#959 - Underoath - The Hidden Struggles Of Mental Health In Music

Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

It's an honor, man.

How long have you guys been playing together as a band?

I've been in the band for 24 years.

And it was like a local band two years before that, so 26 years.

Yeah.

Right.

We've been playing together for 24 years, though.

Yeah.

Have you got any idea how many shows you've done?

No.

I don't.

Do you

2,500?

Maybe.

Where'd you get that number from?

24 years, 100 shows a year, something like that.

There's been years where we've done 06, though.

I remember.

Probably more.

i got married the first time in 06 and we did that year we did over 300 shows

because i remember i got married in salt lake city and no honeymoon anything 72 hours later you know back on the road back on the road we with taking back sunday i remember that tour specifically so it was us taking back sunday in a band called um armor for sleep i remember all the time they were the opener yeah so I we started that tour three days after I got married.

So I bet you it's more than 100 a year.

Yeah.

We played over 100 last year.

So at least 2,000, maybe 3,000.

I would say 3,000 to 4,000 shows.

Yeah.

I'd say 30,000.

You realize that's insane.

It is.

I mean, I think it's weird to think about doing something for a quarter of a century.

Like you hear people like, oh, I've been married for 30 years.

You're like, wow, that's impressive.

And then it's like, yeah, we've been in a band for 25 years, like the same band.

Yeah.

Playing some of the same songs.

Something that I was going to say, how many times have you played The Ronnie Chasing Safety?

I mean, literally.

2,000, every single show.

Probably.

Reaning Rex and Boybrush Red, like those, like the bigger quotation fingers songs off that record.

Yep.

Like

something I think about a lot, as you were just saying that, I think about this so much, is the people I love the most in the world, like my wife and children.

I have spent more time with him than them.

Do you know what I mean?

And I don't know why it does it.

It does a number on my head sometimes.

If I really, if I really like...

If I get introspective about it, it fucks me up for some reason.

And I don't know why.

I think there's a piece of like,

there's a piece of guilt or something about that to me.

And I've never really talked about that, but it's, and I don't know if guilt is the right word, but there's like a thing.

Like, if I think about the fact that, like,

and I love you and I love spending time with you, but like, if I think it, if I think about it, it's strange.

And I don't know, you know.

Well, do you think the emotion is when you feel it?

The one that keeps coming into my mouth right now, just looking at you, is guilt because you spend X amount of time, all the time, away from your wife and children with someone else.

And what we do is

fun.

And I, and I, I'm cognizant enough to know that I shouldn't be guilty.

That doesn't make any sense, like technically, but for some reason, I feel that sometimes.

Yeah, it's, it's an interesting emotion when you love what you do.

So it's kind of, it's, I think if we were oil riggers and we had to leave for seven or eight months and we were in like the middle of the ocean, like eating shit.

It'd be different.

Because there's a sense of nobility and sacrifice

that doesn't happen when you're, fuck, like, there's a type of intimacy I have with my bandmates that I'm never going to have with my wife.

Like, there's a type of intimacy that you have.

Like, if you're dating a musician, there's a type of intimacy that that person has with a fucking random keyboardist playing in an airport that you as a non-musician will never, ever know.

A non-spoken

synergy.

Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, doing something you love,

it can almost creep in personally on both sides, like the wife, wife, you know, our partner's side and ours.

It's like, oh, we have, you know, we've got to go to Austin and do all these things.

And it's like, oh, you know, it's very easy to go, oh, it must be so difficult hanging out with like Chris or hanging out with your friends and going to the comedy mothership and all this stuff.

And it's like, it's weird that this is our job.

You know, it's weird that talking to you is something that I would do.

for fun because I'm a big fan of you and what you've done and the kind of journey you've been on.

And then for that to be a priority because we happen happen to be in this weird public figure business thing is just, yeah, it's not work.

It's like a, it's like a velvet prison in a way.

It's a very strange kind of sort of like golden handcuffsy type thing.

And

I got sent this the other day.

I wanted to read you guys this and get your, get your thoughts on this.

It's an essay called The Raw Truth About Touring and Mental Health.

Touring breaks people in ways that most don't talk about and the industry rarely admits.

At its core, touring is chronic displacement.

You're always somewhere else.

No routine, no grounding, no permanence, your nervous system never lands, you live in fight or flight, travel delays, high pressure shows, interpersonal tension, constant overstimulation, there's no decompression and no off-switch.

And emotionally, touring swings between extremes.

One night it's 1500 people screaming, the next it's a silent hotel room.

You go from deep connection to total isolation over and over again.

That kind of cycle burns out even the most resilient people, but the culture of touring rewards stoicism and punishes vulnerability.

You're expected to power through, joke about it, drink through it, avoid it, and the deeper you go, the harder it becomes to admit you're unraveling because your whole identity is tied to the road.

Your worth becomes about being needed, useful, reliable, so when your body screams, I can't, your mind says, you have to.

There's no roadmap for recovery, no built-in support, no decompression protocol, and when you finally make it home, you don't feel home.

You feel disoriented and numb.

Out of place.

No one around you quite understands what you've been through, and honestly, you don't either.

The truth is, touring is beautiful, but it can also dismantle you.

And pretending it doesn't is why so many are suffering in silence.

Admitting the toll doesn't make you weak.

It makes you honest.

And that honesty is where real change begins.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Did you, that's, did you write that?

No.

That, that is.

Or on Instagram.

I got it sent to me.

Yeah.

I mean, I think

all of that rings true to me.

In a lot of ways, I think there's an arrested development that happens in touring where it, you have to make a conscious decision to grow up because it's very feasible and almost encouraged to not.

What does not growing up look like?

I mean, we've all done it.

We grew up in public,

unfortunately for us.

I think having a tour manager, having an agent, having this writer.

This is the thing that tells you what to do every day, your food's brought to you.

Having shoppers,

runners, you need anything, drop of a hat, it's taken care of.

You lose value of

substances.

You lose value of money and value of time because it's just excess all the time.

And it's not like this massive toxic thing all the time.

It could just be we always get a loaf of bread and five things of deli meat and nobody touches them and we just throw it out.

Like things that in a normal construct,

we would be like, what are you doing?

But in touring, it's like, how are you not doing that?

You know?

And then that's the very baseline all the way up to

love, commitment, how, like, relationships are really hard.

I mean, we know a lot of people in the industry that don't know themselves and don't know how to coexist with a partner.

Why?

What does it do to relationships and intimacy?

Well,

I don't know because I've been with the same woman my whole life.

But my perception is that it

displaces

purpose and replaces that idea with other things like instant gratification.

Like the same way we were just talking about this earlier, but the same way like pornography is not positive for anyone, the people doing it, the people consuming it, it kind of just stretches out.

something that should be this one way into something that it never should have been.

And I think that happens a lot on tour.

I'll take one of those as well.

that mine's lost its flavor oh you just that's when you know that you need another one take some of those suckers thank you for the people that are listening we're powering ourselves with nicotine via wood woods delivery system dude

sucking on a cricket bat i think i think a big yeah like a big answer to the thing is the the obvious thing with love is is absence but the biggest piece of it i know for in my own life and we could talk about this for three hours because that just fucked me up on in ways that i can't understand to you and i want to talk about something specific we'll go back into into it.

I want to talk about something specifically in there, but I want to get to this.

We can go back through it.

We've got all the time in the world.

I want to get to this love bit for a second.

We

go to work and we play in front of thousands of people.

And like you said, everything is disposable in a sense.

You know what I mean?

Like you can have whatever you want.

Truly, like I can, if I wanted to, I could ask a tour manager to get me cocaine.

I can do that.

I want a new Game Boy at every show on my tech rider.

No, I'm not joking.

Whatever you want.

Like,

whatever you want.

Whatever you want.

want.

And when you get home,

it changes through various stages of life, obviously.

But where I'm at in my life now, I'm 42.

I'll be 42 next month.

And I have two children.

And I get home.

And my wife has said this to me in colorful words sometimes is we haven't stopped living.

Like we haven't.

So I get home and expect like.

Time, time, time, give me time, give me time, give me time.

And not only give me time, it give me this deep,

bright level of intimacy that I need and crave and feel like I have been

out here working.

So I don't get that.

And it's impossible.

I'm hungry for that.

I'd be hungry.

I've been punched.

Parched.

And it feels impossible to get on the road

in a certain way.

Well, there's no physical, as long as you're being faithful.

And we all are.

So, yeah.

So you get home and she always says to me, she goes, Aaron, give me a couple of days.

to like get used to having you here even to like hear your footsteps in the the house you know and to like to see you with our daughter and it's emotional for me because it's my reality you know what i mean and it hurts i because i want her to just be like you know in not so many words like come here let me you and love you and like let's do the whole thing and that's not reality for anybody well it's it's too intermittent for that you know

you do a normal nine to five You leave on the morning, you come back in, maybe wife runs up and jumps and gives you a hug when you walk through the door.

Hooray.

You're away for six weeks at a time.

What's like an average medium-length tour?

Like a six weeks?

Six weeks.

Six weeks, something like that.

We did one last year that was 12 weeks.

Motherfucker.

And that's across time zones.

That's the intermittent contact.

That's all the rest of this stuff.

And

if you have been away for that long, that's not, I missed you today.

That's, I got used to life without you.

I got used to a type of life that you were not in and i'm aware that you went away from one peak experience of deep connection with your family to another peak experience of deep connection with your art form but i kind of went through this insane acceleration deceleration process yes i've had to develop all of these coping mechanisms emotionally to work out how to like split or like compartmentalize my heart so that i can open it up when you're here but so that i'm able to silo it off when you're not because if i still have it open when you're not here then it fucking tears me up and you're up until three in the morning, four in the morning on the tour bus.

And I don't know what you're doing and I don't know who you're with.

And there's all of these screaming fans and you've got this like crazy set, but

like, fuck.

Yeah, it's, I used to come home and we just, you know, you end tours on weekends, like, you know, your last show is Sunday or Monday or whatever it is.

And I just come home on a Tuesday and I'd get off the plane, Uber home, and the house would just be empty.

And it's like, you know, the kids are at school, you know, and that's why welcome back to that.

But to your point, like, your kids are at school.

Your kids have, you know, extracurricular activities.

Your wife has a doctor's appointment.

And it was that.

It was like, yo, I'm home.

And you expect like this big parade very selfishly.

Like, I'm back for more.

Well,

also, like the tour continues because you start the tour.

And I imagine opening show, you know, like, let's have a beer.

Let's do the whatever.

It's like, hey, where's the funfair and the banners?

And so it's like, no, you're not, you don't get the special treatment no more.

You're here with are

you're not guitarist singer drummer guy you're dad and like frankly you're kind of like new dad or like absent dad that's now come back yeah there's a there's you need to make it up to us not us making it up yeah it's a weird thing to have a 15 year old and realize i've only been physically in her life for maybe seven years

if you act actually chop it up you know if i'm gone half the year then if my 10 year old is 10 i've only seen that child grow up for five of those 10 years, which is

that's a, that's a vacuum that you can't let yourself get sucked into because it will destroy you.

And it makes you think that.

You mean that kind of reflection, that kind of thought process?

Yeah, it's, it's good to reflect on it.

And I think that kind of goes back to the arrested development.

You have to see those things and look them in the eyes and not try to

cope them away or forget them.

It has to come from a place of self-reflection to then inform your next step, which is how do you treat this person?

And when you go on tour and you have all these people waiting on you hand and foot, and then you get home after 10 weeks, and it's the first time you've had to do a dish.

It's the first time you've had to take out a literal trash bag.

And so I think a lot of people, thankfully for us, we do a good job of keeping each other in check, but I've seen a lot of people.

almost feel like home

is the least valuable place because it's the only place that you have responsibility.

So you go from, you know, screaming fans and girls and you can't go to a bar within two miles of the club without getting recognized and it's wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.

And then you come home and it's like, take out the trash, pick up, can you pick up those socks?

Can you fold that laundry?

And it almost feels like the domesticated home life is the least exciting.

That feels like work.

Real, real work.

And you exclusively work as when you're at home.

And it's meaningful work if you view it that way.

It's an honor to serve my wife and kids.

But if I view it in a labor way,

it could tear you apart.

And you expect it to be grounding.

I think that's the biggest problem is when you're on the road,

you are, like I can say for me, and I can probably speak for you, but

what you do, and this sounds cliche, but what you do, you do for them.

Do you know what I mean?

Like you're making a living for your family and you work hard for your family in the way that we do.

And then you get home and you have felt ungrounded or unmoored forever, many six, eight, twelve, whatever the fuck it is.

And you get home and you expect

to feel grounded.

You know what I mean?

You expect that you're going to feel grounded because it's the person you love.

It's your offspring.

And you expect to feel grounded.

But what they need to feel grounded is you to pick up the fucking socks and you to whatever.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

And make it up to me.

Like you've just totally been away for two months.

Totally.

Make it up to me.

I think if you can get out of your headspace and make it less about you, which is the point of life in general, is to be of service to others.

And the more you do that, the more you find the true purpose of being a human.

But it's intimately attached to your wife and kids in a way that I don't think

it could be replicated.

Like it's almost like if you've never been on tour or if you're on tour, but you just have a girlfriend, you don't understand what we're saying right now.

Like there's something else that like heightens it.

It's all the same subset.

It's all the same data sets.

They're just infused with like.

Volumes louder.

Yeah.

It just, it turns everything up a notch.

And I, I think it's important for all of us to recognize that and then also recognize what tour is capable of doing and then avoiding those things at all costs.

Well, like,

like

I think it's probably a rarity that I've been with my wife for 18 years and have only been with my wife for 18 years on tour.

You know what I mean?

I think that's a rarity.

You're an outlier in the world.

It should be standard protocol, but it's not.

It's also, that's also, it's socially accepted that somebody who is a rock star.

Yeah, I've had people be like, yeah, you're married, but you're in Milwaukee.

Like, this is how this works.

Because we know that marriage laws don't apply in Milwaukee.

Milwaukee is the place, brother.

No, but literally, there's like, there's women that know we're married, and there's women that still try to

disrupt that functioning, flourishing relationship.

And I'm like, it's so easy to fall into those traps.

And then what's interesting too is one of the hardest things for me is watching people fall in love

theoretically with people that love what they do.

Like

there is no better feeling than

having a partner who thinks you're the sickest.

You know what I mean?

And so

if you, yeah, if you bounce around with fangirls, a regular woman who's her own individual person who wants different things in life almost feels boring.

So you're not impressed by it.

Like, look at this fucking riff that I just wrote.

That's nice, but this sock.

Yeah.

That's nice, but what about dinner date tonight?

That's nice, but like, let me tell you about the wheels on the bus go round and round that I did with the kids that I teach today.

Yep.

And you have to lean into them as much as they lean into you.

And I think for me, growing up, I met my wife when we were possibly at our biggest or when we became what we are

2005.

Yeah, so right in the middle of it.

And I had seen that pattern flipping around.

And my friend's like, dude, you got to meet my girlfriend's sister.

I'm like, I am not interested in women right now.

Like, it's too sticky.

It's like, I don't know why they like me.

Is it because of this or is it because of who I am and vice versa?

The voice reasoning, yeah.

Yeah.

And my wife is like, I don't listen to your music and I don't listen to like this style at all.

And I was like, check, like, let's go get a coffee.

Like, let's go try this out.

And then here we go.

Yo, complete an interest in my career is the most attractive thing you could have said to me.

It was attractive to me.

Yeah.

But then there's, then there's other people who literally view it the complete opposite.

And that's what I mean by like the arrested development.

Like literally what you just read is the path.

And you just have to read that before you go on the journey to look out for potholes.

So they You don't become that.

But if you do it, if you do it the typical way, if you come up and touring in the typical way,

let's say we met 20 years ago and we sat across from one another with these cricket bats filled with nicotine.

And you read that to me.

There's no world where that would have been

anything that would have grabbed me in any way.

There's sentences I could have gleaned information from.

My energy sometimes goes up and down.

Sometimes I feel lonely in a hotel room.

Yeah.

But I guess at the beginning, it's like we sleep on a bus.

For us, we did it the old-fashioned way where you go to Buffalo and there's four people and you go back a year later and there's 50 and you go back 10 years later and there's 3,000.

