#2504 - Skylar Grey

30:52It was a meme that was going around too Oh, fucking memes It might have been kind of true But again, yeah, memes I saw it repeated by someone very intelligent I've looked it up before, but I think it was a meme Okay Either way I get those memes get me all the time I'm like, babe, look at this And then you go to the comments and it's like, oh, I'll fake. Yeah, there's a lot of that. But, you know, that's the dirty thing about what they did with Detroit. Like, they decided that they'll take advantage of these people that are ultra poor, that are willing to work with. And it's not just that they get paid a dollar a day or whatever they get paid.

31:32There's no health care. There's no benefits. There's no retirement. There's no dental. There's no nothing. You just get that money and then figure it out on your own, and then you buy a Ford car and you think it's made in America. Commonly repeated claim, the annual income about$34 ,000 U.S. puts you in the top 1 % of the world. But this comes from rough, older viral estimates. It's not based on current, rigorous global data. More careful tools and data sets now suggest that$34 ,000 places you well above the global median, but likely closer to roughly the top 5 % to 10 % worldwide, rather than the top 1%.

32:15Okay, so it appears in social posts. But 60 is still like... Right, you're barely getting by. Yeah. If you make$50 ,000 in America, you're fucking struggling. Yeah. Unless you're super young, you don't have any responsibilities. And where they take t-shirts? That's a good question. Like, what's the average public school teacher salary in America? Let's guess. You think it's like 60 grand? I think it's about that. I bet it's about that. Yeah. I had to guess. Might be less, actually. What is it?

32:5374 ,000. public school teachers now average 74 000 to 75 000 per year so that's like you know you're okay you depends on where you live yeah yeah well if you live in new york you're fucked yeah if you live in new york you live in a box yeah yeah that's pretty good for wisconsin okay um state averages lowest paying states to above 90 000 and the highest paying ones like California and New York. So California and New York,$90 ,000. One estimate says that it's way lower. Oh. Starting teacher pays significantly lower than the overall average. National estimate, the average starting teacher salary, about$48 ,000.

33:36Wow. Meaning it takes years of experience and often advanced degrees to reach or exceed that$74 ,000 average. So if you get really intelligent people, even if they love children, they're like, I can't do this. I can't live like this yeah you start off at forty eight thousand dollars a year that's fucking bonkers that's not even a thousand dollars a week and then you have taxes and then you have an apartment and then you have food and then you have a car kids oh yeah oh how do people do it which is weird that we put our priorities um in strange places like the amount of money that goes through you know various corporations and ngos and the amount of loans that all this different fucking shit that where our tax dollars go and you look at that and you're like that it seems so short-sighted very yeah no politician runs on that no politicians like we need to really find the best teachers and pay them the most amount of money that we can afford to make sure that we get the best and the brightest everybody's like fuck you it's weird yeah it is people are strange yeah i wish you could like check boxes of where you want your tax dollars to go oh 100 yeah i wanted to go to education or whatever yeah imagine if that was an option if when you voted you could actually vote on where your taxes went yeah yeah like not even voted it should be actually individually he might have to pee he's acting you know yeah let let him out because generally he would be chilling by now and when he huffs like that he's usually trying to let you tell you something yeah like that's what he does when he has to eat he huffs he comes around he's like i get it i go chill out bro my dog does that when she senses something outside like a coyote or something.

35:42She starts huffing. Well, you guys were saying you have one of them giant Caucasian shepherds? Yeah. Is that what it is? It's a Central Asian shepherd. We have an alibi. I guess there's a lot of different breeds under the Central Asian shepherd. They're all herding dogs, right? It's a protection livestock. Yeah, from wolves. Pull up the image of an alibi dog. Just Google wolf crusher. Is that what they call them? Yeah. How much does it weigh? She's actually on the smaller side. She's like 105 pounds or something. Oh, that is smaller. But her head is so massive. They get really big. That one can't be real.

36:28But they are massive. Oh, so that's what she looks like. Yeah, pretty much. She's all white. but those dogs are great for just like keeping track of the property yeah look at that image this is wolf crutcher in the bottom the bottom right there all right go to the left right left of the wolf grinder thing yeah that that one right there so that i think is like a turkish kangal um which is i think the next dog we're gonna get because we need another one um Um, our, our alibi Nala, she, I'm just like such an animal lover. So she really should be outside living on the ranch, but she sleeps in bed.

37:15So I need an outside dog that's actually watching the livestock. Cause this past couple of weeks we lost, um, 12 chickens and four sheep. To what? Coyotes. Wow. Where do you live? Napa, Napa Valley. Wow, you have that many coyotes out there? Oh, they are invading our property right now. It's been, the last few weeks have been really rough. Once they know that there's food there. Yeah, once they taste the blood, they come back every night. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. The Four Seasons is back for season two, starring Tina Fey, Will Forte, Coleman Domingo, Marco Calvani, Carrie Kenny Silver, and Erica Henningsen.

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38:33Free samples, real design experts, and zero pressure. Just help when you need it. Shop up to 50 % off site-wide and huge savings on doorbusters right now during the Memorial Day mega sale at Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply. Yeah, I lost all my chickens in California. Yeah. We lost a couple of them every now and then. I had a dog. His name is Johnny Cash. And he was a Mastiff. And he was a sweetheart of a dog. But he was huge. He was like 140 pounds, solid muscle. And these coyotes made friends with him. And so they would come by the fence and hang out with him. And then eventually he got accustomed to them.

39:14And then one day the pool guy accidentally left the gate open. and so he went into the area where the chicken coop is and the chicken coop was like completely protected but we had one of our chickens was brooding do you know yeah yeah okay of course you do so um when you take chickens when they're brooding you have to take them away from the other chickens and you put them in a smaller coop and they have to perch so if they perch then they don't think that they're sitting on an egg and then they get over it after a while yeah and the The coyote tricked Johnny into smashing that little chicken coop so that he can get the chicken.

39:51What do you mean? I don't know how this motherfucker did it, but it couldn't break down the chicken coop because it was only like 30 pounds. And so it was over there with Johnny. And all of a sudden, me and my wife and our kids were playing some sort of a like Monopoly or something in the living room. and someone yells coyote and one of my kids yelled coyote and we see the coyote running across the backyard with the chicken in its mouth and then leaps onto the top of the fence i thought we had like this fence that was probably like six feet tall or something like that like wrought iron fence i'm like i don't keep the coyotes out no it leapt like a ballerina like a gymnast toes to the Top of the fence and then off with the chicken in its mouth.

40:39And part of me was like so impressed that it did that. I wasn't even mad. But I was like, what the fuck? I was like, how did he get that? So we go outside and there's Johnny standing there in front of this destroyed chicken coop, which clearly he did. Yeah, because the coyote couldn't have done that. And so then he realized that chickens are to be killed. Oh, no. And so someone left the gate open again, and he decided to just go right through the big chicken coop, and he killed nine of them. Before one of my daughters was screaming, Johnny's in the chicken coop! No. And yeah, he made a mess out of it.

41:18That's awful. Well, he didn't know. I know, but... My chickens are like my pets. I like snuggle with them and stuff. We lost one to a bobcat last week. Yeah, we had some bobcats take some of ours too. And we lost one to a fox. We lost one to a fox a couple weeks ago. Do you free-range your chickens? You let them out of the coop every day? Yeah. They get out of the coop and then we bring them in at night. But the fucking animals, they figure it out. Yeah. So last week, because we let the chickens out every morning. It was 6.30 in the morning and this coyote came and killed 12 back to back. One coyote?

