Maynard James Keenan and Joe Rogan dive into his Arizona winery’s 80-acre vineyards, planted since 2003 with $30K/acre costs and wild ferments, contrasting cheap southern land ($10K–$15K) to Verde Valley’s premium prices ($50K–$100K). His pet nat sparkling wine uses Malvasia Bianca and Chardonnay, while psychedelic wine theories—like ergot in ancient Roman blends—spark debate. Keenan’s rural life, from falcon pest control to self-built cars, clashes with urban tech dependency, questioning progress’s unintended consequences. Meanwhile, Rogan pushes for MMA scoring reforms beyond boxing’s rigid 10-point system, praising Silva’s striking-grappling mastery. Their dialogue ties creativity, discipline, and skepticism of modern systems to timeless craftsmanship. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I want to learn it, but let me learn it when I'm going to spend three weeks on it and focused on it with somebody who understands the details, somebody who also understands the counters.
Because the counters end up being as important as understanding the actual...
But the beautiful thing about, especially that high level of MMA, is that somebody's going to figure out how to counter it or prevent it, and then it's gone.
I mean, for a while, all of a sudden, people were catching the Von Flu, and then all of a sudden, people were like, no, no, we're going to counter that now.
Like if you said, I want a guy who was a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, who's a genius, who fell in love with jujitsu and is dedicated to it so much so that he walks around with a rash guard every day.
The good thing about doing the gi is you must be defensively responsible.
Because you can't get out of stuff.
You can't just power out of things.
You know, like there's certain techniques that you just, you know, when you get trapped in them, you really have to mind your P's and Q's when you get out if you have a gi.
And, you know, I like training both because I like kind of training my mind to not rely on the gi.
But then when there's something like a lapel or, you know, a jacket or a gi available, then I've trained how to deal with that piece of fabric that's now a tool for you.
So you're, like, you're trying to get a solid seven, eight hours sleep, but you end up having to get 11 hours of sleep because three or four of that is you waking up in the middle of the night because you hit bumps.
He has left us and gone on to the next stage of existence.
But that machine he developed because Louis was like a world famous power lifter and his back got fucked and they told him to get his back fused because it was compressed and so he figured out a way to decompress the spine With active decompression.
So that thing, as it swings down, and you'll feel it, I'll show it to you afterwards when we go into the gym, that thing decompresses your spine on the downswing, and then on the upswing, it actually strengthens the muscles around the back.
Anybody that has the room for it and has some issues with their lower back, even if you don't have issues, if you don't want to ever have issues, I can't recommend that machine enough.
I think the combination of the things that you do is so unique.
You know, the fact that you run this winery and you're very serious about it, you make this amazing wine, and yet also you're making this fucking killer music, and you're doing the two of them together.
When the whole lockdown shit happened and we couldn't tour, it sucked because I just released the Tool album and then on the heels of that I released the poster for Existential Reckoning and we couldn't tour Existential Reckoning.
So what we did, we figured out, okay, screw it, everybody's doing these streaming events, pay-per-views.
That was the thing that for what we do with our characters and some of our sense of humor...
And the nature of some of the kind of interesting, heady landscapes that we kind of paint with some of the songs.
It's a really interesting format for us, and everybody in the band went, this is a great, this is a good thing for us.
So we did another one.
We did Billy Dee and the Hall of Feathered Servants, which was all of the Money Shot album and all the luchador stuff that we shot at the Mayan Theater.
We released that one.
So we went ahead and did this still during lockdown before we actually got back on the road.
We did Conditions of My Parole, the whole album, called Parole Violator.
So it's a bunch of stuff that's got Billy Dee and Major Douche and a bunch of the characters, Hildy and everything, along with everything from Conditions of My Parole.
And we did a bunch of the V is for Vagina era songs, reworked them completely and shot that all in the Sunset Sound studio in Hollywood.
There's some bits in that one as well.
But those are two pay-per-views that are coming out this coming weekend, Halloween weekend.
Yeah, so it's just such a fun, when I figured out what it was and how we can do it, and how we were like duck to water with it, which is, all of us are really good with just the concepts, putting it all together.
Matt Mitchell's an incredible, not only just a producer for the record and an engineer, but also his approach to figuring out how to put all these things together.
And our team, his girlfriend Elisa, You're living a fun life, dude.
Yeah, but I think, you know, a friend with Mark Brooks, who used to be a part of Metalocalypse, and conversations I'd had with him, and various other people that have been involved in those things, they're like...
As soon as you go down that path with somebody like Adult Swim or Comedy Central or whatever things, they just own that thing now.
So imagine me getting in the wrong contract and now all these characters that I've developed, I can't even take these on the road now because some other douchebag owns them.
Well, I think my attention span, I think being the full hour and change thing, that makes sense.
Doing the small episodes and having to build in all those stories for an entire season and have somebody expect following through with the next season.
And I couldn't do, with the winery, the success of the winery, I couldn't do it without people like my wife and Tim White and Calvin and The various people that are involved, Aaron Weiss, in kind of handling their jobs, the delegation of what you guys do.
I have to be there to make the decisions when it comes to the winemaking.
I'm on the forklift.
I'm the one, you know, there.
Deciding what's going to go in what tank, because everything ends up making, changes the outcome of what's happening.
And that's just the approaches of when we're picking the grapes, what grapes are we planting?
All those things come back to me, but the follow-through, if I didn't have...
Jen and Tim and Calvin and Aaron and all my vineyard managers, Chris and Jesse, if I didn't have those people in place, I couldn't do it at all, at all.
So it's not just a matter of me organizing my time.
It's also about me delegating to people that I can trust to make the decision beyond the initial framework that I've set in place.
Every completely untrackable thing that you could think of in terms of the levels of moisture, when that moisture hits that soil, how deep does that moisture go in, the content, the geology of the soil, the weather patterns in that area and how they shift year to year.
