Fug's.
There's a lot of these comparisons that you can make about what we do.
And our place in the music industry is to do what we do.
And for a while, we were taking part in the mainstream aspects of music.
We were playing the MTV Movie Awards and having these insane, weird experiences only because we hadn't done it before.
We felt like we had to do it.
And I wouldn't change anything, but at this point, I think steering is far away from all that shit is what we want to do right now.
You know, it's great that you openly talk about having these panic attacks because there are so many kids that I'm sure who are huge fans of yours who also have panic attacks and they can't fucking believe that you guys, with your level of success, could still have these little battles that we've all had.
So that's so huge that you're willing to talk about that and say that.
I'm telling you, that is definitely going to make an impact on people.
I eat the rest of this thing, this massive ass thing, and I just instantly start sweating, and it smells like portobello mushrooms seeping from my skin.
And I yell to the driver, I'm starting to spin out, I'm like, how do you get this to stop?
He turns around, he only wore black and his shades on, and I really thought at the time he was like Satan, he was like, drink loads of beer!
We're like, what the fuck?
And then I'm just like, in the back, just like, fucking like, freaking out for like two hours.
And then we get out, and I'm like, I just need some fresh air, man.
I'm like, we stop at this gas station in Belgium, and I walk into the bathroom with Dan, and they're like, this woman's speaking in French, basically saying it costs...
I was like, what the fuck?
What's happening?
Dan's like, it costs money to pee here, bro.
And I'm like, what?
He's like, I know, man.
Is that crazy?
And I'm like, fucking freaking out.
And all I had was like 50 euros, and I put it on the tray, and Dan...
Grabs it and puts it in my pocket and then puts a nickel there.
But, yeah, you think that that was the first one, and then from then it maybe has opened up the door, and because you had one, it makes it easier to have another one?
If you can get a good one, a good person who can hypnotize you can put you in a state of mind and sort of change your course, just give you a little adjustment, adjustment in your perception, how you look at things.
It feels like you're in like a little bit of a tunnel.
He stepped out in a big way with that Napster thing.
It was an odd moment for everyone.
Because everyone was trying to figure out, what is this file sharing thing?
And then the music business, you guys felt it first.
You guys were the big hit, more than anything.
It's not the same to watch a movie on your TV. Even if you can download an illegal movie, I'm sure it'll have a little bit of a hit, but people want to go to the fucking movie theater.
But with your shit, once people start sharing things, you just get a file.
And everybody kind of just assumed...
Well, I mean, this is like this new frontier, and it's not really stealing.
You're just copying.
It's just you're not giving them money for it, but you're not really stealing.
Got this weird sort of...
And Lars was the first guy to say, hey, fuck you, you're stealing.
But it was a weird fight to have.
Because it's, you know, hindsight is always 20-20.
We know what the internet has become since then.
It's incredibly difficult to try to keep a rap on things and to keep things, to, like, keep someone from downloading things.
Like, they just get...
If you have songs, they get out there.
You know?
Whereas that Napster thing was the first time this was happening, and he was the guy who was this really, really wealthy guy who was a huge success saying, don't do this.
They gave us like a couple hundred thousand dollars of it out of the billion because they paid it to us in the way the label does.
They paid it as an artist royalty and they took all these deductions off of it and it was a made-up number.
There's a lot of money in the music industry right now.
And the problem is that it's like not like, okay, so my favorite bands for the most part don't have hit songs.
They don't get played on K-Rock.
They don't have like a Macarena type shit that's going to be coming their way.
You know what I mean?
And that's what pays money is like because they treat almost every stream the same.
It's like there's a royalty rate for if you pay for Spotify and there's a royalty rate for if you're listening on a free service.
But what they need to do, in my opinion, is they need to say, this guy, Joe listens to music.
He has good taste in music.
He follows 500 bands, which means that there's no possible way that he's going to be listening to all 500 of those bands in even a six-month period of time.
But when he does choose to listen to a song, it's worth, like, X... Like, 10x versus this person who's listening to Old Town Road a thousand times a day.
You know what I mean?
Because Joe is, like, actually engaging with our thing and not just streaming this song for free.
And, like, a monkey, like...
You know, like a Pavlov, you know, whatever.
Mouth salivating every time they hear the little Old Town Road, whatever.
I look at my Spotify thing, and I'll go months...
And I have all...
I pay for all of them.
I have, like...
YouTube, Apple, whatever.
I don't have title, but that's because they gave ownership to like 12 artists and they're like, fuck you.
What the fuck is that?
Just keep the ownership and pay a higher royalty, you fucking cocksuckers.
You know what I mean?
Honestly.
So I'm like, so anyway, I look at my Spotify, I listen to like, I listen to like 100 songs a month.
It's barely anything.
And I'm like, the way to really do this that's fair is you take my 10 fucking dollars, right, and listen to 100 songs, that's it, because I've got so many ways to listen to music, that you listen, you take that 10 songs, and you give everybody 10 cents.
But that's not the way they do it.
They're like, we pay.000567 cents per stream.
How could you fucking know what you pay for a stream if you're a distribution service?
Do you see what I'm saying?