41:57Well, on the cameras, we only saw one. Wow. Yeah. So it was like surplus killing. Yeah, thrill killing. Well, they kill and then they leave them there and then they go back and get them later. They do that with cats. I mean, mountain lions do that for sure. But yeah, it was weird. They just killed them all and then took like a few of them with them, left some of them. Motherfuckers. It was awful. I was broken because it took my favorite chicken and her name was Big Cheeks. She was the sweetest. She would like come like a dog. You could like call her name and she would come to you. Do you eat chicken?

42:42Yeah. Not my chickens. I don't eat my chickens either, but it's always weird because my wife treats the chickens like they're little babies. Like, hey girls, hey girls. She takes care of them and all that stuff and then we'll be eating chicken. Yeah. It's odd. Yeah. It's odd. I mean, we have cows too. And I eat beef. Do you eat your cows? Well, they're not technically our cows. So we have like an arrangement with a cattle guy and he just uses our property to graze them. Okay. Because we need the cows because we have a biodynamic vineyard. And so we use the cows in the vineyard like for a few months out of the year.

43:23just because it creates like a great ecosystem and also like their footprints make little puddles and the water gathers because we're also dry farmed and so what's that mean we don't water our grapes really yeah so um why is that yeah i'm not the wine expert but i think it's because uh you get like a better flavor profile if you like it's more concentrated if you don't like overload them with water um and also it makes the vines struggle in a good way so it makes them reach deeper like the the roots reach deeper into the ground and so you get more like flavor i guess and so this is your own wine so we don't make the wine we sell the grapes to um i think we have five different winemakers now they're all doing single estate uh wines from our property um Um, so they're not blending it with anything.

44:24So you can drink the wine from our property, but it's not our label. Cause I don't want to go out there and sell wine and make people taste my wine. And I don't want to go down that whole marketing. It's like, I have a whole other job. I don't need that one. We just handle the farming. That's cool though. If somebody wanted to buy wine from your property, like what are the wines? Well, our property is called Glass Rock. and so um pilcrow glass rock um tansy glass rock oh so they all say glass rock yeah on the farm they have like a their brand name or whatever and then underneath it'll say like the vineyard site so if you get it from a glass rock i'm gonna buy some wine from your farm oh i'll send you some do you like wine i do oh i do i like wine okay i'm gonna just mail you a package of all of the wines from our property okay cool um it's all cabernet but we're taking like an old world approach to it because napa cabs are like super powerful tons of alcohol and that's not really my style i like like french and italian wines usually and so all the winemakers we're working with are are taking that approach and so we're picking a little bit earlier lower sugars lower alcohol it's really delicious delicate beautiful wine how did you get involved in this um well i got really into wine like in my 20s and then um i took a trip to napa for a birthday and it's so beautiful there have you been to napa oh yeah it's gorgeous so i just like fell in love with the area and then um i met the love of my life at the grocery store there as i was buying a watermelon and he asked if he could carry my melon for me and that was his pickup line um i actually turned better than a corner i turned him down though i said no yeah um but we um carlo mondavi is his best friend uh do you know mondavi mondavi wines yeah so he's grandson of Robert Mondavi and so they're like best friends and Carlo, I was living in Park City, Utah at the time and Carlo had a house in my neighborhood so that was like our mutual connection friend and so I would just come to Napa to visit Carlo and he would teach me about all the wine stuff and that's how I met Elliot when we were at the grocery store.

47:06And then a year later, we got together officially. We just kind of like kept in touch. I was married at the time. He was in a relationship. So it was very dramatic. But long story short, it was very dramatic. Turned into a crazy divorce, five-year lawsuit, all this crazy shit. But anyway. Those are fun. Yeah, it was fantastic. So then I moved to Napa and moved in with Elliot a year after we met. But we lived in St. Helena, which is like a town up the valley from Napa proper. And it was like a 400-acre ranch out in the middle of nowhere. And we had like a 400-square-foot house, like a little tiny cabin basically that we lived in.

47:53And after a while, like getting cats and stuff, I was like, this is really small. and i have like i have to make music i have to record and like having a studio in a 400 square foot house it was just you know so then we ended up um buying this house down in in napa and we bought it for the house but there was a vineyard there and so we're like we got to figure out what to do with the vineyard and it was conventionally farmed up to that point um but we're actually meaning like irrigated like irrigated they used pesticides like you know Like pretty much most of the vineyards, you know. Yeah. But we're very all about organic and everything.

48:35That's great too because one of the things that we were reading the other day was about glyphosate in California wines. They tested a bunch of California wines and all of them had glyphosate in it. Yeah. So we don't use any of that. That's awesome. Yeah. We're very anti. so we transformed the vineyard into this biodynamic organically farmed um did you know how to do that before that or did you read books how'd you find out how to do it no we hired a farmer for a while um from france that that was his like forte basically um so we transformed the vineyard and then now elliot's out there doing a lot of the farming obviously we have help um Um, it's cause we have like something like nine acres planted a vineyard.

49:23Um, and so we have help, but, um, he's out there running the tractors and stuff. Wow. Yeah. He's, he's always done, he's always done like a lot of like tractor work. Um, but not ever in a vineyard. So it's, it's all new to us, but it's fun. That life of being on a piece of land and growing something there and living with animals, that is the romantic life that everybody thinks about. It really is. Is it that cool? Yeah, it's awesome. You've got to come. I think you'll love it. It sounds amazing. I want to do that. I've thought about doing that many times, buying a ranch, living on a ranch. It's just like I get terrified of like adding one more thing to my life that will probably push out some things or eat up time.

50:14I just don't know where I'm getting that time from. That's the only hesitation that I have. You just hire help. Yeah, but then you have to talk to them and you have to deal with that. Yeah, you have to manage it all. You have to deal with like interpersonal drama between the help. Like Mike's a piece of shit. Let me tell you. Like oh fuck. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's worth it though. honestly it really is it's so peaceful like especially being in the industry i'm in going out and like touring and just being in big cities and then coming home to this like peaceful serene ranch life it's yeah it's the perfect balance yeah well that is probably the key to staying sane as a performer like having a balance i think so because so many of them just fucking and just stay on the road and you kind of like lose your roots.

51:05You lose your grounding. Uh-huh. You're always performing. Well, and for me, like living in L.A. really ruined my creativity. How so? I think a lot of it was like I'm – I have a tendency to like give everybody too much power. So like all these so-called experts like listening to their opinions about what I was doing um it just got in my head and so um removing myself being able to remove myself from those characters and personalities telling me what they thought i should be doing like writing about singing about dressing whatever um i just i need to like have open spaces to really hear my own inner voice and like my gut you know um so i left la when i was 23 and i moved up to oregon for a while lived in a cabin by yourself yeah really how'd you find it um well i had i'd been on tour and i was playing keyboards and singing backups for somebody else so i can back up a little bit.