What actual clone did you plant in that spot and how that clone is going to react differently to all of those infinite variables of just the soil, never mind the infinite variables of the weather.
And then when you choose to pick how you choose to prune, how many clusters you decide to set on that particular vine, how you decide to train that vine, is it going to be a unilateral, is it going to be bilateral, is it going to be just a Bush pruned, all these different variables about how you're going to do that farming, that affects the outcome.
In general though, if there's a particular region that does well with a particular grape, like Oregon with Pinot Noir, there might be various ways that they're pruning and adjusting how they're training and growing that fruit.
But generally speaking, it's going to be Pinot from Oregon.
It's going to have a particular profile across that state.
Variations from region to region, from site to site, from producer to producer.
But in general, it should have a signature that suggests Oregon Pinot.
Do you follow like other types of, do you follow like cigar growing or coffee growing or all these other different things that vary so much on the soil and things along those lines?
I just picked up, it's not here yet, we picked up a nice modern roaster.
Because once I move the Osteria that's in Cottonwood up to the new Hill Project, that building in Cottonwood will become a coffee roaster and breakfast brunch place.
So we're actually pursuing relationships with beans and importers of coffee beans.
So when you do that, like, I'm good friends with Evan Hafer from Black Rival Coffee, and he'll travel all over the world and try out different beans and try out different things, and that's what this stuff is right here.
So, you know, so I have my, you know, Todd Fox is basically my go-to guy.
He actually has that eye of the tiger on those kind of things, and he'll point out things, because I'm just, dude, I'm living and I'm going, and he'll go, Check out the difference between these Colombian beans and these Brazilian beans.
And I go, okay.
He'll be the one that kind of slows me down to focus on, check it out.
You're like, you know what?
Then he'll put stuff, you know, randomly we'll have some stuff.
He goes, what do you think of that one?
And I go, I really like that.
He goes, those are the Brazilian beans.
So he's starting to help me kind of identify what it is that I like in a coffee, in an approach, because I don't Like a band, I don't have to sound like Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin.
I just have to sound like me and express the way I'm going to express.
So I don't need to be able to make every kind of coffee from every part of the world.
I just need to figure out the ones that I like because I'm kind of, in a way, I'm making it for me, but I'm also selling it.
But I'm not selling it to everybody.
I'm selling it to the people that are going to like it and they're going to come to my place because that's unique.
I had a guy on the podcast years back, Peter Giuliano, is that his name?
He's like a legitimate coffee nerd.
And he, we went down like a three-hour rabbit hole of coffee where he explained to me all the beans initially came from Ethiopia and how their flavors changed as they moved them to South America and grew them in Colombia.
I was at I went to do a an article and a training session out at gun site and in Outside of pre and paulden Arizona.
It's an old-school training facility and And I went there, you know, early morning, we were going to do this whole gun range thing, and this guy named Charlie, sitting at the table, he goes, you want some coffee?
I'm like, sure.
He goes, cream and sugar?
I normally don't, but like, it sounded like that's what he, yeah, yeah, sure.
He goes, I asked if you wanted coffee, not pudding.
I do a little bit of cream, and I've been pretty consistent with that lately because now I'm focusing on what beans I like.
And for me, I know it's going to change once I remove the cream, but that's the lens that I see the coffee through is I have to have the cream in there because that's how I'm going to drink it.
So I'm trying to figure out what ones I like and with that lens.
I know that if I remove that lens, it's probably going to change my perception of what coffees I like.
Yeah, I'm planning trips to Hawaii because I want to establish some relationships with some Maui growers so that I can actually make that be part of what I'm doing in Arizona, but also because I get to go train with Luis.
But those days, like those early days of the UFC were so interesting because, like, there's nothing like MMA in that regard or jiu-jitsu where you can go back just 25 years and you go and look at the difference between the art form then and what it is now.
Yeah, we could go on for hours about it, but when I first started at Pico, you could tell that there was a club within the club, and I was never going to have access to that information.
Well, I mean, that's where it becomes fascinating where a guy like John Donaher kind of like leaps to the top of this thing with just this analytical perspective that's completely free of dogma.
All he cares about is what is the correct way to do things.
What's the most effective in tried and true competition format.
Like, this is what we've learned without any bullshit.
And, you know, that's been great for me to be on the road training with somebody like John, like my friends at Easton and Denver and, you know, Dave and Dan Camarillo.
They all have a slightly different approach to the things.
Some of the guys are going to be a little more self-defense oriented, so they're going to be looking to check your position and make sure you can't get hit in the face.
Right.
But I'm a grown-ass man, and so you go, okay, I am playing jiu-jitsu.
I'm not worried about getting it in the face.
I'm going to train this position to understand how to move my body.
Because that's what it is about.
At the end of the day, it is about me taking you offline and advancing.
But really it's about you and your self-discovery and your ability for self-control.
Me being able to control my body to do a thing.
And if you don't have that self-awareness of understanding that this isn't just you flopping around like a fish accidentally kneeing some dude in the face while you're going for a move, you're not really progressing if you don't understand that it is about your self-control.
So Okay, yeah, that's a self-defense approach to the jiu-jitsu, but I'm also conscious enough to know, okay, I'm going to do this.
I'm going to play around with X card and see what happens because I've never done it, and I want to see what that is.
Well, like I've mentioned before on your show, this is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
This does not come easy for me.
I am the perfect example of...
A klutzy dude who this is not natural for me to do.
And because of that, because of that, forever it was stressful.
And so you're activating your mind in a stressful situation and you're still getting oxygen in your blood and you're moving and you're opening up things.
But at some point it became more like chess.
Instead of this, oh my God, this guy's going to tap me.
Well, of course he's going to tap you.
If you just get that in your head like, I might lose today.
I'm probably going to lose today.
Be comfortable in that moment of understanding how to be conscious and aware in that moment so that you can recognize the moment before you get to the moment now for next time.
