https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=yccw1Jv2s9U
is a weird moment when you do this because like we go let’s just say you’re gonna come up with a prediction of the future and it’s not so bright there’s a weird moment of satisfaction you have when you’re like aha I was right and then you’re like oh no I was right no it’s like you come to terminators I’m I knew it I knew it great this is Jonathan Peugeot welcome to the symbolic world so hello everybody I am sitting here with Neil deGrade Neil deGrade is a musician he is the headliner for a band called dirt poor Robbins but he’s also done so much in the music world written scores for movies for different shows he’s been in several bands and he’s also become quite a participant in the symbolic world he is in contact with a lot of people that are kind of swirling around the videos I’ve been in discussion with him for several for like a years now or like over a year over a year now and we’re also looking at doing some projects together so I’m really excited to have him on the show mostly to talk about how it is that artists can predict the future oh this is where I talk I cut right if I was good at predicting the future I could have predicted that oh that’s a good setup I like that now this is a great topic I guess I gotta give you a little background yeah so I I was born into a family of entertainers and musicians so both sides of my family pretty much across the board all musical all entertainers most in many a professional at one point really funny thing I like to tell people is that my I found my parents my parents marriage certificate and on the marriage certificate back then you like in the 60s you had to put your parents occupation so my dad’s father he was a radio announcer entertainer and my mom’s father was a radio announcer entertainer so there was like a part of like my I think I was genetically bred to be on the radio and just missed like stepped out of the stable and missed my calling so but it was a family of entertainers and so there was no question that I was I was going to learn music it was gonna be forced on me whether I liked it or not and it turned out that I really liked it so my dad used to bring home records from the radio station and he the first one I ever get I think really explains what we’re doing the best because he brought home two records for me and my brother to pick from one was kiss and the other one was Queen it was news of the world and my brother picked kiss and you know if you listen to kiss and what they’ve stated their goal was Gene Simmons says like we weren’t trying to be the Beatles like every other band we wanted to be Coca-Cola and that’s like totally my brother he’s like brilliant with marketing and he’s had an incredible career with that and he’s kind of went off that way and I picked Queen which you know Queen I think was trying to be an opera or a movie and so that would like that just blew my tiny mind and the artwork on that record was like this Isaac Asimov take where there was this you know giant robot I guess we could pull this up at the time saying this but you know had was killing like the members of the band and it like really tripped my little five-year-old mind out five years old yeah man oh dude yeah that really just that that was it for me that ruined me as far as being able to do anything normal with music I was all gonna be theatrical and cinematic from that point on yeah and that’s the an interesting aspect of your work which you know your band your poor Robbins there really is a storytelling aspect of the band there’s like almost like you said an operatic there’s some nostalgia there’s something melodramatic about the way that things are presented and so I can really I didn’t I wouldn’t have thought right away Queen but when you say it I’m like yeah that’s that makes a lot of sense that there are there definitely other influences in there so Kate is really the band is myself and my wife and then we’ve used a lot of other incredible musicians and people play with us over the years but Kate and I met when I was in my early 20s and she is really the other half of the band she she kind of taught me I would say how to write lyrics she was already she already had a music career growing we met she was younger than me but I was this really poor guy living in Providence Rhode Island and there was a musical that was auditioning in town it was supposed to be going to Broadway and some people showed me some examples of it I thought it was incredible but I had like zero interest in being in a musical so I did not want to audition but I was hitching a ride with my friends they said they would drop me off where I wanted to go if I would just audition and so the audition was really weird because generally it’s like you know you see these in movies where there’s this panel yeah we’re watching and it that was there but it was also in an old church in New England so everybody waiting to audition was still in the up was in the audience so you’re auditioning in front of all these other people which I didn’t care about because I didn’t plan on doing a musical there was one part left and they were auditioning the male lead and they were like going nationwide trying to find this guy well I got up to audition and I decided my job was going to be to make my friends laugh and it somehow translated as like confidence and composure and stage presence and I had very little experience in musicals and so the next day I get a call and they’re like hey listen congratulations you got the part and I was like oh that’s so nice I don’t want the part though like you know I’m sure you’ve got there were a lot of people there that were great I’m sure you’ve got them there and then and so I turned it down and then the musical called me back and his name was Enrico Garzelli and he was really interesting guy but he started he started explaining to me a very strange angle as why I should do this he’s like I cast you because you go perfectly with the girl we cast for the lead he said you guys are gonna want to you’re gonna want to marry this girl 100% and I think there’s gonna be incredible chemistry and I’m like and she was from Los Angeles she auditioned out in the West Coast and I was like well maybe I could show up to a couple rehearsals so I said yes and I showed up and the first meeting I have with Kate where we had to sing is she just you know got in front of me and her part in this duet went first and she started to sing and I’d never heard anything like this like coming out of someone’s mouth three feet you know it’s really uncomfortable to have someone staring you in the eyes with like complete confidence and just singing at you