52:20So I got my first record deal when I was 18 or something and put out an album that was with Warner Brothers. Linkin Park signed me. And I was going by the name Holly Brooke at the time. That's my first and middle name. And so I put out an album through that and it completely like flopped and I went broke. And, you know, LA is so expensive. And I had spent all my college savings to move out to LA and make demos and everything. So I had nothing left. And, um, so then I had taken, for the first time in my life, I had to get some jobs, like not just performing. So I worked in a Barnes and Noble. Um, I taught gymnastics and I edited porn and then edited porn whoa that was a great experience that's gotta be a weird it was weird well how did you take that job how did you even find out about that job well it was a craigslist ad and it was just like we need video editors and i was like oh i can i can figure that out because i edit in pro tools and stuff music so it can't be that hard and they said they would train so i showed up to the interview in a suit and they were like so you know this is adult content because it didn't say that in the ad that's how they brought it up you know this is adult content like yeah how the fuck would you know and they're like are you cool with that i was like i guess so because i need the job and so i just took it and it was a nine to five literally just looking at like the most disgusting shit you can imagine like two girls one cup has got nothing on what i saw really yeah so it was like hardcore hardcore porn and it was like it wasn't editing feature films it was taking like a feature film and then cutting out all the highlights so that i could make like basically reels or like you know it wasn't instagram but uh basically like these little clips that people would search and and find like a cum shot or like a cream pie or whatever search term they would use to find this specific little clip and so i would put together these little clips and then tag it with all the search terms somebody would use to find it that was the the job and so it was all just like watch the whole film and pick out all the most disgusting moments you can find and turn that into a clip um and then i started getting this thing called the tetris effect have you heard of that no so like if you play tetris for too long you start seeing like the shapes falling you hallucinate basically so you'll just like be making dinner or whatever and you're just like hallucinating like the tetris shapes but i was hallucinating like gaping buttholes and yeah oh my god and so how long did you do that job i only lasted two weeks but it was the best paying job out of all of them that i had because i got paid by how many clips i got done in a certain amount of time and so i was making like 30 bucks an hour which is great for a high school dropout you know um and so it was good money but i um with the tetris effect thing happening to me um there was like a a light socket over my bed that i had taken the light bulb out of because it was too bright and every night when i fell asleep i would like stare at that and see a gaping butthole.

56:12I was just like, this is not healthy. Like this is, can't be good for me to continue doing, you know? No. And then I also simultaneously got offered to be a keyboardist for this other singer, Duncan Sheik. He's like a nineties, he had a song called Barely Breathing in the nineties. Um, and I was a fan. And so I was like, well, that sounds like a better job, you know definitely and that's music at least so i went on tour with him for a while um i don't know if it was like a year or two but the whole time i was just like i wish i was making my own music and singing my own music you know it started really eating at me being like the backup musician and so um i was like journaling a lot on tour and i wrote i just want a cabin in the woods where i I can set up my studio and be away from all these people.

57:07And basically I manifested the cabin because like six months after I wrote that in my journal, my mom called me and she was like, my friend has this property in Oregon and she has a cabin and she's willing to let you live there for free. You just have to work in her art gallery selling art like twice a week. I was like, that sounds perfect. Wow. So that's what I did. That's how you wound up in Oregon. So that's how I wound up in Oregon. What part of Oregon? It's the southern coast. It was in the middle of nowhere, but it's basically near Bandon. Do you know Bandon Dunes Golf Course is? No. Have you heard of that?

57:43No. It's a really famous golf course, but it was kind of near there. And I lived there for like six months. Set up my studio, kind of like had to rediscover my love for music and fall back in love with it because I had like writer's block and was really depressed. I had also just before that broke up with my boyfriend at the time and my heart was broken and it was just like I was a mess. But my cabin was this really small one room cabin with one light bulb and there was no bathroom in it. There was a bathroom outside. and so I had to like walk in the middle of the night if I had to pee I had to walk to the bathroom and I was like terrified.

58:34Where was the bathroom? Was it an outhouse? No it had a flushing toilet and a shower. But it was like a standalone? But it was separate from the cabin and like down a path. By itself? Yeah. Just a bathroom? Yeah. I don't know. Why would anybody? Well because the cabin was like an old fire lookout that they turned into a cabin so it didn't have like plumbing or something so they like add I don't know. But it was really beautiful. And it was also at the top of a sand dune, so I couldn't drive up to it. So I had to park down the hill and hike to it. How far was the hike? Like a quarter mile. Every day?

59:12Yeah. Yeah. And so, and I didn't have, like, internet or anything up there. Wow. But it was great. But I was terrified of mountain lions the whole time. and so I would like you know walking up that hill at night if I came home from whatever um I had my flashlight was like looking all directions like and I actually made a mask to wear on the back of my head because apparently like eye contact with a mountain lion like they won't attack and so they'll because they attack you from behind so like wear a mask on the back of my head whoa that's who told you how to do that I don't know Google there's I don't know if it's real but it's real I did it it's real for tigers there's a group of people that work for the government in the Sundarbans so the Sundarbans is this area in India that's notorious for tigers eating people and And apparently over the, let's just Google this number because I'll fuck this up too.

1:00:19I think over the last 200 years, something insane, like 300 ,000 people have been killed by tigers. What? In this area. Yeah. That's insane. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of villages there and then there's also typhoons. And apparently when these storms happen, sometimes people die and they wind up in the river. And, you know, they get washed away. And the tigers apparently developed a taste for human. And then there's also this thought about the water. The water is not fresh. It's brackish. So the water has a high salt content in it, but they still drink it because it's the only salt water. So they're probably constantly irritated.

1:01:06The Sundarbans, usually prone to attacking, sometimes eating humans, causing dozens of deaths every year. But not every tiger there is a man-eater. Aw, sweet. Historical reports suggest Sundarbans tigers regularly killed 50 to 60 people per year, with some estimates over 100, especially including unreported cases. Most recent expert estimates put the average about 22 to 23 human deaths per year in the Sundarbans, far lower than the popular perception. Well, there's like clusters of attack. Oh, yeah, here it is. Local news reported clusters of attacks multiple fishermen and crab catchers killed within a month showing that risk can spike in certain areas or seasons I had a bit in my 2009 comedy special about this attack that happened in the Sundar bands where there was four guys in a boat and This tiger swam out to the boat killed a guy Dragged him to shore dropped his body off jumped back in the water swam to the boat killed another guy jumped back in the water did it with three guys before he got tired and the last guy just fucking shitting his pants on the boat by himself one guy lived so these are the people that would walk around with these masks on the back of their heads oh wow yeah so i did the right thing yeah you did the right thing well at least for tigers but there's i mean all that crazy like these people all living around there these are honey collectors and the Sundar bands to prevent tiger attacks.

1:02:38Like, you got to know there's a lot of tiger attacks when you're wearing a fucking mask around your head when you're going to work. Woo. Yeah, that's creepy. Yeah. Fucking scary. It's a crazy way to die, too. Yeah. Especially a tiger. It's probably pretty quick, though. I guess once they get a hold of you, it's just smush to get the back of your neck. Yeah. I mean, it probably happens fast. All right. Yeah. Mountain Lion would probably take a little longer. I don't know. Yeah, probably 20 minutes, 15, depending on how much you scream.

1:03:16Yeah, we've had to deal with those too. Did you have a gun or anything when you were up there? No. No? Did you think about getting one? No, I didn't actually. I had an axe. It's better than nothing. I was just chopping wood because I had a little wood stove. You're really afraid of mountain lions. How come you didn't get a gun? I don't know. I didn't even think about it. I don't know why. Wow. That would be the first thing I thought of. There's not a fucking chance in hell I'm walking around there without a gun. Yeah. I don't think at that point I was into guns yet. Are you into them now? Yeah.

1:03:57Yeah? We have a gun range at our house. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Elliot's very into them. I have a carry permit. Good for you. Yeah. Good. Have you ever seen a big cat in the wild? Oh, yeah. A mountain lion. Yeah. What was the biggest one you saw? Like a real big one?

