How To Make Your Creativity Beat The Algorithm (Live Performance) - Dylan Gossett - #1155

0:00People of the UK and Ireland, I'm coming to you live. Imagine that. Me on stage in your city. Dublin is completely sold out, but everywhere else has got limited tickets left and you can get yours now at chriswoliamson.live. This is a custom-built live show. I absolutely adore it. I've spent over your working on it. So if you're a fan of everything modern wisdom, come and see me on stage this October around the UK and Ireland. Chris Woliamson. Dot live. Well, I've headed back to Austin trying to find me again. Something to keep me busy, keep these hands trembling. And it's something like the weather. I try and mark my mind. I try to think of something clever. Keep me safe, spy. I'll take burning on the weekend. Straight down 29. Pass the cedars and believers. On a rain dry, we need to get out of the city.

1:02Pass the smell of the bar. Forced to play, it's gone by, but in the sky, leaving the scar. Oh, do you believe in? I've been having trouble sleeping. The only thing I'm needing is somewhere I can't find. So I've headed back to Austin when I close my eyes. If you only had my bitch and I'm fat like a name I do, try to focus words ahead. And I win a place. I take the simple kind of moment to put my mind at ease.

2:06It takes a girl you said she loves me to make me wait in the mean. What are you believing? Because I've been having trouble sleeping. The only thing I'm needing is somewhere I can't find. So I've headed back to Austin when I close my eyes. What are you believing?

3:21I've been having trouble sleeping. The only thing I'm needing is somewhere I can't find. So I've headed back to Austin when I close my eyes. That's fun. Thank you. I'm believable. So good. Thank you very much. Great to see you. That one's about Austin. Very timely. Yeah. Did you write most of Cole in 25 minutes? Is that right? Yeah. Cole was written one of the fastest ones I've probably written. It started, I can kind of show you. So it started just with...

4:21Maybe not this exact chord progression was a little bit different. I might have an old video that I could show you. But I think it started with kind of that hook. The... I say, Prisha makes diamonds have a hit. You know what I was like? That's great. That's a song. We got to build around it. And then, yeah, verse by verse. And it was just... I remember I was like, had my phone type in on top of our dog kennel in the apartment at the time. And it was like right before we went out with like some work friends. And none of my friends knew I sound. Like, at all. I didn't... I don't know. I just don't go around telling people. And Rolke Cole went out and Julia, my wife, was just stoked on it. She was like, this is so sick. And she was just showing people like Snapchat videos of the song. She was like, you know, just... What do you all think about this? And they're like, doing you seeing? And I was like, cats out of the bag, I guess. And then didn't do anything with it for like a year or two. No way. You sat on that. You sat on a song that did like half a billion streams. Yeah. For a year or so. I wasn't... I wasn't on socials.

5:21I wasn't putting anything out. I didn't do anything until we were on a camping trip with my buddy, Kaden, and his now wife, Kaden, and my wife, and I, Julia. And I brought my guitar. And I was just playing some songs. And Kaden has like the best ear of anyone I know. He's like an A&R that doesn't work in A&R. And he heard Cole and he's like, please sing it again. He's like, voice memoed it. And he's like, you gotta do something. You have to do something. And my wife was like, Dylan, you should just post on TikTok. And I was like, well, I'm not, you know, I'm not a TikTok girl. I was like, I don't want to say, can't stand it. I just just know my... It's not my thing. But I started doing it. And Cole became this thing. I was just insane. One of my buddies, as best man, is wedding. Godfather, it was kid. And he was playing... We were at a friend's house who has a karaoke machine. And I don't even know why there was a guitar there. And he'd been doing exactly the same thing. I bullied him, bullied him. I was like, no, come on, come on. Because the choice was between him playing acoustic guitar with a beautiful voice.

6:22And one of our friends, Sad Emo, rapping. And I was like, hey, look. The decision is really easy for me to make in terms of a pressure. The fucking floor, dude, is so low for you to get over here. Yeah. So I'm interested, what were you in life when you were doing those lyrics? What is that? So I was living in Austin. I worked in... Are you talking about Cole? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Cole. So I was living in Austin. I was working at the racetrack, the circuit of the Americas, down here. So I was... At the time, I was in event operations. I think I was... I was... I started as an intern. I used to live there in like a trailer in my parents' RV for months. I just lived at the job site. But I... Yeah, I was working there. And I might have just kind of been through like a tough season. Like, F1 seasons is just kind of brutal, especially for like the outside guys. You're just... I mean, it's just like 20-hour days that you're living out there when it's F1 time. And I don't know. I don't know. It's like that.

7:22It might have been some, you know, interpersonal family thing or whatever it might have been at the time. And, you know, I always try to say like it's a pretty deep, kind of dark song. But I try to like tell people, I wasn't in like the worst spot of my life. But I was just going through everyday struggles. Like everybody does. That's kind of what it was. I was like, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not really like... I don't know. I don't feel like I'm chasing anything right now. Like, I'm having a great life. I mean, my wife and our dog, we're having a great... Like, we're very happy. And I was like, but a lot of other stuff we were just like, you know, whatever. You know, so... It's interesting. There's like an input, output equation. I think a lot of people feel. And if you're putting lots in the goal, the hope. Is it something that's going to come out on the other side of it? Yeah. But you have this sort of latent leverage after a while. Like, you build up... You know, you pull back an elastic band and you pull it back and pull it back and pull it back. And we hope that life is going to be a bit more linear.

8:22But a lot of the time, you're kind of just accumulating reps or doing something, maybe not even doing what... And putting in more work than you will do in future and not seeing the rewards. I think that's why... You know the top comment. Colescott, 22 million plays on YouTube. The top comment says, this song has the feeling when you're working on yourself and making progress. But you still feel lonely and like a failure. Yeah. That's a great way to put... That's how it felt, I guess, is like... It just felt like we were putting the hours in almost. You know, we're doing it. But I don't know. We don't feel any different. But now I almost see now, it's like without... Like if Cole happened... Let's say I was writing about other stuff and Cole happened five years earlier. No way. There's no way that I think I would be touring doing the same thing that we're doing right now. Because without... I think without going through that job and understanding... Even personal relationships outside of college, like just kind of real world items. Like I don't know, I feel like... I can't even imagine being thrown into the music industry or trying to write songs or any of that.

9:27Without... I feel like having a real frame of reference to come back to. Does that make sense? Like I... Dude, even music as an artist, I think people don't understand. It is such a business. Like I think people imagine artists and myself just being like, Look, I strum the guitar, I show up shows, we collect our money and that's our lot. Like that's... I feel... There's a time where I feel a lot more like a business manager than an artist, for sure. There's a book called The E-Meth Revisited by... I think it's Michael Goebbet. It's like just a business book. It's quite well done. And he tells this fictional story in there of a woman who runs a bakery. And this woman loves making cakes. She loves to do. And she's made cakes for the family. And she makes cakes for her friends. And it's her passion. And she's rated it. Everyone's best cakes. I'm gonna open a bakery. Wouldn't that be cool? Small local bakery. So she opens a bakery. And then it gets popular because she makes great cakes. But she needs to hire some staff. And then some staff come in. And the staff start to make some of the cakes.

10:29And she's involved in the ingredients and the recipes and the releases. But then it's accounts to do. And she grows a little bit more and then she gets a factory. And she's spending a little bit less time making cakes. And before she knows it, she hasn't made a fucking cake in years. It's yeah. And this, no matter what industry you're in, you have to learn to be able to say no to things or to focus on stuff that previously you would have begged to have had the opportunity to say yes to. I want to be in the room with the A&R person. Or you're a writer. And you have all of the opportunities to go and do speaking cakes. Why were you great as a writer? What made you great as a blogger on Substack or as an author that writes books or whatever it is? It was because of the time that you spent like stewing in your ideas. Yeah. Like marinating in this stuff. It was the three hour walks that you took with the dog. Yeah. And all of that time gets squeezed because we can't see. Basically like obvious productivity is really easy to track. How many hours did you spend on Slack today? How many emails did you send?