That was a weird shift for me, getting to a position of, like, I'm in a compromised position, but I'm going to get to a safe position within the compromised position, take a deep breath, and pay attention to what he does next, so that next time I can be ahead of what he does next.
To be able to rep, you know, the repetition and then replicate that movement.
Yeah, we're talking about jujitsu, but we're not.
We're talking about making pasta.
We're talking about making wine.
These are things that apply to every area of your life.
If you can find one that's more difficult for you than the other ones, you'll improve the things that come naturally to you by focusing on the thing that doesn't come naturally to you.
And that's the thing that's missed by people that don't practice it, that think of it as like some sort of brutal endeavor for, you know, macho brutes, assholes.
I think things like jujitsu, things like growing food...
Resigning yourself to nature and having to navigate farming those kind of things they start to reset you in a way where like it's not this not everything has to be an argument mm-hmm sometimes it's you just having to navigate the fucking weather yeah if you can get to that mindset you get a lot more done honestly and you'll survive shit that some people won't because they're so focused on the petty dumb shit that they're gonna miss the bigger picture I think a lot of the petty stuff is people also want you to agree with
You know, so many people, they have an opinion and they feel like if they can't convince you that they're correct or they can't force their opinion on you, that somehow or another it invalidates their own perspective.
Well, I just watched this guy beat the shit out of everyone at ADCC, and he's not doing the things that you're telling me that you're supposed to only do.
Mm-hmm.
You know?
And then, like, this is the only way that, well, using Hickson as an example.
Hickson says, only do this, this, this, and this.
You never do these other things.
It's like, Have you not watched his ValiTudo videos?
He did everything the opposite of what you just said.
He had his nose before his toes.
He had all these things that you're not supposed to do.
Doesn't really happen anymore, but the kind of guy that you wish you were at the end of the bar in some scenario where two dudes or one guy is just fucking with the nerd at the bar.
It's like, for me, it's, okay, I'm gonna train jujitsu.
Okay, we're gonna bring it back to that, because that's our base here.
If I'm going to train with somebody, every body type is going to be a different thing.
And I can't just...
You know how it is.
If you're just going to force your will on some other dude, then it's just two idiots trying to force their will on each other and you're going to gas out.
You have to see what this thing is and this person, how they're approaching you.
Are they approaching you standing?
Are they butt scooting?
Are they going to...
Whatever they're gonna do, each song and every riff or whatever is a reaction to what I'm seeing or hearing, right?
So I'm not just gonna come in with a lyric and come up with a line on top of some kind of rhythm or melody.
I have to pay attention to what's in front of me and work around that thing and listen to it and pay attention to it and drill.
It's me going to, maybe it's me going to Matt and going, okay, just in general, I'd like to see what we can do with, there's some sounds that I heard on this, you know, Maybe it was a movie soundtrack.
Maybe it was a record.
You know, maybe I'm picking out, like, mandolin or, you know, some kind of a particular pedal from a guitar or a film that has, like, a Rykoot or a riff going through it or something, a vibe.
And maybe Matt has picked up, in the case of Existential Reckoning, he picked up a bunch of amazing old synths, like Fairlight and Sinclair and all this kind of cool shit that's, in a way, it's...
Yeah, so old school, like, you know, Kraftwerk, you know, Yes, old, like, you know, Michael Jackson's, like...
Like, that familiar sound that's from a very specific...
And you can manipulate those sounds to a point, but you're kind of boxed in on what those things can do in some cases.
Like the Fairlight, it's going to give you a very specific sound.
Now there's the framework, and he'll come up with a melody or a thing, and he'll throw it to me, and I'll just drill, drill, drill that thing into my head, driving around with it in my car, truck.
You know, putting headphones on on the plane and just listen in the cellar.
I'll put it on while I'm working on stuff just to just to put that thing on loop and drill it into my head of what it is so that I can figure out how to go through around or over this thing, work with it, work against it intentionally.
So it's it's a it's a mathematical three dimensional geometric puzzle.
You know, just like we were going over today with Danaher.
Like, okay, we're in this position, but did the guy retract his elbow or did he leave his elbow forward?
Is the riff giving me an elbow?
Or is the riff cutting me off on a particular rhythm or a melody?
Because, you know, you might have a melody in mind, but you get closer to the end of that riff and it might have changed directions, then your note is sour.
So you have to pay attention to what note goes with that thing, and rhythmically as well as sonically, like, you know, melodically.
So it's you getting used to this thing, and he might be able to move it.
I might go, hey man, can we adjust a few things in here and move forward?
So it is definitely a step-by-step piece.
I will respond.
Then he will give me back a thing that he's developed further.
And I'll respond to his response.
And then at some point, I'll go to Karina and go, hey, I'd like to hear, before I go too far, I want to hear what you would do over what I've done, over what he's done.
And now it's a triad of us navigating that sonic landscape.
So it must be an interesting dance in that you have to do it with people that have sort of the same engagement that you do, the same level of discipline, the same...
I think you just get better at listening the more you listen.
It's like anything.
An action, reaction, and then is there some kind of reinforcement of that behavior?
Right?
I found that when I started listening more and reacting more as a listener, the reinforcement of that behavior was that there was a better thing that came out the other end rather than just sounding like something I'd already done before, jammed over something that somebody else has already done before.
So you reinvent.
And then the behavior is reinforced because the thing, not from somebody externally, but from the thing that you're hearing, you go, I've never heard me do that before.
I will definitely, you know, probably already, you know, I have my head up my own ass, but, you know, I won't be relevant to the TikTokers of the world because it's just not on their radar.
It's not those people that listen to the things they listen to and the people that respond to the things they respond to now.
I'm not necessarily relevant.
But there's an entire generation of people that's not just my generation.
There's people older than me and much younger than me that have grown with this thing.
Because you'll start being desperate and getting plastic surgery and looking like a fucking alien and trying to insert yourself into some stupid fucking thing.
And I think that's one of the strengths of you, is that with Tool and Pussifer and, like, you know, Perfect Circle, you've done so much different stuff.