1:04:21I don't think the ones I saw were huge. They were like 100, maybe 150. The first one I ever saw was just in Colorado. It actually wound up getting one of my dogs. And this was... They got your dog? Mm-hmm. No. Yeah. Yeah. Ugh. I lived in a place called Gold Hill. It's like north of Boulder. So it's like 3 ,000 feet above Boulder. It was fucking beautiful. Gorgeous. I would have stayed there. but um um it's very high altitude it's like 8 500 feet above sea level and my wife got pregnant and when you are um if you're pregnant at very high altitude and you're not accustomed to that it's like you have the flu every day it's horrible and we wound up going back to LA but uh so that was the first one that I saw and then I saw one in Santa Barbara I saw one in uh and actually in Montecito.

1:05:17We were driving, and I saw this thing running across the road. I was like, oh, is that a coyote? And then I saw the tail. Yeah, the tail's the giveaway. And I was like, oh, it's a fucking mountain lion. Like, that's wild. But that one wasn't even that big. That was like 70 pounds. And then a couple of years ago, I was in Utah with my friend Colton, and we were driving around this corner, and he goes, dude, look under that tree. Look at that cat. And we see the glowing eyes of this cat because it was like just starting to get dark out and uh i was probably 30 yards from this thing in the truck with the binoculars just looking at its head its fucking head was massive like a pumpkin like the muscles the mandible muscles were like these things around its head just a crushing machine and these huge forearms that's what i remember about it the most His forearms were massive and he was just sitting there under that tree staring at us.

1:06:16And I was in the truck. Like I wasn't, you know, we were armed and we were in a truck and I was still shitting my pants. Like that thing is so big. How much do you think I weighed? At least 180 pounds, maybe 200. It was a big Tomcat. Like that one that we have out front, like that, like that size. Wow. Yeah, it was like that one was one my friend Adam Greentree killed. and he killed that in Colorado and that one they had a depredation permit because it was targeting this rancher's cows and they had tracked it and that day as they were tracking it it had killed one of these cows and just it was still alive it just gutted it it basically took it down and just started eating its organs while it was still alive yeah that's what they do yeah it was pretty rough yeah they're monsters we had that we had an issue with mountain lions up at our other property in napa we had sheep and um i was actually on tour with m &m and um got a text from my neighbor that our sheep had had babies on valentine's day and so i was like so excited to get home and take care of these lambs and um i guess one of the the lambs was rejected by the mother and so we had to bottle feed it so which is the best thing ever i love that you know some people think it's like a unnecessary chore to take care of bottle babies but i love it so like three times a day feeding this thing and she became like a dog like she would follow me everywhere she slept on my front porch um her name was valentine i got a tattoo of her actually right here and um but so like a few months later we had had like maybe 10 lambs at that point little babies they're so cute um Um, and like one morning, oh, well, so our, the property was like 400 acres.

1:08:25And so, and our house was so small, but we had like other little buildings on the property. So I'd set my studio up in one of the other buildings. And so I would drive up there. It's like a half mile up the driveway. And, um, I was driving one day up to the studio and I saw this mountain lion, like crossing our field and I like rushed to get my phone out to take a video of it of course it didn't get a very good shot by the time I got the video and I turned around and went back to the house I was like babe there's a there's a mountain lion on the property and I showed him the video and it was like kind of blurry you couldn't really tell and we called um our neighbor and I think the sheriff and showed them the video and everybody was just like well nine times out of ten when people say they see a mountain lion it's just a bobcat or like whatever and i was like no i know this is a mountain lion like i know what i'm looking at you know i saw the long tail the whole thing and um they didn't know like nobody believed me like it's bigfoot or something yeah like i'm like no i swear it's a it's a mountain lion and elliot believed me um so we went up and took a little hike up the ravine where I'd seen it walk off to.

1:09:45And I swear that, like, the lion must have been tracking us back to the house because that night we were, because we didn't see it. We went up the ravine and we didn't see the lion anywhere, but we went back home. and then that night we were like uh watching tv and scrolling through instagram or whatever and he showed me this you know how the russians they like become friends with all these crazy animals like bears and whatever so there's like this video of this like russian guy like in bed with his mountain lion like cuddling with it it's always russian i know right they're psycho they are not regular white people no and so he's like he showed me this video and he's like oh i could never kill one of these unless they fucked with my family yeah that next morning i take my coffee out onto the front porch like i always did look down at the sheep pen and i see this mom sheep laying with her baby that's not moving and i was like this is something's not right and I go down there and sure enough there's like the fang marks you know the deep fang marks in its throat and it's like stomach eaten out and the mom would not leave its side and so I go back to the house and I'm like babe we lost it a lamb to the mountain lion nobody believed that I saw and so we called fish and wildlife and they came out and confirmed that it was a mountain lion kill and so they set up they were um they put traps in our sheet pen and you know to see if we could like trap it and relocate it and um so they stayed on property that night and i can't even remember all the details but basically in the middle of the night we heard this big bang and we thought oh the trap closed and we opened the door and it wasn't that It was like one of our sheep had busted through the fence trying to escape the lion.

1:11:56It was standing in our driveway, like right in front of the house. I was like, oh, fuck. So then Elliot goes down to the sheep pen and he sees the lion. And it's like just like those glowing eyes, you know. And and then it darts off into the woods. And it had killed another lamb and didn't the trap didn't go off. and so then the the guys the trackers they came down and they were like okay let's like hunt this thing like take the dogs so they had like six dogs and basically for the next like week tried to get this lion and couldn't like the dogs were getting all mixed up they were like wandering off one direction and then going another direction and they they're like and the trackers were like this has never happened like they usually get it like what what the hell's going on they were the dogs were just getting all confused and um we basically oh and then another night elliot was out there thinking that he heard the guys whistling but i guess it was the cats whistling So mountain lions whistle.

1:13:08Do you know about that? Yeah. It's a crazy sound. You can probably look it up. Mountain lion whistle. I need to hear that. Yeah. But he heard whistling and he thought it was the trackers saying, like, we're here. And he was just standing out there. And then 20 minutes go by and the guys aren't there. And so then they finally pull up and they're like, or he was like, were you guys whistling at me? and they were like no like did it sound like this and he was like yes and they said that's the lions they they whistle to communicate with each other put the headphones on so you can hear this oh

1:13:56whoa

1:14:02yeah

1:14:18Oh, that's in, that's Tejone Ranch. Yeah, man, it's, yeah. That, I go to that place. That's in California. That's outside of Bakersfield. I've elk hunted there before. That place, Tejone Ranch, they had one pond where they set up, camera trap. They set up trail cameras. They found 18 different cats on one pond. That's crazy. That's not normal. Oh, they have a lot of cats. Yeah. Well, California doesn't do anything about them. They're kind of nuts. Texas has the complete opposite approach. Yeah. You just shoot them. Yeah. You don't have to have a permit. They treat them like coyotes. We got permits because they came back and killed every night and then they took my valentine and I was like so heartbroken.

1:15:07There was nothing you could do to like lock them up? Well, I tried to bring Valentine into the house and put her in a kennel in the kitchen, but try sleeping with a screaming lamb. It was like not a thing. We put her back out and she was fine that night. But the trappers just kept saying, no, we got to just leave everything as is and we'll get them. but then like after a week of hunting them and nothing it was like what are we doing like we should move these sheep like i was fighting for that but they were just like no we got to keep everything as is because if you move them and change the what's going on it'll like the cattle just like maybe not come back for a while but then it'll come back you know and so they're like If we're going to get this thing, we've got to leave everything as is.