and she it sounded so amazing I was like I am in way over my head I am doomed here and so anyway we’re like I’m gonna marry her that’s how I’m gonna sell right he was so right we got we got married and we instantly started writing she was a singer-songwriter and I was always in collaborations and bands and she was like a wordsmith and so she instantly like turned my brain on to like that potential music because I was one of like those typical dudes that was interested in melody and music but I was just like lyrics were just in the background of the song for me and she like really gave me a love for that so that’s that’s how we’re like really our band got started in our marriage and our kids and so it’s kind of everything hmm that’s very fascinating yeah that’s weird one of the things that that bring us here is because your last album is kind of causing a stir in the symbolic world world you would say because that you wrote it what in 2018 or you came out and when did you write you write it okay so I guess there’s other background required is that all of our albums all of our you know the last ten years have been concept albums where I’ll write a story and then I will record I’ll write down the bullet points of that story in the most important moments and then I’ll write songs for those so it’s a really I really think art flourishes when I have structure for me like when I know and I have an assignment in a boundary to play within I will write within those boundaries so I write the story and then we fill in the blanks with the song so we are wrapping up a record called the Raven locks in 2017 2018 which was you know one of the things about movies and music a lot of times it’s written long before you ever record it so the Raven locks is wrapping up and I needed a new story so 2018 rolled around and this was a weird way like to come up with an idea for record so you’re familiar with Airbnb where you rent houses you know and travel so we had rented a house on the Gulf Coast of Florida to go on a vacation but right when we were about to leave for the vacation like a red tide had taken over and they weren’t letting people on the beach where the house was and you know they were evacuating there were dead fish everywhere it was horrible and so I was like of course this you know I’m not going to be renting this house so it sounded like a nightmare so you know I’ve messaged the guy I was like of course you know we’re gonna need to get out this is like oh that’s fine you know you can but he’s not gonna give us our money back and I was like oh gee that’s an interesting turn of events so I looked into the Airbnb’s policy on like why you could cancel and so I’m as I’m scanning through one of the things was a pandemic and I was like I hadn’t really thought about a pandemic our previous story because we write lighthearted stuff had to do with cholera a little bit so I knew a little bit about how these things function but as I was starting to read about what made something qualify as a pandemic it the story like hit me and I was like oh my gosh like do you really like there’s a I’ve had this concern that our society we’re already like the social fabric is disintegrating and people are already pushing for a part and if there was just some kind of like even mild pandemic like what would be the implications of that so I just started writing a story about that idea so yeah 2020 rolled around and we had released almost we released our records in chunks almost like a pulp thing where we were releasing in the EPs and everything but the last EP had come out but it was weird because like there were things that were happening directly in the headlines that we were singing about and you know it is what it is I didn’t you know wasn’t trying to predict a pandemic I was just paying attention to the world and like I generally write and deal with subjects that are troubling me because I don’t I think I make music and I’ve never been able to stop myself making music because it’s how I stay sane so I like I use art to kind of like ground me and explore the story because it’s easier for me to see how something fits together when it all comes together as a concept within art and music than it is to just abstractly just imagine what the world’s actually working like so that was where Dead Horse came from so in Dead Horse you have this story it’s all but there’s also not just a pandemic there’s this whole idea of kind of the edge of the world how all of this is is is related to to and there’s not just the pandemic but also the reaction to the pandemic and this idea of a world that is kind of shut down and and how this like kind of this prison of I don’t know how can I say this like this prison that makes you safe but then also also takes everything away from you at the same time yeah so yeah so what I did is I riffed on the idea of quarantine or a society that was riddled with series of quarantines for multiple reasons from even reasons of personality where ideologies were too different and people couldn’t hear couldn’t hear things they didn’t like anymore they were too fragile and also the idea that people just saw that everybody became a germaphobe and was afraid of what everybody else presented to them and the danger that presented and also how companies would benefit from that and how all the new technology would benefit from that so the story actually is this weird kind of like I would say like a rip van winkle structure where the characters find the means to try to go into the future to escape what’s happening so it starts out in dead horse Alaska which is the namesake of the record and dead horse Alaska is in prudhoe bay in the north edge of the world and that’s where the Alaskan pipeline begins and so the story starts when the Alaskan pipeline is turned on and it’s this power and I you know I mythologized it so they I talk about that within the story as if they found like unearth some beast at the bottom of the ocean and what were the implications of that thing and what were the desires of that beast so as we moved into dead horse you know they go into the future and they wake up a hundred years later I’m skipping really quickly just to get to the point of what you’ve asked and that is that they wake up into a world that’s the world we live in now but it’s accelerated so this pattern of spreading out and everything’s on a grid and everything’s distanced and people are you know well sadly like they are now we’re communicating each other through a little window like before we started I picked like the best angle in here and I put like my favorite gear in the shot and so like gear heads would see it and like you know all the kind of breaking the wall but this