I think just that, you know, it could be written off to like midlife crisis, but I think it's also just understanding that chaos and change is part of life.
And if you can kind of get yourself to recognize that things aren't, you're not going to just get to a spot and it's going to be that for the rest of your life.
I think it also speaks to the complex aspect of thinking itself because like You know, what are our thoughts and creativity and how do you keep them inspired and engaged?
And I think one of the ways to do it is to become a beginner again.
Yeah, because there's so many people with their hands out, so many people that have a piece of that, so many people that don't want you to branch out because, you know, anything you do that's not that they think could ruin the gravy train that they're enjoying, right?
So we can see how that might be.
And...
The egos involved, like of the popularity and the attention and the money, the people that you get to hang out with.
If all of a sudden, you know, if I can name five huge pop celebrities of actors and musicians, if they go, hey, we want to come to your show, like, what did I do?
What is what I'm doing of any interest to you?
I don't know what that would look like.
Or what are you seeing?
It's somebody what?
I would be very suspicious of those people coming and actually reacting to what we're doing.
But, like, because I know that I'm busy, and those people are busy.
So why would they stop what they're doing to come and do...
To pay attention to this thing?
They already have all this shit going on.
Like, why would they come to the thing?
And I'm talking about numbers.
Not just one person.
Like...
Five or six people at once decided to come, you know, like, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow and fucking Brad Pitt and somebody, somebody, somebody wants to come to your show.
Well there's a really wild one with Miley Cyrus and in this one she has like this evil aunt who's like controlling her career and they download, spoiler alert, they download her mind.
Into this little doll, like this robot doll that you can buy.
And it's like your little Miley Cyrus friend, but it actually is her inside this thing.
Yeah, but it's like, I don't want to fuck this up, because people should watch it.
It's a fun episode.
But it's her trying to escape her pop lifestyle, but she's being controlled by all these people that have a vested interest in her making extraordinary amounts of money with that genre.
So going back to your original question of how we write, you have to be true, to me, for the way that I write, is I'm trying to be true to who I am today.
Because those are waypoints, as you pointed out.
Those are waypoints along your particular history and your experiences.
So if I can be in the present moment when I'm writing those things about what's happening, how I'm feeling...
Even though some of the experiences are lifelong experiences, how I perceive those experiences today and how I can attach those to a bed of rhythms and sounds and melodies will end up hopefully being what you're talking about.
It's a waypoint for that moment in time that now you can go back and revisit.
And also, like, having a level of discipline is so important when engaging with that thing.
Because that thing can, you know, we were talking about TikTok earlier today, about how the parent company of TikTok is using TikTok to specifically monitor the locations of American individuals and how fucking crazy that is.
But it's so fucked up that when I read it, I couldn't believe that it was real.
I had to go over it from multiple different sites.
Am I being accurate with this?
Does it really have access to your computers that aren't connected to TikTok?
If you use the same email account, if you have the same computer and a network, yes.
Yes, it does.
It has access to everything you do.
Which is fucking bananas.
So I read that over and one of my kids came home and she said that her friend was mad because her mom listened to me talk about the terms of service and made him delete TikTok from his phone.
I find that the reason I'm on it more than I would be is because three bands, three wineries, you know, all the businesses that I have going on, I end up being on it a lot more than I want to be just because I'm answering questions or inspiring plans or whatever.
We're playing Texas with the new version two of the Pussyford Tour.
And I find that when I'm in the break after soundcheck or before training jujitsu with whatever person I can find in that town, I end up, rather than going to those things that I should, like you're talking about, I'll just go back and I'll be watching in my dressing room just old episodes of stuff.
So it's almost like, for me, it's like I'm turning my brain off with my Apple TV. I'm just gonna zone out and have whatever light lunch I'm gonna have before the show, play with my dog and just let that kind of be almost background noise.
What's going on.
So I feel like there's an unconscious Zen thing happening with that eye candy and, you know, familiarity.
Like, how many times can I watch Talladega Nights?
Many more, to be honest.
I'm going to watch that many more times.
But, like, that kind of thing, just being there on the background as a familiar comfort, you know, blanket, you know, to have it on so that I'm not thinking too much.
So in a way, I'm putting that on, so I'm not on this.
I intentionally didn't bring you anything today, because, like, I always, like, I feel like you're probably just every fucking time somebody comes in there, they're just giving you shit.
Again, right back to this and right back to a podcast like this, I say, oh, I love Nashville, and that now people are going to, you know, there's going to be, even if it's five people that decide to go to Nashville because of hearing you say you like Nashville or me saying I like Nashville.
You know, when did somebody say something about Austin that made you move to Austin?
Because, you know, somebody said something and inspired you to move to Austin, which, when I used to be here, it was a much different town when I hung out here in 1985 at what's now Elysium is the club now on Red River.
It used to be, it might still be, it was like a gay bar.
And on one night a week, it would have a thing called Club Iguana.
And it was like a kind of a goth, punk rock night in that location.
And that area was, you know, it was like the sketchy 7th Street was all the, you know, kind of cool alternative gay bar, punk rock thing.
And then as soon as we had the weekend hit and we had the time off, hat comes off, two-tone hair, mohawk, wear some Adamant-looking, Sgt. Pepper-looking jacket.
I forgot about Adamant.
And then wearing stretchy blouse for pants with a belt.
So it's actually a shirt.
You're wearing it almost like tights.
We had a fun time.
It was a good time.
If you saw photos of me, you'd be like, I'm posting this shit on the internet, dude.
Fucking don't you fucking dare post that on the internet.
But that was a good time.
It was fun because it was something I wasn't used to.
In Michigan, we didn't have a club like that.
And it was such a mixed, diverse group of people.
I just love that area.
And so I've always had a thing.
Since then, I've always had a thing for Austin.
But I've watched Austin change over the years.
But it seems like it has this great, I don't know if the word's libertarian or, you know, whatever.