1:16:01But anyway, so they finally got the cat one night. I actually had to leave town and do a show. And Elliot called me, and he actually was the one that shot it. But they got the cat, and I felt like this huge sense of relief. and I came home and I thought everything was fine and we weren't going to lose any more lambs. And then like a few days later, I woke up and took my coffee outside and there was a mom sheep dead now and she was dragged under the fence. And I was like, what the absolute fuck? So turns out there was two cats hunting together and that's why the dogs were getting confused and couldn't follow the trail.

1:16:52and um i guess like in the spring a lot of times the the moms will like teach their children how to hunt and so they weren't even like eating the lambs they were just killing them um and so it was like basically them learning how to hunt i guess i don't know i don't know but uh we got another permit and we got the second lion and then everything was peaceful but we We went down from like 20 to three sheep. Oh, God. Yeah, it was awful. Killed 17 sheep? Holy shit. That must be terrifying. Yeah. And I mean, I'm like out there. I'm scared for myself even. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Living out there and like going into my studio and stuff.

1:17:34Like it was really scary and really heartbreaking. Awful. I can imagine. 17 is crazy. Yeah. It was really bad. When you shoot the cat, do you have to bring it somewhere and then they have to like register it? Well, they took them, the fish and wildlife took the bodies. But yeah, the dogs, you know, treat them. Because people eat them. Like they taste good. Really? Yeah. Yeah, I had some. Wouldn't it be kind of like tough because they're like so muscly? Eat the loin. Like people eat the roasts. It's like pork. Hmm. Yeah, my friend Steve described it as a superior pork. Hmm. Yeah. A lot of people eat mountain lion.

1:18:23Interesting. I know. It sounds crazy. I'd try it. Have you ever had bear? I've never had bear. Bear's good. Really? Yeah, believe it or not. People, like, it depends on what the bear's eating. Like, if you eat a bear that's eating a lot of fish, it's going to be kind of funky. Or if you catch a bear that's been, like, eating a dead deer for, like, a couple weeks, that's not good. You know? Yeah. Or a moose. Like a dead moose. that's something rotten and nasty yeah it'll smell rotten but if you catch one that's been eating blueberries it's like some of the most delicious meat yeah my friend Steve Rinella he has a show called Meat Eater and he was hunting black bears in Alaska over this blueberry patch so he shot this blackberry and he's cooking it and as he's butchering it he did it all on camera as he's butchering it like the fat from the bear is purple with like blueberry.

1:19:18And so like the flavor of blueberries was in the meat itself. That's interesting. It's like it's the most insane meat. It's delicious. I'd try that. Yeah, it's good. I like elk elk. It's my favorite. Where do you guys live? You live in Napa? When are you guys going back? Tomorrow. No, tonight. I've got some. I'll give you some. Really? Yeah, I got a freezer bag. I have a commercial freezer out here. Oh, sick. With some elk. I'll hook you up. Let's go. Let's go. No, it's by far my favorite. Yeah. Oh, it's delicious. It's the best. It's the best for you, too. Like, you feel different when you eat it.

1:19:50You're like, oh. It's like it's got so much nutrients in it. You've done the axis deer hunting in Hawaii. We want to do that so bad. Oh, it's, first of all, if you use a rifle, it's 100 % guaranteed. Really? Like, you can't not get a deer. There's so many of them. I mean, you have to kill them. There's, on Lanai in particular, there's 30 ,000 deer and 3 ,000 people. Holy shit. Yeah. And so in Lanai, you can actually stay at the Four Seasons. So you stay at this, like, amazing resort, and then you go hunt. That's awesome. Yeah. So I went with – well, we've gone a few years, but I went with a whole group of friends one time.

1:20:30It was, like, seven of us. We went there, and we had the best time. We hunted, and then we ate Axis deer. And it's like you're overlooking the oceans, this gorgeous paradise. yeah that sounds like a great bow hunting deer but there that's a deer that evolved around tigers and they are so fast like unbelievably fast like if you shoot at one that's 30 yards away and it hears that the bow go off it'll be out of the way before the arrow gets to it they do what's called jumping the string they just duck down and take off it's not like they know an arrow's coming at them they just know to run and the way they run is they load up their muscles by getting low and then springing forward but they do it so fast that okay 30 40 let's say 40 yards so 40 yards you've got an arrow that's going 290 feet a second and from the sound of the bow going off the pop of the bowing bow going off they're gone yeah which is insane can you can you hunt with rifle out there oh yeah okay oh yeah that's how they do most of the hunting out okay that we went and uh i went with a bunch of like very experienced bow hunters like top of the food chain bow hunters and we all got axis deer but it was a struggle it's like a lot of them jumped the string a lot you gotta we wound up realizing that the best time to go was at night uh not at night but uh in the afternoon because in the afternoon it's much windier and so it hides your sound oh because they're just on edge because they get hunted 365 days a year there's no off season and they have to hunt them because there's so many of them like you'll like driving at night you'll stop and turn the headlights to a field and you just see thousands of eyes like they're they're infested infested with delicious animals and there's no predators there's zero predators other than people so they bring in snipers and people with uh night vision and they shoot them at night and and they use headshots.

1:22:36And when you go to the restaurants in the Four Seasons, they serve axis deer. Oh, that's cool. Oh, it's delicious. It's so good. What is that place, Malibu Farms, I think it is? They have insane venison sliders from axis deers. They're so good. I mean, it's one of the most delicious game animals. But when we went, we did a podcast from there, and we called it Podcast from Paradise. We're all having a good time. and because after that 150 different people went the next year and only one of them was successful with a bow oh wow every other one was like fuck this i'm getting a rifle this is ridiculous these things are so fast like but it's an animal that evolved like i said around tigers yeah king kamehameha in hawaii was given access deer as a gift from uh the leader of india in like the 1800s.

1:23:31That's how they got there. And then they just took over. Oh, yeah. They took over. They're everywhere. Maui has a lot of them, too. But they also have this company called Maui Nui. So, like, if you love game meat, you can actually buy game meat. So, wild game meat in America, you can't sell. So, if you buy, like, say if you buy elk, like, you go to a restaurant, you buy elk. It's farmed. You're getting it from New Zealand. Oh, wow. Most likely. Yeah. Most, I think, most of the elk that they serve in restaurants in America is coming from New Zealand. Because New Zealand's a similar situation, no predators.

1:24:08And they brought in all these animals and then they're just infested. And most of it's probably not even really elk. It's probably stag, which is super similar anyway. But when you get like farm-raised elk, you're probably getting it from somewhere else. I mean, they probably have some places that are allowed to sell farm-raised elk in America. I don't know which one that would be, but wild game that you hunt, you cannot sell. Because that's how they almost went extinct in this country in the turn of the century. That makes sense. In the beginning of the, I guess, like the 1800s, the beginning of the 1900s, they brought elk to the point of extinction almost.

1:24:51And the same with whitetail deer. Because they were market hunting. so because no one had refrigerators you'd have to get meat all the time and so they were just shooting all of them wow yeah i didn't know that yeah but in maui you have so many of them and then they set up a company called maui nui and maui nui you can buy bone broth venison bone broth they have like meat sticks and you could buy actual venison and they'll freeze it and then ship it to you so if you want wild game it's like one of the best places and one of the most delicious wild game too yeah yeah axis deer is delicious yeah we want to do that hunt for sure oh it's a great hunt yeah because you can't first of all you're in paradise and you you're gonna see them it's not like if you go on an elk hunt like you could be in the mountains for days before you find any elk because you know you got to find out where they are you got to listen for bugles you got to you know you got to glass a lot you gotta look around you might not be successful if you if you bring a rifle to lanai you 100 are going to be successful and you can kill a bunch of them you know you could and they like package it for you and ship it home to you yeah there's a guy named bob the butcher shout out to bob he uh he'll butcher them for you and package it for you and all that jazz and um you know if you give it enough time they'll they'll freeze it and uh we actually brought it back to the Four Seasons and they put it in their commercial freezer.