isn’t what my life looks like I mean there’s other angles of this trailer where I’ve pushed all the junk that I was working on yeah yeah it’s like it was kind of a riff on some of these ideas and what that would do to personalities and people and also how technology would try to solve that yeah yeah yeah um so maybe we can look at some of the songs because one of the things that I want to kind of bring about is this idea of pattern or pattern intuition and so you know in 2019 I said I told people like get ready for 2020 because it’s gonna be crazy and then some people later said oh Jonathan predicted the future I’m like I didn’t predict the future it’s like it’s you know if you see a vase tipping on the side of a table and you then you tell people to watch out because it’s falling it’s different and I think that I mean obviously that’s a simplified version but I think there are some people that have an intuition about patterns and so as you kind of look at the pattern then you talk about them um even without knowing it you you can end up doing something like predict the future without trying to do that explicitly it’s just this attention attention to the world attention to patterns and then and then kind of telling a story that ends up formulating this the the say that what’s going on even if it’s implicit and it’s not completely logical and understood yeah yeah I mean I guess before we dig into the story a little more that’s really worth mentioning so when we first got a record deal we were making music independently I was just making stuff on a computer at home and it just started selling and I just quit my job and I was like oh my gosh this is this is going really well and we did the next thing you do is we try to find a record label we had interest and the problem with the record label was that they they need to make money and so what we were doing isn’t like the most obvious way to make money um so there was this like oh they look at they see talent or they see you know like um they see something that’s marketable and then they try to package it within some kind of popular form so there was this real push towards pop and so my problem I always had when I was interacting with pop is I think I made my worst stuff because there’s this tendency just to copy what everybody else is doing like you know it’s good when it fits the pattern but you don’t understand the pattern necessarily so simultaneously there was this other thing happening where um it was kind of where I started seeing the world symbolically and I didn’t know it was a good way to see the world or the right way to see the world I just knew there was power in it when it came to writing so like what we talked about you know with this oil and I personified the you know energy in the story or you could take cancel culture and you could give it some kind of monstrous description and describe you know come come up with some analogous ways that that monster might do the same thing I realized there was so much it was so much more impactful when I would take the patterns I was seeing and I would give them a will and an intelligence um and so that changed things and also the other side of it that changed things is where we realize where we’re going to be positioned as artists is that it was also it takes place within a world that has a beginning middle and an end and we as we’re writing we found it was a way better sweet spot for us to imagine that this was the end um like it was that things were coming to a close and the pattern was about you know something new was ahead so when once I started looking at this world in these in in these symbolic patterns and like really starting to see monsters and like demons and things whether they were there or not I didn’t know it just it suddenly it was like I had no end to the ideas anymore it wasn’t like I was trying to find an idea for a pop song it was like I have more ideas right now than I know what to write about it was changing the way I was looking out out of the window simultaneously I was obsessed with Genesis and the other part I felt was missing from the world was losing sight of what human nature was and why it was there and I got obsessed with the story of the Garden of Eden because it was such an incredible description of like these these weird desires for perfection or to be divine or to be royal that we have and that things shouldn’t go wrong and it just it started to explain that in the story so I always keep that story in mind when it comes to like how consciousness developed and that interpretation of it is I throw that over everything whether people like it or not like it’s that yeah but it doesn’t necessarily because you’ve you’ve internalized it it doesn’t necessarily appear that way this is one of the things too that even in the discussion with my brother Mathieu sometimes sometimes we would say something we would think like oh it’s too obvious like it’s too obvious if we say something this way if we say this way it’s too obvious then you realize no it’s not it’s actually it’s actually not you see the connection like if you’re using analogies you think that it’s the same as something else but but people don’t necessarily notice it and so if you if you take the story of the garden you superimpose it over another event yeah most people won’t see that it’s the story of the garden like they’ll just see that it has this amazing coherence to it or this strange intuitive coherence to it yeah and people are so I think they’re just we’re sitting on top of so many things we didn’t invent we’re sitting on top of so many things we used to have to do ourselves we’re so detached from how we get our food and how even the the car we drive is operates or how it’s built we can’t repair it I can’t fix the computer I’m using we’re sitting on top of all this stuff that just we we don’t we start to reason as if that’s the actual starting point for reality and we all kinds of errors are being made everywhere where even especially in the political spheres when you listen to the different ends of the political narrative it’s like it’s totally detached from the the substructure of what it what being is itself what it means to be a person in this world it’s just it seems so inorganic now it’s starting to it causes like a little bit of panic in me when I realize like how people see themselves and what they think we are sometimes and so really the the record at the end of the day is a discussion of like your nature and what you’re ignoring I didn’t like and that wasn’t my intention but when I look back at it it’s like trying to drive the bottom of why you do what you do and why you want what you want because we don’t question those