If I'm giving you $10 and you're going to take 30% off the top, like Apple Music used to do when you would buy a CD, and then you take $7 and throw it towards the artist, that would make sense to me.
But they don't.
They're keeping all this fucking cash.
Or they're keeping it in a pile.
And then at the end of the day, they're just satiating Rihanna's $100 million check she gets every year.
You know what I mean?
But I know a lot of artists who just, they get checks for like $2.50 for a whole year.
On a record that normally would sell like five or six thousand copies, but there's no need, like you have to basically be an idiot to buy a CD nowadays.
Because it's a digital file that you ultimately could download from Spotify onto your phone and have it with you forever.
If you're in Alaska or North Dakota, maybe you need to have a CD. So few people are printing CDs, then it boils down to how much of an infrastructure do you need as an artist?
How many people do you need to be representing you?
How does your stuff get out there?
Especially with you guys, doesn't it just get out there?
I just found out about you guys because somebody tweeted it.
I think in a way, it's like, when we first started, Our first record deal was with a small label not far from where we are here.
And the deal was this.
Give us 12 songs.
Pay for the recording yourself.
We'll master it, which is the final process of making a record.
It costs a couple hundred bucks.
And we'll send you 50 albums and we'll give you like 12% of the money we make.
That was it.
Oh, and we're going to have a $500 marketing budget.
That was the deal.
You know what I mean?
So we basically, I mean, we made this record, paid for it ourselves, and we went on tour with this agent named Ralph Carrera, booked us a tour, like kind of a mercenary agent who would like book, he booked, the label I think paid him a couple hundred bucks to book us his tour.
And it all kind of started steamrolling, you know what I mean?
But we had no infrastructure, we had no management, we had no agent, we had nothing.
We just kind of got in the van and started going.
And I think in a lot of ways nothing has changed except for that when we got to the second level, there was a couple thousand dollars there for us to make a record.
There was opening slots that touring was a little bit different then.
But I think we've always kind of done it in a way that was pretty DIY. It's the same way it has to function now.
The only difference is there's fewer record labels that are going to sit there and give you $15,000 to make a record and maybe give you $10,000 to help you buy a band.
And that's the hardest step.
That's the threshold where bands are having a hard time getting through.
Once you get through there, then you get to where we were for years, which is you're on a bigger label, you're making records, and no one's paying attention to you.
The only reason why we ended up getting attention paid to us, I think, by Warner Brothers was for our six record brothers.
It was kind of a heavy time.
I just turned 30. Dan just turned 30. And you know, when you turn 30, it feels like you've gotten old.
You know what I mean?
Especially in the rock and roll business.
And we had this record that I thought was great, and I went to talk to Lior Cohen with our manager.
Lior was one of the heads of Warner Brothers, and I was like, we're the most synced band on Warner Brothers, which is when you get a song on a TV show or a movie or a commercial.
I think there's no other band for the last two years that's had as many syncs as we've had.
But I don't even know who works the radio department at Warner Brothers.
And we've been on your label for like four or five years.
And Lior basically was like, fuck, he prioritized us like that week.
And for the first time was like, we're going to work on your band.
And when that happened, that's when the Lollapalooza shit, that's when radio, K-Rock, everything fucking changed.
You know what I mean?
It took us six albums and it took us all those syncs, all that shit, all getting called sellouts all the time for a while.
That's why, like, it's dangerous to have your song in certain things.
Like, if your song comes on...
In Walgreens, you better watch out, man.
Like, that's a red flag.
Because we've had opportunities to have our songs sent to, like, top 40 radio.
And there was this thing where, like, if we won Record of the Year for Lonely Boy, Warner Brothers was going to service that song to top 40. It would have never probably been a hit.
But if we would have won that Grammy, it could have fucked our whole band up.
A couple years ago, I did this record with this guy from Cleveland, Ohio.
Named Glenn Schwartz, this guitar player.
I used to go see Glenn when I was in high school, when I was 17. He played at this place called Hoople's in Cleveland, Ohio.
And it was just a tiny little place.
He was the original guitar player in the James Gang.
So, like, Joe Walsh says he first saw him in, like, 65 or something, and he was, like, on somebody's shoulders in purple bell-bottoms, no shirt, playing electric guitar solo.
And he said, Joe Walsh said, that guy made me want to play electric guitar.
Wow, that's cool.
And this guy, I used to go see him all the time and he would play these songs, which happened to be religious, which is just like another story, but it sounded like cream, crazy guitar.
Anyway, two years ago I had him at the studio and...
All these memories were flooding back of all this heavy electric guitar and seeing Link Wray in Cleveland, Ohio and playing in the basement with Pat.
And it was all at the same time.
And all of the sounds from the first Black Keys records were coming out of this...
He's almost like 80 years old playing this fiery electric guitar.
And it was just like...
It's who he was and he helped me become who I am.
And as soon as I finished that record, I called Pat and we made this new one.
And it was with that spirit.
And it was just the two of us.
And we never even talked about working with it.
We didn't even talk about it.
We just put it in the books and we got together.
Because I knew that we...
I always know, no matter what happens, Pat and I can make music.
Most of the stuff that, you know, that's what's important about music is it's just to do what you are good at, what you feel, what you connect to.