1:26:17They froze it for us and then we put it in these big Yeti coolers and brought it back on the plane. Nice. Yeah, and you could literally get a year's supply of your meat in a few days if you wanted to do that and just eat venison for the rest of the year. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yeah. We usually try to get a deer every year up in Napa too. Do you guys go deer hunting? Well, I don't. Elliot does? Elliot does. I help him clean it, though. I've been doing that since I was a little girl. Oh, really? My dad taught me when I was a kid. He hunted a lot, and he would send me on these routes to kick the deer out to him.

1:27:00Oh, okay. So I would do the hiking and kick him out. Push, yeah. And then we would all gather. It was usually around Thanksgiving. giving we'd all gather in the basement and like cut the cut the meat up and skin it and all that wow so i like doing that part well that's cool it's a great way to be connected to what you're eating yeah exactly different experience you have a different appreciation for it oh yeah you know than something you just like buy at the store or in a restaurant like it's totally different appreciation oh 100 and also it's like you know it's organic it's an actual wild animal and it's the best life that this animal is ever going to live and including the best death because especially if you if you're good with a rifle if you're accurate you practice like it's it's dead like that and it's not like getting its guts eaten out by a mountain lion you know or right anything else that's going to eat it or old age or winter, all the horrible ways that animals die.

1:28:05Yeah. Their teeth grind down to nothing and they essentially starve to death. Aw. Yeah. That guy's rough. It's a hard life. Yeah. So how did you wind up leaving Oregon? So you're walking a quarter mile every day by yourself with a flashlight trying to avoid being eaten. Yep. How did you get out of there? well I figured out that I needed to find a way to make a living in music and so I reached out to the only person I had left in my corner musically because like at that point I had lost my record deal my lawyer dropped me my manager dropped me but I was still technically signed to UMPG publishing and so I reached out to my like point person there who hadn't spoken into in years and I said help me figure out how to make a living in music I gotta figure this out because that's the only thing I really know how to do and I'm a dropout so I can't really get a good job and editing porn yeah and I don't want to do that and so um I met with her in New York I flew to New York and we just sat down had like this long conversation and I had like ever since I was like 13 when I'd first heard Stan by Eminem, I'd always been like, I love that combination of like a pretty, you know, female vocal with hip hop.

1:29:42And so I'd always wanted to do something like that. And so I said, I think I could write hooks for hip hop songs. Like that was kind of like my, what I told her I wanted to do. and um she was like well we just signed this producer named alex kid and uh that's kind of like his wheelhouse so you guys should meet and um so i flew back to to oregon and um she connected us on email and i would go down to the little cafe to get internet and so um i would just I emailed him and he emailed me back some beats that he had just made and um I would just sit there with my headphones in the cafe and like hum little melodies into my computer and and send them back but the first one I did was called love the way you lie and a month after I sent Alex that hook uh it was a number one song wow what was that like it was crazy going from like broke and living in the woods in this cabin and then writing a song that literally took over the world yeah so that's kind of what took me out of oregon because after that i started getting phone calls, you know, from everybody wanting songs from me.

1:31:13Em had me and Alex come out to work on Detox for Dr. Dre. And Puff Daddy wanted a song. That's where Coming Home came in to play. Yeah, it was just crazy. Suddenly I went from nobody caring to everybody trying to get a song. that's gotta be such an insane experience to be like what am i doing i'm out in a cabin i gotta go outside to pee i gotta walk a quarter mile to the house you're like completely isolated did you have any friends out there at all yeah i had a couple friends i made a couple friends when i was out there and then all of a sudden all of a sudden i was yeah off to the races it's crazy how did you adjust to that i had to be very strange it was and i also felt so much pressure because like i definitely had a little imposter syndrome when i wrote that song because i was just like that was too easy like it took me 15 minutes to write that hook and i sent it off and suddenly everybody wanted to get a song for me and i was like that must have been a fluke Like, this is never going to happen again.

1:32:29I'm never going to write another one like this or whatever. And so, so many people were just wanting songs and I felt so much pressure to deliver a hit song every time. You know, and I was always so hard on myself, but that became even worse. Just, I would just put way too much pressure on myself. I got invited to do so many songwriting sessions, but at that point, like, I had pretty much only ever written by myself. And so being thrown in rooms with songwriters and producers and stuff, I was so shy. I just felt it was always so hard for me to open up creatively in front of strangers. So I would just walk out of sessions crying and just be like, I suck.

1:33:14I can't do this. It was hard. That was the hardest part for me. Just performing in front of a bunch of people in the studio? yeah just trying to like create hit songs every time i go into a writing session i just felt like there were some such high expectations on what i would deliver and i can't force creativity it's like it just happens or it doesn't you know but i felt like i had to deliver a hit song every time and because i put that pressure on myself it kind of shut down my creativity and it made it really hard for me to do that. So then I ended up like just leaving a lot of sessions and feeling like I didn't deserve to be where I was and not good enough.

1:34:06How'd you get over that? I didn't really.

1:34:18Yeah. I don't think I ever got over that. I did a lot of these sessions for a while because I felt like I had to, and then I just kind of stopped taking them. I stopped agreeing to do them because it was just too hard on me. So explain these kind of sessions. So you go to a studio with producers, and they essentially say, okay, let's try to create something. Ready, go. and then you're in there and your creative process is you by yourself like trying to connect with emotions and thoughts and ideas and all of a sudden you're around people and also you're a little weirded out because you've been living in a fucking cabin yeah by yourself you know that and you're editing porn for two weeks and it's like that and i just had this like hit song that was huge was massive and i just felt like there was such high expectations on me you know right so it was very hard everybody that i've ever met who's really good has imposter syndrome yeah i think it's a part of being genuinely creative because i think like genuinely creative people don't have that kind of weird ego we're like yeah finally i'm getting mine because some people do have that or they feel like they deserve this but i feel like at least most genuinely creative people that i've talked to when something big happens to them they're like this is fucking crazy like all of my comedian friends when they start to hit like when something happens when they get like a viral clip and then they do a netflix special or something like that In the beginning, they're like, bro, I'm kind of freaking out.

1:36:09I'm like, we all are. It's okay. This is the thing. You're going to feel fucking weird. That thing, whatever it is, that imposter syndrome I think is a good thing. I think it's a sign that you have a healthy mind or at least maybe not healthy. Maybe that's the right word. You have a creative mind. And also everything completely changes. You have a hit song all of a sudden out of nowhere, number one, like what the fuck? Like that kind of shift in paradigm, like that is not normal to get adjusted to. You'd have to be a complete psycho to be like, all right, this is perfect. This is what I've been waiting for, you know?

1:36:49Yeah. Because everybody like sees people either on television or, you know, you see them in the media and you think that's a different kind of thing than me. I'm not a famous person I'm not popular, I'm not successful I'm just me and then all of a sudden people know who you are and love you and you're like oh my god I'm a fraud they don't know about the shitty songs I've written they don't know that like 99 % of the songs that I write suck and then the one you know I think that's the case with everything though you know I talk to all my friends that are comics all say the same thing like out of the jokes that they write like 10 of them suck and then one one pops through but the thing is like you just gotta keep cranking keep keep trying to find whatever it is that was the hard part for me was to keep going and keep trying how would you do it how do you how did you like what is your creative process my creative process um well now Now, a big part of it is not living in L.A.