11:29I've got a full back to back day of schedule calls. This must make me really important. And you go well, how useful is it for you to go fishing for an afternoon with nothing else happening? Well, I worked really hard today. I went fishing. The pure and work ethic, the guilt that comes up because I should be working harder. But that's not what necessarily got you here. No, and it's so strict because yeah, because expectations change from everyone involved too. Right. Like the fans have different expectations of the listeners. I have a different expectation as myself as I put up more and more albums. Back when I was writing coal, I was not writing it for anything. I was just like, this is my outlet. This is my passion. I love playing guitar. I'm just going to pick it up and write. I had no reason to do that. But I wanted to because that was just what I was so passionate about. I kind of like the bakery. Like she wants to just bake. So now it's like three years, three and a half years later, or I guess from coal writings like five years, but looking back, like if I wrote that exact same song today, and I, like if I hear the version of coal right now,

12:31I would be like, what is this dim? I would never put that out. You know, and it's like I tried to remind myself like when I'm in the studio, because like that was just, that song was just made on my laptop on the edge of my bed. Like that's where coal was recorded, engineered, the only thing I didn't do on that song was master it, which actually I put it out. We had to retake it down to remaster it because it was so. The levels were all up. Yeah, it was just off. It like didn't blend in with other music. So yeah, it's so, it's so strange. Like you have to, yeah, you've got to find that passion, which I still have it. And like I think, you know, obviously I'm going to, I'm going to talk about the struggles of music, because there are some. But the last thing I'm going to be as ungrateful for what it is. Like I'm living my dream. Like whenever I have struggles in this industry, because there are, kind of like you said, it's like four years ago, I would have killed to be stressing out about putting my album out. You know, oh, I have to go sign vinyl in Nashville. I would have died for that, dude.

13:31You know, so I, I don't know. I just, I have to remind myself that my wife reminds me that all the time. She's just like my number one supporter. And it's like the greatest teammate in the world. So yeah, it's such, it's the goal post just changed. Isn't it crazy station? You know about habituation and hedonic treadmill, right? Like you get, you can't wait to get a new car. You spend all of your time thinking about this new car. You get the new car and then after six months, you sort of bored of it. Yeah. Looking after the next one. What nobody really talks about is the same thing, but with goals and problems. Right. That you wanted to have to do soundcheck. I just wish that I had a team of people who would maybe tune my fucking guitar before I go out there. And then you've got to negotiate because one of the fucking guitar techs has had to leave. So we need to get a new guitar tech. Hang on. So you're telling me that the person I pleaded like begged, prayed to have, and now I need to get a replacement for it. And that feels like a burden to me. Yeah. And we get accustomed to a different quality of life, a different level of ease or something.

14:37And yeah, I've always thought it would be really cool if you could take photos of your own mind and go back and visit them like you come with a photograph. What would it be like to go back to the texture of your mind from four years ago? Even just plug it in. What problems? Yeah. What problems were you thinking about? What concerned you was you fell asleep? Money worries. I'm going to make fucking circuit of the America. I'm boiling hot on the fucking golf cart. Yeah. Can we do a little, a little, a little cold? Yeah, let's do it. Beautiful. Yeah. This was like the one. Because you know what's funny? I posted a video of cold way early on and no one cared. It didn't do anything. But I was fine with that. I was like, I already stuck to it. I was just going to keep posting. I didn't post cold. And again, until after to be free happened, the first song I ever put out. Because I was like, I have a little traction now. I should try to, I was like, I really, really believe in the song. Like the writing on it's really good. And then it was like, yeah, over in that video changed. Why did you do that? In cold, why did you do that pre-chorus? Because you don't drop like the line until the second time it comes around. Why did you make that creative decision? Two things.

15:37At the time when TikTok, I hated what music promotion was. I hated that it was like, okay, we're going to hear this 15 second clip of Bad lyrics weren't even on the screen really at this time. Like people weren't like, I don't know, just like all about a 15 second clip that people can just repost and redo videos to dance or whatever it was. And what they would do is they would get all these pre-saves lined up, pre-save, pre-save, and they would just extend this thing for just months. And what I did with cold was like, I think the strength of this song is in the writing. It's not necessary. I think the hook is like this huge payoff at the very end that the people who listen to it are going to get. At the time I wasn't thinking like, oh, I should probably shave that off because a 22nd video is going to have a lot more views and a 45 second video like you're saying. But I also just like the writing of it. I don't know, like, I've seen heaven without dying, with a devil without trying. I was super proud of that. And I was like, I think that's a good hook to bring. Who knows? If I started with the chorus, it might have never happened.

16:42Like, you know, if it was a dark sky instead of a sunny day when I was recording, it might have never happened. Like, I think about that stuff all the time. I took, like I did like five different videos that day and I just chose that one. I was like, there's a chance that that video didn't go. I never posted cold again. And we're not having this conversation. You know what I mean? So it's, yeah, I don't know. I also like, I'm a big believer in that things happen for a reason. So that also gives me peace of mind. I don't know. But yeah, so. So. Well, I've seen heaven without dying, with a devil without trying. And they both seem to want to talk to me. But I'm all out of luck now in my dreams. I'm worth the book. This game life plays heavy on my heart.

17:44And love is tough, loneliness twice is hard. I'm carried out about everywhere I go. They say pressure makes diamonds. Hell, hell, am I still cold? Hell, hell, am I still cold? Yeah, that was the clip. So good. So I mean, do you think deliberately looking unpolished is now its own kind of marketing? As soon as somebody does it on the deck and it's successful, like everything becomes commercialized. Like authenticity is really difficult to survive once a team recognizes it's got commercial value. And that kind of kills what authenticity is because people are now performing authenticity. Yeah, I mean, so that was something. I mean, it's honestly, it's still some I obsess over of like, and I don't obsess over it in a way of like, how do we make this look and feel, you know, because people are smarter than they ever are.

18:47Like, dude, you're not going to fake it. And people do. And maybe I'm wrong. You know, maybe people do believe a lot of self-as-authending when it's just absolutely not. But I don't know. I just feel like I try to stay true to what my mind was thinking when I first got into this thing of like, there's lines I won't cross. Like, what like? I would never sacrifice for a while. I wouldn't even run ads. I wouldn't do anything. I would not. And I drove my team crazy. And I guarantee you, I probably took a hit on a lot of things for that. And maybe I was overthinking it, but I was just like, look, I just, I don't want to just all the sudden, like you said, it's like, we know this thing works. I don't want to all the sudden just dive in. Everyone's telling me, we'll wait. That's the formula. Yeah, here's the formula. Don't put it out right now. Wait three months. Get your pre-saves up. Post it 30 more times.

19:47I posted a call in total. Even like today, I think it's been like seven to ten times ever. You're kidding. Ever. Now, when it came out, I think I posted it four times. And what people would tell you now is like, you got to post that song 50 times. You know, and it's like, I don't know. It's just such this weird thing in music right now where there's so many people doing it. So like, you've got to get out there somehow. And you've got to separate yourself somehow. Like, it's even ten acts of whenever I like, Cole came out of like the amount of people kind of playing this type of music. And I don't know. I really don't have the answer to like how to separate because everyone's doing the authentic thing now. And everyone's doing the polished thing. Like, there's just so many things. And I think in your world and in my world, the ends of the barbell are where people are succeeding. So very, very produced. Right? Like super, super polished or very roaring strip back. And I think the middle is where people seem to go to die at the moment.

20:48Yeah. But looking at talking about the growth of the music industry, Billboard Top 10 from 2020 to 2023, rap music, 34% country music, 7%, 25 to 26, country music, 27%, rap music, 17%. So rap music's gone in half and country music's 4x. That's incredible. That's pretty crazy. Yeah, I mean, wild. I think it's the natural way of things. Like, I think at some point, country will be back down and rap will be back up. Like, that's five. That's the two ends of the. Yeah, but also like, it's country is not what country was in 2020. Like, I mean, I hear songs right now that are charting or whatever. That I'm like, that's a great song. I love it. I would call it country, but sure, you know, you know, it's got acoustic guitar in it. Let's do it. That's country. But yeah, it's cool. I think at some point, it'll go back. There'll be like a whole new wave of hip hop or something that comes in.

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22:51because as soon as you find a way to make something become effective, everybody's going to start to play that. I guess, how do you tell the difference between a song that's good and a song that's just algorithm-friendly? Ooh, I mean, I feel like I have a bad view on this because I'm in it. So I feel like I can pretty easily see when something has something pushing it. You know, I kind of know what the markers are of when I hear a song that's trending, and I'll go look at the audio or whatever, and I'm like, okay, they got a team. They're running this thing. What is some of the indications? Like, okay, you'll see a song come out, and there's a thousand truck edits to it or something. And I'm like, what's a truck at it? Like, okay, you'll see a new song come out, and it'll be like a video of an account that all they do is just truck videos with cool, moody lighting,

23:54like lyrics on the top, and they put a song to it. I didn't realize this was an ecosystem on Instagram. Oh, it's not just truck. It's a truck. There's a truck. It's a truck. Yeah, that's a big thing. Right. And again, it's a truck. It's a smart thing because a lot of people follow those accounts for music. So like, what teams will do is, you know, they'll pump someone's song on stuff like that. Now, I'll say now more than ever, that doesn't mean that you're going to have a hit song. It might put more ears on it, but like if the song is not that great, and if it kind of sounds like something else, like it just won't, it still won't really catch. You know, this is the kind of escalation of firepower when it comes to marketing, that how much harder is it to break through if every moderately good song has now got an army of clippers and truck edits and boat edits behind it. So yeah, that's, I mean, that's what I mean. It's almost like in my case, right? Like I'm very blessed to be in the position that I am is like selling tickets.