And I think that, I guess that's ultimately what I'm trying to say is that it's always been this way where it's like there's always been this noise of like, you know, annoying, bad kind of mainstream music.
And the problem is that because everything is getting streamed on the same platform and there's There's less independent record stores.
There's no college music journal.
Everything's kind of compared to it.
You listen to the new Purple Mountains record, which is a guy who unfortunately passed away this summer, a friend of ours, David Berman.
I mean, I think it's maybe his greatest work, right?
And the record has maybe a million streams or something.
And compared to...
Whatever Drake is doing, it gets lost.
It's completely lost.
I think that there needs to be a better way to highlight this stuff.
It's still crazy to me that there isn't a website that I can go to as a crazy music fan that I think is curating music that I actually want to hear.
We both have really open minds when it comes to music, but there isn't one thing that's just highlighting stuff from the underground, from mid-level rock bands.
Like, the way that they've programmed the four or five rock channels.
Like, there's a channel on there called The Spectrum.
Dan has a show on there.
And it's like the AAA channel, which would be like KCRW here, or whatever.
Like, the morning becomes eclectic.
I'm trying to think what song it was exactly that I heard, but they started tapping in.
This should be a format that's highlighting...
I think music that's current, music that's coming out, you know what I mean?
And they were playing a couple of U2 songs on there the other day.
I'm like, this is a band that plays the Rose Bowl.
Why the fuck are you playing them on the fucking AAA, you fucking asshole?
You know what I mean?
I was like, seriously.
And then I go and I look to the alternative station, and the alternative station is playing pop music.
You know what I mean?
Like literally pop music.
And then you go to the alternative channel and they're playing like five or six artists or the indie channel.
There's like, there isn't, there's like almost, there's, I don't know.
There's like underrepresentation of, of, of, uh, I mean, let me put it this way.
I went to France this summer for a month.
I always wanted to take this trip.
My family and I, we went to the south of France, rented a car.
And I decided, I didn't even hook my phone up to the car for weeks.
I just, right when I turned it on, I scanned the radio and I heard a song I liked.
And I was like, what the fuck is that?
On this channel called Radio Nova, which is a nationwide, not digital, terrestrial station in France.
I heard this song.
I was like, what is that, man?
I was like, oh man, that's like a new song by Damon Albarn from Blur, from a record called Africa Express.
I never heard.
It's amazing, this song.
How is that not playing anywhere in America?
I listened to this channel every day for the whole trip and every single day I heard maybe two songs in like 21 days that I knew.
It was all new.
It was all current.
Some of it was classic.
Even the classic stuff.
It was like a Janis Joplin song I'd never heard.
It was like true.
I felt like I entered a different dimension.
And I came back to the U.S. and I put on my satellite radio.
I was like, why am I hearing the same fucking bullshit There's so much good shit out there.
And even when I go to the algorithm, my algorithm on a...
I was sitting with this guy named John Vanderslice the other day, who's a well-known indie producer.
We were looking at our algorithms, our predetermined Spotify thing.
And every single thing was something that I had listened to already, except for one artist.
And it was something I didn't even care for.
Like, with all the technology, with all the ways to hear all the millions of songs on Spotify, they still haven't figured out how to satiate someone's desire to hear new music.
Do you think it's because they try to program those channels strictly to be commercially viable?
They just want to make money from it, and they feel like if they put U2 or an old Elton John song on it, and you're flipping through the channels, you'll stay on it, even if it doesn't match the format that you're looking for.
Well, they should have a better social media, so they don't have to think about that.
So when they find a new artist that's great, you pump up their social media with your social media, and then you put them on your network and people tune in.
And if you have a trustworthy list of people, if you continue to recommend really good artists, they go, oh, holy shit!
I think that it, you know, there's a couple of these kind of like, I don't want to name names because I don't want to talk shit about it, but it's like this form of music that I, it's like pop, rap.
That it's always like some white dude with tattoos all over his fucking face that just came out of nowhere.
And it's always like...
Their social media is always like, man, I've cleaned up my act.
I'm so glad to be alive.
I'm bringing new music to you soon.
But that never had a hit.
But they have like 500,000 likes on this shit.
And you go look at who's liking it, it's all like mindless...
Kids.
You know what I mean?
Not to say that that's bad, but I'm saying like, you can't as an adult, like, programming a radio station, look at that and be like, this means something.
You know what I mean?
I mean, honestly, if you go back to 1991, right, to when Nirvana's Nevermind came out, The equivalent of social media, they didn't have shit going on.
They had a fucking song that just knocked everybody across the fucking face.
And because the programmers are looking at these other dumb metrics, they're not going to get that song across.
I mean, the Billie Eilish thing is pretty cool, actually.
But I think there's a Billie Eilish to be found every month.
You know what I mean?
It's not that.
There's so much good music.
And to have to go to France to hear American music on the radio is insane.
So then I drop out and I had this whole other experience.
But fast forward to 2014. We're on tour.
We're about to go to Pittsburgh.
I'm talking to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
And I'm like, oh yeah, man, I love Pittsburgh.
From Akron, two hours away.
I actually used to live there.
I went to this school.