1:38:01I have to be out in the middle of nowhere. And I like to be alone in the room. Even if I'm writing to somebody else's beat or something like that, I just like to sit with myself and do it. And I just try to focus on how it makes me feel. You know, I spent some time trying to write what I thought other people wanted to hear. and I feel like those songs always sucked. And so just like letting it flow, almost like I'm not writing it, like I'm channeling it or something, that's better. The songs that like take less effort tend to be the better songs and the songs that I slave over to try to get them perfect and overthink, they end up doing nothing.

1:38:50John Mellencamp told me he wrote, I need a lover that won't drive me crazy in the shower. Yeah. like that done he was just saying i need a lover that won't drive me crazy no it makes total sense i write stuff in the shower i write stuff when i'm cooking dinner um it's not like go into a studio from this hour to this hour and write a song like it never works for me to do that so it'll just be random like this new album i'm putting out um there's a song called motivation i remember it came to me when i was standing outside the vet's office when my dog was getting surgery on her ACL or whatever they call it in dog world.

1:39:28I was just pacing outside during her surgery, and this song started coming to me. Did she have to do that thing where they cut the bone? Yeah. Yeah. I had a dog. She had to have both her back legs done that way. She blew out both of her. It was brutal. The recovery was brutal. It's horrible. She was also a puppy, so she had puppy energy. And we had to sedate her, and it was awful. yeah and so do you take specific time to just like sit and try to write or do you just like let ideas come to you i usually just let ideas come to me i like take a lot of voice notes in my phone or i'll write down lyric ideas that come to me and then um i need to be better about making time for it because when I do make time to like go in and be creative uh it usually does there's a balance it's like I can't force it but I also can't be lazy and like just avoid it completely you know so I try to balance that have you ever read the war of art uh I started I started it I started it I have copies out there I'll give you a copy if you Copy of the book.

1:40:49It's a very small book. It's very easy, but it's all about that. And Pressfield was kind of like an underachiever until he was like 40. And then somewhere along the line, he realized that what he really has to do is be a professional. And so he developed this methodology of like channeling the muse. And instead of thinking of the muse as being, you know, instead of thinking of creativity as being this sort of abstract thing, he thought of it as a thing that you summon. Like legitimately show up every day at the same time in front of your computer or your notebook or whatever, however you do it.

1:41:31and literally say, I am here to summon the muse. Like I'm here respectfully to call upon you for your gifts. And if you just show up every day and treat it like that, it will work. Which is a really crazy thought. It makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Do you do it? I do it. Yeah. I don't do it every day. Does it work? But when I do it, yeah, I just sit there, And I don't say I'm summoning the muse. I think he does. What I do is I go, here we go. I just say, here we go. I say, here we go. And then I start typing. And a lot of times it's like almost like working out. Like in the beginning you're like, you know, you got to warm up.

1:42:20You got to get things going. You know, you get on the bike a little bit, crack a sweat, start stretching. You know, I'm typing in the beginning. It's just like, whoa, I fucking suck. These thoughts are useless. This is not, oh. Yeah. And I got something. Yeah. And I figured out a way to do it that is more organic for me. Because I used to just try to write things that were funny. And now what I do is just write. I write on a subject, like a thing. And then I'll let it, like, if I'm writing about whatever, fucking global change, global warming, fucking earthquakes, whatever I'm writing about. I'll let it shift to what I don't try to stay on subject yeah you let it yeah it might completely change to something totally different a completely different subject and I just let it and then I just try to just get out of my own way and write as much as possible and then I go over it and try to extract things from that and I take those and I copy and paste them into something else and then I'll expand on that idea like I'll start fresh with this idea and it's it's it's just a numbers game.

1:43:26It's just a numbers and time game. The amount of numbers, the amount of time that you spend thinking about stuff, you get these little gifts. And that's where the concept of the muse comes from. It's because it's almost like it's like some sort of a divine entity. Yeah, it feels like that. It does feel like that. Everybody says that, whether it's authors or musicians or comedians or anybody creative, they say it feels like it's not even my idea. It just came to me out of nowhere right which is the weirdest thing about the creative process it's not like like a structure you're putting together like a house you know like i know how to do this i lay down the foundation i put up the girders i do the it's like this thing like this spiritual weird entity that you're in contact with yeah for sure and it's not you because you're like empty when the ideas come they just like make their way into your head you're like whoa where the fuck did that come but then you're responding to your emotional like how it makes you feel yeah like reading what you're channeling or listening to it and for me like i focus mostly on that like how is it making me feel is it causing some type of like emotional response you know yeah and then those are the magic moments well that's why it would have to be so weird to do it in a studio with a bunch of people you don't know with under pressure yeah for me it doesn't work i don't know how some people are like thrive in that environment i don't know how yeah i get it a lot of rappers i just love doing that but i think they feed off of each other you know and like a lot of rappers they tell me that like like they're doing it for their boys so like as they're like hitting like new lines and coming up with new new rhymes and new raps it's like they're they're fucking around with their friends and like having a good time like impressing them with like strong lines and great bars and i mean i've definitely had some moments like that especially like you can find people you have really good chemistry with then it can work right but generally speaking just going into a room with strangers it doesn't doesn't work for me but yeah there are some people that like I feel super connected to creatively and I can do that with them.

1:45:49Well, I'd imagine everybody's got their own different little process, but it's just a matter of like doing something, like making the time for it. And I would imagine also it's like as you get really busy and successful and there's a lot of obligations, it's harder and harder to find that still time. Well, yeah. And there's like cycles. Like right now I'm not writing at all because I'm just in, you know, album promotion mode. And so it's all about like content and all this other stuff. So I haven't written a song in a long time. So, and it's also kind of like a muscle, like songwriting for me.

1:46:29Once I get into a songwriting zone, it's like coming like way easier all the time. But I have to like warm up to get into it and get back in that headspace and, you know, warm up that muscle again. That makes sense. Like marathon running. Yeah. Yeah, something. Yeah. I think everything's like that. Yeah. You get into like grooves. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So when you're in the middle of promotion, like what is the difference in like do you have ideas that still come to you and you just sort of jot them down and go one day I'll go back to that? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I just store them. Does this feel like when you're in promotion time, does it feel weird?

1:47:18Like you got to go out and sell it and you got to talk about it? I enjoy all the different aspects of it. You know, I love that it's all creative for the most part. Like even just like making content and filming stuff. It's an art form, too. So I feel like I'm still like getting my creativity out. It's just not in the songwriting lane. And so is it like one of those things where in the back of your mind, you're like, eventually this will come to an end and I'm going to get back to it. And then it starts to like itch at you. Yeah. Yeah. I get the itch. Yeah. Yeah. Time to get back. Yeah. I'm already feeling it.

1:48:01Are you? I'm ready to write again. Yeah. Well, I would imagine that being in a place like Napa where you're like around like peaceful, you know beautiful background and you know nature and it's probably like way easier to get in touch with your mind than to be trapped in manhattan for sure beep beep fuck you you know yeah that's exactly why i've stayed away from cities yeah i guess everybody has to find their own thing because i have friends who thrive off that shit i have friends who live in new york city they can't live anywhere else they love it yeah i maybe it's because i grew up in a rural environment because you're not broken i think my friends are all broken i think it's a comfort thing because like i grew up in the woods so it feels like home to be out in the middle of nowhere but if i grew up in the city that might feel more comfortable for me and And I might be able to hear myself think better there.