But you've got a mix of everybody here, and they've managed to get along and not kill each other.
Yeah, but when I was at that club, it had come here in its purest form, and I was still in the military, and I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to chance that.
you know, it was that weird thing, but like, when there's just always that clause in the middle of it, you're like, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, but up to our discretion.
So, like, you know, and I'm not going to...
I'm not going to chance it because maybe they would detect it somehow and, you know, I'd be fucked and sent to fucking the brig.
And then he became not just a hippie, but a guy who runs a podcast that plays, like, old Alan Watts speeches and Terence McKenna things.
I mean, Psychedelic Salon is probably, like, the best resource of, like, just psychedelic conversations and...
And it's run by this guy who's – God, I think he was a lawyer, wasn't he?
Do you remember?
I forget what his – but he was like a super straight-laced guy who someone turned him on to it.
It's like Jack Harrow, the guy who wrote The Emperor Has No Clothes.
That guy was a – Like a Goldwater Republican and got divorced, met some new gal, they smoked pot together, and then all of a sudden they became this like hemp activist and, you know, became this like super open-minded hippie who's writing books on mushrooms and marijuana.
Because those things are, you know, they alter your perspective and they open up neural pathways that hadn't been open to you before.
Now, I wonder if you're a kid who grew up in that thing as a young kid and you tried it.
If it wouldn't have the same effect because you're not—that consciousness shift, that near-death kind of thing in your body or whatever that shifts your perspective, that opens up new possibilities, if that was always kind of present in you,
are you a person who would build something interesting or go down some interesting path, or would it take you— Trudging along in the world that you live in and all of a sudden having that moment, that consciousness opening thing that you've already established what you think the world is and then it changes your perspective.
It's like there's so many – I mean there's different ways to live your life and there's different cities that you can go to and they'll help you with that.
They'll feed that vibe or destroy it or turn you into them or, you know, turn you jaded like the New York City vibe.
But then I got to retreat back to population 500. Yeah, even when I lived in LA, I didn't live in LA. I lived outside of it in Ventura County and just, you know, dealing with coyotes and shit.
That to me made more sense.
I need some peace.
I mean, I have friends that love to be on top of it.
I always kind of lived right in that kind of near between Cahuenga and Wilton in the Hollywood Hill area where you get like coyotes the size of fucking Buick area.
Like, that's right there, and Chateau Marmont's right there, and then, like, the Gucci's right there, and then there's, like, a coyote and, you know, fighting over a fucking raven and fighting over a rabbit.
And I guess my retreat is to try to grow more food, to teach my friends how to grow food, and to understand how to, you know, distillation, roasting coffees, like growing things, producing things in-house.
That's my default of understanding, like, whatever's going to happen, unless it's a meteor or something crazy that interrupts, you know, what we recognize to be as weather patterns and growing seasons and those kind of things.
Whatever's happening politically, financially in the world, if we can just remember how to secure fresh water and grow things and survive whatever this is, I don't have any answers other than that.
That's, you know, that's my default, is to grow things and to not hoard, to actually be active and conscious, aware, in the space to figure out how to survive this thing.
Yeah, I would like to think, because I'm an idiot and romantic, I'd like to think that we would—most of us would choose the right way to do a thing.
But when faced with impossible situations, I think that we're probably going to go back to our primitive— I think many of us will choose the right way.
But the problem is there's been so many people that developed in sort of a— An environment where you didn't really have to have earned character, you know,
where you don't really develop the concepts of discipline and of, you know, of postponing pleasure and, you know, to farm off All the important things that need to be done to have society function correctly on other people but yet expect it to work.
And then it goes away and you never really developed the discipline or the skill or the understanding of what's required.
Yeah, just understanding, you know, and I don't, this is of, I don't know, I'm just kind of making this up, but it seems like that 40-hour work week, I know that's kind of a standard, like, you know, that's your weird corporate, that's the way we've grown up, but if you can do a thing and focus on doing a thing where you're, you know, you're working your 30- to 60-hour week of something that you're doing...
That I feel like as long as it's feeding you in some way, that's what I do.
I don't have like...
I don't work like, I don't know, 10 hours and then coast for the rest of the fucking week.
I'm working...
That moment where you're starting your workout and your heart rate's going up and you're like, man, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this today.
Well, you've got to just get past that first five minutes of getting to the next thing.
And then you can do that thing for fucking 70 hours a week.
That's the thing that people don't learn how to do.
And, you know, now people are struggling with remote work because they don't want to go back to an office where they're forced to actually get past the resistance.
You can kind of like fuck off and you use an app that pretends your cursor is moving around and you get caught jerking off on Zoom.
It's like you are a guy who wants to be stimulated often with your endeavors.
And some people never learn that.
And that's sad to me.
That's unfortunate because I think we all could be that.
And we all could find satisfaction and just a real sense of purpose and a real sense of – I want to say accomplishment but that's not really the word.
It's like engagement where life becomes rewarding and stimulating.
It's like you have these robust moments, these exciting things that are happening in these endeavors, these things that you're choosing to do that are complicated and difficult to do and if you can get past that initial resistance.
But some people just never develop that and that's what's unfortunate to me about people that just work.
They just have a job and the job doesn't engage them and they just want to get out of there.
It's like there's other ways to live life and if you could find a life that is engaging and if you could find things that do stimulate you and find things that you do Get real satisfaction out of the complexity of them and the learning and the growing and the constant stimulation of those things.
I think part of it, and this is just my upbringing, I don't know that this was everybody's, but my dad and my stepmother were very inspirational for me to be able to always assume that maybe you don't know what you think you know.
And also work toward a thing so that you can develop just that focus and those skills and understanding connecting A to B to C.
Like, we're going to weed this thing, we're going to till this ground, we're going to do this thing, and at the end of the day, you're not going to know what you just did.
We're not going to know until like next week or four weeks from now or six weeks from now.
Now we're weeding that spot to make sure that this thing survives.