things nearly enough all right so I want to look at some of the songs right now because I think because we’ve been talking about it abstractly but people are gonna are going to to see right away especially people that have been following this channel are going to kind of see the patterns pop out and so did you have a song you wanted us to start with particularly um okay so I well I guess this is worth mentioning I hijacked Jonathan’s symbolic world intro with a song and the song and the song is called Saints 1 so you’ve already heard the introduction to that song and I guess we could start there because I think that’s an interesting one because right after I released that um I just thought it was my idea for a story but then like Tim Cook you know from Apple came out uh that’s his name right Tim yeah Tim Cook yeah yeah like literally just outlined the idea like just straight I was like oh okay I was it’s a weird moment when you do this because like we oh let’s just say you’re gonna come up with a prediction of the future and it’s not so bright there’s a weird moment of satisfaction you have when you’re like aha I was right and then you’re like oh no I was right oh no it’s like here come the terminators I’m I knew it I knew it great wonderful um all right and so let me read some of the some of the so tell me this is the concept of the song first of all and then we can look at some of the actual lyrics okay the song is interesting because it intentionally steals Christian imagery of the saints and redemption and absolution but it’s being used in a pattern to advertise this technology that is supposed to solve your felt needs so the the needs that people are trying to solve now um are generally it’s this idea and like you know Tim Cook says it in his speech that like like there’s it’s immoral to despair or it’s unethical to despair and this is this way that technology companies look at you or even anybody selling a product to you is this is here to make you feel better about yourself feel better about life um you know to give you to take you one further step down that red carpet towards your throne and so what happens is is that this this abandoned structure in the world where there’s like people used to venerate saints and they decide to well they come up with an acronym S-A-I-N-T-S and it describes the technology and acronyms are so wonderful like they’re so acronyms are like one of the diseases of the modern world are are these acronyms well and so part you talk about this in your channel but people can’t help so when a powerful thing gets abandoned you know people will pick it up and use it for whatever they whatever they can they won’t understand the purpose of it so they’ll abuse it so in this song it’s basically this world where everybody’s detached and so fragile and separated from connection they’re like well we’re not going to get them back together with people that doesn’t work so we’re going to create this AI this embodied technology that’s going to go and it’s going to solve their felt needs it’s going to Oprah Winfrey their self-esteem and uh and so that’s what the saint it saints is and so this song is like they’re opening ceremonies for the revealing of this technology so that’s it’s it’s their propaganda is how i would see it in the story right exactly all right so here for something to say to you strip the scales from your heart a hostage tied up by its nature they can’t help them sheathing its claws oh from an unlikely place redemption has come from a once abstract space is So I mean, it’s pretty wonderful to see like, there’s the imagery is really powerful. First of all, this idea of you want to be special, you want to be set you apart. And it’s a great way of saying it because it actually that’s what being holy is, right? When you say something is holy, we say it’s set apart. And so you have this desire to be holy and to strip the scales from your heart, to remove those outer garments, you know, and get to the middle. But then you realize that it’s this factitious thing that they’re presenting. And it’s also this idea. I love how it’s like, I want to all of a sudden this idea of when the saints go marching in and says, I want to be in their number. And then it talks about the light begins to shine. All of a sudden, you realize this weird kind of 666 image, right of this of this total system that will identify you that will name you that will shine its light on you, you know, and make it impossible for you to, to hide, like you said, to hide in any form of negativity. Like we’re going to make you happy by whatever means necessary. Right. And it’s just that that that that Simpsons episode with Ned Flanders, like there’s a Simpson episode, like Halloween episode, where Ned Flanders takes over the world. And he has reeducation seminars where everybody has to say that everything’s okay. And they force them into smiles. Like they pull hooks, their their their lips up into smiles. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. Because I mean, the the reality is that these narratives are detached from how things really work. And so the everything every person who doesn’t fit the narrative is is evidence against it. So that’s why you have to force conformity, because the reality won’t conform to this idea. So you have to use muscle. It’s like, you know, there’s autopilot’s heading in a different way and you don’t want to go there. And so you have to muscle up and see how long you can hold the wheel going in a different direction. And so that’s what happens in these. This totalizing system is that it just it doesn’t work. People break from the inside out, even if they can’t get at each other. Yeah, exactly. And it’s you can see it now because it’s creating it’s creating these weird side effects that they I guess they probably haven’t planned for. And now they’re constantly trying to patch over and to compensate and to, you know, to actually at this while they want to kind of include everybody to make everybody part of this total system, then they nonetheless end up having this strange desire to totally exclude those that don’t want to be in the system. You know, that’s the problem. Right. That is that that’s the problem with this kind of system is that because it’s presented itself as this totalizing system, then those who don’t want to be in the system are they’re not human or they’re barely human. They’re you know, they’re they they don’t have a place. Well, you can’t have equity if you’re around other people either. So the problem is the more things you equalize, the more the things that can never be equalized exaggerate. It’s just it’s just what happens. I mean, like one of the jokes I make with people is like