24:54That's what we've always based this thing off of. Like we've never really outside of coal. We've never really had like viral moments like that was it. Like we haven't really had one sense before it. But what matters to me is that our shows keep growing. Like that's all I've always cared about is like getting people to buy tickets in seats. And I mean, even that's getting harder with just how many everyone in the mom is touring right now. But it's a. Lou Dotfea is happening. Yeah. And that's just like, that's a whole another crazy thing. That's that's just like that is a mixture of just everything going against people buying tickets. So like, but then you know, part of the reason for the people that don't know Lou Dotfea is a wave of artists, many of whom are pretty big doing some pretty large venues, some stadiums, some arenas not selling out or often not selling enough to even maybe continue with the show or perhaps killing the tour entirely. Yeah. And part of it is, is this person as relevant as they thought, have they overcooked it, but another huge part of it is what are the

25:58fucking ticket prices? Yeah. Like what's happening with ticket master and live nation and how much are people getting squeezed and dynamic pricing? Yeah. It's all cohesing at the same time. But one of the most common things I'm hearing on the show is how much real life events are going to come back. Like everyone's bullish as fuck on live music. Yeah. And everyone's so bullish on comedy, on real world events, on you know, slow phone tech free sabbaths, trying to touch grass and you know, fucking see the sky again. And at the same time, you have this other force which is cost of living. People don't have as much money as they want anymore and live nation and ticket master and every venue on the planet knows, okay, well I've got a squeeze, but I can't squeeze too much. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's like, yeah, you want to go see a massive stadium act, right? It's like cool for me and my wife to go, that's going to be a four figure day. Like, and that's if I'm in the nosebleeds, that's if I'm in the worst seat in the stadium, I got to go get a hotel, I got a park for $50.

26:58I got it. If I want to buy a shirt, a babysitter, I mean, you're talking about thousands of dollars to go see a show in a really bad seat from row F. And then they go, well, hold on this tick, this tick talk artist that remember we have on our, on our playlist, he's playing down on the table. He's playing down the road for a $15 ticket and there's 200 people going and it's like, let's just do that. But there's a thousand people now. So to have, I feel like agents jobs are getting harder every day too, because it almost like you build touring off of like sellouts and coming back and revamping like your show that you did after an album, you come back to the city, you crushed. And it's like, all right, well now you can do 20% more tickets because your album is doing well and people are enjoying it. So let's do it. But now it's almost at the point where it's like, oh, you know, Dylan's coming to Chicago. We saw him last year. Great show. Love it. But we saw him. And what about this new artist that's coming? We should go see him because we can only choose one show this month or this year because everything's so expensive.

27:59So it's just, yeah, dude, it's such a, it's such an interesting landscape. Again, we're just, we're just very blessed we get to keep doing it. So that's what we shot. Overnight success used to be a bit of an insult and now it kind of feels like what everyone's chasing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very strange. Very strange, right? I also think a lot of people aren't ready for it. Maybe like, I mean, I wasn't ready for it, but luckily like it didn't happen in such a way when I was too young or like you kind of happened like in the perfect moment. Like my wife and I just got married six months earlier, like fell settled down, moved into a house together. And then it happened, you know, and I, yeah, you know, I think the hardest part is maintaining it. I feel like that's what does not always happen is someone will have a really big moment and you'll know the song. Everyone in the world knows the song. And then in a year, it's like they can't sell shows because maybe they just had that one song that was getting pushed out. I don't know, it's, it's a weird world. I feel lost in it all the time.

29:01That's why I do, I, I've deleted so much social media. Any like a country account out there, I pretty much just unfollowed. I just, I just, it's just overwhelming. It's just too much. What's the sensation that you feel when you get exposed to that, when you were getting exposed to that stuff? I mean, my sensation, it's not like I'm like getting anxious or stressed about it. It's more of just like, do not get to have a life outside of everything. Like Instagram used to be like, oh, what are my friends posting? And now it's just like at, at promotion, promotion. Oh, there's my buddy, you know, let me just go through that. And it's just, it just gets, it's like when people are like reviewing other country artists. And it's like these people that hide behind us. It's just weird. And I'm like, like it, obviously it's good for the music industry. It gives a lot of eyes. But as someone that's in the industry, it's like, I'm trying to separate a little bit my life in my work. Which I feel like I've done a really great job on. Like again, I'm not, I'm not like very social media forward.

30:02Like there, I mean, we have an album coming out. So I've kind of been trying to, I'm like trying to post more. But like I'm like, I don't know, I don't, I don't know. I don't, you know, it gets lost out there a lot of times anyways. And it's just, it's just a lot. It's another element of what we were talking about before that as you become successful, your ability to do the things that made you successful become harder to access. In order for art to imitate life, you have to live a life. This is why comedians as they get bigger and bigger, all of their acts are about airports and dinners and shows and hotels. Because that's all that they know. Because they're now a big touring act every single weekend. They're away playing two or three shows. Maybe they're matting and all of their friends are in the industry as well. And before you know, you go, what is the wellspring that I'm drawing from? And this is the same for anybody. You're a marketer, right? You're a branding person. You're trying to come up with really interesting insight for a new campaign for a client that you work for, for your own company that you run or whatever. But where are you drawing that from?

31:02If all that you're consuming is just derivative work of other people talking about the same thing. Well, I'm big in the branding industry. It's very important that I spend time at the conference. Okay, so you as a marketing guy, spend all of your time talking to marketing guys about marketing. Where is the new inspiration? It's inspiration. It's like, yeah, who you used to be the person that you would market to. Like, I used to be the guy that I would want to be like, I would want Dylan to be a fan of Dylan. Really? I'm trying to, I'm like, I think this guy would love to be the same thing with the show. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Again, like you said earlier, how can you tell what's a good song and what something's been pushed? I'm like, I think I can tell. But you might have been finessed as well. Yeah, maybe I have because you know, and then I start to believe certain things, right? Where again, like you just kind of keep pushing the line back of like, oh, I hate, I don't like how they promoted that or whatever. And then your next record comes out and you're like, well, do we need to do? I need to play that.

32:02Yeah, I don't know. It's a, it's that's such a good way to put it. I've just, yeah, the farther, I guess you could say, quote, unquote, the most successful, successful you get in the more away from where you started. Yeah, you got to find time to get back. I think Miley Cyrus might have said that one time interview was just like she requires certain time off the road so she can just just live like just off. She's like, I just have to live a little bit. So yeah. Where does your process usually start? Is it like a line, a melody and emotion? It'll be, it'll be stuff. Like, okay, like, I don't know. I feel on the couch, Julia will be watching TV or something like that. We'll be watching something and I sing gibberish. Like, I'll try to find a melody that I think is like, I'm not saying anything. But I'm not saying anything. And eventually maybe like a word will come into me that feels very thought provoking or something.

33:04Like, okay, for like, head it back to Austin when I played earlier. I think it was kind of that line. Like, I knew where I wanted to go but I didn't have anything. And that just started with again, me on the couch, probably like 30 minutes, not because I'm trying to write a song, but it's because I'm just noodle it. Like, I don't know. I just like doing it. So I started. Sort of. And I'll look at Julia like, that sounds cool. She's like, yeah, I like that. And I'll look at you. And then you just kind of start gibberish forming continents and battles until they become a word. Hang on. So the right is room is you, whatever bullshit's on TV. The white presumably now the kid who's just like flailing in the background. So the difference between this and a Nashville engine, a little bit different. But that's why like, and again, I have nothing against those guys. They're very talented in their own. It's incredible what they can do, but it just doesn't.

34:07I can't do it. That's like I said, have you tried to be in the, like the engine? No, no. I've, the closest I've come to that is like, I'll write with my brother, or like multi instrumentalist, Colton. And even then it's just different. It's a whole different way of writing. I can't say if I like it more or less. I still think, just me on my couch in my living room, usually at night, is like, that's where I get the stuff I like. But then like my brother has a song that he wrote called Ramblin. And it's on the album. It's actually the title of the album, Ramblin. And it's like one of the best songs on the album. It's written so cool. And all I did was write like the chorus and a little like melody for the chorus. Can I hear it a bit? Yeah. He's way better at playing on guitar, so I'm probably gonna butcher it. Also, I haven't played it in so long.