And then you're harvesting that thing and we're going to have that thing for dinner.
When you start connecting that all the way back to the cause and effect, that was a very important lesson in how some of the things I did wrong so we don't get to have this part.
So understanding everything you had to do for your day to enjoy the thing you're doing, but also understanding you're doing it for a bigger purpose.
You have a connection with it.
I don't know.
That was instilled in me early.
And I think you're right.
People that don't really understand, if you're doing this thing just because you're trying to survive and you're not connecting...
The beginning to the end.
Yeah, I guess you are miserable.
You're going to pick up the app that's going to move the cursor around because you're not really helping anyone.
The amount of work involved, you talk to a real farmer, a real get-up-at-five-in-the-morning farmer, work till dark, and be exhausted, and then do it all over again, and not get rich!
And, you know, all the challenges come along with it because now I'm getting my phones blowing up the last couple days because we're spotting a bobcat in the neighborhood.
Well, that means now I've got to bring...
I'm not even there and I've got to make sure that I'm checking with Jen and make sure she's bringing the ducks home early and paying attention in the morning.
Don't let them out too soon because we want to make sure there's people around.
And I'm literally doing things like peeing into a fucking water bottle and spreading it around the perimeter of the fence because some of those predator cats, they don't like...
Just mark your calendar because eventually, like, in about, you know, a year you're gonna, like, the video surface where I'm out there half-naked peeing on a fence chasing off a bobcat, you know, with a fucking paintball gun.
Well, yeah, it loves the quail, but we can take it around the vineyards eventually, and it'll chase off ground squirrels and rabbits out of the vineyard.
Yeah, the best, generally speaking, the best wheat flour is an Italian milled flour, but a significant portion of that flour is actually hard wheat, winter wheat from Arizona.
We were using quite a bit of heirloom flour from Arizona, but the combination of the blend, whatever the Italians do to blend that thing together, it just ends up being better.
So we're trying as much as we can to use Arizona wheat blended in.
We blend more in.
When it comes in, just because we're trying to support the flour from Arizona.
But at the end of the day, it's got to have structure.
It's got to be tasty.
So we've got to do what we've got to do to make the end product be presentable and awesome.
So we're doing our best to not, you know, we use as much as we can just, you know, manual weeding or we use the ground cover in the vineyard to eliminate that part of the process.
Do you pay attention to people like Joel Salatin from Polyface Farms or any of these people that have, like, regenerative agricultural practices where they...
It's interesting because I don't know if it's scalable.
Too many people not growing food, too many people in general, or just the scale of doing that thing with the current, the way we do farming.
Like, you know, the debate of, you know...
Migrant workers coming in and working on things.
It's a lot.
It's a lot to do.
So that's why you end up defaulting to things like Roundup and those things because they're trying to make the margin and cut the corner to get the thing done.
It's an economy of scale, I guess.
So we're trying as best we can to do that in-house.
We grow our own food for The Trattoria Osseria in the place in Scottsdale, we do as much as we can to grow food for those locations.
So the stuff that's on the pizza, the stuff that's stuffed in the raviolis, the salad you get on the Labrador plate.
A significant amount of that is what we grow.
You start to supplement.
So when we supplement, we supplement from local growers in Arizona that are, you know, organic growers that are not using the Roundup.
That's the weirdest thing about cities, is that we've figured out this way to make these centers where you have extraordinary populations with, you know, cement structures and, you know, water piped in underground, but there's no food.
And then, you know, we would get in the shipment of the new hamsters this week, and I would have to take this aquarium, move it away, put a new aquarium there, put fresh shavings and stuff in it, and then move those hamsters and those and put them in together that way.
If I put the new hamsters in with the old hamsters in their environment that they've been pissing in for a couple days, they fight.
You have to basically introduce them to a new environment so that it's new to all of them, and it's new smells, and then they won't fight as much.
So people had sort of a, there was a humbling aspect to the night that allowed people to just like get a perspective and also just the beauty and the majesty of the sky and the looking at the cosmos and looking at the Milky Way.
It put things into focus in a way that I don't think people in cities have access to now.
So, you know, that's, you know, when you're at night on my porch, that's, I can see that.
That's a little intense because they've definitely, like, done more of a time lapse, so it's kind of, like, really sunk in, but, like, on your average night in Arizona, I can see all those things.
I was reading this thing about quantum computing today.
And you could probably relate to this because you've done some music with the Fibonacci sequence.
And where they entered the Fibonacci sequence into quantum computing and they found it had something to do with different ways that time expresses itself.
So you can find this because I'm going to butcher this.
But I was reading it and I remember here it is.
Scientists fed the Fibonacci sequence into a quantum computer and something strange happened.
You can have the system behave as if there are two distinct directions of time.
I think it's just a matter of time before they figure something like that out.
There are, but there are movies that start that way because we understand how the human mind works.
This constant lust for technological innovation is never going to be quenched.
And I think if we continue to stay alive, we're going to come up with something that's going to change everything about the way we interact with reality.
And it's probably going to happen within our lifetime.
We live in an amazing time because both things exist.
You have wine, and you have farmers and people cultivating food and creating art, and you also have these disruptive technologies that are being implemented in a way that we really have no idea what the consequences are.
And it's all happening simultaneously.
And it makes the hikes in the mountains more attractive.
It makes the staring at the sky in Prescott more interesting.
That you do live in these simultaneous sort of timelines.
Gotta get to the Tesla that goes zero to 60 instantaneously.
That, you know, operates on some fucking gravity drive that allows you to punch a hole through space and time and pop up in Australia in half a second.
I think by the time he actually had sold it to a guy, sold it to a guy, and they actually took it to the dump, and, like, they picked it up and it broke in half because, like, the engine was still good.
500,000 miles, I think, was on it.
But the frame was gone.
Like it was, you know, foot through the floor under Fred Flintstone down the road.