Like we did a van,

shitty van, nicer van, you know, RV bus.

Like we did it that traditional way.

And I just wish that

I wish that there was

that somebody told me, could could have succinctly told me that and made sense to me.

Have you guys heard me do my bit about unteachable lessons?

Have you heard me talk about this?

Yeah, so it's just there's certain things that we can't learn through explanation, only through experience.

Yes.

And I get the sense that the raw truth about touring and mental health is one of those things that you can warn people.

And it's the same.

You're not in love with that girl.

She's just hot and difficult to get.

Money won't make you happy.

Fame won't fill your self-worth problem.

You should probably speak to your parents more.

You shouldn't work as hard.

You need to spend more time in a hammock.

Like all of these things are lessons that we disregard because they sound either cliché or purposefully

like paradoxical.

It's like, oh yeah, being a rock star is hard.

Like you have to say that.

That's like you paying your due in a way.

We say it all the time.

Oh, I got to go work for an hour.

Boohoo.

We say that.

Yeah.

And it's like you making the normies feel okay.

And in many ways, when people can see all of the beauty, like a billionaire saying that their money made them feel empty inside.

Will Smith.

Will Smith said, when I was poor and miserable, I had hope.

When I was rich and miserable, I was despondent.

Like, because he thought that money was going to fix his self-worth problem, but it didn't.

I heard him talk about that.

Yeah.

And when you have achieved the thing that you think was going to be the thing that was going to fix the problem, still empty.

You're like, oh, fuck.

And now the solution's gone.

Yeah.

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So I think that this is one of those, a little bit of one of those unteachable lessons.

And dude, let me fucking roll this for you.

As difficult as almost everybody in the industry has it, imagine how much harder it is if you're a woman.

Oh, yeah.

If you're a female rock star.

Yep.

Now what?

Now, how are you, how are you navigating that?

I saw it firsthand.

When Under Oath broke up for a period of years, I left in 2010.

I quit.

And then Under Oath broke up from 2012 to

16.

And in that time, I played drums for Paramore.

Oh, fuck.

Haley Williams?

Yeah.

So I spent almost five years or whatever on the road with her.

And they sell out like fucking Madison Square Gallery.

Twice in a row.

Yeah.

But what you're talking about, I saw firsthand.

And she used to.

Is she a mom?

No.

No.

She wasn't then.

I don't think she is now.

Is she?

No.

But she would, she would kind of, like hearing you say that, imagine how much harder I would see.

I got a glimpse of seeing that.

And she didn't distance herself much from us, you know, from the band, but she distanced herself a bit.

And I,

at the time, I was 29 or 30 or whatever, and I would think, like, why did she distance herself from us?

You know, she had her own dressing room.

And there's the obvious reasons why, but like, I think even more so, she, she felt a different type of isolation and a different type of like unmooring, a different type of unsettling, you know.

Where do you think that's coming from?

I don't know.

I mean, I can imagine it's hard to be a female in rock and roll music, which is a predominantly male-centered and fronted thing.

But also for her,

she came up in it so young.

Like when Paramore signed their first record deal, I think she was, when we met her, she was 14.

A child.

The drummer was 11.

Like the original drummer, when we met them, we played at a place called Blue Sky Court in Nashville.

I remember it.

Remember this show?

Yeah.

It was hotter than the devil's butt.

And she, she was 15 years old.

Fuck.

You know what I mean?

She was on Taste of Chaos tour, an opening, and it was before Paramore.

It was just Haley Williams, and it was her in an acoustic.

She was like 14 or 15 years.

Is Paramore a like

pseudo-solo project?

How much is it solo?

something she says a lot and me spending time there is she always she would always scribble like i probably once every 10 shows she would put a white tank top on and scribble paramore is a band on it like that's her she is vehemently like

this is a band

this is but i think that i think that she feels

and i i don't want to speak out of turn but i think she feels heavy pressure the other direction because if you were her

And you look like she does and you dance like she does and you have this great talent that she does.

The back, I can see how the suits would be like the back suit.

So you need to push her

out.

I love those guys.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And she doesn't want that.

They're all a band.

They all write the music together.

But by nature.

Yeah.

That's something that only in the last 12 to six months,

I've listened to this music for

over 20 years now.

I actually spent, it's a cool story about you guys.

So I spent when I was 21 years old i spent my final 10 pounds to drive from edinburgh where i was doing my placement year to go and see you guys playing glasgow to put fuel in the car really to drive and then i came back and i had the choice between being being able to afford food that night i was a uni student running a huge events company yeah what year was this

2000 and

eight

2008 in glasgow crazy I think that would have been just after Define the Great Line

came out.

It's a brick building.

I remember the show.

Yeah.

Yeah.

On the main strip.

Yeah.

So

I drove to go and see you guys.

That's wild.

And then

went back.

So anyway, I've been around this sort of world for a very long time.

And it's only within the last six to 12 months that I've realized how many bands that are ostensibly bands outwardly are solo projects inwardly.

We actually talked about that a while ago.

More and more now than there ever have.

Yeah, real bands, like full-on groups that all have

equal contribution and/or veto power are dwindling.

No, it's not even hiding, though.

I mean, it is if you just look at, hey, this is called a band and a person's name, but anybody can go and work this out.

And, you know,

it's not to say that anything is better or worse in terms of the way that you put things together, but it's certainly a much more, a much different kind of dynamic.

But for anybody that listens to any kind of music, if it's a group, go on Spotify, go on a track, track, and just press on the song credit.

Look at the song credits and see how many people are credited.

It's like, huh, those two people aren't, they don't seem to be in the band.

It's like, yeah, that's a producer and that's maybe

some session songwriter, drummer-y type person.

But yeah, that's a whole, I'm like, what the fuck?

Kind of made like, you know, Ronnie Radke or something like that.

You go, okay, like, kind of evidently, like, that's a fucking insane projecty type thing.

But you go, the rabbit hole of that stuff goes pretty deep.

It's pretty interesting.

It does.

It's deeper than you even realize.

A lot of it is not just, you're talking about the creativity of it all.

Like, you know, producer A wrote this song and songwriter B wrote this song, but there's a lot of it

wholeheartedly is a solo project, like business-wise.

Like the other four guys don't get to say,

you know, can we have this kind of bus?

Can we have this on the writer even?

Like,

there's more, and it's uncouth to speak about it, and I never would, but there's more.

If I told you all of them that are that way, you'd be very surprised.

Like, I can't count them on my fingers and toes.

Is Is that a function

of

bands struggling to get coordination from a creative standpoint and power struggles happening?

Yeah, I think

something I've observed is this new,

it's me, I'm calling it this, and then you guys work for me kind of structure is from

people who have already been in bands.

Like it's like the, it's like the next evolution, I think.

Like when you, for us, it's like a marriage, right?

It's like, it's hard enough being married to one person.

We're actually married to five people.

And

we have to manage everyone's mental health and physical health and who's getting sick and whose kids coming when and, you know, all of these things.

And

it's, it would be so much easier if it was just my band.

I pick when we go on tour based on my schedule.

I tell you who you're like.

We can't go on tour at that point.

It's our anniversary.

We can't go on tour at that point.

It's the wife's birthday.

Yeah.

The kid's birthday.

I mean, I'm playing a show on my wife's birthday this summer.

Like literally, I'm going to be in Canada.

And I have to look at these guys and then look at my wife and go,

I'm screwed here either way.

So that's the fucked up guilt part.

But it's true.

And then I have to literally weigh, like,

do I tell five people in our band and then all the surrounding people, like our crew, manager, agent, even though you did your job and got us this opportunity to make some money, I'm going to say nobody here gets to eat because it's my wife's birthday.

That must be difficult to do.

Yeah.

And we've done a really good job of navigating it, but there was a time where it's like, we're not doing this ever.

That doesn't work.

And then there was a time we said yes to everything.

That's not sustainable.

And you only arrive at this place, I think, after, to your point, an unteachable lesson over.

decades.

I forget who it was, but you had someone on your podcast talking about something about falling in love and staying in love.

Really brilliant guy.

Arthur Brooks.

Brilliant.

Bold dude.

He was sat there.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

And he was talking about stage one, two, three, and four.

Yep.

And like stage one is where people get stuck in relationships.

And that's where people get stuck in a lot of things.

And then you kind of push through to stage four where it's like, that's my brother.

He's crazy.

I'm crazy.

We don't do the same things at all, but it's, we're past that.

But you know how you get to stage four was eye contact and touch.

It's oxytocin bonding to push you through the serotonin dump.

Yeah.

You get to come out on the other side, which is precisely the thing that being apart from your partner stops you from being able to develop.

It burns the newness off.

I have to imagine that the,

there is a lot of sort of cyclical, I mean, it seems like not for you, but there has to be a lot of cyclical dating when someone, maybe even somebody who, I really want a partner, I want a long-term relationship.

I want to make this work.

And you go, you can never progress.

You're in this permanent like holiday romance thing always.

Where you're back home two weeks.

It's like a fling.

It's not a relationship.

We have someone very close to us who's been in a fling for 20 years with, I mean, different people, you know what I mean?

But it's rinse and repeat.

Yeah.

And I think, I honestly think with this individual, and I...

Not hyperbole, I really believe that he craves and needs deep, real intimacy, connection, reality.

And he keeps rinsing and repeating, trying to find it because he's chasing that oxytocin feeling, you know?

Yeah.

And it's really interesting to like unpack all of that

with one person, let alone five at the same time.

I mean, Aaron's

probably

walked me through the hardest times of my life more than anyone in my family has.

Like my dad died.

We were just on tour.

He saw me melt down,

you know, passed out in the front lounge for a whole tour.

Dad has cancer, but I got to go work.

And what do I do?

Literally you reading that, I'm like, oh, I am in there.

I'm not there now, but I've been everything you just read.

And I think the easiest thing to do is, well, my next project, that was so, that was so tough.

I don't want to do that again.

It's almost like if my wife left me, I wouldn't want to get married again.

Because to have a good marriage is so much pain and work.

And it's worth every cent of it and every second of the time spent crying together, fighting together, working through things together to get to that other side.

But it's not easy.

And everyone.

It's also not worth it if the end result is you falling just before the finish line or if the, if the, if the race ends up finishing.

Yeah.

You know, and it, it's like, I think that's where solo projects with other guys come in.

It's like, I was in a band for 20 years.

I don't want to be in another band.

I would never start another band.

I would literally start my thing.

But you take all of that.

We've both done all of those things.

And I did do a side project.

I remember.

Yeah.

And I brought all of this

to the side project.

And I thought the whole time, here, I have, I have, here, here, here.

I thought the whole time.

They might have dried out.

You might have started something with this.

The whole time I thought.

I have a severe,

I have a severe anxiety issue.

And the fight or flight thing is I've been in fight or flight for

in varying degrees for 25 years.

And the work that I do around that is life-giving and life-altering.

And

I've probably been to the ER 250 times in the last 20 years with anxiety.

And we can get into that later if you want.

But the whole, what I'm saying is

I took all that with me, all this baggage, if you want to call it baggage, whatever you want to, whatever you want to put on it.

Like, I just took it with me to the Side project and it was worse.

And I think that's why, you know, when we started this conversation of how many bands are actually solo projects, there is a, there's a, a modicum of like,

this isn't a great thing.

When you said it, like, I don't know exactly what you meant, but I had this feeling that you're, there's, there's some disearnestness or something about it when you hear about a band that, you know, whatever.

And I think that's because that individual was in a band once, like he said, and they take it to the next thing and it doesn't fix anything.

If you're broken, if you're broken and you're out of sorts and your priorities are out of whack,

changing the room does what?

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Yeah, getting all of the veating veto voting power makes no difference.

That makes that being said.

But on paper, it feels great.

But also, on the flip side of that, if you have great vision, wonderful songwriter, all of the contacts, you're a healthy person in a well-regulated relationship, you now get to do exactly what you want and your creative output is completely unbounded.

That's a dream.

I just wonder how many people are able to reach that.

Yeah.

Didn't work for me.

I mean,

I don't know if we've reached it.

I think in varying degrees we have.

I don't know if we ever will.

And maybe that's the whole point.

It's like, you just keep trying and you're never going to get it right.

You know, I'll never have a perfect show.

I will never be able to take my wife on the perfect date.

And I think that life is designed that way on purpose.

Cause to your point, like when you have the perfect show and you have the perfect date and there's nowhere else to go, but down from here, what's the point of doing that?

What about if

you have played the perfect show?

300 times, but you refuse to let yourself actually believe that.

Because if you did, then there would be this unreasonable next level so I think about it with regards to my show

every time that we hit a new launch velocity on plays let's say we do a million plays in in a day

holy fuck that's insane million plays in a day immediately two things come into my mind the first one is that's fucking great and the second one is holy shit the minimum bar for acceptable performance has just been taken up like yes double so every time that you reach a new level of performance not only is it a cause for celebration, but it's a cause for anxiety because anything less than that becomes a sense of insufficiency moving forward.

Dude, I think

the launch of an album.

I really wanted to get into this as well.

The analyticalization of music.

The fact that you guys have got Spotify for artists dashboards on the back end and you know exactly track on track where we were at, how many plays, what's the monthly at, this album we're counting down.

Or will Waterfall release all of the singles so that we can get, we can like bump the plays back up again?

It's gamesmanship.

It used to be, it used to be tangible.

So there used to be this thing called sound scan.

So like sound scan was literally like a big calculator that counted records sold.

Okay.

It still exists.

It still exists, but it's now it's not the main, the main metric now is what you're talking about.

It used to be you'd have your merch guy or whatever had a piece of paper and however many CDs or albums you sold that night, they would just tick a box and you would send it in.

And the tangibility of it for me made it easier to process i don't know how to explain why and we could get into it but like it's so weird now because people will say numbers to me about an album release or how many how many times something is streaming and i'll be like okay is that good and i'll the number will be large and i'll think it's great and then i'll open my phone and band x or y will have you know quadrillion plays first week and I'm like, well, fuck.

I guess that means I'm a piece of shit.

But one of the ways that behaviorism gets reinforced is the speed of the feedback loop.

Yeah.

So the tie to the feedback loop.

That's one of the reasons why I have massive envy over guys that get to do stuff live, comedian friends of mine, musician friends of mine, that

first off, you have feedback that happens in person.

That's very positive, very reinforcing.

And it happens instantly.

You play a fucking cool riff, you sing a great note, the crowd reacts immediately.

You can feel it.

You put a good podcast out on the internet, and it's like two weeks later, some people that you never see maybe press the thumbs up button.

And it's this totally sterile, arbitrary number that has no emotional salience to it at all.

And in some ways, that's good because you think, okay, I'm less at the mercy of some of the emotional fluctuation.

You get your stability elsewhere.

You do.

But on the flip side, you go, fuck, like, that's a lot of work to not get the

requisite equivalent amount of positive reinforcement that you want.

So you have to find your motivation from elsewhere, too.

Yeah.

I mean, I think, I think it's, to answer your first question, to circle back to that, I think it is, I think it's really toxic

without contentment.

Like,

I think it was really easy for us.

I'll give you an example.

I think it, when we,

for,

I mean, is there a more,

is is there a better word than blew up when we when our body off bro when our band came out and we were whatever number two on build we had our moment we were selling out everything and we were in theory at least in our little scene the biggest band for a few years

you you have this like we're on top how do we help everyone below us and then you fast forward and it's really easy to be a positive community focused person when you're at the top you know it's like you're Rogan.

It's a big bank account.

It's very easy to be charitable.

Yeah, if you're a Rogan,

you want to give everyone a thing because you're at the top and you're in a super position and it's almost natural.

It's not even a sacrifice.

And then you fast forward and we take out Spirit Box and we take out Bad Omens and they're opening for us

three years ago.

And now they're selling out arenas and we're playing the exact same room that they opened for us.

We have not moved

and they have gone nuclear.

And

it's interesting because you really see the person you are if when that happens, you're happy for them or if you're jealous of them, you know, and I think it's, I, I've, we've seen it in our small circles of like, as soon as that band pops, it's, oh, it's because they have a mask or it'll be that like you start making excuses because you're feeling not validated.

And it's like, there are bands that are 10 times bigger than us that suck.

And there are bands that are 10 times better than us that will never leave their small town.