a world that’s trying to let’s just say men and women are all the same is a world that also suddenly it’s like cool to have a beard. And it’s like, well, why did that happen? You know, should we all be clean shaven? But also there’s yeah, there’s this well, the notion is so like just thinking down this idea is that if you don’t deal with the problems in there in their traditional places, we dealt with problems now you have to you don’t know where the problem lies. And so everybody’s a problem. So you have to treat everybody as an equal offender of being diseased, as being a potentialist, a potential insurrectionist. You want to say that way like that? Everybody’s a problem. So everybody has to get away from each other. And that’s the problem with that. That system is the end result is if you really try to stick to it, eventually you have to isolate everyone from each other to actually have equal because otherwise you’re going to just observe inequalities that exist through any difference anytime. And something. But your insight on that is so good because it’s it’s almost happening kind of on its own in the sense that I don’t I can’t imagine that that some people maybe like there are people that evil that are sitting around and thinking we need to isolate everybody from each other as much as possible for our system to function. It almost happens organically out of the necessities of their desires, which is like they because they want this this thing, this kind of they want everybody to be included. The only way they can do it, like you said, is to actually limit real interactions between people, because in those real interactions, hierarchies will appear inevitably like you can’t avoid it. So now there’s still one of the things they realize with the technology that there is too much individual variation in between people. So they they do almost like what you do when you try to hack a pop song is where you try to find this the commonalities and like you try to come up with something universal. I think a really funny version of that is on the show Lost is this band called Driveshaft and their one hit song was called You All Everybody. And it’s like the most generic like you who does that not include you all everybody? And I just thought that was a really perfect idea of like when you try to hit the lowest common denominator, so they can’t properly produce an intelligence that is reactive enough to everybody with their traditional means. So they outsource this idea to the collective knowledge and like the, you know, a summeral, a summarizing look at all of the books that have been produced and the songs. And so the computer just collects everything and tries to understand it that way. So it just looks at what everybody how everybody is already defined things and then uses those definitions and adapts. So in the story, there is a group that’s kind of like a Knights Templar group that, you know, that protects the Holy Grail and Indiana Jones would be the way most people know about that idea. But there’s this group that sort of hates this technology and they’re sort of like vanguarding this. And so they decide to take it down or they try to take it down or break it by using ambiguity this naturally in language. So they find the ideal word to mess with, to break the technology. And that word is heart, because the heart is well, it’s the center. It’s an actual organ in your body. And it’s almost the same way in every language. Every language uses this the same way. And that has to do with affections. It has to do with things. And so they realize the best way to break the system and break the program is to mess with the idea of the heart. And so that then, you know, all hell breaks loose in my story once this once this blog is introduced. All right. So the second song we wanted to look at, it’s called It tore your heart out. And here you really get this. You really get this vision, which is which is powerful. So I’ll read a little bit of it. Locked alone in the lavish homes With pets and wigs and the bloated drones Such a pure devotion to your skin Hold themselves you from your sin You flee communion paranoid Now your cup is the roid It tore your heart out Oh, when you didn’t understand Why the beat has started It tore your heart out Oh, when you didn’t understand Why you want what you want What you want All right. Well, gee, this one was this one was freaky because I had recorded it and I hadn’t I was just about to release it. And it was I think it was like March 13th or March 15th. And then it was like, oh, we’re all locked down in our homes. And I was, oh, gee, this is a problem. And so I was looking at it and I was like, oh, man, well, at least I had my head on straight is what I thought. And I felt like I had some kind of well, way to look at what was happening outside of just, you know, I did. I’d never believed, you know, 15 days to flatten the curve. I just had never never even occurred to me that that was what was going to happen. Yeah. You’re like this. There’s no way there was just no way it was like because like you were saying, I don’t you don’t have to be conspiracy theorists to realize where the opportunity lies in any given way. But the money is going to mean that you’re going to be in a kind of a passive in situation like it. You don’t need a group of people planting behind closed doors to plot against you because people are just going to go where the money is. And so money is going to go to the world that can world that’s isolated. So, you know, Zoom went through the roof and, you know, Amazon, of course, all these companies really benefit from this. And there is incentive for them to just keep making it easier and easier for us to live like this. So I did. little bit. What’s interesting to me is like I use this imagery is they’re locked alone in their lavish homes with pets and wigs and their bloated thrones. So that’s the idea. Such a great image. Well, there’s so much there’s so much to dissect in that in that sentence. Well, everybody’s gonna become a fop. You know, it’s like, if you don’t know what a fop is, just you know, go back and look at the you know, the signing of the Declaration of Independence and wonder why these grown men were wearing white wigs and, you know, or watch Mozart, you can find out about that Turkish fashion movement. But so I mean, with your filters and all the things people use, it’s like, yeah, I have this really controlled view and like, oh, man, like, this guy’s life is great. His studio is awesome, except for the mess over there. And so that was the thing is like, I just envisioned, I’m like, if you keep people in a place where the only time they see other people is through a little