Transcript of Mark Ronson Returns

Wndri Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple podcast, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Sheppard, and I'm joined by Lily Padman.

Hi.

Hi. I did an intro for you yesterday.

You did?

For Mom's Car. Oh, my goodness. And what did you have to say? I was trying to rattle off all your many nom de plouhors, and there's just so many.

Oh, that's nice.

Today, we have Mark Ronson. I don't know if he has any nom de plouhors. You think I'm saying that correctly?

Yeah. You mean nicknames?

I'm out on a limb with it. Mark is an internationally renowned DJ, Oscar winner, and nine-time Grammy Award-winning producer and songwriter. His albums are Late Night Feelings, Uptown Special Version, Here Comes the Fuzz. But also, he did the Barbie song track.

He sure did. He did the shit out of it.

He did the shit out of it. He wrote that awesome Duleepa song that's on there.

Uptown Funk, Valerie, Electric. He's one of the biggest music producers we got.

He's a monster. He has a new memoir out on September 16th, 9: 16, called Night People: How to be a DJ in '90s New York City. It's just a huge love letter to New York in the '90s.

His stories are wide.

They're insane. As you'll hear. They're insane. No, he has one of the craziest childhoods and lives imaginable. Yeah. Please enjoy Mark Ronson.

I'm Jon Robbins, and on my podcast, I sit down with incredible people to ask the very simple question, How do you cope? From confronting grief and mental health struggles to finding strength in failure. Every episode is a raw and honest exploration of what it means to be human. It's not always easy, but it's always real. Whether you're looking for inspiration, comfort, or just a reminder that you're not alone in life's messier moments, join me on How Do You Cope. Follow wherever you get your podcasts or listen to episodes early and ad free on WNDRI Plus. How Do You Cope is brought to you by Audible, who make it easy to embark on a wellness journey that fits your life with thousands of audiobooks, guided meditations, and motivational series. Hello, I'm John Robbins, comedian and host of WNDYRI's How Do You Cope podcast. I'm also, plot twist, an alcoholic. I've written a book, Thirst: 12 Drinks That Change My Life, published by Penguin. Thirst is a book about alcohol. It's mystery, it's terror, it's havoc, it's strange meditations. But, John, I hear you cry. Isn't that a rather odd book to write for a sober man who, more than anything, wants to stop thinking about alcohol?

Well, yes, But I had to go back to find out why the one thing I know will kill me still calls out across the night. It's the story of what alcohol did for me and what alcohol did to me. If that's of interest to you or someone you know, Thirst, 12 Drinks That Change My is available to pre order now online and from all good bookshops.

What are you guys chewing? I'm jealous.

Oh, nicotine.

Oh, no, I'm okay. Okay. I did do nicotine for a long time, but it used to be in rectangles. Now it's in these little circles.

These are lozenges. And then I augment also- With cigarettes. With a direct nicotine spray. Okay, cool.

Which I'm going to do right now. Then how- How do I sleep? No, I just mean, is there a weaning thing or you're just good with that now?

Oh, no, because there's nothing- There's nothing bad about it. There's nothing bad about nicotine. It's just a delivery device. Why did you quit the gum? It's so fun and playful.

I think at some point I just didn't need it. Made Baby. I don't mean to. That sounds like- You need it. I need it. Do you know? Are you friends with Justin Thoreau? He's just always popping. I like the patch. I like the gum. I don't know. Just stop.

Most people are like you. They use it for a purpose to get off, and then they're done, but not you.

I went back and forth a lot, and then it was the hypnotism because they probably went back to smoking.

And so the hypnotism was the thing that- That's a big missing. Big different. Part of the story. You know, I want to know this off the top of my head, but we interviewed you in June of 2021. Yeah. Long time. And then a couple of months later, you were married.

I know.

And then you have since had two daughters, as I have two daughters. Congrats.

I have a really clear memory of listening to our podcast, our interview, sitting in a car outside the In & Out. I had gotten my burger and I was going back to New York. I think I worked all day on a studio session and it just come out. Just like one of those really lovely sitting in a car listening to this interview, listening to me talk When we were about my wife, when we're about to get married. It's just a very Magnolia Paul Thomas-Anderson lonely LA thing, but also very warm and sweet because I was listening back to our thing and I'm talking about my wife who I have a sweet love. It's funny. It's really ingrained in my memory that interview we did.

Oh, good. That's our goal.

It was lovely.

That was through the terrible interface of computers. That was Zoom. That was a COVID interview.

Yeah. And we found out that you and Bradley Cooper have the same birthday.

Three days apart. September fourth. So you're a Virgo as well. As well.

And he's about to turn 50.

I'm a Virgo. You're about to turn 50?

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. In a few weeks? Yeah. It's her birthday in four days? On Sunday. Happy birthday.

How do you feel about 50? It feels like a full of shit, but I don't feel a certain way. I think because I'm so fucking grateful about where I am with family. And that was the thing that I never picture for myself. So I feel so settled in it. Everybody's like, Are you going to throw a big party? I keep having these flashes of seeing pictures online of Nas' 50th birthday with everyone in tuxes and it's like Gatsby. And in my head, I'm like, I've DJed so many great parties. I've had some great parties. My book is coming out 10 days later. I'm in the middle of fucking scoring a film. I don't think I'd be able to let go enough to have that party right now. I don't think I'd enjoy it. It's not really the time.