And that's just how the universe works.

And you may never have 50 million, but you may have five.

And is it worth stressing over how to get six?

Or can you just go, dude, look at me.

I'm, you know, reasonably wealthy.

I'm in great shape.

I have a very successful podcast.

Like, I have nothing to complain about.

But then there's always a North Star.

As soon as you ratchet down, your aim gets higher and higher and higher.

Well, this is a habituation problem, right?

That you play a show that's your new minimum baseline.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, does that mean that anything that isn't that becomes failure?

So, um, for some people, yes.

Well, if let me give you it does feel that way.

Let me give you this from a different industry to yours, uh, books, authors.

So, Mark Manson, good friend of mine.

Uh, his first book actually is from 2013.

It's called Models.

It's one of the best books for guys that want to learn how to be more attractive to women.

It kind of came out of the, I guess, like elevated pickup artist world where it wasn't like icky.

I've seen them book.

I just want to, I just want to improve myself and

find a good woman.

But then he writes the subtle art of not giving a fuck in like 2018, something like that.

And

this thing's been on the New York Times bestseller list for like 250 weeks.

Every airport has like 18,000 copies.

Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Morgan Housell, The Psychology of Money.

I've spoken to each of these guys individually.

Mark said to me, it was like, the worst thing that I could have done was have a book that went that big because every book after that's going to feel like a failure.

Every single book that I write will never be as big as that one.

How do you?

But we deal with that.

It's like we, we go on tour and we have a new record out and you know, it's the place after this one and it's all about that.

And then

the songs do well.

And then we play a 20-year-old song and the place explodes.

And you have a choice in that moment.

You can be grateful and be like, holy crap.

We wrote this song in my mom's living room or our local church when we were 19.

And now we're 40.

And there's 2,000 people screaming every single word.

This song again.

Or same data set.

We peaked when we were 19.

Everything we've done since then has been dog shit.

How do you know?

Nobody, nobody cares about my band.

They just care about this one stupid record I wrote 20 years ago.

Looks like the author.

Those internal dialogues are all getting a drink at the same bar all the time.

How do you navigate that emotionally?

Man, honestly, I think

for all the shit that we give it,

growing up Christian really helped.

Like having something,

whether it's real or not, we debate to this day.

We've shed all of it pretty much, but.

From a young age, being baked in with your life is not your life.

This is not the tim or the chris or the aaron show we are small pieces of sand and our job is to make the most beautiful beach out of this and we are a small part and just the almost the forceful humility and the forceful like what is what is life and it's it's never about us and all of those things which can be overexposed Can be toxic and toxic

and they have been, but I think once you back out of that and you balance it and you kind of get all the levers right and everything's kind of balancing on a very thin edge,

it just turns.

It's almost like, how can you not just be grateful?

Like there's, there is no other option.

You know, I'm proud of Beartooth.

I'm proud of bad omens.

And, you know,

it's such a drain to.

try to listen to bands that are bigger than you and listen to their new song and pick it apart.

It's just, it's not good for anyone.

And it's not helping you become better.

It's just making you more

violent in turmoil inside, you know?

And I, yeah, I don't know.

For me, I always go back to all I ever wanted to do was sell out the state theater in St.

Pete.

Which holds like 500 people.

500 people.

All I ever wanted to do was play there, which we did.

One of my first shows was opening for a band called Moss Feaster with Under Oath,

which is named after a funeral home crematory.

I thought about that.

So, my first show at the band was Playing State Theater.

We played first to nobody.

To 40 people or whatever.

And I was like, man, how sick would it be if we were like the last band?

We didn't know about Headliner and Direct Support and Two of.

We didn't know anything.

She's like, what if we played late when people are here?

And then we sold that out.

And then everything else is just kind of unfolded.

And if you can remember where you came from and why you did it in the first place, this is

all a blessing.

It is not a game.

I think you're really good at optimization and you have a lot of guests talking about, you know, if you want to go from here, do here and then IPOs and everyone's always trying to ratchet, ratchet, ratchet, ratchet, ratchet in a good way.

But for us,

we didn't set out for this to be our career, you know, and you can see the bands that do.

And if it's your career, then it's different.

We happened to be here.

Like,

we're here.

I don't know what I'm saying.

I have a theory.

How many friends do you talk to?

I've been thinking about this the last 15 minutes.

How many friends do you talk to that say this?

Oh, I loved their first album.

When you're talking about an artist, you're talking about artists X, Y, Z.

They go, oh, I love their first album.

And I think.

Louis Capaldi is a good example of that.

Yeah.

And I think with our band, we're an example of that.

And it hurts me to say it sometimes

because

I do think that we, I know we work so so hard on our new music and we work so hard on optimizing the way we run our business and how much stuff can we bring in-house and what can we purchase versus rent, all this stuff.

But I think that people,

like, why is bad omens bigger?

And why is this, that?

Why is this, that, and the other thing?

And I don't know the answer, but I think I know a piece of the answer.

And I think when you make your first thing.

You know, like this, the subtle art of not giving a fuck wasn't his first thing, but it was like, basically.

It was base, basically.

And I think that, and I started thinking about this when you said that.

Our first album, it was,

it was

honest.

There was no reason

we did it other than the fact that we wanted to.

We weren't following something.

We weren't thinking about what was next.

We weren't even thinking about being big or popular or cool or any of those things.

So now everything we do is, like you said, it's hearkening back to that.

But I think the first album syndrome theory is because the public

feels

that earnestness and that honestness and a word that i hate that awesome that authenticity you know what i mean like when we wrote they're only chasing safety there wasn't never a moment i promise i can say this with with glee in my heart we never thought a bunch of people sing this in time's time i never ever for any reason had that thought i love the word earnest it's one of my favorite ones The bravery to take your emotions seriously.

Yeah.

Earnest.

Yeah.

I mean, you're not worrying about sucking and you're not worrying about failing.

And I think that that's this whole thing.

That's why people start side projects.

That's why people

chase the rabbit, the dragon, whatever it is.

So, if you will, with this business, with this art form, is because

you're chasing something you

and this is, this is a huge generalization and assumption, but that you'll never get again.

Like, no matter matter how hard Louis Capaldi tries, I don't think you're going to get that record again.

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When you mentioned about some of the challenges you've had with anxiety, nervous system regulation coming back down, did you see

how I'm feeling now, the documentary about Lewis?

Uh-uh.

Dude, it's on Netflix.

I know he's had struggles with that.

It is fucking canon if you're a musician to watch this thing.

So

I must talk about this like every month.

He writes his first album.

I mean, he blows up from a song.

video that was him playing in some random pub in the arse end of Scotland, singing this song that he'd written when he was 16.

And then he sort of slowly builds up this album.

I think he releases it maybe when he's 19, something like that.

And then it's billions, billions of streams, everything, every single everything.

And he's got this really interesting way of presenting.

He's very self-deprecating.

He's very, very sort of British in that way.

He doesn't take himself too seriously.

He's not glamorous.

You know, he's like very self-affacing in the way that he shows up.

And then COVID happens, and the documentary starts in COVID.

And it's him in his mom and dad's old house in Scotland.

And he's in this back shed thing, which is very nice, right?

Recording studio.

And it's like the wall is just platinum record, platinum record, gold record, platinum record, platinum record, award, award, award.

And his day-to-day life is him

having had his entire childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood to write his first album.

And then the pressure of the biggest record labels on the planet saying, Hey, how are we going with

anything with his second album?

How's anything?

And he develops

a like

Twitch.

He develops this nervous Twitch over time

that it turns out is Tourette's.

So he's got this predisposition for Tourette's, but it's 100% brought on by this.

And then what you want is for there to be some wonderful

conclusion, some sort of victorious hero moment at the end.

And one of the final shows of the entire documentary, he steps out on stage and is so nervous he can't sing the songs.

And his dad and his mum are in the crowd, and his dad sprints from the seat to like be backstage to like hold his son.

Yeah.

And it like tears them up.

And he went out and did Glastonbury.

I think he might have done Glastonbury two years in a row and not been able to perform, like, got to stage and then shut down.

Wow.

Like multiple times.

And

that

was, that's like, it's still, it's one of the most formative things I've ever watched.

And it taught me two lessons.

First one,

there's this bit partway through.

And he's explaining about this sort of, you know, wild trajectory of what's happened.

He turns straight to the camera and he goes, people think that fame changes you.

Fame doesn't change you.

just changes everybody around you.

And I was like, holy fuck, that's deep.

Yeah.

And then the second thing it made me realize is that there are some people who have the skill set to be unbelievably famous and successful, but a disposition that is not very

comfortable with it.

Or you could say there are some people that are built to be

so talented that they would be famous, but they can't deal with the fame.

And they'd be an introvert or whatever.

I mean, I think.

I think fame in general is not healthy.

I mean, I think with technology and everything being everywhere, like now I can hear about a girl who was kidnapped and beaten up in Iowa.

And now I'm wearing that.

And it's like the world got so short and so small in our lifetime.

Like we used to tour with Sam's Club payphone cards to call home.

No cell phones.

We had an Atlas, no GPS.

An Atlas.

It's a

Tom Tom.

Oh.

No, a company called Rand McNally in the 90s and early 2000s would make this like binder book.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah.

We've got the entire United States with highways and roads.

We've got that in the

and then every there's like 65 pages.

So then you get into like per state and we would navigate literally by math.

Fucking orienteering your way to the next.

I don't know how we did it.

And then when we got lost.

Just an additional fucking

burden.

Yeah.

Then you get lost.

So you have to go find a payphone.

You type in your minutes.

It says you have 120 minutes left.

And I'm calling this promoter being like, I think we're close.

And then fast forward and we have Instagram and your podcast is being listened to in probably 75 countries.

That was not possible.

And I think that acceleration of information

has just accelerated the kind of the fame engine a bit.

And I don't think anyone knows how to deal with it.

I think

we were meant to be in a community, you know, of 100 people or we were meant to be in our neighborhood.

I should know my neighbor's name and he shouldn't have to buy a lawnmower because he could borrow mine.

Like that is what we have done literally until about 20 years ago as people.

And the ones that did it before us were like these mythical outliers, the Beatles, obviously.

Yeah, worldwide successes, of course.

But on a day-to-day life,

our kids are the first generation just being born into this is the way life is.

I think probably

everyone that's listening to this podcast right now will have one friend that they know personally from earlier in their life or that they've spent some sort of a time with that's got a million followers on some platform.

Yep.

And

for

a variety of like justified and unjustified reasons.

You know what I mean?

Like someone might know Bonnie Blue.

Someone might know like a great fucking poet or some shit.

Yeah.

And not that Bonnie Blue's not a poet.

That

speed of ascendancy feedback loop, like how fast.

And, you know, you mentioned about sort of tribe, ancestral setup, what's typical.

Yeah.

The problem that we have is our previous comparison group would have been, so you got your Dunbar number of about 150.

But within the 150 tribe, that wasn't one big tribe.

It was little pods typically of about 30 within that.

Break off.

Yeah, they'd sort of be like

moderately tightly affiliated, but not totally, totally tight together.

And then you would have this, this sort of wider group.

You didn't have that many people to compare yourself to.

Correct.

Because out of 150, 75 are male.

Fucking

like

of the 75, maybe

15 or 20 are under the age of 14.

Right.

Because everybody fucking dies early.

It's like, well, I'm kind of not competing with the 14-year-old.

So, you know, there's such a small group of people that you end up actually competing with.

And the issue is that in the modern world, we don't know where the boundary of what our competition comparison group is.

You can compare yourself to everybody.

Yes.

In a different way, it's like you guys, in some way, are comparable with Sabrina Carpenter, despite having

you could not find a person that's more different than you, other than the fact that she makes notes come out of her face.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think,

I think, with that knowing that,

I'm not surprised by that documentary.

And honestly, if we were filming our lives the whole time, we would have those moments too.

I have a version of that.

Even like I intentionally don't go on Instagram and I intentionally don't look at other bands' Spotify numbers.

I don't look at that because all it does is lead to comparison.

And, you know, even if I'm looking at it and looking at smaller bands to make myself feel better, it's still comparison.

It's a, it's, the binary is still there.

I need a dopamine hit.

I need to feel valid.

I don't.

So let me find something to be like, at least I'm not as bad as that guy, which is never the way anything progresses.

And I think fame is just

an unfortunate,

an unfortunate thing, to be honest.

Would you tell me the story?

Your Louis Capaldi equivalent?

Yeah.

In 2004,

think we I guess we probably wrote chasing safety in 03, right?

We did.

So in 2004 we started touring on it.

And we were still touring as a pre there was MySpace, so there was some evidence of how things, big things were getting or not.

But that year we did the warp tour and we were playing on a stage called the Smart Punk stage, which was like

out of the seven stages, it was the worst one.

Like literally like a truck with a flat surface.

Like the opening band from the stage had to build it every day to sick to gain their access to play it yeah okay um some of those guys were still friends with one of those guys plays in paramore now sick underminded joey malin yeah so um

we started out playing that summer in front of 100 and 150 people people that were niche enough to know the underground hardcore scene they would come see us in warp tour and by the end of that summer it had blown up i'll never forget it we played in boston

And we played during the used.

There was a lot of crossover during a warped tour.

There's this big blow-up thing in the middle of the stage and you didn't know when you what time you were playing until that morning, every day, 10.30 in the morning.

There was no set set times on Warp Tour.

Jesus Christ.

So if you're in Milwaukee, like you might play at 8 p.m.

And the next day you're in Chicago and you play at 11.45 a.m.

So we were woken up a lot going year on in 40 and we're like shit.

A lot.

So that particular day was the final day of the tour and we get told when we're playing and then we go look at the blow up, the blow up thing and the used is playing during us.

And I'm like, well, there's that.

You know, we're fucked.

Like, no one's going to watch us play.

And we got on stage, and there were two or 3,000 people.

In front of the flat truck to see us play because Chasing Safety, unbeknownst to us, had,

I hate this word, and you said it now, I hate it worse, like blown up,

right?

But no one had a phone to be able to keep.

No, right.

There was no way, there was no, there was no way to know.

And then that, that, and then that fall, um, we toured with a band called Stretch Armstrong.

Um,

and we had to play twice every day.

So many people showed up to the shows.

So you did a matinee to try and keep up?

No, no, no, we didn't, we wouldn't know because again, the metrics were so messed up and there was no phones.

So we'd show up at a 800-capacity club and we'd play and there'd be 900 people outside still.

And so we would just go run it back.

I don't even know if we got paid for it half the time.

Yeah.

It was just, we would just run it, do it again.

And in the middle middle of that, I started having, um, I started having chest pains.

Like, and I had experienced them a little before,

like searing, sharp, like

chest pains.

And my hand would go numb and my jaw hurt.

And I would get real nauseous.

And there were days

on that tour.

I don't know if I can, I don't know if I can.

And I would always muscle through it and just play.

Meanwhile, I'm going to the hospital every third day.

I'm having a heart attack.

I'm having a heart attack.

I would go out, walk in crying and saying that I'm having a heart attack.

And they would go, You're 21 years old.

You're not having a heart attack.

You got to find, I got to find out.

You got to do the work.

You know, I need blood work and the retroponent levels.

And I know all the jargon because I've done it so many.

I probably had 300 EKGs in my lifetime.

You know, I need an EKG.

I need a retroponent.

You know, there were days where I remember the opening band one day, particularly this guy, Chris, telling me, like,

this is just in your head.

And I'm like, how?

I feel it.

It's real.

I feel it.

It's real.

And it got progressively worse through the years.

The band got more popular.

And then in 2010, I quit.

And I put it under the guise of, like,

at the time, we were all pretty religious.

And I put it under the guise of like, I, I got to, you know.

I got to do something else for God.

I got to, you know, and the reality was I just didn't deal with

my nervous system and my anxiety.

And if you ask me today, gun to head, like what caused it, you know, what caused the onset of it.

I have a bunch of theories, but I don't really have an

what are the theories?

I grew up in a super, super Christian home, like he said a little bit ago.

And my, like, my family talked like this.

Like, I grew up in the, you know, my family's from Georgia and they talk like this.

And

all I ever heard growing up was about medical things.