lens, it’s there, they’re going to spend all of their resources and time into that window. Yeah. And so, you know, I just thinking about that, and I realized other things about it, once I started living in that world is like, you know, I’m in public, and the only time I’m in public, no one on my identity is veiled. So when I’m actually with a person, my identity is veiled. But then when I’m with you, it’s not only am I not, it’s my full identity, it’s a hyper identity, because I’m looking in a mirror, you know, I put it over here, so I’d have to do this to look at myself. But you’re looking in a mirror. Yeah, while you’re talking to someone else, everyone is like, not the proper psychological studies have not been done on what the impact of that would be. Yeah, talking to someone but seeing yourself at the same time, a horrible, horrible idea. It’s like, there should be a fairy tale about it. But there’s something about this, this paragraph, which is just so powerful in the sense that so the name of the song is it tore your heart out, and that’s the chorus. And so if you tear someone’s heart out, if you tear the heart out of something, that is the center, if you tear the middle out of this out of it, then what you’re describing is, is such a powerful kind of modern version of what that would look like. First of all, this idea of the suburban hell for the living dead. So the suburbs are, are not the city, they’re this ambiguous, like, margin of the city where everything becomes this, like, you know, I’ve talked about this before, right? Everything gets spread out, and there’s no center, there’s no reason besides just kind of being this these these independent points on a map, basically on the grid, this like spread over a piece of toast, kind of. And so that is that is a form of living death, because you’re there, but you can’t see the reason there, you can’t understand why you live next to these people, right? There’s nothing bringing you together besides just the factuality of just being in a line of people on a street, you know, and then this so then being alone, obviously, but also being that you have pets and wigs, it’s such a great image, because it has to do with the hair, right? It has to do with the extremities and these dead things, because this animal, this animal part of us, like, it’s also talking about kind of being stuck alone with your desires, in the sense that it’s like you’re there and you you don’t have communion. So you end up also going into your you’re in the danger of falling into idiosyncrasy, right? Right. And that’s what the foppish aspect of it too, is like, going into these weird idiosyncratic aspects of what it means to be to be human, and then coming coming coming to it then to say, pure devotion to your skin, which what ends up being what this is all about, like this, this outer is this being stuck in this outer periphery alone in this, in the in the in the in the periphery in the the edge of the wheel, let’s say you’re stuck on the edge of the wheel. And then you then you compare it to the opposite, which is you flee communion, right, which is where you find the heart. And then the cup is void. And I say it’s just a perfect, it’s such a perfect thing. It’s crazy. Like I said, that you wrote that I mean, I guess you could intuit that, like, even if there wasn’t like a plague that happened, that this was already going on, it was already going on. Yeah, that’s it. I’m like, dealing head on with something I just it’s just where things were going. That’s that’s the trajectory of things. It’s like what you’re doing is that same thing you do on the SATs. And they’re like, they give you seven numbers and the next three are blank. And you have to figure out the pattern, right? And obviously, there’s more factors in life than just this number sequence. But it’s the same thing. It’s like, yeah, like this is where we’re going. This is what all the technology is allowing us to do. People are tough. People are a problem. As long as people define their life as going wrong, anytime they have any kind of struggle, or that like, you know, God’s favor has left them, if anything’s difficult, you’re that’s the man I can sell that person anything. Right. So that’s part of the problem with this is that the idea would would it tore your heart out? You know, because you didn’t understand why you want what you wanted. Yeah, you know, so I met someone the other day, well, someone actually knew before this, but they had lost their sense of smell and taste from this, you know, this COVID flu thing going around. So they they were like, they’re in perfect shape. It was so silly. They said this over the like, you would think I would lose more weight, since I can’t taste my food. And I was like, No, you have to swallow your food. Like, it’s weird, like nobody thinks about this anymore. Like, swallowing is the is more important than the food’s taste at the end of the day, because go to your favorite restaurant, like just if they ever let you do this, but you’ll never do it. But go eat all your favorite thing and chew it up and spit it in the bucket and tell me how good of a time you have. So there are things in life that are fat that take longer to develop than meals that were at if you didn’t swallow your food at the end, like there might be you know, one of the things I might realize about myself is one day I might look back and like I didn’t have grandkids and I might feel like I didn’t swallow life like that might hit me different, you know, as I as I’m older, and so now I have kids but there’s also other weird things like you know, you when you get hurt, like people don’t understand like even what’s going on inside of them because they think it’s all made up. But you know, if you stub your toe on an object, you you have a weird thing you do where instantly you you assign a will to that object that hit you is like it did it on purpose, you want to kick it back. Yeah, you have to stop yourself from destroying yourself because that’s that weird vengeance narrative we have that only destroys us. But also at the same time, people don’t recognize when they’re hurt, they feel isolated, they like you boom, you zoom out from the rest of the world, and you’re alone and they don’t understand suffering and loneliness go hand in hand. So they there’s this lack of understanding of what’s really going on in our nature. And we we don’t question enough. I think that Garden of Eden story is so great because you know, I read Hymns in Paradise. And when I read Hymns in Paradise, you know, I think I told you this and I ended up writing a song on this record about it. It was this idea that was like, oh, it was like, I remembered something I