35:09Cheese. Listen to the wind. It calls me by name. Same old dirt. From where I's raised. Ain't no ramblin' out of cows all this pain. Listen to the wind. Listen to the wind. No. Listen to the wind. It calls me by name. I don't know. It's so cool. It's a beautiful song. I butcher it. Sorry, but like he's probably listening. He's like, you messing up my song. But yeah, no, he does this like finger picking style that like I just can't even do. He's a way better guitar player than I am. But this is so cool. That's the stuff that I love. I'm not... I was early on, but especially now, like I'm very open to collaboration. And I'm not as sacred about every word's gotta be not. I'm very... Writing is my passion almost more than singing.

36:11So I'm very particular of what I want the songs to say and sound like. And I don't know, I just like writing. Would you ever do it for someone else? I think so. But it's maybe. I don't think I could write a song for someone else that I think that I could sing. Because I'll just want to sing it. The supplement industry is full of products making claims that I can't back. Which is why I'm such a massive fan of momentas. That co-founder Jeff Bae has played in the NFL and saw first hand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built momentas around a higher standard. Every product for momentas uses his own money. Every product for momentas uses evidence, backed ingredients, transparent doses, and independent third party testing. Everything is NSF certified for sports or what's on the label is actually what's in the tub. So why momentas is trusted inside all 32 NFL locker rooms? It's why I've trusted them with my own supplements for years. Best of all, momentas offers a 30-day money back guarantee so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally.

37:11Now you get up to 35% of your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. We're heading to livemomentas.com, Sash Modern Wisdom. And using the code modernwisdom.com, check out at livemomentos.com, Sash Modern Wisdom and Modern Wisdom. Check out. Well, I had a belly in on the show last year and he's just so fucking... I mean, there was a guitar on the back side of the room and I'm thinking, okay, John, mother fucking belly in. Okay, right, I... Gestured to a guitar. Yeah, you know, explain how he did... He looked at it and he was, I don't know, I played that thing. No, I was like, I'm fucking... It's not my bag. Yeah. I'm just here to do the thing. Yeah. But he was telling me about how he'd taken all of his time off five years, maybe, this big break away from producing any... Publishing any music himself. And he just wasn't first. He'd had this altercation, pretty public altercation, I think, with his label. Didn't want to... I'm not going to play the game. I'm just going to make music for other people and this would be great. And he's just creating Banger after Banger. And I said, well, how did you know that you wanted to get back into making music again?

38:14He said, well, when I had my stack of tracks to show whichever artist was coming in, like little demos and stuff that I'd cut together for them, I had a little listen to. I'd find myself, you know, going down, going down. And then I'd double tap over the top of a couple of them. And he was like, that one's for me. And he could hear in the back of his mind this bit of almost kind of a selfishness, or maybe a bit more swagger or kind of ownership coming back here because he wanted to do that. But yeah, I think about a lot of my friends that are writers, you know, they do versions of Ghost Riding for people and they'll shape ideas. And then sometimes they'll come up with the synthesis of an idea. And every so often they put out one, they feel a little bit aggrieved that they didn't get to put it under their own name. And the same goes for comedy writers. All of the roasts that you see, every big roast that you see online, a lot of comedians now are opening up in the caption of their Instagram post if they put one of these huge big clips up there, completely wits.

39:16They put the credits in that of all of the writers that have contributed. I don't know about that. It's not that I'm right here, right, Jared? Like this is the... I always thought it was like... I always thought it was like rap and comedy. Like the country was like the country and pop were like they had writers. I thought like... Yeah, I thought like... I thought like rap comedy was more like you are what you write. No, I mean what percentage of comedians now, touring comedians do you think are using? Just off the top of your head, what percentage of touring comedians do you think are doing their entire sets? Less than 10%? No way. That is crazy. At the roast, I would probably guess... Probably less than. It's fucking armies of people to put this together. I mean, you even hear them call it out now, Shane at the Espes just gave a line and he said, that wasn't mine, I didn't write that one. Like he's calling out the matter of the whole engine process. And yeah, I saw...

40:17I saw another roast that came out a couple of days ago and the fucking Instagram captions, 10 lines long. It's crazy. Like writers and then other contributors, you know, it's got the dog in there. Like everybody's cut, you could say, you could say the writer's room. It's good, it's not Nashville credits or else your kid would be like tapping you up saying, Hey, I was in the room when you were in the room. Yeah, you were in my 33. Yeah, yeah, dude, it's... Wow, yeah, I don't know. I think what you said earlier, I take ownership. And I try... I don't think I'm a very egotistical person, but the one thing I think I do like take pride in the most is probably the words. And it's just... I don't know, it also just... If somebody... I'm trying to think, like if someone came up to me with just an absolute amazing song, and it was like, do you want to sing this? I've never had that. I've never had that. Except for Blake, my brother, with Ramblin. And I was like, that's no brand new. Let's put that on the album. Maybe it feels a little different that it's come from SoCo's own.

41:17Yeah, and I guess, mate, or even... Or even if it's a person that's just like a really great songwriter, I'm like, I have this song on you singing, I'm like, cool, I can't... You know, let's do it, I'll do it, but... What about Inreverse? What about you writing to someone else? Again, I think it's the ownership thing, like I think... If I write a song, I think it's just so good. I almost get to the point where like if I have a chorus and like a verse, and all I need is like a little bridge, and I'm almost like... I'm so... I'm sorry, like I really don't want to help with this. Like... I want to own it. I want this to be like... Yeah, I want to complete my thought. So that's a really interesting point, and I've found this with writing, that there is always, at least now in the world of writing, and maybe increasingly it's going to start creeping in in the world of music, the contribution of AI. So I've got this idea that I'm playing with at the moment, and I've got a friend, and he bumped into an ex of his a little while ago, and he made the decision that he didn't want to be in a relationship anymore, a good while back, and he was certainly really done the work, spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not he wanted to leave,

42:19decided to leave, saw her, gets completely knocked sideways, just bumps into her randomly, and his head's in a hole spin, and he was saying, I can't work out how I was so certain at the time, and so regretful now. And there's an idea from psychology that's called the fading affect bias, and what it says is that bad memories fade with time, but good ones don't tend to, and that's great, because it means we have a psychological immune system. It protects us from being still at the mercy of some horrible thing that happened in our past. Your dog dies when you're 10, but when you're 15, it doesn't sting quite so much. Hooray for that. You have a psychological immune system, you distance yourself, you distract yourself, you have reframes, tragedy plus time equals comedy, is about as close to an algorithm that psychology's got. So bad things fade with time, good things tend not to so much, and in fact, sometimes bad things can kind of become funny, right? You can have a tragic situation that becomes funny in future. But one of the weird side effects of this, as you get a little bit older, is that you assume wisdom compounds with age,

43:23as I get older, I know more. But in matters of emotion, as you get older, you're just further from the evidence. So what he had encountered was a situation where a future version of him had less information than a previous version of him. The person that was closer to the emotion understood what it felt like to not fully be in this relationship, to be uncertain, to be sad on the couch and not have anything to talk about, to always be going to bed worried about whether or not who's making the right decision. And the version of him now isn't more experienced, they're further from the evidence. And I was like, fuck, I love the fading affect bias. I've got this story from a friend, sending this like series of texts. And I was like, trust that the previous version of you was stewating the future version of you appropriately. Like do you trust that you had your best interest in mind? That's a great, at the time. And I've been fucking fighting with this idea for ages. And yesterday is my writing day, or is Sunday's writing day.

44:24So I'm sitting down and I've got, fucking, a thousand and it only needs to be 500 words. It needs to be short little essay, snappy, that, basically what I've just said, a little bit more formed. And I've got a thousand, two thousand words of just like bullshit. And I'm like, I can throw this into chat GPT, put it on deep research. And it'll take my words and it'll, it'll put them together, put them into a flow, maybe it'll tell me a story about Charles Darwin and it'll be done. And I knew that if I did that, I would get the essay out today. It didn't put shock horror for the people that subscribed to the newsletter. It didn't go out today. I put something else up, that was easier for me to write. The reason I didn't do it was that that idea will be concretized for the rest of time. That will be the reference that I use for whatever the name is I come up with. Or the story, the way that it's formed, the examples I use. And they stick in my mind. And I'll always know that it wasn't me that did it. I'll always know that it wasn't me that put the fucking finishing garnish on the dish. And all of the hard work and there was this bit at the end. And I wonder whether that might be ego. I think it probably could be ego that enough.