And even if you get your grape, now you got to wait, you know, you got to make it, you got to age it, you got to bottle it, you got to sell it.
So from your first, assuming you own the acres, and assuming you have power and water and it's been graded, and you're $30,000 in for your first, for that first planting, that first year, you're not going to see your first dollar for at least six, seven years.
Between Pucifer, the Pucifer store, all of our distribution people, our retail people, our behind-the-scenes seller workers, I'm about 110 families that we employ around Arizona.
So down in southern Arizona, Jesse lives on site with his wife, and we have a couple full-time people.
And if you're farming it properly, you need seasonal work, you need people to come in, like a large number of people to come in and prune, a large number of people to come in and do...
Shoot thinning and blah, blah, blah.
And then for picking, of course, you've got that season.
You have people around that you have to do the pick and you have to work with a labor contractor to make sure that you have those numbers of people there to do that.
But annually, year round, those two or three people are on site all year round.
There's a couple people in our genre, not even really our genre, just like musicians.
There's a couple people that are doing stuff.
I think Pink is involved in her wine production in some way.
But other than her and a couple people, not anybody here that has a wine label, generally speaking, is...
They're just putting their name on it, or they have somebody doing it for them, and they might be kind of involved, but they're not as involved as I am.
I don't really see any reason to give up either one, because they can coexist.
There's definitely time for both, especially if you're Organized like I am and create those spaces for creating music and touring, but knowing that it's not up to you when it's harvest season, this is harvest season.
So I like that balance of like, I had to respond to what Mother Nature says on this front, but on the music side I can kind of have a little more flexibility and create when the spirit moves me.
Well, again, going back to, like, you started this thing, and seven years later, and then I put that wine in a bottle, and I try to forget about that bottle, to then open that bottle another ten years later, to go, oh, fuck, man, that's...
Have you ever heard of a book called The Immortality Key?
There's a guy named Brian Murorescu who became obsessed with the Lucidian mysteries and the ancient Greeks who drank wine and invented democracy and invented all these different things in this like one particular area of enlightenment.
And he started studying this and found very distinct evidence that the wine, what they were calling wine back then, was wine that was mixed in with a bunch of different things.
And a lot of it was like ergot, and a lot of it was psychedelic compounds.
And so our fermentation process is kick-started by the yeast that exists on those grapes.
So I just do wild ferments.
I don't add yeast.
Some instances I do, depending on the fruit coming in, and if I'm observing there's going to be maybe some problems with that particular batch of fruit.
Yeah, maybe I'll do an inoculation for that thing, but we're 95% wild ferments.
But I do also do mead, which is honey, water, yeast.
I think if you're a champagne person versus like an Italian sparkling, now I'm getting all geeky with people that are wine drinkers, but what we're doing in Arizona is far more like a filtered drink.
Ancient method, Italian sparkling, because it's Malvisia, Bianca, and Chardonnay, 50-50.
So if people are, for people listening, if you're wondering what kind of sparkling I'm doing, that's a pet nat.
It's very much an Italian sparkling approach, rather than a champagne.
The reason why I brought up the Brian Murray Rescue book, because I've always been fascinated, like if that was what wine used to be, that wine was the fermented grapes mixed in with psychedelics and all these other compounds that they're sort of discovering, when did modern, what we think of as wine now, which is like what you make, when did that start?
It could very well be some kind of way before pre-prohibition kind of stuff in Europe.
I have no idea.
But, you know, I know that there's people that have done like botanicals where they're kind of doing almost like beer, beerish, wine-ish botanical fermentations.
Various, you know, varying results, but I don't know.
There's always been that kind of like, you know, you can't taste how expensive a wine is.
Well, no, of course you can't taste how expensive a wine is.
But there are guys who are really good at identifying right down to the year and the producer by what they're tasting in a glass.
And it's like, I think it's fucking, it's voodoo.
It's incredible how they can do that.
They can narrow it down.
And that's, of course, from an established region that has a history that you can kind of track it to a point through time, and having maybe had that wine.
And they have that fucking lockbox.
They can log that shit away, and it's like a steel trap of recollection of those things.
Yeah, but you know, at the same time, I don't have to sound like Led Zeppelin, I just have to sound like me.
So I'm only expressing, these grapes are going to tell me what they're going to do, and I'm going to try to get out of the way to make sure that these grapes grow from grapes to wine.
And I'm going to do everything that I know how to do to get out of the way to make sure that thing is that thing.
Now, me describing that thing to you like a psalm describes it, I can't do that for you.
But I can get out of the way to make it get to the thing that you can describe.
I just thought time in cellar, spending time in Adelaide Hills at Penfolds for a very short amount of time.
Seeing it happening around the world, going to wineries while on tour, while they're trying to time it where I can go when they're going to actually harvest today to see, what's the equipment they're using?
And then slowly backing up and understanding the chemistry of it, working with people to go action-reaction and logging that in to develop that constantly.
But the process, just the basic logistics of making wine made sense to me almost instantaneously.
You start to all of a sudden went from a dude who grew up in a lower middle class family with parents at a teacher budget, cutting wood for the winter, to being on tour with a band and all of a sudden I can afford a bottle of wine that was more than $50.
You know, going, oh, this is cool.
Seeing all the agents and the lawyers and the fucking promoter and the manager and the fucking accountant all backstage having a nice glass of wine while I'm drinking Bud Light over here.
Going, what the fuck's that?
And I want to know.
And I grabbed a glass and tried it and went, this is a new thing.
There's a way to do it to not get in your own way to understand the 16 steps.
Like today, dealing with that triangle, I kept getting my foot caught up and trying to get the leg around the head because I was getting in my own way.
I didn't shift enough to make it so that I wasn't in my own way.
In the cellar, I'm not in my own way.
I'm thinking five steps ahead, and I'm not going to put a thing down in the way that I have to move and add six steps to getting to the next step.
That's wild because there's nothing like that in my mind that I'm fascinated by, that I would want to go and start developing a company that makes these things.