Actually, it's one of the biggest scams of all fucking time.
And they're like, what school?
Artists in Pittsburgh.
And it became local news for weeks.
Like...
So I just did a pre-tour interview with the same writer a couple weeks ago.
He's like, hey man, remember that interview we did about, you were talking about talking shit on Art Institute of Pittsburgh?
I was like, yeah, he's like, they went out of business.
And like, literally, they kind of hold you accountable for it.
And I'm like, how does a college go out of business?
Because they're scamming fucking kids.
It was a scam.
A lot of colleges are fucking scam.
Wow.
I know I had a relative who was going to...
I've paid for a lot of fucking liberal arts schools.
You would be surprised how much I've paid for.
I never went to a school.
I help out family members and shit.
I've paid for a year at Oberlin, which is not fucking cheap.
I should get a fucking honorary degree from this shit.
I've paid for this shit.
I don't have a fucking education.
I got asked to pay for some of Lewis and Clark, you know, and it's fucking $60,000 a year school in Portland.
Man, there's a school called Oberlin, Super Liberal Arts School, really cool radio station, a lot of cool people go to the conservatory, you know, man, but very liberal school.
And Dan and I are pretty liberal motherfuckers, you know, and it's not far from Akron.
And I'm like, as I'm mad, I'm like, I don't mean to sound this irritated.
I don't know why I do.
I just don't mean to sound that irritated.
I really don't care as much as I sound.
But I need to show you that there's other stuff to do, and you guys should be hanging out.
And then, like, it was weird, because I was telling them, like, you know, when I was a kid, we used to watch Troll 2, and, like, we would have sleepover, watch Troll 2, and make fun of it.
So I'm like, I go up there, like, late at night, like, one in the morning, they're all watching Troll 2, but the thing is, like, they're deep into the movie.
I'm like, oh my god, we always turned it off after the first hour.
unidentified
You guys, I forgot to tell you, you guys are gonna warp your brains watching all of Troll 2. I've never seen Troll 2. I only saw Troll 1. What's the difference?
Well, you know how the secret knowledge of things, like videos getting passed around before YouTube, and it's no different than music was the same way.
Well, we did, but oddly, Pat and I had a connection to the real music business, both in our family.
My cousin was Robert Quine, a guitar player, who played with Lou Reed and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, one of the first punk guitar players, really influential, and then Pat's uncle's Ralph Carney, saxophone player, played on all the Tom Waits records, B-52 records, all kinds of records.
Well, that's why someone who doesn't understand anxiety is never going to understand how a person like you, with all that success, could still get weirded out.
Do you know?
I mean, that's what makes it interesting, the managing of the mind.
But you watch a band like Devo, though, I was going to say get to L.A. and whatever happened there, the change that happened.
I mean, that's been something that Dan and I have been actively trying to avoid is that kind of thing.
But yeah, that's like, I go home to Akron, I fully accept and know that I'm going to get made fun of for certain things.
I mean, I'm going to, like a real individual, get my shit thrown at me by my friends and they're going to make fun of me for whatever.
And Rightfully so.
But yeah, Akron, I mean, Ohio and the Midwest, it's an inspiring place because it kind of is a vacuum and the people who are operating there, like 99% of them are operating just because they have no other choice and they love doing what they're doing.
Music-wise.
So you go to New York the first time and it's like, you know, the smallest little band has a connection to the biggest producer and it's like that here too, you know?
Like, if you end up signing a major label, like, look, we almost signed, we got some offers early on to sign to major labels.
Early on.
And we did not do it.
Mostly because we kept being strung along.
The contract would be there in a week.
A week would pass.
It wouldn't show up.
Two weeks would pass.
We'd call.
It'll be there next week.
Finally, we were like, fuck this.
We realized at the age of 22, we realized if we signed this shit and they can't get a contract to us to even look at in six weeks, if we make a record, we're going to be so fucking logjammed.
We're never going to be able to do this shit.
So we took the gamble and we signed with the small indie and just kept fucking going.
And when we finally went to a major, it was a subsidiary of a major with a really supportive president and we were kind of on the outside still.
Even though we were inside, we were on the outside.
And we were able to do our thing.
We've never had an A&R guy sit around and tell us to speed a song up or whatever.
But the problem is, if you get in without having some of those boxes ticked, and you get in, you sign a big record deal off the bat, some fucking dumbass who has a communications degree from, like, fucking Pepperdine is going to be sitting down next to you and be like, I think the hi-hat's too loud, bro.
I mean, K-Rock can't play that.
This guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
That right there, when you get those notes coming from some dude that's your A&R guy that doesn't really know what he's doing.
I mean, there are good A&R guys, but most of them are these types of dudes.
And they'll be like, yeah, man.
And it's basically what they are doing right then when they're getting it in your head and be like, You gotta change the hi-hat on the mix, man.
What they're saying is, when this record fucking fails, and I can't deliver any sort of fandom to you, that I'm gonna say that you turned the hi-hat down too low.
Or, I turned the hi-hat, you didn't turn it down low enough.
There's all cop-outs everywhere.
And the only way to get through that is to...
We learned how to make records ourselves in a basement.