45:25But I also think it's like this, it's this, you see where the world is going. A little bit with it with it. I mean, you, like, you can't even open your phone without it just begging to be like, let me do it for you. You can't even, like, someone will email you and I haven't even read it. You don't need to respond to it on your behalf. Yeah, I had to turn it off on my phone. It was like summarizing my messages. And I'm like, what? I'm just going to read it. Hey, I got an email reply. How about this reply? And this is whole reply. And I think I think we're in a state, at least I am. I am, it's like this yearning to be like, it's so great to work your mind. You have to try to work your mind. Because dude, I feel like there's days that go by when I'm on tour. I'm on autopilot. I'm not, I'm not doing anything beneficial. I get tired. I'm just on my phone. I'm doing scrolling. And like, I'm getting down there by the day. Like I'm not getting cognitively fast. Yeah, yeah. And I'm not exercising my mind. Like I'm not trying to make it this big thing. I'm like, you know, God, exercise my whatever. But yeah, I think I just yearn for having that stamp.

46:32And like it's such an accomplishment. Growing up as a kid, like that's why so many people are against participation trophies. Right? Like I'm in there myself. I was like against it. I've just, there's not a better feeling than when you do get it on the win. Earn the win instead of being like, we're all winners. It's like, no, you wrote a bad song. It's bad. But I promise in two years when you write that song and you know you did it and you crushed it. And you put it online and people resonate with it. And you think that they're just resonated with it because it's a different, no, it's because you failed and failed and failed and failed. You made the right song. And that is like, that's the whole, I don't know. I think that's almost just the point of everything. Like it's the payoff. Like if you just write AI the rest of your life, like there's, I don't know. There's no, there's no like highs and lows in that. You're just very, yeah, I don't know. Does that make sense? Like it's, there's a line from Mark Manson that I've been fucking obsessed with this year. And it speaks to this AI thing. Do hard shit. Not because it's fun, but because the win actually means something.

47:33You bled for it. You broke for it. You earned it. Easy wins are forgettable. Hard ones change you. That's the point. Yeah. It's like that's, that's everything. And the more that I think about that line, easy wins are forgettable. Hard ones change you. That's the point. Yeah. I'm like, oh, that's the choice that everybody's going to make when it comes to AI. And it's going to be in small ways as well. I've got to write a letter. Thank you, letter to somebody saying, I really appreciate you taking care of the kids this weekend. Or the dog walker on her birthday or whatever. Do people care about receiving a card? Or do they care about the fact that you went to the effort of having to write it by hand? Do you want to the strange things about, I don't know whether you guys have got moon pig or magpie, they're like a card sending services. Oh god. But you sort of type in what you want. And it's very nice to receive a card. Like it's kind of rare to receive a card. Yeah, very. It's at least twice as nice when it's been written by hand. Oh, okay. As opposed to something that's got printed off on the internet, somebody typed it in and it got shipped to your door.

48:36It's like, no, go to the fucking post office. Because yeah, it's not like, it's not like I received a letter in the mail. And I'm like, this 299 piece of paper is what I've been looking for. No, it's like, okay, they put it in there. They're just showing you love from afar because they can't. They're showing you ever from afar. So yeah, it's like, and again, I'm not saying that AI doesn't have its place in certain parts of the world. Like obviously, I mean, it's just technological advance. Like for example, I don't, I don't go hand-lost my clothes and hang them up on the clothesline. Yeah, I'm not showing ever. You know what I'm saying? I'm like, yeah, I'm like, I got to live hard. You know, because obviously we advance, but there comes a line where it's like, all right. Yeah, I can, I can, especially, I think where I, the line crosses for me is when it's like artistic or sentimental, right? Or I'm sure there's other stuff, but artistic, it's like the whole point of art is that. It's not perfect and it feels like something only humans can do, right? So it feels very natural. And then what the sentimental stuff, that's the whole point of, like you said, writing a letter.

49:38I'm not writing you a letter just so you can have the piece of paper, I'm writing you a letter, and putting something in here that I think is going to have an emotional effect on you, just like I'm having an emotional effect writing it. And I'm doing it, and I'm not like saying that writing a letter is hard, but I don't know. I think we're saying the same thing. It's harder than putting the prompt into chat GPT and getting it to do it. It's better than just checking the box. This episode is brought to you by Woop. Most people treat recovery like it's optional, but unlike politicians, data doesn't lie. How you recover is literally going to determine how good your next day is going to be. And Woop tracks all of it. Sleep, strain, heart rate, recovery. It's like dog the bounty hunter, but instead of criminals, it's tracking down your bad habits. All of this data gets pulled into a dashboard that actually tells you what to do with the information. And now the brand new Woop 5.0, 7 cents smaller, it's got two weeks of battery life, shows you how fast you're actually aging. It comes with hormonal insights for women managing their cycle or pregnancy or men hiding from it. Once you see the patterns, you start making better decisions. It's that simple. Best of all, you can join for free, pay nothing for your Woop 5.0 strap, plus you get your first month for free,

50:41and there's a 30-day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now you can get the brand new Woop 5.0 and that 30-day free trial by going to the link in the description below. Or heading to join.woop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.woop.com slash modern wisdom. The decision that everybody's going to make is, okay, do I want to do the harder thing? And it's weird because do hard things is kind of this tagline that everybody likes to lean into of the 4.30 AM coal plunge and the runs and the weightlifting and the stick and tear diet. But the decision of do I want to do the harder thing or the easier thing is going to encroach into every area of life. It's going to encroach into whether or not you want to order. If you one click order flowers that goes to your Mrs.'s door because she's having a hard day or if you drive to the fucking florist and pick them up and hand-deliver them to you, there is just a explicit real world difference, a tangible difference between those two things.

51:46But as things convenience begins to encroach on the rest of life, everybody's going to have to make that decision for more and more and more stuff. Oh yeah, like, yeah, you're just saying it's not, I saw this one picture where it was like, it started as sit down restaurant. It turned into drive-through and now it's Uber Eats. You know, it was movies and then it's YouTube and now it's YouTube shorts. It just keeps going. Yeah, and it keeps expanding. It's derivative. It becomes distilled down. Yeah, and it's like, even, I mean, I find myself, I used to never do this, but I found myself literally this week, you know, I was watching Instagram real, and I was watching it and I was like, let me hold down, let me go times two speed here. You know, I'm like, what am I doing? I just, I need to, I need to speed fuck myself because that algorithm honda. Yeah, and it's like, it's like you're saying it's not just that. That might not be the bad thing. I don't know, maybe you're on a bathroom break and you're like, I don't know, get to the point. I, you know, I get that, but it starts creeping into everything because, yeah,

52:4720 years down the road, you know, with, with a musician. And they're like, how do I got to pay the bills? We need a new song. I just don't have it in me. What? Write a song. Yeah. It's pretty good. It's gonna sell. Like what's, what's stopping people from doing that? If it's just every, every year, it's just one extra thing, you know? Well, I'll say, you know, think about how songs are recorded now. You go into a studio, you can play a song like pluck by pluck and just chop that together. Yeah. And then you got the perfect take, the perfect take. Whereas it would have been what 50 years ago, a single fucking room. You're okay. Yeah, because they were also on tape. So they, I mean, they, they legitimately had to make a decision right there in the moment and say, hey, either we're running out of tape or hey, it's literally not worth our time to go, they have like, exacto knives. They would have to cut these things together, splice it physically, tape it up, run it through the machine. Like it's, and now it's just,

53:47yeah, just hit it again. You're fine. Yeah. So that's why you hear on Sony's old records, like an Elton John record or something like that. You'll hear like in the background something like a hat fell on the keys, but it was a great take. And they're like, we can't keep the hat in. Keep it. Like you'll hear like the little key hit. And they just keep it in there. And it kind of gives records life a little bit. Like there's certain things, like I think in the records that I make, I think, like my, I think the imperfections almost make it perfect sometimes. Yeah. And it's just, you know, as soon as you say imperfections give something a degree of life, the imperfections then begin to be engineered. Oh, so all, yeah. Everything becomes marketable, right? The authenticity, the stripbackness. Well, oh, this great story about Elton John, we must have a hat. Has anyone got a hat in the room? We can make the hat fall at the right time. It's very, so okay. And like, whoever's listening to this, I don't know if any Nashville producers look into this. I'm probably not talking about you. I've had a lot of great experiences in the whole natural way. That's the same around as the way.