To this day, day, like my mother, to this day, if I call my mom right now, right now, and I love my mother, and I'm not,

I don't want this to come off if she hears this, like, mom, you fucked me.

We love you, mom.

Yeah, but she, she would,

yeah, so-and-so, you know, sister, in the churches, they call you sister, whoever, sister Gina, whatever.

You know, sister Gina's got like a, they had to do something to her iota.

Do you believe that?

You believe that?

And growing up, the whole time it was like that.

It was like that the whole time.

And my parents, my dad had a mistress.

And I caught him with his mistress and kicked him out of my house when I was 18.

I think that probably AIDS and abets to it.

And both of my parents had this anxious disposition as well.

His health, anxiety, disposition.

His health, anxiety, and disposition.

Fed into you.

My whole life.

My whole life.

To this day.

If I call my mom right now, I promise Chris, she would tell me something about her physical body.

I promise.

Like, like I know my name.

Like she would say.

So it was put into me that way.

And then the pressures of, oh, there's not only one show that's sold out.

There's another one that's sold out.

Are we getting paid?

I don't know.

And Tim, Tim and I are very different.

And we're very alike in some ways, but we're very different.

And Tim is the most punk rock person I know.

I mean, like, we'll do anything.

Like, if there was 500 people out in the street and you were like, can you guys play?

He'd be like, oh, yeah, for sure.

And I'm just, I have a hard time with that.

I'm getting better with that, you know, by being able to be more,

you know,

spontaneous.

But at the time, I wasn't.

And it ate at me and ate at me and ate at me.

And if I'm honest with you, which I think this format doesn't work and our conversation doesn't work, um, I deal with it today, not to the extent that I did then, but, um, something I deal with every day.

And it's really difficult and

to be honest, like, it's scary sometimes.

You know, the fact that I have to say this to you, um, I hate a lot.

Because I'm a fan of your show and I'm a fan of a lot of the people on your show.

So to come here and say what I'm saying about my own life and my struggles, it feels like a little bit like those Spotify numbers where I'm like, I want modern wisdom and I'm talking about this.

Well, don't forget, I mean, I appreciate you saying that.

And that must have been hard to deal with.

That's tough to be a young kid thrust into the limelight and to be

fuck.

Like this is my dream.

It's my artistic outlet.

And like my fucking nervous system is betraying me.

Like, this is my shot.

This is my thing.

Yeah.

And my fucking, I'm, that must be what it feels like to be Louis Capaldi.

It's like, I've, this is what everything I've ever dreamed of.

I'm on Glastonbury, the biggest festival in the world.

All the flags.

Yeah, man.

Yeah.

And my fucking body is betraying me.

So I'm sorry that you went through that, man.

Yeah.

That's really no, thank you for saying that.

That would be tough.

It's something that it, and on the flip side, I was thinking about this the whole time talking about Lewis too.

Is all the struggles that I've been through with my mental health and my nervous system and the whole thing, it directly has affected him.

Like

indirectly and directly.

And that is something that I feel actual guilt for, heavy guilt.

Because if I really think about it, like when I left, I've never said this.

When I left, there was a large decline

in their career.

They did a record without me when I left.

Yeah.

There was a large decline in their career.

And I know that was directly correlated to me leaving.

And I left because I couldn't, in layman's terms, get my shit together.

You know?

I'm sorry that happened.

Thank you.

Yeah.

But that kind of goes back to like,

how do you do that for 23 years and then like

feel like you can be close with like your mom?

You know, like that.

Let me pick the kids up.

Yeah, that exactly, that exact thing is like they're, and I'm grateful for it.

I'm, I'm glad that me and my wife will never have stuff like.

what we've been through.

But once you go through it or still deal with it, it does do something to a bond in your brain that is

not better or worse or closer or more distant.

It is just an

it's a unique

bond.

It's not that's what I meant about

a different type of intimacy.

Yeah, it's not brotherhood.

It's not a big and another one's through tour.

Yeah, it's like not brotherhood.

It's not family.

It's not best friends.

It's not business partners.

It's like all of it all the time, which is interesting.

And that way.

and I mean, I talked to him a lot about his stuff.

Like, I mean, the last fight we got into was in Europe.

We were having like the oldest beer or something.

And you were, you were going to the hospital like three times that tour.

And I told him straight up.

I don't remember what the ailment was.

I just told him, like, dude, you're going to have a lot of regrets at the end of this whole thing because

you're, you're either choosing to or being captured by,

I don't know which because I'm not in your head.

And sometimes it feels like it swings different ways as we all do.

But to have this beautiful kind of thing happen in this random career that none of us asked for and for you to just be sitting in it in misery rather than

going to the pub and grabbing pints with the boys or

the old recipe ever made somewhere in Munich.

Yeah.

Jesus Christ.

But he was in it in a, he was in a state.

Um, and I would, and we were all in a state.

A manic spiral.

And we were all drinking.

So when I drink, I, I, I'm a very direct talker anyway.

Unlike him, I'm from New York and my New York family is like,

say what you, what the fuck you on about?

Like, say what you need to say.

Um, very loving, but just very direct.

And so I was just like, it was done through argumentation.

Yeah.

And I was just like, you're just going to, you're going to, you're going to have a lot of regrets when all this is over because you're wasting

this thing, you know?

And he got really mad.

We all disbanded.

He said it differently.

And he came.

What did I say?

I have to say that.

I'm sorry, Chris.

I'm sorry.

No.

You said, I'm not.

When you die,

you say at the end of this thing, which is very podcast etiquette.

You say, when you die, you will regret so many things.

There, I said it.

On your deathbed.

Yes.

On your deathbed.

Yeah.

Because that's when you get full perspective and reflection.

And the goal is not to look at like Steve Jobs, last 10 things he wrote, money doesn't matter.

I wish I would have spent more time with my family.

To your point, these unteachable lessons.

It's like, we're being taught these lessons now, man.

Like we've had this, we've lost it.

You left, you're back.

Like we all have done the good, the bad, the biggest, the smallest.

biggest man in the world, this tour is eating shit, and we're making no money.

We've done all of it now.

So it's like, how many more lessons are there left to learn?

And to his point, he's like, I don't choose.

It just happens.

And

kind of like, you know, the dude with the tick, like,

can, is it just, do you just live here now?

And is there anything you can or can't do?

Um,

and yeah, as far as that goes, like, I think his, his stuff specifically does directly affect us.

But I think, if I'm being honest, it's more like I can tune him out.

If he's going to the hospital, I'm like, if for this period or episode, I just need to reduce you to a coworker.

As long as you get on stage for the hour I need you and we make our money and we can have enough gas in the tank to get to the next show, you can melt down for the other 23 hours by yourself in your bunk.

You know, and that's not loving or true, but you have to.

in those states, figure out a way to cope.

He can't cope.

I can't cope.

What are we going to do?

Blow up the whole tour?

No.

So you then start putting in these protections and

sometimes they're not healthy.

And so we've been through, again,

so much that

it's kind of like you go home and somebody's having a bad day.

And it's like, what are you on about?

Like, you haven't had a bad day in your life.

You know, you've, you've never

been through certain things that we have.

Therefore, I can't expect you to have the same perspective.

But it's hard when your perspective gets shift, shifted so much.

I imagine you used a couple of times sort of soldiers coming back from war as an example.

Which is a terrible example.

I'm not trying to church up.

Fucking people, I had Jocko Willink went out today.

Like, that was the guy that did the Battle of Ramadi.

Oh, yeah.

So he's a Navy SEAL.

Saw that go up today.

Yeah, who is maybe one of the scariest men I've ever seen in my entire life.

But

is it comparable in terms of kinetic danger?

No.

Is it comparable in terms of emotional

intensity?

Yeah, probably.

And

I really appreciate you opening up like that.

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Most of the things I think that you're

the

shames that you have in your life, the ones that are the worst that you have about yourself, if you look at them, they're usually the dark side of the stuff that you're the most proud of as well.

So I have to assume that when it comes to writing a record or mastering a track or like dialing in a particular sound or working on the new melody, the new lead, the new drums feel, whatever it might be, that that is an area where your obsessiveness gets deployed in a really productive manner because you're able to go like, no, it's not there.

It's not that.

I'm going to play it again.

I'm going to play it again.

I'm going to play it again.

You look at the fucking timeline.

It's just like 60 takes, 100 takes, 200 takes,

all the way down.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So if you want that, like, do you appreciate that about yourself?

The fact that you have this level of precision in your art form?

Okay.

Well, guess what the price is that you have to pay for that?

The price that you have to pay.

in order to have that level of precision in your art form is that you don't get to switch it off in other areas.

You don't get to turn that off.

You don't get to turn it off.

You're not going to turn it off with your partner.

If your partner makes you feel unsafe, like your nervous system is going to go, like, okay, what did they say?

Why did they say that thing?

There was no kiss at the end of that text.

That's what that meant.

Ruminate, think, obsess.

Okay.

You don't want it then.

You do want it when you're writing a record.

Choose.

Oh, you don't get to choose.

You don't.

So

what do I love about this?

Well, I love my attention to detail.

I love the fact that, and this is something as as well that you can sort of find, I think, between each other where you go, fuck, like, dude, the way that Aaron shows up, like, he's the first person in the studio in the morning.

He's the last person out at night.

He will not give up, or whatever it is, right?

However it is that you like that obsessiveness sort of shows up in the process.

Like, I really fucking love that about him.

And

would it be cool if he didn't have this

demon that he's got to battle in other areas?

But

would it be fucking total dog shit if we didn't get this level of performance out of him when the rubber meets the road?

You know what scares me the most?

Sorry.

What scares me the most and what I've seen a lot of therapists for this stuff and I've

taken a bunch of pills for it and I've talked to a million people about it and nobody

Nobody has ever said that.

It's always been

so thank you, number one.

But number two, it's always been

you'll get better if,

like you'll stop being obsessive about your health symptoms or whatever if you do X, if you do Y, if you do Z, if you change this habits you have.

No one's ever just said it like that.

And that, my friend,

is the essence of what it is.

To pump your tires up as high as they'll go.

Let me do that.

Because

you're absolutely right.

And it's scary to hear, to know that like

that pill, that conversation, that thing isn't going to fix it because it's, it's connected in that other way.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, well, it's who you are, dude.

I think so much of it is in the resistance.

You know, if you ever have

something

that you're really struggling with, And

I've had a rough 12 months.

Jesus Christ.

I've been kicked in the nut so many times over the last 12 months.

And

maybe

20% of it, 30% of it is like what you're dealing with.

And the vast majority of it is the resistance to the thing happening.

It shouldn't be this way.

I don't want it to be this way.

This isn't what it would, like, if only it could be different.

This is my fault.

This is someone else's fault.

What caused it?

What did it?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

How can I change it?

What can I do moving forward?

I'm wasting my life.

I'm killing myself.

I'm doing this thing.

I can't do this thing.

Like all of that, right?

You have the first emotion, anxiety.

Then you have resentment at your anxiety.

And then you have bitterness about your resentment about your anxiety.

And then you have frustration about your bitterness about your resentment about your anxiety.

You have this infinite regress of second-order emotions.

Mark Manson calls them meta-emotions.

It's like you don't get to control the first one, but you do have choice over the second one.

And the problem with that is, oh, I have choice over it.

That means that I am bad if I don't control my meta-emotions.

And if someone says you'll get better when, that's a denial of you.

That's them saying you are not enough as who you you are and when you're that way you're less you

and you need to fix the thing that's happening because your behavior makes me feel uncomfortable yikes you being that

makes me feel uncomfortable you not being okay makes me not okay so i need you to make yourself okay so that i can be okay now too

And that's just a denial of whatever it is that you're going through.

And that's rough, man.

So again, I'm sorry that you've no, thanks for saying that.

I think that I've I've never heard it put that way and I've always felt that way.

And I've never heard it put like that because.

But that is it.

It's more it talk about that a lot as a band, like even like with people are like, how do you stay faithful on the road?

How do you

stay diligent or not diligent?

And

it's just that.

It's like, we're all sexual beings.

I can't.

change the first thought.

You know, if there's a really pretty girl somewhere, I'm not going to not notice.

And then it's like, great, that I'm not looking for it.

I have no interest, but I can't change that first spark.

And I'm going to throw sand on it or I'm going to throw gasoline on it.

There's a really cool story.

David Buss, grandfather of evolutionary psychology here at University of Texas.

And he wrote a book called The Evolution of Desire.

And in it, he explains how men have an area of our brains which

give us reward if we look at something that's sexual.

Like guys will happily look at a pair of rocks that look like boobs and be like,

like, kind of fucking hot.

And this guy wrote in and he said, Dr.

Buss, I just want to thank you for saving my marriage because

I was finding I'm happily married.

I love my wife.

I love my kids.

I was happily married, but I found myself like finding other women attractive.

And I thought I was unhappy with my partner and something.

I thought there was something wrong with me.

I thought there was something broken.

And your book taught me that, no, like, it's fine for me to see a hot woman and be like, that's a hot woman.

In the same way, it's like, huh, those clouds look, you know, gray or whatever.

It's a thing.

And is it the thing that you tell your wife?

Probably not.

It's like, hey, honey, there's a beautiful cloud outside.

Like, yes.

Hey, honey, there's like a hot Latina walking past.

No.

But

the inside voice.

Yeah.

But the sense that you have with that, and that same dynamic there, I think, is a good part of what we're talking about here.

Which is like, huh, I have this thing.

There's some good in it.

There's some bad in it.

It is me.

What happens if I'm like just

okay with that?

Yeah.

What happens if I'm not trying to fix it?

Just put it on a shelf and let it be there.

It's just a part of it.

It's just like, here it is.

We're not going to deny it.

We're also not going to exacerbate it.

It just is.

I mean, the question that I've been the most fascinated with over the last few years, one of them has been the price.

that people pay to be someone that you admire.

And Elon Musk, he does this episode with Lex Friedman a couple of years ago, and Lex asks him some question along the lines of, like, how are you, really?

or something.

Oh, yeah.

And Elon says, I know what you're talking about.

My mind is a storm.

People think they want to be me.

They don't want to be me.

They don't know.

They don't understand.

You're like, this is the richest guy in the world.

Read the

biography that was done on him.

And it's like,

there was this day where his COO found him laid down in his office, just like staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep next to his desk.

Yeah, they're like, you need to come and do this shareholder meeting.

He's like, I'm not doing it.

I can't, I can't, I can't stand up.

He's like, no, you need to come and do this meeting.

Like, it was one of those Tesla's about to go under and we need to raise more money or fix the shareholders or do whatever.

He's like, I can't, I can't stand up.

He's like, no, you need to.

It took 15 minutes, like coaxing, coaxing, coaxing, coaxing, coaxing.

Finally, get him up.

It's like, all right, do you want to be Elon Musk?

Yeah.

Do you want to fucking be that guy?

Because that's the price that you need to pay to be Elon Musk.

And unfortunately, man, that's the price that you need to pay to be Aaron Gillespie.

Like to be you.

Yeah.

That's the price that you need to pay.

You want to fucking do the,

you want to do that?

Like you got to deal with the other thing too.

It's, it's, it's just so, it's staggering.

It's staggering to hear an acknowledgement of that.

You just don't, you don't hear that.

You don't hear that when you're rehabbing through it.

Not from your friends, not from professionals.

You hear, like I said before, 20 minutes ago, if you do X, you'll get Y.

You know what I mean?

I don't have any incentive.

And I think that that's one of the problems that even the best meaning guys, even the guys in your band, they want you to get better.

And I understand it.

I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sour grapes about it.

No.

It's, it's, it's, it comes from a really well-meaning place.

But

yeah, this is an area.

Joe Hudson, who does the art of accomplishment, has taught me so fucking much about this.

And he has a framework of view.

vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder.

And that's like heart-opening, heart-opening communication, especially.

And impartiality is a really interesting one, which is

sitting with somebody without wanting to change them, impartiality.

And I think a lot of the time when we see somebody going through something difficult, we want to help them.

Of course, you want to help them.

Is that not the good thing to do?

Is that not the empathetic, caring thing to do?

Of course it is.

Care about your friend.

You see them in pain.

You want to fix it.

It's like, but in that

fixing is a denial of what they're experiencing.

You aren't right as you are.

You're not good enough as you are.

This isn't okay.