We had a tape machine, a $100 tape machine, and Radio Shack microphones, and we recorded our first record like that.
We did our second record like that, our third record like that, our fourth record like that.
And finally, we...
We went into the studio with Danger Mouse, and we knew how to run a mixing desk.
You know what I mean?
We knew what we liked.
So if someone came in that wasn't Danger Mouse, or one of the mixing engineers we've worked with, if someone came in and said the kick drum sounds like shit, we'd be like, fuck off.
We know what a kick drum can sound like.
We've been doing this.
And I think basically, if you can spend the time, get the time.
That's why back in the day, it's like, A band takes years to develop.
It took us eight years before we got us on the radio of actively making records and touring.
And a lot of this stuff is set up with labels where they want a hit on the second record.
I'm married to a woman who sold millions and millions of albums of songs that she wrote.
And when she turned in an Americana record, Like, Warner Brothers gave her such the runaround, they shelved the record that cost 800 grand to make.
Dude, I think there's a lot of good records, but I also think, I think there's a lot of records that started off really good, and then some Pepperdine dude is like, remix this, you need to remix it, you need to add this, you need to do this, do this.
Some dude just guessing, you know?
It's like, it's not hard to just guess.
It's like, if you're looking at remodeling your kitchen, and you're an idiot, you just be like, Put the stove here.
Oh, not fucked up.
Put it over to the left, actually.
You know what I mean?
But if you're really a producer or musician that makes records and you turn in a record, it's so frustrating when you get someone that doesn't know what they're doing coming back like, oh, maybe you should do this.
I actually had that happen to me.
There's this band called the Sheepdogs, this Canadian band that actually, this record ended up going platinum in Canada.
And in the U.S., it never even got pushed to radio.
Not even one song.
But this guy, Chad Blake, who Dan and I work with all the time, who's mixed our last four records, he mixed this record.
If you're an A&R guy, right, you're getting like probably six figures.
You report to a senior A&R who reports to a vice president who reports to the president.
And if you stick your neck out and you say, I want to take a million dollars from the fucking machine.
And I bet it all on this band.
Or even a quarter million dollars.
The odds of any band making it are like probably one in a hundred.
I'm talking about even breaking even.
So if you're only an idiot would ever really get behind a band that is unproven.
So your whole job is to deflect blame.
You know what I mean?
So that's what the problem is.
If I was going to sign a band and someone offered me, they said I had a million dollar budget to sign a new band, I also wouldn't give them all the money because there's no way I'd make it back.
And if you're lucky, Dan and I have lucked out, and then you look back and it's like, I don't even know how it happened.
There's all these other factors that come into it.
You go try to help a band, something that worked for us would never work for another band, so there's no formula to it.
It's really random.
It's similar to this shit.
This chick I know was talking about Ancestry.com and how she doesn't care about her ancestors.
I was like, you don't care about ancestors?
That's interesting because think about the odds of you existing.
You go back just 20 generations and Then that means that you have like over a million grandparents.
I think it's like two million grandparents in just 20 generations.
Think about all the fucking sperm and eggs and the odds of those, each one fucking happening.
It took two million people fucking and that happening over and over again to get to your ass.
You don't give a fuck about any of it.
Like, that's just fucking ignorant.
Honestly.
And if you want to buy into the Elon Musk simulation, remember this.
That means there's some motherfucker sitting at the simulation who made that motherfucker.
So it's like, you know what I'm saying?
Like, the simulation had to have been made by some motherfucker.
Like, there's always something deeper.
That thing about...
The thing about any...
It's unexplainable.
The fact that Dan and I grew up next to each other, the fact that we were close in age, the fact that we were able to put up with each other's shit and find each other amusing after 30 years of knowing each other, it's all fucking insane.
This same person was saying to me that they're an atheist.
I was like, that's fine.
You're allowed to believe that.
But you also have to accept that there's possibly that's not true.
And they're like, no, that's what I believe.
But then they went on to say that they believe in demons.
And I was like, you gotta...
My rationale about all this stuff is that it's simple.
I was talking to my stepdaughter, who's so smart and so sweet and really changed my life in a lot of ways.
We were swimming in the pool.
Talking about life.
It's one of these conversations.
She's like, do you think that there's a God?
She asked me.
And I said, well, we don't go to church or anything.
And I said, I said, I don't know.
But I was like, this is something interesting to think about.
I was like, whenever I think about that, I try to think about the end of the universe.
Like the very end.
Like the edge.
And I can't picture it.
I can't picture it.
I can't picture infinity.
I can't grasp that at all.
And the mere fact that we can't grasp infinity would lead someone like maybe Elon to believe that purposely that was left off in some sort of simulation or whatever.
But maybe that would be the argument.
I think that...
The fact that I can't picture it, maybe I'm just an idiot, but it makes it that I think that there's maybe something more...
I had this conversation with a guy who was actually an expert on it.
This guy Nick Bostrom.
He was trying to explain to me that because of probability, it's more likely...
Or very likely that we're in a simulation because of the probability of someone eventually creating it and that it's very possible that we're in it right now and more probable than not.
This is what I know for sure, by my own experiences, that we are the only people on this planet that have ever gotten to 2019. This is where we are.