54:47Yeah. But there are a lot of that, a lot in that setting that it's very performative. Like you said, it's very, it's like they want it to be natural so bad that they're going to make it natural. Does that make sense? Like you said, like it's going to be an artificially natural. Yeah. Artificially natural. Like you're saying. And it's like, what's the craziest thing? Get your car keys and you know, that's how they did it. You know, that's how they did it on whatever it's called. No, we need to be living in them. And I'm like, I think it's just this sort of commodification of everything. And as if it's less gate-kept by technology or by expertise, it means that more people are going to be tempted to do it. The problem is going to be, can we remove drudgery from people's lives without taking away the stuff that actually matters to them, without taking away not just like you want to be involved in this thing, but it is genuinely better for you to take a longer route round

55:51to take a higher friction route from where you are to the outcome of this thing, because it's going to be better for you. Maybe the work will be worse, but the win will mean something. It won't be as forgettable. You know, it's strange. I guess it's weird in music because for such a long time, there's been teams of writers and bands even say, okay, so you said the lyric and maybe the fucking guy that wrote the lyrics left. It's like a 10-year-old song, right? And the guy, maybe he's dead. Yeah. You know, well, he's not even a part of the band anymore, but we're still singing it and it's ours, we get to own it. So there's been more fluidity, but that also I think means it could be a slippery slope. Oh yeah. Mastering. What are you fucking? You must be able to one-click master track, not as well as a elite audio engineer now I'm guessing, but you must be able to one-click master tracks now with... For sure. I mean, and again, like, some of it is good. So I want to say, like, I want to be... It's important I say that some of it is good because there's also a lot less gatekeepers nowadays in music.

56:51It is so sick that I can write a song called, like, Cole, that I believe in and I can record it on my laptop. I put it out and it does better than 99% of all the money pushed multi-song writer songs. I love it. That's awesome. I love it. That's great. I think that is a great side of like, entry access. Yes. Yes. But like you said, it's democratized it so that you can compete. Exactly. But you're right. Like, it's a slippery, because as soon as the people go, that works. Hold on. And it's like, hold on, we're the million. It's fucking, it's like, what has got to go say AI? How do I make it? Yeah, dude, but it's like, that works. It's only a matter of time. Maybe that's what I'm trying to get. I'm not trying to sound like Bully. Everything that's good, it's all you. It's all you can come on inside eventually. Yeah, but it kind of feels like that in the industry. There are thousands of people working every single day to find the next new thing. Yeah. So when you have something like Cole or something, like, I don't know anyone else in this industry that has a song,

57:55people are going to be like, what did they do? Why did it work? How do we replicate it? Yeah. And how do we dump a truckload of money behind it? And just maybe you see that was a variety piece about geese. You know, that band. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't see the piece we're in. It was like a big article about how the engine, the clipping engine and stuff was behind that band. I think the band were pretty successful beforehand. And then it's just, you know, you really put the fucking fuel nitrous boost about not. Between where was this song originated? Who wrote the lyrics? Because is it an AI song? If AI helped you to craft the lyrics and then you sang them? I think so. But my point is like at what point? How far back do you go? Okay. So I'm really struggling with Rhyme's block. Yeah. It's an app for iPhone. I'm really struggling with a word that rhymes with small, but fits this. Oh, I'll just go in. It's like a walk-pine. Where do you draw the line? I do. That's a great question. And as technology begins to democratize it, the only place that you have this, that you can make this decision is my own kind of moral gauge for what I want on the other side of it.

59:04Yeah. I think I do. I mean, there's a great area, but I think it's one of those things where it's like, you know, you know what I'm saying? It's one of the, like, I feel like the Ik-re-dah. Yeah. And it's, I mean, I'm not trying to get too deep, but I think this goes with a lot of things. I think there are people that are just going to always push the envelope of, well, what am I allowed to do? Like, always trying to be like, how much wrong can I do before I get in trouble? And I try not to look it at that way. I try to be like, you don't immoralize it. Yeah. And also, I just like, I don't have, I don't think I have that thing in me where I'm like, how, how much can I squeeze out of this with AI to help me write this song without people thinking that it's AI? And it's like, I think if you're doing that, like, you know what you're doing. But I think if you're a kid at home and you're trying to like, you wrote this song and you're like, dang, what's that word? Open up the dictionary, open up like a rhyming website or something. And you find like, oh, cool.

1:00:12That kid has no intention of being like, you know, this fucking wud was written by you. Yeah, like that's his song. You know, I, because he's, I don't think that that, that someone like that's pushing the envelope. I don't know. I don't know how to like, word this correctly, but I just think, I think you know, you know, like it is, or do I mean like there's also the debate about, you know, producers and mixers and engineers and stuff like you said, like, what if they use AI to kind of like, help them with the side chains really hard. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, okay. You know, as long as the argument is, hey, there's an argument to be made that as soon as you've got doors and you're like, hey, back in the day, dude, we have to take a fucking lead, take it out of that synth, put it into that. So you want to chain those things together, go and get you going, go and get your quality. Yeah, it's like, is losing an electric piano. You know, so yeah, again, I think it comes down to like, you just know what you're got. You're, you're the making music or something else is making the music for you.

1:01:14And it's like, I don't know. It seems like you take a very sort of emotionally informed approach to music. It's quite self-deprecating. So stock. Sometimes I think is that fair? Yeah. I think, I think it kind of depends. You know, I also think it really changes the mood of this song itself. Like, I don't know. I find those songs can be easier to write. I feel like when I write my happy songs, they come off cheerier. When I feel like it's the same level of lyrical writing. And it's also, yeah, it also, if I put, if I put coal and I get EDM track, I guarantee people would be like, they wouldn't really care about what the lyrics are. I get this, it doesn't feel sad. It's like, have you seen, have you seen people that play like ballad piano like the Drick and Josh theme song? It sounds like a beautifully written song and you're like, it's kind of deep. It's kind of a sad, you know, whatever. But it's like, it's all how it's framed. I think, I mean, I think of like Jason Isbo when it comes to this. But if you put his type of leercism into his type of guitar playing and his voice in the raspiness, like, it's going to come off that way.

1:02:24Whether it's intention to be or not, or then you can go listen to like a turnpike song who I think is some of the best writers in the world, but maybe they're for on the floor. And it's kind of a more upbeat group, but he's talking about how like my dad's going to what my ass, I remember back in this county, like it might be a sad feeling. Or whatever it is that I'm not trying to say that song specifically, but. And it feels upbeat. You're like, oh, I can get down. This is party. You know, it's a good time. So I forget the, forget the lyrics or remember. Yeah, I think I think it's, yeah, I think it's sometimes the way that it's played on the guitar, you're playing different minor chords and stuff like that. But I like to lean into that. Like I feel like I love listening to music like that. Even when I'm like happy, I'll be, I'll be the happiest guy in the world. And I'm like, let me put on a sad one. Let me put on a slow one. Why do you think male sadness is dominating modern country? I think, I think two things. I think for one. I think it's the only place where I feel like a lot of guys, a lot of males.

1:03:25Feel like they're allowed to talk about it. Like without being without, like for example, if I went up to like my buddies or in our group chat and said how I felt in coal, it would come off of like, I'd rather get it together. What are you talking about? But you put country music behind it. And it's like, dang, that's a beautiful song. I actually connect with that. But I'm not going to like say I do. You know, it feels like it's guys, almost like a dude therapy session. And I think that's why so many people write about it is that it connects really deeply. It almost like it says the feelings that a lot of these dudes I think feel that they're like blue collar felles around. I'm not telling. I'm not telling nobody how I feel. But like you do at our shows, the people who are like heart and soul singing it out there in the crowd are the dudes. Arms run each other that I promise they would leave that show and they would never tell each other about their feelings, but they come to the show and they're looking at each other screaming these lyrics. And it's like, yeah, it's like cathartic. It's like it's there. It's like a thing. So I think I don't think it just comes off.

1:04:25Well, it's like the way to do it as a dude. I'm still being cool. I wonder if it's a weird comment on masculinity that men feel comfortable seeing their emotions reflected in lyrics, but uncomfortable exposing men daily life. Like this guy has said this thing that I feel he's put words. So I'm happy to sing it. I'm happy. I'm happy to sing it that his show. And I'm still it feels like there is room for that. It's a it's a really interesting sort of balance between those two things. Yeah, and it almost it almost feels like sometimes the opposite for women like it almost feels like. Female songs are empowering and male songs are about vulnerability. Yeah, but but and it's in its the opposite to where it's like when women sing about vulnerability. It's almost like the male crowd is like, here we go. Another you know, another female coach, I was talking about a breakup, but it's like when guys do it, it's like brother. You know, I got so it is it kind of feels like that's that's the male outlet sometimes is like through music.