You need need to change.

And a lot of the time, that is a transference of you saying, your discomfort is making me uncomfortable.

Stop your discomfort so that I can feel okay again.

And that's where codependency comes from.

You know, if you see somebody and you think, I'm not okay if you're not okay.

And it roll that forward.

And all of you guys have got this, which is I'm not.

What's the

Jimmy Carrism, which is,

as he's talking about comedians' relationships with audiences, he says, if you don't love me, I don't love me.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't, I, I, I think it's maybe

more complicated than that, but yeah, at its essence, yeah, for sure.

I mean, I think it's significantly more complicated than that.

Yeah.

Um, I would argue not even just nuance, but yeah, it's deep.

But yeah, it's like,

I think,

I think overall, it's just a matter of trying to find common ground where you can't and just

being okay with things not being okay.

Yes.

And that's,

that's hard, but it's not as hard as

we're not leaving this room till you're fixed.

You know, Tim, you're doing this.

We're not leaving this room till you stop doing this.

Like that, those ultimatums, which don't happen, but I'm saying that's the other side of that.

If it's not this, then it's on its way to be that.

And

I think there's a lot of like,

I don't even know.

Like everything's so bite-sized now.

It's like hard to even know what like truth is anymore.

You know,

like music, same thing.

Like music and stoicism, I think, are like the same thing in the sense that like you have these stoics, quote unquote, that just put up like a little blurb, like a Bible verse a day tear away calendar and you're missing the context.

You know, there's like 14 hours of Marcus Aurelius on Audible, And then you pick out like your favorite scripture and just pop it out.

And everyone's like, this, you don't, you don't know how much I needed this.

And it's like something like, if it doesn't bring you peace, be confident enough to walk away.

That without the surrounding context

results in friendships dissolving, people walking away from relationships because this just isn't bringing me peace.

And it's like music.

All of those things are just kind of going in that way where it's like TikTok moments.

Nobody listens to albums anymore.

We used to write albums that were like one through 12.

We don't listen to songs.

And we would do more.

We would literally put this song as the fifth song on purpose in a linear sense.

And now it's waterfall singles, it's waterfall stoicism, it's pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

Waterfall stoicism is a funny way to put it.

Yeah.

And it's, I think it does more.

I don't think it's all net positive, I'd say.

I don't know if it does more bad than good, but I think it does a lot more confusing, like confusing than it does

helping.

Because even to your point with Aaron, it's like, if you really zoom out, like everything you said, I agree with.

And, you know, a lot of the talks we've had, I agree with.

But it's so much more complicated than that.

Everything is.

And I think,

yeah, just the 10-sided die of life.

It's not just, oh, women are complicated.

Men are complicated.

It's.

The whole fucking ride is so complex

that it could have been walking in on your dad.

It could be when my girlfriend left me.

It's a trauma response.

It could be anything.

It's like so deep, like the cavern is like,

you know, you could throw a flashlight into it and it just disappears.

I've been thinking a lot lately about is, is he who wins the one that uncomplicates it enough?

And what I mean by that is, for an example,

one of my favorite episodes of your show is Dry Creek.

Dry Creek Dwayne.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was texting him this week.

And what I love about that episode is his story is crazy.

But my favorite part of the episode is at the very end.

And I think you asked him this question or somehow I gathered that you asked him this question.

What's a good day to you, Dwayne?

And he said, well, you know, like yesterday, I woke up.

Yeah, I'm upset with my friend's wife.

And then he came home and I had a cigar and then I had another one.

And I'm like,

if I could,

I'm not, and I'm not trying to make him sound like Force Comp.

That's not what I'm saying.

But like that is,

that is pure peace to me when he's, when he outlines that day, when you ask him, what kind of day, what's, you know, what's, what's a good day to you, Dwayne?

And he says all that.

And then we're talking about all this.

And you're saying that, and all I can think of is the one who wins is the one who can decouple.

I'm not saying to become ignorant of the complications of things and to become ignorant of the feelings of things and to become ignorant of the idioms of grief or whatever, but is the one who wins wins the one who can decouple the two.

And I had two cigars and talked to my friend's wife and we ate some supper at Longhorn or whatever the fuck he says.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, is that, is that

simple life is very, is highly underrated and I would argue more valuable than most things.

And it's becoming harder and harder to do.

But this is one of the curses, I think, of being an introspective deep person.

If you're someone that's sensitive, if you like to do the reflecting thing, if you like to ask the question, why?

Why Why do I feel that way?

Yeah.

It's like, well, I mean, this is an endless portal that you can tumble into of thinking about yourself.

And it's very interesting.

I take an awful lot of pleasure from asking the why question.

Like the entire reason for this podcast is understand the world and understand yourself and the world around you.

That was what I wanted to do.

I didn't understand myself and I didn't understand the world.

So I wanted to speak to 900 and fucking 50 people or whatever that maybe that would that would maybe be able to tell me.

But the problem with that is that, as you alluded to earlier on, there's like a sort of beauty and simplicity.

Like the the guy that's just like, yeah, fucking 500-person show, pull it.

Yeah, let's go.

Like that

don't overthink it thing.

Yeah.

When arrived at, I have to assume more naturally as opposed to curate.

That must be part of your nature that you've maybe sort of enhanced a little bit as opposed to Aaron with you to, in order to get yourself to that stage, it's like 10,000 hours of meditation.

But to think, okay, well, what if it's not about unpacking more of my stuff?

What if it's trying to like just

okay with whatever's going on and just like the letting go?

And that's one of the things, again, to give some props to the guys that are in bands.

And also,

I think this show is the kind of thing that's listened to by people who are in a lonely chapter.

You know, they're people who are struggling to find conversations, stimulus, support in their immediate surroundings.

So they find it in other people who they can listen to.

They have this sense of

community.

Yeah.

Like, fuck, like, that's, that, that guy went through that stuff and that's real harm.

Like, I went through something like that.

Holy shit.

I thought I was broken by having health anxiety.

And that's the first time I've ever heard anybody talk about it online.

I'm not broken.

Like, this is part of the human condition.

This isn't a personal curse that's been fired at me from above.

Yeah.

And, you know, the problem with that is that the lonely chapter by design is lonely, right?

You're so developed that you don't resonate with your old set of friends, but you're not yet sufficiently developed that you've got your new set of friends.

And you're trying to do all of these things and you're developing your life and you're changing the way that you think and the stuff that you're into.

And you're like, I don't know anyone that I can talk to about this.

And I have two choices.

I can either regress back and go to like this old version of me, which I know that I can't, shouldn't do this.

But

where is the net?

I haven't found my next tribe yet in that regard.

And the problem that you have there, and again, this is what I mean around the band.

The one thing that you guys have is that there is always someone with you.

And I imagine that if you want some introversion time, the fact that there is 16 people on a fucking tour bus, double-decker tour bus, and the support band's upstairs, and the front lounge is full, and the back lounge is full, and someone's parking, and someone's not.

Yeah.

And you're like, fuck, like, all I do is pack and unpack and get into go to airport, whatever it is.

Yeah.

But

being around other people is a really lovely way to pull yourself out of that.

And I think it's, at least for me, now, uh, just yesterday, we uh signed, I bought my first office studio space here in Austin.

Oh, sick, dude.

Congrats.

Thank you.

That's going to be real special.

That for me is because I have exhausted, I have close to exhausted my solo Sigma male, like DGen work energy tank.

Like that fuel, I'm on fucking fumes from that.

I like COVID happened.

I started working from home and I just never grew out.

I never graduated out of it because I'm like classic introvert.

All I want to do is get my head down and crack on.

And I just never stopped I was like oh well this is good so more of it must be better so I'll just keep going and keep going and keep going this thing's growing growing growing

you're like oh well this is this is and then after a while you go

how did I get kind of like yeah I kind of like miss people I think yeah so that's the solution that I've had to have and

must be tough when you want to have your own space and you can't but on the flip side the fact that you've got this camaraderie, this sort of brotherhood, this group of people that know everything that you've been through.

Yeah.

I mean, imagine how much, again, imagine how hard it is for male artists, make them female.

Imagine how hard it is for bands, make it a fucking solo artist.

Holy fuck, you are on the road and you don't even have your boys with you.

You don't have anyone that you can turn around and go, dude, when we did that thing on stage, it's like, who the fuck is session guitarist number three?

Yeah.

Like, who the fuck is that guy?

Like, he wasn't here last week or last year.

You see it eat people up like Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson.

I mean, these, these stories are not, they're not almost not even documentary worthy anymore because they're just so normal.

It's almost like,

yeah, we were talking about this earlier, but it's like back in the day, like the guys with tattoos were like the wild ones.

And now it's just everywhere that if you don't have tattoos, you're like the weird, kind of oblong, out of

sync with the culture kind of vibe.

And I think it's just, it's a story that keeps telling the truth every time.

And I think as humans, we have a really interesting knack to go,

yeah, but not me.

You know, and that makes that gives you juice too.

I literally, I literally, I literally talk about like being rich.

And it's like,

if you win the lottery and you have $100 million,

I don't care if you worked your ass off and built a company, blood, sweat, and tears, and come from a poor family.

And, you know, the cycle stops with me and that whole thing, or you just find a winning lottery ticket.

There's a certain amount of money

that will destroy you.

And everyone goes,

yeah, but I think I would do it different.

I'd buy all my friends' houses.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't do this.

I wouldn't do that.

And even for me, it's like, I know that it would destroy me.

And then if you said, well, here's the lottery ticket.

It's worth $100 million.

Tear it up.

I'd literally

probably not tear it up and think that I I can do it better.

Do you know that is the Unteachable Lessons essay?

Like, that's a part of it.

No.

And it's watch me dance through this minefield and avoid all of the other tripwires that everybody else kicked.

Absolutely.

Some solipsistic, narcissistic version of that might be true for them.

But not for me.

And

I think that that's it.

Like

you.

We are attracted to a dry, queak, dry creek Dwayne type guy.

Fucking impossible to say that motherfucker.

I still honestly, dude.

I feel

like my dwight weak way.

I had to practice

on the way in.

You're like, dry creek drain.

Because I start every episode typically by going like dry creek drain.

Welcome to the Dwayne.

Dry Creek fucking.

Dry Creek Dwayne.

Welcome to the show.

And I was like practicing it on the way in.

Got all of these things to think about.

Yeah, I'm trying to work out the motherfucker's name.

Yeah.

But I think the reason why he's inspiring is because he's just like,

it's not about telling you what to do and how to get better he almost solves his problems by just saying I just get up every day and try not to break something yeah a day I don't break something is a good day yeah and it's so simple

yet it it's more powerful than being like well you're monochromatic antibodies when you're when you're tired after you get seven hours of sleep versus seven and a half at the wrong bed with the UV light and like all that's so overwhelming and then you just see a guy come up he's like man just get up and don't break no I didn't break anything today.

I mean, that was my favorite story.

That is such a favorite story from him where he was saying, you know, I got up.

I looked at this horse.

He was trying to ride it or

discipline it in some way.

And he just looked at it for an hour.

He sat down and had a cigar.

Then I sat down and had another one.

Yep.

And he's like, I, I don't know.

It's a good day.

I didn't break anything.

Yeah.

What did you do today?

Not much.

You have a good day.

Yeah.

I didn't break nothing.

Like, that is more powerful than

how do I scale 10x here and there and there.

and then when you get there to your point your ratchet changes your happiness doesn't and i think there's i don't know what study it was but there was like a psychological study that came out that talked about um gratification and then satisfaction and the temporary stay of said satisfaction meaning i make a hundred thousand dollars a year

You call me in and say, Tim, you've been such a good job.

I'm going to give you $140,000 a year.

My happiness meter goes up about 15%

for about 30 to 60 days.

And then it recalibrates back to

I need 180.

And

it's not even about, oh, now I'm spending 40,000 more and not living below my means.

That's a whole financial question that I think is adjacent, but not the point.

It's, it's that we keep thinking more stuff and more achievements

are going to fill a hole that only contentment and peace that you find on your own can fill.

Oh, it's not the clubs, it's the theaters, it's not the theaters, it's the arenas, it's not the arenas, it's the stadiums, it's not the stadiums, it's the global tour.

It's crazy that you're even saying those words because if you skinny it way down, for us, before you were here, it started like this.

It started, let's go real micro for just two minutes.

It started with me at 15 going, I just want to be in a band.

I played drums at my parents' church.

I just want to be in a band.

Literally, I just want to play music with other people that aren't like the nerdy church people.

Right.

And then

I just want us to write one song.

Right.

And then I just want us to play one show.

I just want us to play one show where people are at it.

I just want to play one show where people are at it and know the words.

And now you just said stadium.

And that's, that's the most interesting thing to me about the whole thing is we never talk about how micro it is before it gets to this macro player.

Oh, me and Chris talk, our keyboard player, we talk all the time.

Oh, I know you two do, but I like that is that this is this podcast, by the way.

I'm not trying to be a fanboy, like this is my shit.

Like, I love digging in, and like, yeah, Chris and I, our keyboard player, talk a lot about it.

And to your point, like, how do you know you're grounded?

Uh, you know, is it natural?

Is it my predisposition or is it work?

And I think it, it's probably all of it, but like

a really interesting way to stress test, like, your priorities and where your head's at is like the band breaks up today.

How do you feel?

Aaron quits.

I die of a heart attack.

Whatever.

Make up anything.

Under oath is no longer.

The best years of my life are over.

I'll never do anything as meaningful as that again.

Now I just work at FedEx as if that's some like prison sentence.

I have to get a real job, God forbid, all these things.

Or

same same exact data set.

I can't believe we made it 23 years.

What a blessing.

All we wanted to do was write one song.

Like, which one is it?

Because both are true.

It just tells you who you are inside, you know?

Like, if

this doesn't work or we break up in a week or 10 years or 100 years,

I don't need this again.

It's, it's not.

part of me.

It's

informed who I am, obviously, and afforded me amazing experiences like the one we're doing right now.

But if all of this goes away and you're just a quote unquote

regular person with a regular job, like, are you okay with that?

Or do you need this?

What part of this is you?

And have you become

the thing that you just did?

You know, we would just do music.

And now have I be, have I become Tim from Under Oath?

Well, that was the, I think you said at the very beginning, do people love me for who I am or for what I do?

Tomorrow, Zaranko.

And do I love me for who I am or just what I do?

Yeah, 100%.

And

I'll ask your question.

You've been talking like this.

And I think in the early days,

especially when it blew up, I keep saying that.

There's got to be another way to say the band got popular.

I think it's the way that everybody knows.

Yeah, yeah.

But what

you, he has talked like this.

I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

You have talked like this since you were 21 years old.

Like there was a time when the band first,

fuck, here it is again.

When the band first blew up, where he would ride.

And I don't think you mind me talking about this.

No, he would ride with like the opening bands in vans.

Like he would.

Was this like your stoic hair shirt equivalent?

Like you purposely putting the fucking uncomfortable clothing on just to remind yourself of where you came from?

Honestly, it was.

I think at the time it was immature looking back, like, would I do that now?

No, but I think it was a response to exactly what we've been talking about.

But it came, that's the point I'm making.

It came from this same place.

It came from fame and money and me going, this is all gross.

And it scared us to death.

The reason I brought it up, the reason I brought it up, because I think it's pertinent to say, is

that self-actualization and that realization of like, FedEx isn't a prison.

Like,

let's switch this data set to same data set.

Let's switch the perspective to say, we had 23 beautiful years.

It scared us to death, some of us, some of the rest of us, hearing that reflection.

Or it sounds like the person's less bought in, or it sounds like they would be okay with a thing happening that you wouldn't be okay with happening.

It's like, holy fuck, is Tim half out?

Yeah.

Like, maybe he's not, maybe he's just going to pull the fucking pin one day.

But especially, and I thought that.

And if you hold things open-handed, it's not about making sure I never let it go or intentionally throwing it.

You just hold it like this, and it doesn't matter.

Like when you realize it doesn't actually matter, and not to say that under oath doesn't matter.

I think we've, I mean, we know we've saved people's lives and they have tattoos and this got me through brain surgery and whatever.

We've heard all the stories and the impact that we've had on life and culture is noticeable and palpable.

But

outside of that, if it wasn't us, it would have been someone else.