We know there's a history behind us.
We know that this is the peak.
You walked in at a freaky time, my man.
We're at 2019 right now.
We know we exist.
We know we have culture.
We know we have incredible technology.
We don't have any idea if we're the only ones.
It's likely that there's other life forms out there.
It's likely there's other intelligent life out there.
But there might not be.
It might be that this is a crazy situation that happens incredibly rarely where you have a planet that's this close to the Sun where these life forms figure out how to fuck with matter in an incredible way and they start flying and sending things through the air that videos that instantly get to your phone.
This might not ever happen.
This might only happen here.
It might happen here and in versions of here, which if you believe in infinity, you have to believe there's infinite versions of this.
So there's infinite versions of life.
So it's almost built in mathematically that infinity is so big, there's so many possibilities that everything that you've ever recorded has also been recorded by you in another place with infinite variations of each individual song, infinite variations of each album, that there's infinite versions and that infinite versions of each version And so it's insane, the whole thing's impossible for our little ant brains to wrap around it.
That's possible, too.
It's not unlikely that it's a simulation.
I mean, it's possible it's a simulation.
But it's also possible that this is as far as anything's ever gotten.
Because we know this is as far as we've ever gotten.
How can you dig tunnels under LA, make batteries, make solar panels, make electric cars, make rockets, shoot them into space, plan to colonize Mars, like what?
I have this dream where it's reoccurring where I'm in a house that I'm vaguely familiar with, but there's all these additions that I discover, and they're usually either really rickety and dangerous or really beautiful and completely need to be fixed up and covered, like Scooby-Doo house type thing.
Last night I had this dream where I was in a house I used to own with my wife and...
There was a home invasion, and I had something that they needed, and they basically told me that if I had it hidden, and I said they were going to come back if I didn't give it to them.
They were going to kill me.
And I was trying to figure out how to keep this thing hidden.
Do you remember when there were certain stores that would have those little stations and you'd have a button and you had headphones and you could put the headphones on and listen to an album for a couple seconds?
It's just interesting to see how all this stuff shakes out 10 years from now.
Who's gonna be around?
What matters?
Back to my wife, Michelle Branch.
She sold millions of records.
She's an insanely talented individual, insanely amazing person.
Her audience was commercial radio, top 40. And the thing about Top 40 is it's like it's the same type of person that goes to watch whatever's popular on television or Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
Like someone who watches Keeping Up with the Kardashians is probably not familiar with Gilligan's Island.
You know what I mean?
And five years from now, when there's something different than keeping up with...
Well, probably not.
That show will probably still be around.
But you know what I'm saying.
They just...
It's like...
It's whatever's freshest and newest.
And so you end up...
If you end up developing a pop...
This is why we were talking about not wanting to get played on the radio.
It's because it's a different type of fan.
It's a less personal type of fan when you get played on Top 40. It's like...
You know when you go through...
When I would go through certain friends of mine's parents' records, they'd have all these records.
And they're like, Oh yeah, I used to listen to that, used to listen to that, used to listen to that.
And I go through Dan's dad's records or my dad's records, my dad would be still listening to that shit.
The point is that these people were buying like Billy Ocean records and my dad was buying like Cream records and he was a fan of music and this person was a passive pop fan.
And I think that what you're experiencing is when you try to compare pop Maybe some of this pop stuff has some sort of credibility because it's independent or whatever, but I think it's a very weird thing trying to figure it out.
I think booking a festival nowadays is probably fucking really crazy.
That's why the Woodstock thing, they didn't know what to do.
When we were told about the festival, it was like we were going to headline Saturday night.
When the lineup came out, it was like Chance the Rapper...
Us, and I forget who else was on it, but there were a couple people, there were like three headliners, and we're like, that's insane.
Like, what are you thinking?
You're going to sell 150,000 tickets at $700 a pop?
Fucking idiot.
Just do this.
Just do a festival for 30,000 people.
Do two festivals, two weekends.
Do a pop festival, do a rap festival, do a rock, do whatever it is.
But don't get, their obligation per night was like 10 million in guarantees or something.
You fucking dumbass.
You're like, I wonder why they fucked up.
I was like, well that guy fucked up the first Woodstock and 50 years later he hasn't fucking figured it out yet.
Is that 50 years?
He's like, well, you'll get it in 50 years, dude.
Mike, you'll get it.
50 years from now, you'll figure it out, buddy.
You know, it's like that idea of this repeating shit that doesn't make sense is like, we've all done it, but even Elon's done it.
The music business is set up the way it is because there are independent people who have made...
Very successful careers without having to engage the machine, right?
But traditionally if you wanted to sell out Madison Square Garden, traditionally, there are people like Fish or whoever who have done it based on the backs of whatever things that they've done.
But traditionally if you want to make a record and you want to get to Madison Square Garden, You need promotion.
You need radio.
You need exposure.
You need publicity.
Now, almost all of that stuff you can get for free if you have enough bullshit up your sleeve on social media.
And you can get enough 13-year-olds streaming your shit.
You get to fuck MSG without a label, without a publicist, without any of that shit.
A band like us in the situation that we're in now...
We're in a position to be able to look at the music industry and be like, this is just crazy that we're paying this person this much money to do what they're doing.