was trying to remember my whole life, like, or, you know, reminded me of something I was trying to remember. And there is a sense of like, we’re, you know, we have this evolution story going around. And I’m not anti evolution at all. But I don’t think the story says enough because there are all kinds of desires we have for paradise and for perfection and for completeness and for things that never go wrong, that just don’t make any sense. We’re these squishy animals running around. And then I read the story. And suddenly, it’s like, yeah, we’re like, like, like, mom died in the beginning of the Disney Princess story. And we’re trying to solve that problem. And so people don’t know why they want what they want. And if they really believe that, you know, anytime something isn’t going their way, that’s, that’s wrong, right? That I again, you could sell them anything. So then breathe into the next song that I wanted to look at called But Never a Key. And then this song really looks at the problem or let’s say the problem that the opportunity of safety gives and like this, the problem that we have right now, which is to see safety as the ultimate value and to see this, this kind of safety and pleasure too, like this kind of idea that if you’re safe, you can have your little pleasures. And I hear even the politicians talk about that. It drives me insane. Like here in Quebec, you know, they’re like, well, it’ll be okay. You know, you can just, you can have naps and you can watch TV and you can play video games. And it’s like, you know, you can get the rest that you’ve always wanted, right? You’ve always wanted this. So there’s like, you can, you can get that nice little pleasant life that you, that you wish for. So let me read a little bit from this. The horror is your tragedy Now ends happily And I’m sure that they won’t be done Till they’ve fenced off the ledges and rounded the edges of all that goes wrong For you, Algenon Gone are the days where you’re endlessly racing towards Pavlov’s reward Now your maze is replaced by the locked door you asked for Oh, that’s the way that it goes I’m sorry you’ll never be free If all that you see is a danger, the cage will relieve And oh, no, that’s the path that you chose A true hedonist indeed So don’t lift a finger, your warden provides all you’ll need But never a key But never a key Oh Yeah, it’s awesome. There it is. Yeah, it’s such a, it’s such an amazing, I mean, it’s really amazing to see that you wrote this, you know, several years ago. Yeah, I mean, it came out in 2019. Yeah. So I mean, but it’s also not that long ago that it was right on the edge of the pattern. Like it was right on the edge of the pattern so that when things started to happen, it was like, it was that thing, that thing ahead of you that was telling you to watch out that you didn’t listen to, you know, when you should have. Yeah, no, I cried when I wrote that too. It’s so sappy. But like, I, this thing hits me every once in a while where like, you condense something into what feels like the right idea. And it’s, it’s like, you know, I think something’s profound when it’s like you saw it, but you didn’t have the words for it. And then someone comes up and they say it in like a real concise way. And you’re like, the light bulb goes off, but not because you weren’t already seeing it. You were seeing it. So like, when I wrote this, it just hit me. I was like, because I mean, this obviously, all these ideas are present beforehand because, you know, again, like this, like everybody is just so concerned about it being in a pleasured state. And there’s so many things on tap that can like, you can just satiate so many different things without any hesitation. And so when I wrote this song, it’s like, yeah, I mean, this is, this is what’s happening. People are going to, people are going to accept a cage. That’s what’s, that’s where we’re, if something doesn’t happen different, this is what’s going to happen. Yeah. I mean, it’s already there. It’s there right now. I would say it’s just like, it’s like, maybe we have the sense that it’s going to stop, but it could get worse. It could get a lot worse. It could get a lot worse. So Daniel Keys wrote this song, this story called Flowers for Algernon. And he wrote the story based upon experience he had with a real life student who had a brain injury, who he was teaching to read again. And then they went away for summer break and the student came back and the student had forgotten everything. And he was devastated. And he went and wrote the story Flowers for Algernon. If you haven’t read it, I would check it out. Really great book. It’s funny that it’s called, but never a key and his last name is Keys. But so one of the things they tried to do when he went to publish it is everybody was like, oh, what a great story. What a cool sci-fi story. Yeah, just make the ending happy and we’ll run with this. And he refused and finally someone published it and it was like a Pulitzer Prize winner. And then they wanted to make it into a film in Hollywood. I think the film is called Charlie. And they’re like, yeah, we’re just going to make it have a happy ending. And he’s like, no, it’s not real if it has a happy ending. So he wouldn’t sell it until they made it his way. And so the whole idea here is that saying this, this idea of the devouring mother that, you know, like, okay, kids had seven cupcakes, but like, here comes the eighth and he wants it. And you can’t say no, because you think your job is to keep everybody like you’ve sinned against someone if they are upset with you. So that’s the whole idea is like, we’re going to, you know, you just look at the, if you’re old enough, like us, so you can see that there used to be not, not used to be rails on certain things. And they didn’t force you to wear seat belts. And some of this is good, but also like everything’s getting padded out there. Yeah, I love it. They fenced off the ledges and rounded the hedges. Yeah, round. Yeah, right. So that’s it’s just what’s happening. It’s like that’s, you know, that’s too, if you’re in like, politics, you’ve got to look for the sharp pointy objects sitting out there that are still left. So you have a purpose. Yeah, right. And there’s something from somebody, something like you said, it’s already there. So like, I think I might have told the story on the channel before, but I, one of the things that when I was, when my kids were younger and we go to the park, there’s this one moment that hit me like a, it just hit me so hard. I saw there were these children and this child was playing in the park. The child starts running. And then the mother says, or it was the father, I don’t remember if it was a man or woman