It seems like it's just so rare that something like a light bulb goes off and you're like, I need a wine press.
Tim and I are probably going to develop a gin, but that will be 100% us just coming up with a label, coming up with a concept, coming up with maybe a recipe, and then handing that to some...
Tequila is agave, but I don't know the process on tequila that much.
I'd like to know, but I think gin is going to be more accessible to me because just the process of over-farming and tearing up land, if I can put in agave, I don't know what that sounds like.
We want to expand because a healthy wine region has a healthy bulk wine market.
So if I can make wine out of all those grapes, but I only need 80% of it, I sell my 20% of juice to other winemakers just so they can supplement their programs.
It's a very popular bottle of wine called The Prisoner.
For the most part, that was all bulk wine.
That's a California project that took off, that made fucking distributors and people a shitload of money because the person was just basically going around initially to just get bulk wine from all these different houses that had bulk wine that put a cool blend together, and it was priced perfectly, and wholesalers made a shitload of money on that thing because it hit.
But it was bulk wine.
It wasn't some weirdo like me in a cellar making wine.
Yeah, so to answer your question, I wouldn't mind expanding the vineyard so that I have flexibility because what happens if I get hail and it takes out half my vineyards?
If I have way more vineyards than I need, then I can kind of, in that year, I can kind of massage what I have Maybe use bulk wine from the year before to supplement into a blend.
But if I've made all the grapes from the vineyard we didn't get, whether that wine is always valuable to somebody else to sell as a bulk product.
The look on his face at the end, I was like, he normally runs his mouth pretty good as a good old Arizona boy, but he had that look on his face like, Did I win that?
But one of the problems is that I feel, and I've said this ad nauseam, that I feel that we're very limited by this 10-9 This 10-point must-scoring system.
Because someone can win a round 10-9 and it can be a very close round.
And someone can win a round clearly and it can be 10-9.
And that doesn't make any sense to me.
And I feel like the system is designed for boxing and it's a good system for boxing.
I don't think it's a good system for MMA. I think MMA needs a much more comprehensive system.
Like, if a guy can hold you down with no damage at all for three minutes, versus a guy who holds you down and damages you for 30 seconds, what's worth more?
You know, what hits you with three or four good hard shots, is that worth more?
Or is, like, the predominance of a round, like, if you spend the majority of a round on top of a guy, even if you're not damaging him, how much is that worth?
How much is a leg kick worth?
How much is a submission worth?
Like, a submission attempt?
I think we need a much more comprehensive system.
It's not a 10-point must.
I don't think that's the right system for MMA. I think it should be a completely different system.
We just sort of adopted the boxing system.
So the first round of Aljamain Sterling and TJ Dillashaw, that is a fucking dominant round.
Like, what is that?
Is it a 10-7?
Is it a 10-6?
I mean, that's an all-Algermaine round.
He beat the shit out of TJ Dillashaw.
Took him down, dominated him, took his back, beat the fuck out of him.
Like, what's that?
How do you score that round?
And, you know, how could...
How could that be better scored with a better system?
They do it like, come on, we're here to watch this, you know, watch the show.
I go, so you get an extra show.
You get a thing that's like, not just us doing our thing.
I'm going to deliver what I'm going to deliver.
I'm not going to not sing the song, but I'm going to run over here and you should be laughing at the fact that I have this weird fucking obsession with UFC for your show.
And I think people, for whatever reason, think that he's— I think you have to take him seriously.
You have to take him very seriously.
He knocked out Tyron Woodley with one punch.
He's legit as fuck.
Anderson Silva is one of the greatest combat sports athletes of all time, one of the greatest MMA fighters of all time.
And as a boxer, even though he's 47 years old, he did beat Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., who was a legitimate former world champion, and he knocked out Tito Ortiz to show you that he's got power.
Well, I was very fortunate to be able to commentate against while, excuse me, when Anderson was competing in his prime against the best in the world.
When Anderson was in his prime, he was a magician.
He was spectacular.
To see him fight in his prime, like when he knocked out Vitor with that front kick to the face, when Anderson beat Chael Sonnen with a triangle in the last round, a fight that he was losing, when he just beat the shit out of him in the rematch, Anderson during his prime was something extraordinary.
He really...
People forget because you see him towards the decline after he got his leg broken by Chris Weidman in that fight.
He was never really the same again.
But if you remember...
You should look at a fighter in terms of what they were when they were at their best.
And Anderson, at his best, was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all time.
I was a fan of his before he ever got to the UFC. And I remember there was a betting line when he was fighting Chris Lieben.
And I was like, whatever the betting line is, put the fucking house on the Brazilian.
I'm like, you have to understand what you're about to see.
Like, this guy is on many different levels.
And he was in his prime.
Because I was watching him compete.
He was initially competing in Japan.
And then he started competing in London, in England.
Was it Cage Rage, I think it was called?
That promotion was when he came into his own.
That's when he fought Lee Murray.
That's when he fought George Oliveira.
He was in his prime then.
And that's when he came to the UFC right after that.
I'm like, when he fought Tony Fricklin and he hit him with this preposterous upward elbow.
He was so good.
And I was like, we're getting Anderson when he came into his own, and that's when he entered into the UFC. So people got to see this just perfect striker.
He was so good.
But he's 47. When I'm looking at this fight coming up, I'm like, hmm, I don't know.
He's also 47, and I don't know what kind of testing they're doing.
That changes everything.
That changes the whole world.
Because if he's on all sorts of Mexican supplements, then we could see a turning back of the clock.
The arena was packed to the gills and it was nuts.
The energy in the place was incredible.
And to be there, like, to have it this popular, it's not a coincidence that it's this popular while Gordon Ryan is at his peak, who is the greatest jiu-jitsu athlete of all time, at 27 years old, which is so crazy to say.
It was impressive to see because most of the things that he was doing were very simple, methodical, cutting off all your fucking exits and trapping you into a thing.