This is fucking insane.
And we can really talk, have open conversations with people like, we're not giving Warner Brothers $5 a record to bundle this shit.
Because we're paying you to be on your record label so that we get a fucking number on SoundScan that ultimately you'll brag about.
Like, fuck all this.
Fuck it.
But no, but you can't do that.
That's a way that PowerStruck is still set up is that if you're on a label, most bands sign these record deals, they gotta give that fucking money back to the label.
It's a 360 deal.
They got fucking, not only that, but they get access to your ticket sales, like straight up, like profit.
That's why you'd see bands like, I don't know, fucking huge bands in the 70s, Bad Company or whoever, they would sell fucking huge ass fucking stadiums for like $3 a ticket, maybe have a bunch of support, sell a couple million records, find out the manager stole all the fucking money, write a memoir about it.
You know, it's like, I come from like an indie rock background, and it's always, it was sort of like, and Dan does too, and it's like, you know, when we were coming up, it was like, even kind of having any knowledge of the business, it was like, It was considered uncool.
But it's funny now where I'm just like realizing...
We took a break off the road for four years.
And when we came back three years after a break to make a record, it was like we had gleaned a lot of perspective.
And our conversations when we first started making this record, aside from like Watching the news and talking about that and making each other laugh and shit.
This band is something really fucking special.
The fact that we're sitting in this room 18 years after starting this band, And it fucking working out and we're fucking here.
We need to make sure that this band is always something that's fun and not a burden and not stressful.
It shouldn't be stressful.
It should be fun.
It's rock and roll.
You know what I mean?
And I think that we've been spending the last year figuring out how to make every decision that way.
So like, for instance, this show.
We were like, do you want to do this TV show?
This TV show.
No, we want to do it.
We both watched Joe Rogan, listened to Joe Rogan.
I happen to watch it.
We want to do Joe's You know what I mean?
That's what we want to do.
That's what's important to us.
We don't want to play Woodstock.
It's not important to us.
It doesn't speak to us.
These are the things we want to do.
And taking that type of position with the band and also looking at the business side of it and be like, this is fucking bullshit.
This is ridiculous.
What this band should be giving us is the ability to help other bands, which is what we do all day long when we're not touring.
I mean, in the last five years...
Dan's produced probably like 15 albums for other artists.
I've done a handful myself.
He has a label, puts out other people's music.
There's a lot of fucking work.
When we're not touring, we're still working on other music.
And the craziest thing is this.
We've sold millions of records.
We've made, between the two of us, something like 60 plus albums.
When I finished a record I'm really proud of and I sent it to Warner Brothers, the last time I did that, they didn't even fucking respond to the email.
When that shit happens to you, you know what you want to do?
Tell them to fuck themselves.
You know what I mean?
And right now we're in a situation where our record contract's done.
But what we need is we need people to work with people who understand that the Black Keys is very important to us, but it's also a vehicle that we can leverage to help our other artists when we're producing shit.
And it's so fucking infuriating.
To have been in this business for 20 years and honestly understand the business better than most fucking managers and be treated like dog shit by this person that you've made millions of dollars for.
Listen, you have the answer right in front of you.
You're a great talker.
If you just developed a podcast where you played new music and then talked shit the way you do now, it would be gigantic.
If you just go on the road, just do Pat and Dan, you can call it Pat and Dan on the road, and you guys just do it from your tour bus or wherever, you just wind him up, let him talk shit about things, and then play music, like music that you really enjoy.
If someone like Spotify wouldn't jump on something like that, they'd be crazy.
It's a great idea, and you could use it as a platform to help artists avoid the system entirely.
I think we're trying to figure out now is basically how to actually really work, again, truly independently.
You know what I mean?
Where it is something that we can figure out a way to actually do the things we're passionate about, which is a lot of it is making records and even to make a record and press it.
It's at least $10,000.
You know what I mean?
So, I guess what I was trying to say was you'd expect that someone would look at your work and respect it enough to kind of step in and help out.
Because it's not like you're asking for fucking millions of dollars a year to finance some shit.
You're asking for like a couple hundred grand.
But that's the problem with the music industry.
Is that certain labels are willing to give like...
A SoundCloud rapper, like $15 million.
But then they look at a band and they can't quantify their metrics, like maybe the Black Keys or whoever, and they don't give a shit.
We're like in the fucking top.001% of this shit and still fucking annoying every single fucking day.
The trick to the music industry is because if you really love music, like the way that Dan and I do, where it is still the thing that we're most passionate about.
Love music.
I only think about music.
Listen to it all day.
But yet, you have to find that fine line where you don't...
When you make a record you're really proud of and no one fucking hears it, and no one that works with you even responds to an email about it, you have to find that space where you don't want to kill everybody.
When I found this photograph that I just hung up on my road case of Dan and I playing one of our first shows, I'm like, oh, this is important.
I should make sure I have this hung up.
Because it just reminds me of all the fucking days that we spent like...