And it's more about

it it really doesn't matter.

Like, I'm always thinking about deathbed, always.

Like, and then everything that comes out, Steve Jobs' last things.

I've already mentioned that.

All these people's last things.

We asked 85 people in a nursing home, their top 10 things they changed.

You see it all day long.

And it's all the same shit.

So why wait until we're dying?

Question for you on that.

To deploy that.

Question for you on that.

The top five regrets of the dying, the deathbed thing that we had a very famous survey that was done.

What do you think are the top five deathbed regrets of ex-rock stars?

What do you think they would have in that?

Ooh, I think it all depends on where they end up.

Or why they're exes.

I think that the first time you have an actual relationship with a woman, you probably regret wasting 20 years just having sex with random women.

I think when your kids grow up, and we'll see, and me and Chris talk about this, our keyboard player a lot.

Like, I know I'm doing my best, and I also know I'm breaking something.

I just don't know yet

what it is.

You know, my kids could turn on me and say, You were never there, and they're technically correct.

Um, I FaceTime them.

We have a great relationship.

You know, my daughter's in a band, which she comes to all the shows.

She loves it, and I check in with my kids.

I'm like, Do you guys,

is this okay?

Um,

so for me, it's hard, it's hard to hard to tell.

But then you have people like dying, like drugs, the whole thing.

Like, it's almost like what's good about being in a band.

I think that's a lot easier to quantify.

You can count those way quicker than what's bad.

And you do feel like, like the other night,

I was dead asleep like two weeks ago on a Monday, like very asleep.

Like I've been so busy and I work like a nine-to-five in Nashville as a song as a staffing songwriter.

I've heard.

Yeah.

And I, so I just, I'm, so when I get home.

You're at the cold face of songwriting in the moment.

Yes.

So just tired, tired, tired.

And this is something that I regrets the wrong word, but

my daughter wakes up and vomits, has to vomit.

Sorry.

Sick.

Stomach virus.

You know, kids, whatever.

She's four.

And you know what the first thing she said was?

She's scared to throw up.

You know that feeling when you're trying to fight vomiting.

She goes, somebody please take me to the doctor.

And my brain went, oh, fuck.

Because

for years with the health anxiety thing, I've always, that's what, that's the first thing I do.

Oh, this hurts or this.

I got to go get a scan.

You know what I mean?

And my brain went,

I've passed the curse.

I've passed the curse.

And that,

to me, is the biggest regrets of 50 dying rock stars is like,

will I pass on the habits that I picked up touring and doing this?

Will I pass that on to my offspring?

And you, and you will.

And I know.

And I will.

And I think that's kind of the thing of like, we're all breaking something.

And I think to make your top five list, regrets or top five best things, like it has to be, it has to be in the construct of like, we're not there yet.

The story is still being written.

But

we have, I have a pretty good idea.

but I won't know until I'm 60.

And I look back and go, huh.

When you're triple D, you you can say, well, that's a good day.

I quit the band in my head

probably four times a year.

And it's like, and it's,

it is palpable.

And it's always on a plane,

always during turbulence.

And it's

not real.

But I'm like, what if I were to die?

Oh, I see.

And it's all about.

Me going to play in front of 3,500 people in Australia.

How selfish was I to think that this was the only way that I can make money and the only thing that's going to make me happy.

And now my kids don't have a dad, you know, which is absurd.

But like

when you have these moments of like full clarity and peace and you see what really matters, like none of nothing matters more than a very few people that you've committed to raise and provide for and protect.

Well, also on top of that, obviously, it certainly seems like you guys have been through some like a tumultuous past, people coming and going, challenges.

We really haven't.

I mean, we've 23 years with the same lineup for the most part, except for the...

I mean, emotionally turbulent, whatever.

Between you, everybody, right?

Fucking five, six people?

Copy.

Five people.

It was six, not five, to your point.

But the gamut, you're right.

Addiction.

Yeah.

This thing.

People's lost parents.

People have had kids.

People have been in marriages.

People have got divorced.

People have fucking been tempted to to cheat on wife, people have avoided, you can fucking, dude, you're coming home, you've had too much to do with all that stuff.

Yeah, the full works of that.

Like, think about it.

I mean, this is the most, like, maybe it was the friends we made along the way, like, is the most fucking that thing ever.

Yeah.

But

I'm interested to just dig into the art form thing for a second, because I think, you know, audience capture is something that's talked about a lot in my world.

Yeah.

You know, allowing

the

you create an avatar of what you think your audience wants, and then you continue to to throw red meat to them in an attempt to appease what it is that they want.

Interesting.

As opposed to doing what to you feels tasteful, earnest,

artistically pure,

being led by curiosity and wonder and awe and intrigue and sort of genuine bravery to say the thing that you mean and feel the thing that you do and not rush through the stuff, like sit with the awkward,

whatever it is.

And

I have to assume as well that looking back on a body of work, you guys will have had, I don't know, but I have to assume that there was periods where you would have been like, fuck, okay, so what do we need to write to be popular?

What do we need to write to be able to get like they're only chasing safety numbers again?

And

do we need to do that?

Or do we need to do what we, and fuck, like, how do I even separate that out in my mind?

Because there is this analyticalization of the music industry immediately.

So what's my metric for success?

Is it

how hard the fucking crowd goes when we play it live?

Well, what if the crowd's a little bit smaller?

Is it how much I love the song?

Well, what if somebody else in the band doesn't love the song quite so much?

Maybe I'm wrong.

You have all of this self-doubt that starts to come through.

And

I have to assume that looking back on

a library of work that you feel proud in has got to be one of the

most dividend paying ways to spend a career that is in an artistic outlet because it's the it's one of the things that you can always feel proud about.

You're like, dude, I fucking love that song.

Yeah, I fucking adore that, that track.

Like, that was really, really fucking meaningful to me.

And I know that we shouldn't have made it.

And I know that the label fucking hated it.

And I know that, and it really fucking meant a lot to me.

And like, that's something that I feel really fucking proud of.

It's been cyclical for me.

And I,

I think I'm,

there's been times in our career where I've been like,

if we do this, we will, we will, and I've believed it.

If we do this, if we make this type of song in this key with this type of vocal arrangement, it will become chasing safety.

Like, I thought that, I thought that like 15 times.

And then there's this other side of me where it's like, let's write a seven-minute song.

about his father's death that I think is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever written that no one listens to.

Which tracks that?

It's called Pneumonia.

It's on our second to last record.

So, not our newest one, but one before.

It's the final song.

So, is it the last song?

Yeah.

Like, I think about that song, and I'm like, oh, that's everything I've ever wanted to do in this band.

You know, and then you have, and I have been cyclical like this the whole time, looking back at that, going,

That's what I wanted then.

And I think you are probably the person in the band who has been the most steady with what

how you want it to be.

Meaning,

you're the first person.

You're the first person, one.

You're the first person.

You're the first person I ever heard refer to music as art.

Yeah.

When we were young, you know?

Yeah.

Never,

for me personally,

it built a lot of tension in the band.

I think.

Well, looking back, I didn't know.

Yeah, always.

Uncompromising.

Fuck the label.

Like literally.

Our manager is not allowed in the studio.

Nobody's allowed in the studio.

To this day, he's ever.

You are not allowed in the studio because you are an outside influence.

It's just us.

And your eyes will light up, but your eyes won't.

Yep.

And then, dude, Chris told me he came over for beers.

He's like, dude, the third track, like, maybe we should do all of it.

And maybe that's like a

protective

coping mechanism

because I am impressionable.

I don't know why it's so sacred or maybe so hardline, but it's never, ever

what's successful.

Like to the point where I've literally hit them and I'm like, I want to, our last record, the one we just did, I was like, I want to go to the cabin and I don't even want anyone to be on iTunes.

I don't want to hear what

Beartooth or Bad Omens or Rob Zombie or I don't want to hear anything about anything.

I don't want any outside influence.

I want it to be two ingredients:

us

and inspiration.

That's it.

And if you let the song drive,

it will drive, you know?

And I've always been that way.

Like chasing safety, they're like, dude, if you do this again, we're going to get you on K-Rock and you're going to be the next Fallout Boy.

And so we wrote To Find the Great Line instead.

Just the heaviest thing ever done.

I fucking love that album.

And that was in direct response, in my opinion, to

you guys trying to

make me do this thing.

I'll go fuck you somewhere.

I love the album too, but at the time, just to be frank, I was

like, what?

But why?

You know what I mean?

Because I am

the polar opposite of him, and where I

have now learned with Under Oath that I want it to be just us.

And I think it's correct.

I think it's the correct, but on a day-to-day basis,

like I want to work with somebody different every day.

Well, you do.

I do.

And that you've found yourself in your fucking Batman Bruce Wayne new lifestyle.

You've found yourself.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, can you explain for the people who don't understand

what the sort of velocity of Nashville songwriting at the moment, please?

For me, I, so

I do, I write five songs a week up to seven.

So like I get up, I go to the gym, I go to the studio, someone shows up.

I've either met them before and written with them before or not.

And you spend about an hour like this, you know, and a lot of this stuff does come up.

Same stuff we've talked about today.

And the artists now are so different than they used to be because they're dealing with like algorithmic issues like we kind of talked about earlier.

And they're dealing with like

a couple months ago, I saw a girl's $250,000 album get shelved because she hadn't had a viral moment.

And she cried on my couch about what am I going to do, you know, because, so yeah, it's, it's a, it's a different song every day, and it's usually written and demo tracked in four hours.

Right.

And the the Under Oath machine is

it's a slog for me.

And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but sometimes

like what I've learned to do with Under Oath, this is what I do.

Tim and I typically begin every song and sometimes Chris will bring something, but we typically begin every song.

And for me, songs begin with like a thought.

Sometimes a title, but most of the time a thought.

Like I want this to be like

fast in double time.

And at the end, it'll really sprawl out and do this thing.

Like really edge theory.

Like that's how it works in my brain.

And Tim and I have such a close relationship that we can do that together very quickly.

And then I like to leave.

And then he will brood and ruminate for days over that three minutes that I shit out with him 72 hours prior.

And then I'll come back at the end and go, oh, he was right.

And then

we'll do the lyric thing and then we'll do the vocal thing.

But that's the way that I.

But Nashville is

like the fucking ford production line yeah when you

start to spread it out i've only recently begun to understand first off i've only recently begun to understand how many ex-scene kids are running the country scene crazy what the fuck all of them what our very first tour manager a guy that we met in virginia it was in a shitty club called alley cats is jelly rolls tour manager and sound guy yeah

yeah yeah

yeah and scene kids run everything

Dan and Shay Dan and Shay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm good.

I'm good friends.

Scene kids.

They do.

I mean,

the guitar player for 18 Visions is Zed's tour manager.

Like,

and I think, I really think it's an attractive quality to come from like the DIY hardcore scene because

we're the only

genre, I think,

that I can think of at scale that has to do everything themselves, has to book your first show yourself.

You have to carry around a diary, a freaking Atlas, a notebook full of addresses, who's getting what, like

in rap, in country, and everything.

And national machine jazz, it's a jazz musician.

It's built in a machine.

It's built at EDM.

It's built in a vacuum on SoundCloud until your first show is in front of 10,000 people.

And then you're like, what the hell?

How do I get t-shirts made?

Like, oh, we all own merch companies, bro.

Like, we got you.

Like, it's literally literally

just a skill set that maybe is not even virtuous it's just what you have to do but once you've done it that's valuable you realize how rare it does and yeah

you're a dime a dozen here and you realize our scene literally is baby and everyone else in the major world

who knew dude who knew that the sad emo kids from school were going to grow up and dude i work with artists on a regular basis i don't know what have sick i don't know on a regular basis i work with artists that have a label deal, fucking brand deals, an agent, a lawyer, a merch deal, and they've never played a show.

And then they come to Aaron to write their songs for him.

That's not art.

That's a business.

I mean, we're seeing this a lot at the moment, right?

Benson Boone copying a lot of fucking stick at the moment for.

Yeah.

And I think...

I talked to somebody about that last night.

Everybody is.

And it's not too dissimilar in

the world of content creation.

Hey, how much truth is this person saying?

Like, how much, how much is this person saying what they believe?

And how much is this person saying something which is

politically or culturally popular or expedient or useful or strategic or molested, perverted in order to be able to get the outcome that they want to align themselves with a particular person?

How much are they causing

sucking up to this or that or the other?

And how much authenticity is in here?

I love your use of the word molested.

I've heard you use that a couple times.

And it's so jarring because that's only triggers, at least in the States, is like weird stuff with kids.

And you're right.

It's like taking something and just distorting it and fucking with it.

And yeah, I don't know.

I think

I try.

I really try.

And this is.

I'm earnestly saying this, like

with all these people that get sent to me,

I really try to like inject, and I learned that from him.

I try to inject that art into song in a box.

You know what I mean?

And that's why.

We've got four hours.

Let's try and come up with something that's not totally meaningless.

Yeah, because you know.

He's so good at it.

Like, he's good at it.

Like, and when I say that's not art, that's a business.

Everything about that is about trying to find the right product to sell the most units.

But in that vacuum, there are actual artists doing the work, you know?

Yeah.

So, I mean, also, let's say, I don't think what he's doing is factory work.

Let's not forget with the fucking Scene Kid,

whatever you want to say, Renaissance

revolution, perhaps,

the level of talent that you have to be able to play those sort of riffs and to be able to play those particular drum pieces, like that's got to be one of the contributing factors that it's technically quite a difficult music.

And then you go up and you go like, hey, man, like you're fucking C-A-D-C.

But

it's back to what he was saying, though.

Like

when people come to me and

they can't believe, and I'm not pumping my own tires, but they can't believe that I'll just do it all right now.

They're like, what do you mean?

You don't have to hire someone.

I'm like, for what?

Because we had to do it all ourselves.

That's the scene.

That's the Scene Kid Renaissance and why the Scene Kids are running Nashville.

He can record, he can sing, he could play bass, play guitar, and drums and get you a full song of the business.

By the way, I'll give it like a little bit of a master as well.

I'll be able to just bounce it.

It'll sound like it's demo, but like it'll be, it'll be fucking.

Throw some samples on there.

The label will sound good.

You can can sense it.

I got a job.

I got gainful employment in Nashville, and I'm successful in Nashville because of what you just said.

Because

Nashville was becoming such a song shop in the sense where you go to a songwriter, then you go to a producer.

The producer would hire a band.

I'll write the song with you, and I'll give you a demo that slaps.

And then you'll call me in two weeks and say,

can I have that demo?

And I'll go, for this number, you can have it.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Like, but that's, but that's how, that's how we've, that's how we work.

I'm interested.

I'm interested, you know, this, this very much is like kind of the whatever Batman to your Bruce Wayne thing, uh, that you've got a lot of pressure, uh,

creative tension, working at a pace that sometimes can be

artistically challenging

for you.

But you've got now this other part of your life.

Um,

well, what sort of fulfillment do you get out of this other bit?

Is there how much ick versus fulfillment versus artistic expression?

Are you ever conflicted about that stuff?

Under oath to me is like like,

this is going to sound so cheesy.

It's the feeling of musical home to me.

I

can suck so bad in front of Tim and just say, I have this idea.

Like, and I, I, like,

for instance,

um,

Dangerous Business Walking Out Your Front Door, you know, the time is running.

I had this, the original idea for that song was insane.

I wanted it to be about different languages and people groups.

I wanted to say, they say they're French.

They do this.

It was ridiculous.

Like the most ridiculous.

Like, but to me, like, that's free.

That's the purest form of home in music is where you can go and dare to suck in front of someone.

Like, really.

Don't dare say anything.

Like, really dare to suck.

I can say anything to him and he won't be surprised.

I could promise you, if there's a studio over here and you're like, guys, write a song, I'd go to Tim and I'd go, I've been listening to this one rap artist and he's got, he will go, I got these samples.

You want to try them?

And we would try to make a rap song.

And it would come out as an under-oh song somehow in the end.

But that it's the true freedom that, and I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Yeah, the freedom to be able to suck is.

Because without it, I would implode.

Yeah.

I mean, even going back to the question you just asked about like the authenticity and who's who's

spinning things and who's in a position of like, this is hot right now.

Let's cover that.