1:05:28And then I feel like the girl outlet again, I'm I'm not trying to be the guy speaking on behalf of all the women out there. I would never do that. But yeah, it kind of feels like it's the opposite where it's you know. I thought I don't know if maybe I'm wrong. I thought I sit in parks by Kelsey ballerina was such a fascinating fucking concept for a song. I haven't heard that dude. So it's her talking about a relationship that she used to be in and she didn't go through with it because her partner wanted to have kids and she wanted to focus on her career and then a few years later, she's sitting in the park on a weekend looking at this family playing with the kid. And she's asking, have I made a mistake? Have I made a choice that I can't reverse? Yeah. So I take my Lexa pro and I puff on my vape and the albums, June March. And my next tour is coming up and my friends about to have a kid and I'm worried I'm worried I miss this thing. And that was really like fucking roll. Like very, very complex. Maybe I might I might have missed the mark. Because also a pin house by Kelsey ballerina like that's also great.

1:06:36It's like kind of a better relationship. So yeah, maybe I'm wrong, but I just I think that you're right. I think that the especially a lot of the country music tropes. Maybe that's the reason. Maybe that's one of the reasons why that if you hear a guy talking about vulnerability, it feels rarer. Yeah. And it's now being done through this vehicle, which is music. And it's almost like the tortured hero the only way that he can even open his heart is to do it to a chord. You know, it's like that's the excuse that's being given. But it's also a defense mechanism. It's a defense mechanism. Because if guys aren't comfortable about talking about it normally. This frames it in an artistic and romantic way. They just create a little bit of distance. I don't actually need to show myself in the same way as you said yourself. And it's like open up in the in the group chat. It's different to what's going to happen if I open up in a song. What the kind of thing that blows my mind is how many guys would love to have a outlet but answer a song writers and how difficult it is to find something else. I think. Yeah, writing songs. Maybe poetry. But that's perhaps even more inaccessible than then some singer songwriter.

1:07:53S.A.ing micrub logging stuff on sub stack. And you can write in the third person. And that feels that's probably a little bit more accessible. But fuck me beyond that. It's like you're into the world of YouTube and conversations with a therapist. So it's I know it's a I guess like that that might be like the do's that come to those shows. You know that's like it's group therapy. It's like man. I can't sing it. But I'm gonna try not you know in or get in the car or do it or. Yeah. Drink and then talk to the buddies like you know. If you're going to spend an hour in the gym. You might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it. And honestly who wants to be in the background of a TikTok is highlight real dress like a chump. Gymshark make some of the best men's and women's training gear on the planet and something that I realized a few years ago is that when you actually like what you're wearing in the gym. You show up differently. You train harder. You stay longer and get way more high fives. The hybrid shorts are my go to they are the perfect length super lightweight easy to wash and dry and their sleeveless t-shirts. So I've trained in every day for basically the last decade. They're the ideal fit. They're breathable. They hold their shape perfectly no more looking like Adam Sandler's your stylist. Basically everything they're doing.

1:09:02They're making is unbelievably well designed. You already know about them. The high quality you get 30 days of free returns globally with global shipping and attempt sent discount sight wide. So get the attempt. Discount by going to the link in the description below heading to gym.sh slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 10. A check out that gym.sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10. A checkout. What are what emotions have you found to be the hardest to write about? Oh. Probably. Like happy I think and not not in a way it's like I can't write about being happy because I can but I feel like it doesn't come off the tongue is easy as like. As like a sadder more heartfelt song I feel like I can really paint that picture versus like when I'm singing a song and maybe like I mean like happy I don't mean like love I feel like I can write really well about like I can write about my wife like a lot I have a ton of songs about her and I feel like those are some of my favorites are written.

1:10:10But I'm talking about just straight up this one's going to come in come come on in the bar. Yeah struggle with that. I don't know why I think some people nail it and I've just I can't it's not always there. I mean I spoke to Dan and Shay about this. Luke comes fucking unbelievable like got as much swagger as it's possible for a white guy to have like he's the blackest white guy. Yeah. Yeah. And but when you think about the that sort of arc over the last one decade or so of his songwriting you go from very sort of tortured uncertain tumultuous it is crises. And now there's a bit of me that wants him to smoke some crack. Yeah. And it's a bit of me that wants him to like have that friction again in life because things are going well and my son misses me when I go away but I do come back and like my dad's getting older and that's going to be hard when it doesn't happen.

1:11:10And he's still fucking ripping it. Yeah. But how much harder you have to work to make a banging song when you don't have that friction in your life. Yeah. And you're almost beginning to concoct stories or you're hearing things that have happened to other people or you know confabulating ideas and and tales of an imagined world a different world that you could have lived in. Yeah. Right. This is what I could have been. It's like your life's so good that you have to imagine one you don't have in order to be able to create because for some reason people seem to resonate a lot with that pain and that vulnerability. And again, if autism is imitating life and your life's going really fucking well. What are you going to be singing? Yeah. What's what's what's your sad song? Show me your pain. Yeah. And again, I don't think it's the worst thing in the world too when people like because I also love being a storyteller. I love writing songs about I have a song called Lonell Cowboy, which is about you know a guy going and getting cheated on killing the guy and on the run.

1:12:10I didn't like I never did that, but I think I love the storytelling aspect and that comes from my thing kind of more like that western kind of swing old like Marty Robbins about like the gunfighter ballad and everything. There's like a whole album of just like ballads written about like gunfighters and stuff. So it's like fables. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's all the yeah. But then but then there also gets to like yeah you start getting into what feels like you could be a real story like obviously no one thinks that I went and shot this guy and ran away. But you know when I when I sing a song about maybe some stranger that I see that I'm like I'm just going to make up what I think his life is like and tell that story. I think that's also sick. I think that's really cool. Do you know where Jolyne came from? Dolly Parton saw? I don't know. Maybe I don't think so. I'm pretty sure it's written about a bank teller bank assistant that flirted with her husband. And she didn't use the name of the bank teller but found a lady at a party who had the name Jolyne and placed the name of the lady.

1:13:16Story came from a beautiful bank teller who with dolly's husband Carl Dean shortly after they got married. Dolly said the woman was tall redhead and paid call of attention. Carl enjoyed the attention. Dolly jerked. That he seemed to spend a lot of time in the bank for someone with so little money became the seed for the song. It was more of a playful thing. The name Jolyne came from a totally different person. An eight year old red headed fan who asked Dolly for an autograph. She thought Jolyne was such a beautiful name. She told the girl she was going to use. She wrote Jolyne and I will always love you. That's not right. She didn't write. I will always love you. It was working 9 to 5. She didn't write. I will always love you. Did she? Yeah. Did she? Yeah. That's her song. That's her song. And then Whitney Houston saying it on what was the movie. And then I think Dolly was I think Dolly probably said like that's your song. Yeah. No, that was yeah. That's Dolly's song. Jolyne and I will always love you in the same day. Talk about crazy. Yeah. Fuck you with your fucking 25 minute call. Yeah. Yeah. Get on her lap. Yeah. She's like, let me just write some of the two two absolute bangings. But yeah. Again, you've concocted this story. You've taken one element from the other. Oh, and then I guess it was in so Linda Ronstadt saying it every song that ever she sings is just better.

1:14:24That's so cool. Whitney's record became the best one of the best selling singers. Well, I'm 14 consecutive weeks at number one. Pretty sure that this is just being knocked off the top by Ella. Really? Yeah. Because it's Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey who both had the 14 and I'm pretty sure that 15 is now. Yeah. It's crazy. Fucking wild. Good for that's that's so sick. I wonder whether there's any emotions that you want to sing about but you don't think that the market has an appetite for. I mean, okay, here's a great example and I know a lot of artists struggle with this. I'll play an acoustic song in my back porch. And I'll play it a certain way. But I know the studio is different studio versions difference. Got some drums has a little slide and I be in it. It's just kind of more upbeat. And then you'll put out that version and everyone's like just just don't change me the porch. The port, you know, and it's like. I think you have to try to expand your sound like I was watching that Billy Joel documentary so cool.

1:15:30By the way, if you haven't seen it, it's like five hours long. It's incredible. His life is just it's what the heck. But he always made it a point to change the way his sound was Bob Dylan did the same thing where you went to the Newport folk festival. When I was like, you know, get your harmonica out and he's like, I want to play an electric guitar and it's it's a. You feel like you don't want to get trapped in like your own throat. Like I'm not trying to get trapped in this like I'm an acoustic guy. I'm going to sing about how hard my life is and. But you also want to service the people who listen to your music the most like you know that's what they want that's in it's like. Yeah, it's it's it's like it's pushing pull thing so I feel like. I've done the best job that I can like I don't really put too much pressure on I'm still making music that I love I really not I don't try to overthink it. But yeah, I know a lot of artists that fall into that thing where it's like. I want to put out different music, but I just know it's probably not going to do well and if I do it if I put out this song I probably do a lot better because that's what I'm known for that's what people want to hear.