Being fucking miserable in a van because we love music so much we go play a show for fucking nobody and maybe make enough money to get like a Motel 6 room share a bed get up the next day and go to Waffle House and keep fucking doing it for years and years and years and years But it does take that type of motivation and it's frustrating when you do that and then you get to a point where it is the point that we're at and you feel like you've gotten really good at what you
do and you help another artist and you realize that after all that work, it's like the myth of Sisyphus.
It's like, oh, after all that work, it doesn't move the fucking clock at all.
Still, these same motherfuckers aren't fucking helping, you know?
And then you start realizing what really has made a difference.
I mean, I've heard people say, take credit for our success, say that it was because we played the Spike TV Video Game Awards.
But the point is that what actually moves the needle?
What actually moves the needle?
I was like, is it playing Colbert?
Is it playing these things?
I was like, I don't fucking know, man, because I watch baseball, and then I put on your podcast, and then I go to bed.
That's what I do in the evenings.
I don't know who watches that shit, but I know my stepdaughter doesn't watch that shit.
I know she doesn't even know how to work the fucking TV remote.
She watches YouTube all day.
You know what I mean?
The times are fucking changing, you know?
And I think that's the hard part, trying to pivot with it.
And I think if you're, it's like guys our age who are running these labels, looking at these view counts and this shit, and they're all fucking getting it wrong.
It's always been like that, ever since we were 16 and 17. Wow.
I've never really...
I don't think...
The older I get, the more I realize how special that is.
You know, I always took it for granted.
I mean, I remember when we were trying to audition bass players, we had this one guy try to come and play with us, and I just remember it just fucked everything up.
If I could go back in time and give our 22-year-old selves one piece of advice, it would be like, don't tour with your girlfriends until you have a kid and they can come out for a couple shows.
Just avoid that shit.
And also, probably, don't really have a girlfriend until you're in your late 20s, probably.
Dude, it's just a codependent motherfucker like me.
It was just really hard.
I've grown up a lot, you know what I mean?
But yeah, it's just hard.
The hard part is that I'm up for the work, and Dan's up for the work.
And when we're on tour, I go through periods of time where I get phone calls and be like, what the fuck are you doing, motherfucker?
You know, or, you know, like, I miss you, like, that guilt, or it's just like, I'm, like, literally in the back of a Ford Econo van, like, with, like, a torn-up copy of TV Guide, reading it for the fifth time, because we don't have any money, no cell phone, or, like, with a Nokia phone, like, getting the guilt trip and stuff.
It's like too real to even talk about.
Our first tour, I remember Dan having to stop at the payphone.
I think that's just where the uniqueness and the crazy thing about life is that certain things are rare.
It shouldn't be that crazy that a relationship like Dan and I is so rare, but it is.
There aren't that many of them.
Right.
I mean, there are a lot of friends who start off playing music, but most of those stories end in either just failure, giving up, hating each other, or some shit version of that.
But yeah, simulation.
The simulation, there has to be a simulator to play the simulation on, and that's the problem.
It could just be we're confused about what reality is in general.
It might be the reason why we think it's a simulation is because it exists in so many different planes and it's probably always shifting all around us all the time and some of the way you think does have some effect on the world itself.
Well, I used to wake up in the morning and Like, drink a cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette, play a video game, jam on my drums, drive around, hang out with my friends.
Now I wake up and I do so much shit, and none of it is necessarily stuff I want to be doing.
That I do think that there's no way we're in a simulation, because I would never fucking have simulated that.
But if you just decided that it was a simulation, and you said, well, I don't like this course, I want to shift some things about it, it would probably be easier to do if you knew it was a simulation than it would be to shift them in your own life.
If you're like, I'm doing too many things, I'm just going to take these, I'm going to phase these out and piss these people off.
It's a bummer to think that someone's getting divorced at 85, but then part of me goes, well, is it more of a bummer to be in a terrible relationship when you're 85?
It's probably a better relief.
Like, if you're fucking throwing in the towel at 85, you're done.
I mean, it's a really incredible film, the first half of it, the rest of it.
I would not recommend it.
Actually, Dan's brother, it all takes place in this town called Nilbog, which is even one of the best parts is that it takes place in a town called Nilbog and the little kid sees the sign in the rearview mirror and is like, Nilbog is goblin backwards.
So it's actually about goblins.
Troll 2 is about goblins.
So Dan's brother had the personalized plate, Ohio plate, that said Nilbog.
No, see, if you were gonna hack the CEO of the biggest fucking social media platform in the world, wouldn't you think there'd be a goddamn ruthless investigation?
But then, you know, the Justin Bieber thing happened and it was like, I just, I realized at that point, like, it's a real, like, A, these are all kids.
You know, that, of course, would never go on now, and I could see how somebody fight offended, but at the time, when I saw that for the first time when I was six or seven, like, you know, that was a different time.
Perfect Strangers is supposed to take place in the same universe as Family Matters, but I do think Sucks in the City takes place in the same universe as Doogie Howser.
What happens is typically a manager says, oh, you don't need to fucking fly private, dude.
You hub out of Jackson Hole on the West Coast, dude.
Yeah, it's fucking great.
The thing is that the manager is still getting the same cut of whatever you're making.
You're just spending all of your cash.
The most genius thing you can do in the music business, if you're a manager or business manager, is to get your client to spend all their money because they just have to work more.