says, don’t run, you’ll fall in a park. No, I was like, what did you just tell your child not to run because they will fall? That is the most insane thing I’ve ever heard. Yeah. Oh, like it’s grass. It’s like, that’s fine to fall on grass. That’s where you do fall. Yeah, exactly. Right. They better learn to fall there. All right. So last song I wanted to look at, all right, obviously it’s a perfect song to also to finish off our analysis. It’s called No Land Beyond and here’s part of it. When the world is upside down, follow the fool for solid ground. That’s awesome. It’s a very Pajoe-ian line. Very Pajoe-ian line. But it’s great because it also talks about this idea that this problem of not knowing the language or the language falling apart, like they say, the sacred language falling apart and then people not being able to recognize the patterns. And then at that moment, you know, it creates this madness because people don’t know what’s going on. They can’t recognize, you know, the world’s falling apart, but they don’t understand why they can’t see it. If they could only, they only knew the language, then they wouldn’t notice that this is part of the story and this is where we are. It would give them some strange comfort to be able to at least realize what’s going on to limit the side effects or limit the adverse effects of being in this pattern. And then, of course, you know, at that moment, like you said, there’s only one last thing left to do. So one of the things is like, so what I saw this part of the song as I did it as a canon, because these are like things I think that are swirling around right now. Like these are problems that are swirling around right now. And every once in a while, there’s this like, there’s this one little light that pops up and there’s so many stories that just seem so politically driven. And the world is filled with so much mush that it’s like people don’t understand the structure of reality or how to see it, because it’s again, we’re sitting on top of something so inorganic. But the fool in there is like the is this idea, I tell a story, it’s like if you’re ever like stuck and you’ve run out of ideas and you need to make a decision and nobody has an idea, you look for the most foolish person in the group and you get them drunk and you listen to them. It’s this idea like you know, because everything’s so everything’s so counterintuitive that it’s like, oh, the person who’s is the anomaly who’s saying the thing that doesn’t fit the system might actually have the answer for this broken system. So that’s part of the two of the end. In the end, we’re all mad men is that one of the ways I see life is like, you know, this is another type of womb. Like we had a we were a child, we were in a womb. And there are parts of us we don’t need yet that are there. So it might be I don’t remember being a baby to you. But either might be parts where it was awkward to have legs and arms like but that you need in life. And, and there’s this moment where right before you’re born where it’s the least hospitable space, you’re just you’re you’re scrunched in there. And life kind of works like that, too, in the sense that are still there are still things that are in us that we don’t know what they’re there for. And we don’t know why these desires are here. And there’s there on the other side of a thing we can’t see yet. But so part of where I was like realizing like the power was in us writing about the end of the world all the time, was that that’s what life feels like we’re crunched up against the edge of this thing. We’re just we’re and that things make less and less sense. Our bodies are changed by this technology. We don’t understand how this technology has really shaped our body away even to want things that aren’t a part of our nature. So I think that that’s the in the end, we’re all mad men is that there’s this that moment of birth that’s ahead, like you want to look at it that way. It’s like just doesn’t make it’s not good for anybody in that moment. It’s not good for the mom, it’s not good for the baby, like, but it needs to happen. And we seem to be at this point where everything’s just getting crushed. Yeah, you know, in the next things just around the corner. So that’s, and then our life also, like, I mean, when you talk about looking at patterns, our life is just, you know, our every day is a really good example of what your life is like, and the way you wake up, you get to your feet, you become aware, you get energy, you run out of energy, you get sleepy, and you lay down. That’s a life in general, too. And so the world just seems to be like right there. It’s like run out of stuff. And it’s everybody’s getting lazy and weird. And, and stressed and crunched. And meanwhile, we can satiate all of our desires. And so it’s just the madness is abounding. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like you said, it is it’s like, it’s the end of the day. And that’s the moment where people don’t know what to do. And so some people will play games, some people will get sleepy, some people will try to satiate themselves, put the TV on until they fall asleep. Exactly. And that definitely, definitely feels like where we are. And so, but I think that I really appreciate you kind of positing it as this hope, you know, as this capacity through the pattern to be able to see beyond this, this first veil that appears to us, because sometimes I get lost and I get discouraged because you know, I all I see is the breakdown. And I don’t realize, like you said, in an absolute truth, which if there’s a breakdown, it means that there’s a resurrection on the other side. And so if we can keep our focus on on that, then, then all of this madness will won’t be as difficult to bear. Yeah, too, for artists and just the average person too. I mean, like there’s no less good in the world. It’s just in fewer and fewer places. Which means that when you see it, hopefully it shines brighter. So like, that’s the hope at the end of the tunnel is that as people, like kind of give into this hedonism, and you know, this, this self indulgence is that it just makes what’s good left shine brighter. So it stands out. Yeah. All right, Neil, this is awesome. I really appreciate it. And, and so I would say everybody check out Dirt Pole Robbins, we’ll put all the links. I hope you appreciated this. I am really, I’m excited for the things that are coming down the line. We have some, some announcement to make very soon about some some stuff that Neil and I and other people that you know, are working on. So we’re excited to announce that very soon. So stay tuned to that. And Neil, I wish you the best. Oh, same. Thank you. It’s good to talk to you.