1:16:31You know the idea of audience capture. Have you heard of that? Okay, so it's from my world's content creation YouTube. You test the ground with a bunch of different content. Maybe start to pick up a little bit of speed. And then you find something that hooks a bit you start talking about politics, but you talk about it from a libertarian lens and you're you're sort of you're maybe a bit more bombastic than you used to be. Oh wow, they like that. Oh, I've been rewarded for that. I'll go again and you get a bit more bombastic. You get a bit more bombastic before you know it. You're like peak Alex Jones, you know, sort of shouting and screaming and doing the thing. And you begin to throw red meat to your audience and instead of creating what you want to create you give them what you think they want. Yeah, the problem with it is that you can achieve success with it because you're basically taking audience feedback which in some ways is important and good like movies screen test the versions right and they check how what were people's reviews. Should we change this bit this fellow people to understand that so you know audience feedback is important. But if you're not careful, especially if you're doing something that's very iterative over time your audience doesn't fall in love with you.

1:17:40They fall in love with your projection of what you think they want you to be. Yeah, yeah. And you're like this weird reverse puppet thing where the audience has got their hand inside of you doing this and reliably every single person that I've seen do it and there's a bunch of people that have done it in my world and probably tons and yours as well. Every single person eventually has ended up resenting the audience because what happens is you can taught yourself into this weird shape. That you think the audience has rewarded you for and then if they don't like what you're doing anymore. You feel so aggrieved because you betrayed yourself for an audience that doesn't even want the act that you're playing. Yeah, and it is so it's so fucking reliable. So that's one side that's audience capture. And then Ethan Strauss has got this fucking unbelievable post where he talks about criticism capture which is the opposite side of it. So audience capture is this big term for a long time people do what they think the audience wants.

1:18:40Yeah, it's the musician who denies himself the move from acoustic to electronic or a total pivot in terms of singing style because he doesn't think that the audience is going to want it. Yeah, that's your audience capture. Criticism capture is behaving in a way to avoid criticism or front run it from your audience instead. So instead of acting out of encouraging desire, it's acting out of defending against hate. So what are people going to criticize me for doing most likely? And how do I front run that so that it doesn't happen? So you see this in the same way in my world, people start to caveat a lot before they say anything, well we must remember that they'll do this sort of land acknowledgement or this throat clearing thing beforehand or in a different way people sort of steam out of the gates really aggressively and they're super ardent and militant and they have no quarter given no. And that's another way to do it. They're sort of pushing people out. They're front running the complaint. They're either making themselves so inoffensive that they don't say anything so that they don't get criticized or they kind of shadow box this imaginary opponent who doesn't really exist in an attempt to scare off critics.

1:19:54And you see it's so fucking warping. It's just audience dynamics, reward and pain and people are playing with these two levers in an attempt to try and get as much pleasure and as little discomfort as possible. And it kind of leaves on eggshells where you're just like, I don't know what to do. Yeah, and especially like nowadays with social media, everything's so instant that like I think that messes with artists quite a bit of just the most instant feedback you can have. You'll walk off a stage, you know, sitting in the green room and you're getting tweets or you're getting your stories off and it's yeah, you know, in with the phones. Yeah, I used to, I don't know. But if you say, let's, Jerry, can you pull up that video? I want you to show you that there's two videos going back to back that I think are pretty interesting. There's this Morgan Wallen video that's flooding around at the moment, which is him in a fucking huge stadium and someone saying the performance standard for male versus female artists is so different is all I will say.

1:21:12That's closer to a military reenactment is so much, is that anyway, and then look at this. Pull that other video up, Jerry. Is it a take the cray one? Yeah, I mean, it is just an insane level of the most polished like look at this. Oh, I'm going to dip myself in literal liquid gold. Oh, my God, it's like actual. I mean, that's like the whole like the coach Sheldon, like Justin Bieber, the night waiting to do. Oh, yeah, that's it. That's in liquid gold. That's in the next set. We're doing that. That's the next time. Well, it's just, I mean, it's different. Like I've been, I've been to a Morgan show. It also like the production is still crazy. Him himself might not be in his dance number.

1:22:13You know what I mean, but in the dance. I guess like it's also, it's also this for reasons. It's a device thing where people just, they just have to keep doing the next big thing and make it bigger, which like an entertainment. That's a good thing. Like, you should be challenged. But I mean, you go look at the female acts from like 1950 or even the male acts. Like everyone's just on a microphone and just doing the same thing. I don't know, but yeah, I guess when did that separation happen? Because I mean, we used to have like in sync backshared boys and they were doing full production. Like when did it become? I mean, MGK is bringing it back. He's got full dance numbers on stage. She's got choreography. But like everything that's everything that's new is now old, you know? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's like, oh, they used to do that. That's cool. Let's bring that back. All right. So let round us out. What's your, give us a little something from the new album. Whatever you like the sound of. Well, play a place I'm called clothesline. Um, should I sing this one? Yeah, this one's good. I think this is going to be a single maybe. I don't know.

1:23:16That's something you could do this afternoon. But no, but I do it on purpose. I, I, I, this is what I'm talking about. Like when I, I, yes, I could choose the singles and have it all in a calendar and rock it and just go, but I, I don't, again, I think this something that I probably, I struggle. Is kind of the system formula thing. I don't know. I, I, I would rather go like week by week or like feel it out. I don't know. Yeah, I, I, I, I, I think it's going to be a single. But again, I also, actually this, and I will, I'll sing it right after this. But this brings you back to a point that we were talking about earlier about like teasing music and crowdsourcing and being like, what song does better? Like there's a part of me that misses the way of like when an artist puts out an album, you don't know what the songs are. They've not waterfall released five and you don't know what the songs are in your stokes to dive in.

1:24:19Yeah. And I'm trying to play this middle ground like, okay, business wise, yes, we should be teasing songs and you know getting people excited. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing. But there's a side of me that's like, they wouldn't be great just to give fans just 12 new songs that everyone can be excited for. And you have no idea what it sounds. It might be a whole new sound. Like that's kind of what used to happen. Or like, I don't know. I just think that side of it's cool. Like my favorite thing. I know I brought them up a lot, but turnpike when they dropped price for admission. They didn't know singles. All they did was put up a billboard in the middle of the desert and was like albums out in two weeks. I think that is so cool. Now I'm not saying everyone can do that algorithmically might not be the most effective way to do it. Yeah, but yeah, but that's where like as an artist, you have to kind of weigh your options between, you know, like you said earlier, like what's authentic. And at the end of the day, like what is going to get people this music? Like what's going to pay the bills and do, you know, there's a fine line. But anyways, this one's called clothesline. I haven't played this one in a while. I should I'll remember that's a no thing I'm bad with lyrics.

1:25:31Oh, am I plugged in? Yeah. Cool. I'm sleeping in and I'm going out. Try not to thank you much about you. Don't call me later when my lights are. I know just how you do. You call me once. You're having a door later in the morning. You'll be gone to your sin. Cause I know. You're just gonna hang me out to get so close to be left on that clothes. Oh, second guess and toy is left in this so hard. Maybe I know. You're just gonna hang me out.

1:26:41Oh, it's a gel. So stopin' early, ay, ay, little lights. Say that you're the reason. You used to tell me that I'm movin' too fast with your hand tied around my wrist. So treat me like it was here to go before you change your mind. Say I was nothin' to hold my soul lover and baby, maybe you'd be right. I know. You're just gonna hang me out to get so close to be left on that clothesline. Oh, second guess and toy is left in this so hard. Maybe I know.

1:27:43You're just gonna hang me out to get so close to be left on that clothesline. Say I was nothin' to hold my soul lover and baby, maybe you'd be right. You're just gonna hang me out to get so close to be left on that clothesline. Oh, second guess and toy is left in this so hard. Maybe I know. You're just gonna hang me out to get so close to be left on that clothesline. Say I was nothin' to hold my soul lover and baby, maybe you'd be right. Say I was nothin' to hold my soul lover and baby, maybe you'd be right. Let's fucking go.

1:28:46Dealing Gosset, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Dude, you're all. Congratulations. New Eldens out one. September 25th. Yeah, so. Appreciate the heck out of you, man. Yeah. Thanks for having me. All right. Goodbye, my beauties. Dude, that was a great time, brother. Thanks for all the effort you had for me. You're the last time I was coming. Push your limits, train with precision, see the results. At Equinox, that's high performance loving. Everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox. Start today at Equinox.com.