Like we were talking about this earlier, but like

rock music specifically to me is very uninspired.

Um,

right now, and and yeah, and you know, to Aaron's point, to use his words, he's like, it's all sounds the same, it's all made by the same five people, and somebody's just waiting for the next nirvana, you know.

And there is the turnstiles, and there are all these, and then you zoom out, and you're like, oh, but those are the biggest bands, but they've all been bands for like 10 years, 15 years.

They're not, they're more our peers than like, oh, the new crop are going to do it right.

And then

I think about

the comedy scene here, And I think that's the most punk thing happening in culture is like Dave Chappelle,

Tony, all those guys, Gillis, like they

are unhinged.

And you can feel that they're not pulling punches.

And I think people gravitate towards that, even if it's like, yikes, like, whoa, he said that.

You believe them.

And I think that goes back to what Aaron was talking about.

Everyone believes our first three albums because they're true.

Like, well, how hard is it to get back there after you've spent such a long two and a half decades not knowing what real life is like?

Oh, I don't think, I don't think you do.

I think that's the beauty.

I think that's the ride.

Like, that's the beauty of the ride is like, you can ride a roller coaster once and have your mind blown.

Tell me you can recreate that if you got a free pass.

You could just ride it 10 times.

Like, you only get the ride once.

We did a, we did Matt matt edgar's podcast this morning

and it's in this like it's a little studio room but it's on the back of a i get it what's it it look underground comedy club okay literally underground black cement dirty as called like black sheep there was a spew in the bathroom when i went to pee like like the place so it's like a like the places like the places we grew up playing yeah and Matt is like, yeah,

I do a set here once a month.

I was like, damn, it's pretty sick.

What's that like?

Because at this point, like, and then he's going on warp tour.

It's like,

I saw, like, I literally thought about it today because we were talking about music and I literally saw myself in that guy.

I was like, oh, you get to like,

you get to become like a nirvana right now.

You're at the front of the scene.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In the basement of some shit ass building over here.

And it's like, that's the, that's the, that's the coolest part is like just

seeing

people

go and go and go.

And I think a big part of it too is like success.

I think

not that we were ever starving or we needed to make it because that was never the point, but there is something that's different about being our age now and being married and having kids and having other commitments where, I mean, I remember writing, writing on the walls.

We all lived in a like a commune.

apartment.

Not all of us, but I lived in a two bedroom house with seven people.

And we had three people in per room and one person in the living room is the best.

But like, if we weren't just hanging out, it was just all music.

Had no girlfriend, had no mom.

Our friends weren't fucking dying all the time like they are now.

Like, we didn't have any of the, it was just excitement and

limitless ceilings.

I remember writing, writing on the walls.

I still have the computer because I'm trying to get the hard drive out of it in GarageBand programming all of the drums.

You know, bounce bam bounce

like the worst but like i had everything di modelers all of it and i just wrote the song it wasn't like yeah we're in the studio we have all this gear and it was just me just sitting everyone's downstairs playing halo and i'm just upstairs like

where's where's this go how's this go and like we don't have that anymore We have to literally like

check with five people's spouses to see if these three weeks work for everyone and then consciously go away from our homes

and then go somewhere and try to simulate the isolation and the freedom that you had.

When you weren't isolated, you just didn't have anything to do.

So now we need isolation to try to mimic the freedom that we have.

The synthesized isolation is so different than

it's, yeah.

It's well, it's because you know it's

do you ever remember when uh Tim Kennedy got waterboarded?

You ever remember that?

No.

You know Tim Kennedy?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So Tim Kennedy wanted to show.

On purpose.

Yes.

Okay.

So he, I can't remember, this is a while ago now.

He, I think, was making a point about enhanced interrogation techniques.

Yeah.

And basically said, I'm going to let someone waterboard me, and they can waterboard me for as long as you want.

So towel over face, boring, whole thing's, I'm pretty sure the whole thing's video.

It's on the internet somewhere.

And a lot of people gave him stick for the fact, well, yeah, you know, you're getting waterboarded, but you know that at some point it's going to stop you're in control yes so there's this degree of

I'm sure that it was still fucking awful and uncomfortable and I'm pretty sure Tim said like go for as long as you want keep going like do it again hit me again

hit me again but

there is something about the lack of authenticity that I think was the reason that people tried to poke holes in it and said hey like fucking you like let's be honest here like it's his these two things you're laughing your LARPing is enhanced interrogation as opposed to that and who's to say that the fake version of it that he went through didn't last longer than some of the real versions of whatever, whatever.

But the emotional

of like, oh, these people don't have my best interests at heart is kind of the same as what you guys are trying to create when you go to the cabin in the woods.

I think you went like three times, yeah, right, for this last minute.

Yeah, went up, it went back up, and then went back up different producers, second time, etc.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

You did your research, I like it.

Um,

so I think

it's an odd realization that the start of something,

the liberation that you have there, you know, if people are to look back on any, whatever career it is that they've got now, go back to university or go back to college or whatever and think about what was like, when was it really, really good?

Dude, you know, you had to hand that project in and it was like midnight on the Sunday and we slept and slept, we ordered dominoes and everyone slept under their desks and then we got up the next day and we did it.

We fucking made it, man.

Like that was what was cool.

And

again, this is an unteachable lesson that luxury becomes as much of a prison as it is an enabler.

Absolutely.

Like, you know, you guys on a fucking double-decker tour, but like Dan and Shea, I went to go and hang with them after they played in Austin.

And they've got like two.

And I'm sure you know, like the most fucking intense

star.

Oh, well, you know, the way that we've actually done this bed is if you put it at the very back because no one has to walk past it, you can have like an additional queen-size thing, and it's over the back wheel, which means that there's more dampening and whatever, whatever, like all of this stuff.

And, you know, it's cool as fuck to see it, but there's a

something about the like rough and ready story having to get the fucking orienteering out.

We say it all the time.

Yep.

We say it all the time.

The shit you remember, the shit that impresses upon you, and the shit that makes you you is like, bro,

in the last six months, we've played

the forum, crazy arenas, all these places.

I remember like, I can tell you the way that a place in 2003 smelled.

You know what I mean?

Like sleeping in the the van in the gully.

Well,

I think you dive into this a lot, but I know it's like kind of

very,

I don't know if like Rogan-esque is a good thing and you can edit that out, but like

the idea of like the Goggins and these kinds of people where they're like

similar to Tim Kennedy, like.

Suffering is where growth comes from.

So choose suffering.

Choose something, whether it be a cold plunge or

a run or anything, sauna, like do things that are uncomfortable intentionally to then allow everything else to kind of feel a bit normal.

And

I think that's what, that's the difference with your Tim Kennedy analogy.

It's like me going in to a cold plunge is me setting a timer for four of three to five minutes.

I'm in control.

It's 33 degrees.

I want to die.

And it's not the same as me falling through ice as me being in the titanium.

Fully clothed in 33 degree weather.

And maybe I'm only in there for two minutes.

That two minutes would scar me compared to the five minutes that I willingly do upon myself.

Although the environment's exactly the same as far as physically.

And I think in a weird way, like,

We try to recreate stuff like that, but like when it actually happens naturally by life, like that's what forms you.

You know, you could try to heat up metal and try to distill it and try to purify it and do this.

And like, yeah, like let's, let's go do something hard again.

Let's go to a cabin and act like we're single and alone and maybe even try to go crazy a little bit to see what comes out.

Like we're doing an experiment on ourselves, but we're really just attempting to set ourselves up in the closest form that resembles something that came natural so that we can receive transmission.

You'll laugh as an older version of you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Eating five.

Or a younger version.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

You know what I mean?

Having fucking Elon's fucking Skynet Global Inc.

Chorus.

Yeah.

Pipey Van Winkle whiskey, the whole thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, yeah.

Now it's the same as when we were doing it in an old storage space, except for there's a movie theater, a hospital,

a grill, and he brings 15 bottles of whiskey and we make old fashions every night.

And by the way, and by the way, and by the way, and we have a car and we have three cars, actually.

Like

I bought my first car when I was 24.

I drove the band van around as my person because we were just

like literally, I did not own a vehicle or

car insurance

phone until we were all 22.

So one guy had a college phone that we depleted.

We spent all of his fucking money.

Yeah.

And we used his phone.

Thank you, Dave.

And Karen Brandelle.

But yeah.

And you want to recreate it, but you can't.

And I think I've heard you talk about this or someone

was talking to you about it, but talking about slumps and like almost how,

you know, years three, four, or five of doing this podcast or whenever it was, something in that realm, it's like, that's where it started to get stale.

And like, how, how do I excite it?

And like, that's, that seems to be everyone's real question and possibly the most important answers that nobody can answer.

I mean, even today, I forget who it was that asked it, but they're like, you've been with the same woman for 18 years.

I'm like, yeah, I'm actually, I've only ever been with my wife.

I've only seen one human being naked ever

in the physical, obviously.

And

he's like

kind of dumbfounded and then goes, so what do you, how do you make that like special?

And just kind of like, how do you spice it up?

I think was the bigger question.

And what is it like over time?

And yeah.

And because I think we all think about things in like a, it's constantly degrading.

And the first six months of a relationship, step one, is always the best.

The infatuation, the

romance is there.

There were flowers and fresh cooked meals and the sex was great.

And now 10 years in, you got a couple of kids like,

and that's how everyone views it.

And in a weird way, like, I'd rather just age gracefully

than try try to recreate being a horny teenager.

Well, that's a really interesting question that I've thought about a lot that there isn't, I don't think there's a particularly healthy conversation around how to age gracefully as a man.

There's not and I mean not for anyone.

No,

that would be true.

I think the reason that it's particularly interesting, it's tiny little bit like maybe novel, it's just that

the conversation around women aging.

because

the world places an awful lot of value on women's youth, the way that they look in terms of youth.

And that's why cosmetic surgery and makeup and face lips and all this stuff exists in order to hold on to that, right?

To not, to not grow into it, to go back.

And that has to be tough for chicks to deal with.

But I don't think that there is a, I simply don't think there's a conversation around what it's like to age as a guy, physically, mentally, emotionally.

Like, what does that mean to transcend?

It's like, you know, we understand what it's like to have the super arrested development of like the adult man-child, you know, like the 35-year-old infant.

Um, there's a movie about it where some couple hires some woman to break their son out of that 40-year-old guy living in his house, and I can't remember what it's called.

Okay, it's gonna drive me crazy, but yeah, so go on though.

I think I know where you're going.

It's just it's just not a

particularly

well-trodden path, and I don't think that there are very good archetypes for you know, I'm 37, and the first time I think I noticed age, yeah, was probably about 34.

And I was like, huh,

workouts actually take a little bit longer to embark.

Is that fucking gray hair in my beard?

Like, it's one.

I mean, that's kind of cool, I guess.

Like, but you know what I mean?

And you think, huh, I'm

really ever heard.

And then when you start to roll in, okay, what does it mean about relationships?

What does it mean about your role in the world?

How are you supposed to show up?

Because like, am I going to be the fucking like leanest, most jacked, strongest, coolest, newest guy, band, fucking singer, songwriter thing i'm not hot shit anymore okay so what does that mean am i supposed to try and recreate that old thing because we valorize success especially first-time success and descendancy and trajectory so much correct okay well what does it mean what does it mean to sort of

graduate what does it mean what does it mean to to move on from that well that's why i think a lot of men older men like don't have

to your point like there's no archetype there's no uh

mentors.

And it's like these people retire and then they go back to work.

Like men don't even know how to stop being this one thing.

You've been doing it for 50 years.

Like,

you know, what is next?

What is the next chapter?

And it's, there, there isn't one.

And that's why I think that's why, you know,

episodes like The Dry Creek.

Dwayne.

So drawing.

Yes.

First nailed it, dude.

I said triple D earlier.

Is is cool because he's an old guy

and he almost feels like he's so different than me that it feels like my grandpa or my dad talking to me about how to go about life versus, you know, peers, people that are my age, your age, our age.

And it's like, okay, what happens at 50?

What happens at 60?

Like, what do you do with that?

And it's like.

There's such an emphasis on, to your point, recreating that.

It's like TRT therapy and this and this and this and all the things.

And all we're doing is kicking and screaming, being dragged towards death.

Raging against entropy.

And doing the best we can to stave it off rather than walking with the current and going, here we sit.

Well, having no examples too, is I think is the biggest, like Dry Creek, Dwayne, fucking two fifty is, is really, it really appeals to me.

But to you.

I could see you in Wyoming fucking wrangling a holes.

But to you, that might not appeal.

You know what I mean?

Like you might want to age and go out a different way.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Like with, and I'm not saying like, like with women,

you can see it in television and the media.

Like you have the woman who's like the gardening lady and she ages that way, the yoga lady, like cat lady.

Some of the wives in our band, some of the,

they're getting in their mid-40s and they're becoming yoga teachers and stuff.

And it's a beautiful thing to watch.

Yeah.

But men,

like we because there's archetypes, like it's either dry creek drain, you play golf and rot or you or become Elon Musk Musk or die trying.

Or you go back to work.

You do the permanent munch.

Yeah.

Those are those are those are

the three options, you know?

And I, I think what helps me is having

anything that can take me out of thinking of me is a good thing.

Yeah.

That was a good thing.

And I think having kids and having, knowing that I'm going to be a grandfather one day, like there,

my path has already been laid out.

And so it's,

I don't know how I'm going to get there.

And I hope I'm valuable and can contribute when that time comes.

I'd love to be the grandpa that's fit enough to be able to throw the football with his grandkids.

Think about this.

I know that you both have got challenges to do with, fuck, like, you know, we

nailed it.

We made the world a better place.

We gave songs that sort of brought people out of themselves.

We helped them to understand bits of their life.

We created a collective effervescence for like millions of people across a huge, huge, huge fucking career.

Yeah.

But I missed some of my kids' upbringing and all the rest of it.

But think about what it's going to be like when your kids have got grandkids and granddad has got the sickest stories.

Like, granddad's cool.

Yeah.

Granddad knows the world.

He can tell you about Delhi and he can tell you about fucking Jakarta and he can tell you about what it's like in Adelaide in the winter.

And he can tell you about what it's like to go to Dublin Island and have, I've been to Guinness Factory.

Let me tell you about the Guinness Factory.

You know, fucking, dude, that is a worldly patriarch in a family.

Yeah.

is

like, that's where fucking like druids come from.

You know what I mean?

Like that anchor of why you're there.

Big, hopeful, that's a big, hopeful piece rather than being the dad who rots in the chair.

Yeah.

And I mean, I think, yeah, it's always,

we're breaking something.

Every day we're breaking something.

We just don't know what we're breaking yet, you know?

And I think that's the exciting part of life is it's not color in these lines and then beautiful picture comes out, color in these lines, another beautiful picture comes out, everything's in its right place.

Like there,

there are things that I've probably done or will do or I'm still doing that are hurting someone somewhere.

My goal is to make sure that I do less of them and recognize them as they come.

And then I think by the end of it all, you just look back and go, we all did our best.

You know, that's all you can do.

I think another way to look at that, the breaking things is

an interesting way to frame it.

Another way to frame it might be there's a price that you have to pay.

Yeah.

In order to do things, there's a price.

Yeah.

Right.

There's a barrier to entry to being.

There's a cost of doing business.

Yes.

Yes.

Correct.

There's a cost of doing business for this thing.

You want to be you want to fucking make music that changes a portion of the world?

Okay.

Cool.

I have to go to a portion of the world.

There's a fucking price that you have to pay for it.

Yep.

And I think that's fine.

And for me personally,

I don't know if the price

necessarily

is as valuable as the outcome.

I don't, I don't know that those correlate.

Like if we had to start over and someone said, here's a crystal ball, you're going to start now.

And if you do what you just did for the last 25 years again, by the time you're 75, you're going to be sitting down with a very old Chris Williams and you could have the whole ride over again.

I would say, no, I'm good.

Like, I like

the beauty of things being temporary and it's like,

and the contentment of just going, yeah, we've,

there's, there's two ways to look at it.

We're playing fucking the Norva again.

We played the Norva in 2003, 2004, and now it's 2025.

I'm still at the fucking Norva.

Or, holy shit, the Norva sold out again 20 years later.

Norva is sick.

It's away.

No, yeah, I know.