1:49:05But, you know, everybody's different. I think everybody who goes to the woods realizes they need it. I think it's a vitamin. I really do. I think it's just like how sunlight gives you vitamin D. I think there's something about being in wilderness where you're in tune with all those life forms. because it's not as simple as, oh, there's a bird, there's a squirrel. No, the fucking ground's alive. The trees are alive. There's energy that all these things have that is being distributed somehow or another in this strange array of information and of just life that's all around you that you feel. You actually feel when you're out there.

1:49:56Yeah, it's like forest bathing. that Japanese practice. Yeah, for sure. And it's also, there's no fucking cell phone service. So I think there's something to that too because the earth feels cleaner, if that makes any sense. Like when I'm in a place that has no cell phone service, I swear there's a subtle difference in the way the world feels. It's like a vortex, yeah. Yeah, because I think like in this room, we have Wi-Fi, we both have phones. Like I think there's signals that are just out there that we can't, you know, you can't tune it in and go, oh, that's a video my friend's sending me. You don't do that.

1:50:33But there's something about whatever the fuck that stuff is that I think your body recognizes as a – they say it fucks with bees. Like cell phone signals in particular really fucks with bees. And like, okay, well, it fucks with bees. I bet it fucks with us too. Oh, I'm sure, yeah. Yeah. Because it feels – like if you're in a place with no cell phone service, the world feels different. And it's not just because you can't check your phone. It's the world. The actual air around you feels different. Yeah, I definitely feel that too. Yeah. I think that's how people are supposed to live. I think we're doing some weird shit to ourselves.

1:51:14You know? For sure. But the weird shit is cool in a lot of ways, you know, because it's how we meet each other, how we talk to each other, you know, how we find out about new things. It's all about the good balance of it all, you know? Exactly. yeah yeah do you have goals yeah what are your goals like because some people don't some people just enjoy just doing they don't think about like goals yeah i mean i have like things i want to do before i die what do you want to do um well i want to be better about putting out more music because because i do put so much pressure on myself it's taken me like five years between each album to make one and put it out.

1:51:59Yeah, but they're also good. I second guess myself all the time. And I think I put so much pressure on it. This has to be the sound, the mark I leave on the world, and this is what I want to be known for. I'm like, fuck all that. Just capture a moment in time. What am I feeling right now? What vibe am I into? And capture that zeitgeist musically, and then move on to the next one. It doesn't all have to be cohesive. I used to just be like, put so much pressure on it being cohesive and having like a certain sound or whatever. But now I'm just like, okay, right now this album, I'm calling the genre bubble grunge.

1:52:41Because it's like inspired by the 90s, pop and grunge kind of like combined together. But then the next album, I might totally flip it and do something totally different. And that's okay. Like, it doesn't all have to be, like, it can be different. I can change it up. And so my goal in regards to that is to put out an album every year instead of every five years. That's a big shift. It's a big shift. But I don't want to look back and just wish I would have released more. Because I have so much music sitting on hard drives and on a Dropbox folder that's never come out. because I would like make a bunch of music and then second guess it and start over and start over again it's not good enough it's not good enough I'm like I should have just put everything out I should have just been okay with like you know putting out a bad album or a bad song it's okay but you think that that's making it and putting it out perhaps a part of the creative processes boiling it down to something that i think so but i think i take that way too far do you think that that is in part because of the pressure that you experience for your first thing that hits is number one which is a crazy experience yeah and you were really young yeah you know all of a sudden boom yeah maybe that was part of it just made me like extra hard on myself um but i want to have more fun and not take it so seriously so how do you plan on doing that how do you plan on having more fun and not taking it so seriously i'm already doing it yeah yeah i think i just turned 40 and i think that also has something to do with it because i'm just like seeing the end And like, what am I doing here?

1:54:44Just like torturing myself with all this pressure and not just like having fun and being creative and throwing it out there, you know? So I'm already doing that. I'm already having more fun. That's great. But that is one of the beautiful things that comes with age. Yeah. Giving less fucks. Giving less fucks and just accumulating experiences to the point where you recognize the flaws in your past thinking and why I did this and I'm not happy I did that. And you gather enough of those experiences where you get a better map of the territory. Like, I think I get it now. Yeah. And then you're really established now, too.

1:55:24So it's like you don't have to be as worried about whether or not, you know. Yeah.

1:55:36It's a beautiful thing that comes with age. The not giving a fuck. One of the funniest things is seeing an old person doesn't give a fuck. Oh, yeah. Old people who don't give a fuck and just say anything that comes to their mind. It's hilarious. They're fun. Well, thank you for being here. It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed talking to you and I really enjoy your music. Oh, thank you. can I talk a little bit about the album that I'm putting out absolutely okay it's called wasted potential it's about me wasting my potential but it's a it's an album where I'm telling the story of my like upbringing in small-town Wisconsin discovering my sexuality and just like it's like a coming-of-age story and it's a part of my story I don't think a lot lot of people know.

1:56:32They mostly know me from working with Eminem and all the things I did after that. But I just felt like it was time. I think because I turned 40 recently, I was like thinking about my childhood a lot and like realizing I didn't appreciate it enough. I had a great childhood. And so I just wanted to tell that part of my story kind of for the first time ever. So I'm excited to get that out. And it's important. It was important for me to get it off my chest and out so that I could like finally I was depressed about turning 40. Really? Yeah. So depressed about it. But I think it's because I didn't I didn't feel like I was like present during my childhood.

1:57:15And I mean, I was working a lot. And so it was important for me to get it off my chest and be at a point now where I feel like I can accept that I'm 40 and actually enjoy it. And so that was the whole gist of the album. Well, do you really think that you have wasted potential? Oh, yeah. Really? How so? Well, when I made music for my mom growing up, it was a completely different lifestyle to now making music in L.A. and the big world of music. I didn't realize how much work it would be. I didn't realize the grind and uh I think when I first got into it I was kind of lazy about it because I was like oh I honestly I probably should have been a Gen Z because I was just like fuck this I don't want to do this you know um and so a lot of decisions I made in my career um I feel like you know it was all my fault basically all the failures that I've had, I realized were my fault for being, you know, lazy or not putting in the effort and the grind.

1:58:35And yeah, so I wasted a lot of potential. I had so many huge opportunities when I was younger in the music industry. And then I kind of just like, I was like, this is too much work but is that a part of like a work-life balance yeah i mean that's what gen z would say right they're all about the work-life balance but in i feel like in my generation the millennials it was all about like work work work work work you know and I wasn't doing that as much so yeah I didn't I didn't feel like like turning 40 I was like I'm not in the place where I thought I'd be I didn't do all the things I wanted to do by this age and I was feeling kind of like a failure and so do you think that that self-critical mindset though is just one of those things it's just like it's it's actually inherent to anybody that's creative and ambitious like you're always going to be self-critical and that's probably one of the reasons why your music is so good like this idea like it's not good enough it's not good enough like and obsessing over things where you only release something every five years but then look at the quality of the songs that you do release that you do love it's like there's a balance in there like a little bit of self-critical a little bit of like I'm not doing enough let it in there but don't believe it you know life is life it's not all you know it's not all like leave a legacy because in the end it really doesn't matter I know it's true that's why I'm just trying to have more fun that's great yeah both things both things listen your music's awesome thank you and it was awesome seeing you with eminem it was great oh yeah you came to the show yeah and uh also that's how marshall was named he was named after yeah that's awesome yeah so so cute thank you and thank you so much best of luck with your album with everything else in the future this is really cool i enjoyed it me too all right thank you all right bye everybody

2:01:05Thank you.