And yeah, for me, it's always the second one.

It's like 20, 18, whatever.

These people are still coming to see us.

And it's, but it's all the same.

And what I'm not interested in doing is trying to be that like sad 55-year-old rocker who can't let it go and

be a career musician.

Like, that doesn't interest me.

I don't, if, if we happen to be here in 10 years talking to you and still playing shows, I will gladly do it.

I'm not intentionally sabotaging anything, but I think the open-handedness of just like, whenever this is ready to go, I've had more than my fill.

I've been beyond blessed.

I've had more memories and lifetimes that I ever thought would be provided.

If it all goes away now, I try to remember how blessed and fortunate we are to put, like the Norva thing, I was, I was, um

where is Norva?

Uh, it's in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Isn't it Norfolk?

Norfolk, yes.

My, um, my ex-father-in-law, I've been blessed enough to co-parent my first child with my ex-wife, and I'm still close with her family.

I was there just there this weekend.

And they live on the other side of the country.

My ex-father-in-law, who I'm close with, he's dying of emphysema.

He's in his 70s, and he smoked cigarettes for like 50-some-odd years, and he carries around an oxygen tank.

And these guys all know this, but he's like, he's an amazing guitar player.

And he played in bands all growing growing up.

That's what he did.

Bar bands, you know, like gigging.

And he never,

he never made it.

He was never in anything that blew up or sold records or was a real living.

And had a conversation with him on Saturday afternoon outside at a barbecue at a family member's house.

And he goes, I put it down.

I did it.

I stopped.

And I'm happy about it.

And I'm like headstoppling.

Can't breathe.

He's like, I put it down.

I finally did it.

Because when you saw him a few months ago, he was still lugging gear to venues in 70.

With a fucking with a fucking oxygen tank.

I mean, yeah.

Holy fuck.

But what was beautiful, it was,

I got emotional about it because he's like, I did it.

Closure.

He's like, my time is over.

And you know what he said?

And I thought, like, I literally, when he started the conversation, I was like, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck.

He's going to be like, I never made it.

None of this ever made it out.

Yep, yep, yep.

And he literally was like, it was so fun.

And I'm so glad I got to do it.

And it fucked me up because I was like, we're over here bitching about the Norva, you know, or whatever.

In a theoretical model, by the way, I love you, Norva.

We all love the Norva.

But

he never played for more than 400 or 500 people ever.

Do you find it difficult?

It seems like Tim's got a very

balanced, that open-handed, impermanence sort of approach to things.

But I get the sense that you're a little bit more conflicted, not necessarily about that precisely, but generally, what does this mean?

Sense of purpose, where is it coming from?

Given that you've got someone who is kind of like a purist in no one else in the fucking recording studio, but also with regards to this, that's kind of a little bit like being with the

LeBron James of Impermanence a bit.

You've got this like,

but

you know, this Buddhist guy sat next to you

in one form.

Is that

fuck, like maybe I should be like that.

Maybe it would be easier if I could let go.

Does that cause a little

more so when I was younger?

Because like I told you an hour ago, this motherfucker's been bent like that since the beginning.

Like been like this since 2003.

2003, when 2004, when it was like, I grew up in a trailer on food stamps.

2004, someone, we literally started making like real money, like buying house money.

And he is over here like, well, you know, if like, whatever.

There's been times where, to answer your question more directly, I've wished I was like that.

And there's been times where I've gone, he's a fucking idiot.

He doesn't know what he's, he doesn't know what he's got, and he's squandering it with his psyche.

And then now where we're at now,

we're both 42 years old.

And where we're at now is I look at him and I go, that's a beautiful thing.

And I'm glad that he's able to do it.

I'm glad that he can hold everything with a greased hand, you know?

And I, I hold on a little tighter.

And I think the reasons I hold on tighter are irrelevant, but I, maybe they are relevant, but like

it, it's just an acceptance that I, you have, if you don't, it's like being, like you said earlier, it's like being married to four other people.

And if you don't accept some of their quirks, you're really on the breaks.

You're in trouble.

You know what I mean?

Like your relation, this doesn't work.

And it's a constant, marriage is hard.

It's work.

It's beautiful work.

It's one of the most beautiful works you can do, in my opinion.

But it is a labor.

It is a labor that you do.

You get up every day and as cliche as it sounds, you choose to love that person and you choose to love the things about them that you don't agree with, number one, and that you can't see eye to eye with in any facet.

And that's just what it is.

And there's things about the greased hands thing, the open hands thing that I'm like, do you even care about what you're doing?

And then I'll, you circle back around and go, I get it.

And some days, I wish I, I wish.

Yeah, I think, I mean, that's a

rational question, but to your point even earlier about, you know, you pop in and get all the ideas out and then I'm the one stuck for three days like brooding.

It's like, I think I earn

the right

to qualify that statement with the fact that I am, if not the, one of the hardest working people in the band.

Oh, you're the finisher.

For someone who quote unquote can easily get painted as like, oh, he doesn't care.

He's squandering it.

Like, why am I working so fucking hard?

And it's because this has meaning, yet it does not define me.

And that's a difference.

You've got a really beautiful mindset when it comes to that.

It's very impressive.

You know, as a fellow obsessive,

it's difficult to find that level of equanimity, right?

To be able to deploy everything, but to have it come from a place of just, I want this to be really good, as opposed to, if I don't, this defines me.

And it is indicative of my self-worth.

And if I can't make this fucking melody, this track, this fucking fill, this whatever, this part, this vocal, if I can't make this a success, as beautiful as whatever it might be,

then I am,

dot, dot, dot, then it means this about me.

Then, and I'm going to be homeless and alone and under a bridge with a gluten intolerance, you know what I mean?

Like all of these things are going to fucking happen.

Yeah.

I learned about this thing the other day that was pretty interesting.

hedging your identity.

So the healthiest and happiest people in the world apparently have multiple different places that they take their sense of self-worth from.

And yours might be a musician,

father, husband,

friend, bandmate, leader,

confidant.

You know what I mean?

All of these different things.

Someone else might be a Brazilian jiu-jitsu grappler, but also they're

a salesperson.

Also, they're a pool player.

Also, they're a, you know, whatever the fuck.

And I think I was thinking about this literally on the way in.

I wrote a huge message on the way in about this: that

the price that you need to pay to be the best in the world is to probably sacrifice absolutely everything else in order to be able to get there.

Now, this is the best in the world under a very, very narrow domain.

Yeah.

It's a very narrow window, which is

you will perform

in your chosen pursuit.

to the best of your ability.

And the reason that you have to sacrifice all of these other things is that if you don't, you will be beaten by a person who's prepared to sacrifice all of those other things.

Yeah.

Like, make no mistake, if none of you guys had got married, none of you guys had ever decided to have kids, done all the rest of the stuff, I mean, who's to say that it hasn't informed you artistically?

It's kind of the weird leverage thing for how art works that sometimes stuff which is suboptimal actually ends up giving you a step change in terms of insight.

But let's say that it's something a little bit more linear, like football, right?

Or powerlifting or some shit like that.

I always use this example, but Eddie Hall, World's Strongest Man, 2018, 19, British guy, and he's stood there on the winner's podium and he's got this trophy and he's throwing it in the air and he's saying, Nana, this is for you.

His grandma died like not long ago.

Nana, this is for you.

Tears streaming down his face.

And he does this interview afterwards and he says, if I hadn't won, I would be dead, divorced with no relationship to my daughter because he was six foot two, two hundred and like fucking

like 400 pounds, 400 plus pounds.

He was on so many performance-enhancing drugs.

His blood pressure was through the roof, all of these different things.

Spending all of his time training and being obsessive.

So his wife and his marriage fucking falling apart, wasn't seeing his daughter at all because he spent all his time in the gym obsessing over winning this thing.

And you go, okay, that's the price to be Eddie Hall.

Yep.

Do you want to be Eddie Hall?

Do you want to be Eddie Hall?

Because that's the fucking price that you need to pay in order to be that.

Right.

And this is where.

This is kind of the lesson that I keep drilling into myself.

It's largely like this whole body of work for me has been like a thinly veiled autobiography um

and uh

like what i'm trying to drill into myself is okay what is the metric of success like what what is it that you consider to be success because if it's

the most plays the most money the most followers the most whatever on the show uh being known or validated or liked by the most people that's going to pervert your

direction and it's going to cause you to like you can end up if you do that you can end up at a place in life, not only that you don't want to be, but one that you literally didn't even mean to get to.

Yeah.

And you can turn around and go, holy fuck, like I got to the top of this huge mountain.

I was supposed to be on that meadow over the far side.

Yeah.

Supposed to be down there.

And you're trying to shortcut that.

But and here's the question that has kind of been in the back of my mind for all this conversation.

I wonder how much, and it speaks to your ex-father, ex-father-in-law's point, which is what you thought he was going to say too, which is this unrequited, unfulfilled level of success.

I wonder how easy it is for, or how much easier it is for you guys to be able to talk about, you know, like the ease, the open-handedness, all the rest of it, because you, like, the only chasing safety in many ways, created a sound that 20 years later is now the ascendant or partly an ascendant sound that's coming back around, right?

That is is like, how, how much did it shape the next fucking however many decades of rock in lots of different ways?

And to be able to, we've played, like, is there a fucking country on the planet that's not at war that you guys haven't played in?

Probably not.

Like, you know, every single place of every single show, of every single tour of every single, everyone, anybody that's in the rock, rock industry knows the name of that.

It's okay.

So it's all well and good going, you know, like, I just, I'm open-handed with it, man.

And like, it's easy.

But

the real rubber meets the road when you go, you never played to more more than 400 people in your entire career and you were never recognized and you never got a record label deal.

And I think that that,

again, this is an unteachable lesson being said by people who have got to some form of success within their industry to be able to tell people further down, hey, man, you can, you can chase it, but I'm telling you, your problems are still going to be your problems when you get to the top.

And they're going to say, Fuck you, watch me dance through this minefield and that type of thing.

Yeah, it didn't work for all of you.

Watch me do it.

I'll be different.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's true.

I mean, that's all, that's all life is, is us looking at celebrities, overdosing, and all these people, and rock stars never being good dads, or good moms, or good partners, and cheating.

And I mean, even Dave Grohl had come out.

Fuck.

Yeah.

Like,

what a hero falling from the top.

And literally, like, and that's kind of like impossible.

That's kind of.

I've broke people.

That's my thing, though.

It's like, why are we making these people our heroes?

It's, this is not new.

Like, and

I don't know.

Like, it's just a weird thing to be like.

I look up to musicians that inspire me musically, you know, Run the Jewels is one of my favorite bands or groups.

And like, I listen to a lot of hip-hop and then a lot of like weird stuff that

is, you know, down here.

Direct bullshit.

Yeah.

Well, there's a band like Howdy, H-O-V-V-D-Y.

You've probably never heard of them.

I think they're from here.

They're in Nashville now.

I love them.

They're great.

Porsches, shit like that.

And like,

they're not my heroes.

They inspire me, but like to put someone in, especially for musicians, to have someone that you idolize that is just doing what you're doing at a 10x scale.

and not recognizing that it's just 10 times more fucked up than the biggest thing that you have to pay to get that.

Yeah.

It's just like, like you don't want to be that guy.

And if you could be that guy, you'd be miserable.

I'd fucking hate it.

And I think every, I think the universe, if there is a God

or an energy or a spirit, it's trying to tell all of us all of the time,

go grab a cigar with your friend and don't break nothing and stop trying to be Eon Musk.

There's nothing logically in my brain or heart, which is more important, or my spirit, whatever you call that, that says the opposite.

There's just nothing.

And it just, it kind of just ends there.

I mean, three and a half hours later, you can end it on like this poetic, like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But like,

if you can synthesize all of it down, like, that's what it is.

I don't want to be in Nashville writing more songs for more people.

I don't want that.

You know, I don't want to.

be more famous than I am.

I love going to Target with my kids and just being a guy nobody knows.

You know, like it's not about climbing the ladder next, next, next, next, next.

And I'm not saying he is either.

I'm just saying I'm just naturally wired to just be like, man, the simple, the peaceful.

You know, we used to take fishing poles out.

Like we would just get out of the concrete jungle and just go to any lake and just fish, pack some beers.

Let's get out of here.

Like the nature, the mountains, the cabin, like everything that we are doing, even collectively, I might be maybe trying to forcefully do that.

And some people are like, I guess we'll go to the mountains.

But man, like when you're there, it's it's like

different it's than being in la it's the beauty of enough right oh beauty of enough contentment that should be a whole other podcast even i you know i was listening to a podcast the other day i think we listened to the same one with bono

and bono's polarizing for a lot of people you know like i don't know much about him for music people he's polarizing because are you are you serious i don't know much i mean i know he's like i know his music oh okay i don't know much about yeah yeah oh yeah yeah i've never read an interview with him polarizing for a lot of people because a lot of people hate modern YouTube.

But something that was really in he's player old stuff, just like

he's been involved in a lot of causes, you know.

But

with enough being enough, like something that really got me that he said was he,

and he seems to have this huge ego with the glasses and he's fucking mono.

And he says, our band, like we started this conversation, I thought it was so cool.

He says, our band is is a democracy.

And he's like, that's one of my biggest

pride things that I have about what we do.

You know what I mean?

And for me, like the fishing, the

cabin, the contentment, like

if you put something on Under Earth's gravestone, for me, it will be that we did our own shit our own way democratically.

even when it was impossible, even when it seemed impossible for us to do it in a democratic way.

And even sometimes at our demise.

Like, if we would have made Chasing Safety Part 2, would I be richer?

Probably.

But I'm glad that we did.

Would you be happier?

That's that's exactly it.

And Bonn, I think Bono, the vibe I got is: I think he's happy because those other three guys in his band and him agree.

And they fight to do it like we do, but they can say, yeah, this song should be this way or whatever.

Ultimately, you're going to know.

Right.

At the end of the day,

maybe there's a certain level very low level of self-reflection where people are able to kind of continue to masquerade as a thing while being a different thing in private yeah and and continue to do things ostensibly out front for one cause whilst secretly believing something different or wanting something different privately uh but ultimately i think you're gonna know you're gonna know whether or not you fooled yourself you're gonna know whether or not you lied about this thing.

And that's cool.

Like you can look back on a string of miserable successes or inauthentic successes, right?

That were crafted in a manner that kind of fuguesied people into believing that it was you.

Yeah.

And, you know, again.

You unpack that a lot, though, right?

Because you have been like imposter syndrome.

I hear that come up a lot.

Like just, are you wise?

Are you this driven?

Are you fit?

Because you know people like.

Where's it coming from?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But But

I think at scale,

over

time,

you will be found out.

You know?

Naval's got this wonderful line.

He says,

you don't need karma to deliver spiritual justice.

All that karma is is people repeating their patterns, virtues, and flaws until they finally get what they deserve.

If you roll the dice enough times, eventually

the thing that is coming for you will come for you.

And sure,

some people can dance through the minefield and not kick it right yeah but there are people in your industry there are people in my industry there are people in my old industry yeah that i know i'm like hey man like i get it you might be making it work but you're a piece of yeah or you're um

self-deceptive or you're uh obfuscatory or you're you're um unfair or whatever right you're mean you're mean you're a mean person and sure maybe you're hot now maybe you'll be hot forever but like unless you have a fucking half-inch deep level of self-reflection, at some point it's going to come back around.

It's going to come back around in your fucking nervous system.

It's going to come back around in an existential crisis.

Or you're going to roll the dice one too many times and snake eyes is going to come up and your wife's going to catch you fucking cheating or your bandmates are going to realize that you've actually been doing this thing all along.

You've been like, you've been fucking skimming transaction fees off the top of every bit of merch that we've done for the last fucking, however long, like whatever it is that you do, you'll repeat your patterns.

And I think the goal is, it's what Dwayne says.

He's like,

I like me, I buy me a beer.

Yep.

And you're like, you want to be a person that you can fucking buy a beer?

Triple D, baby.

Yeah.

Boys, this has been fucking unbelievable.

We've done three hours.

Hell yeah.

It was an honor to do it, man.

Thank you.

Thank you.

For real.

Appreciate it.

Sick.

Appreciate it very much.

Well, let's go and eat some steak.

Let's go.