Well, you can put a pin in it. I was anti-party as well. My birthday is January second, which is the worst. We were in Mexico. We got norovirus on my birthday. Everyone's dead. I was like, Wow, it literally might die on my 50th birthday. Oh, my God. Regardless, got home Even though Kristin knows I didn't want a party, she did plan a surprise birthday party.

Was it a milestone birthday or no? Just a regular birthday. Oh, you just said 50.

I just turned 50 in January. Wow. You look great. She rented the roller rink down the street, and I don't know how many of there was this? Maybe 40 or so? Yeah, probably something like that. Forty people roller-skating to a great playlist with some incredible barbecue was brought in.

It was about as good as it could get. What date was it? How long after the thing?

It was a couple of weeks after my birthday, at least.

I could do that.

Yeah. So when you're done with the film and the book comes out, maybe we rent Moonlight Roller Way and we just reset it.

I was trying to imagine the thing where I was surrounded by people I love and doing something that would be wonderful and not stress out. I would be stressed out roller-skating, but my equivalent of that.

What is it?

What would be yours? What is it?

What is it? Big kayaking party. Yeah.

Is that just something fun? I don't know. Like Greco Roman wrestling.

Yeah, that's great. Is social and as big of an extrovert as I am? If a lot of people gather for me, I'm very uncomfortable with that. The roller skating rink for me was a dream because everyone already knows I'm there to skate. I love to skate. I skated the entire party other than blowing my candles out. So I'm just out there and then I'm seeing, Hey, it's a nice little chat while you're skating and dancing.

So it was a great little- No pressure enough to talk to every single person. That type of thing.

Yes, because that's what I think. Oh, people I haven't seen in a couple of years are going to come. I owe all of them 35 minutes of heart to heart catch up.

Because, yeah, you think about it, you're going to go around, say hi to everybody, and before you know it, it's 3: 00 in the morning. That's right.

But I'm going to fast forward to a question I was going to ask you at the very end of this, which is, reading your book got me so nostalgic, and I have been saying to Kristen for a while. We had to go to Atlanta for work for something, and I said to her on the way there, We're going to go out dancing. I'm going to find a club with some good hip hop, and we're going to go dancing. She's like, Can it be at 8? I'm like, No, that's not how clubs work. She's like, I can't do that with you. I need to go ahead and have fun. It occurred to me, Will you ever as an old man, still go to a club and enjoy that scene?

The crazy thing about this book is a really good friend of mine read it, and he's always got a good insightful off-the-wall take on something when I'd play him a piece of music or read this book. He's like, I love the book. It just sounds like you really miss DJing. You need to go back to DJing and only playing vinyl again. So my first thought was like, Jesus Christ, hauling those like hundred pound crates of things. I got to find them all. Because I've been DJing with digital, not to get too techy, but for the last 20 years, you DJ CDJ's and Serrato and all this stuff. But I was like, it's worth a try. So I started DJing again, and there's this great club, great clubs all over Brooklyn.

Oh, you're now currently DJing?

Not only me, I'm just DJing. I'm hauling crates of records. I'm stuck Rumbling home in to bed at 2: 30, 3: 00 in the morning. My wife, who is very happy for me but completely missed out, fortunately on this first phase of my life, is just like, Oh, fuck. I married a DJ. I didn't I can't count for this. She's supportive of it, but I'm up at 6: 30 with the kids, no matter what.

You'll do it after getting home at 3: 00?

Yeah, because I want to, and I'll find a nap later in the day or something. Okay. Oh, boy. The difference is, back when I was DJing in my 20s and 30s, and it was my whole life, I was DJing every night and then going out to see other DJs, AM, whoever on other nights, because that's how you stay in the game. It's really hard for me to go out till 3: 00 in the morning if I'm not working. But yes, I've had this weird thing where I'm like, Oh, fuck, dude. It's dragging me back in. This book is about New York in the '90s and me coming up as a DJ in my '20s, and it's a lot about the emotional highs and lows of being a DJ. But I'm going out now and I'm playing music and hip hop from the '90s and 2000s, mainly because that's what all the fucking young kids are playing anyway. But it's so funny to play these records and be reliving these literally physical actions of this other time to kids who were not alive when I was doing it the first time. So it's lovely. Are you able to lock in and have the experience, or does it feel like returning to high school?

I think it's both. There's obviously something about reminding myself by literally physically going through the motions of this thing when I was at my best or my peak or at this magical time in my life, which is making the whole thing come back.

There's two scientists. They wanted to catalog every single movement the face was capable of making. That was their objective. But what they found out on accident was when they were going, okay, we now do crying. They found out that the physicality can inform the emotions. Generally, your emotions start the physicality, but it works in both directions. And so I can imagine where even if you had reservation going there, and this is going to feel awkward. Once that physical activity, the memory of that might reverse engineer the emotion.

I read so many books and books about sound and how music works with the brain while I was writing my own book because I just thought, who knows where get a nice little tidbit. And one of my favorite studies is of this old age home where they started playing all this music and baseball games and things on the radio from the '30s and '40s, which is when these people would have been in their formative years. It literally slowed the aging process of these people because there's just something about taking your brain back to that time or whatever it is. Then there's this other thing, which I found in another book, is that in a place for... I don't even know what you're supposed to call this thing, but the home for neurodivergent. Neurodivergent. Neurodivergent. Honestly, the first time I ever heard the word neurodivergent was in Barbie. I just thought it was so funny because she was like, Look at that crazy... I mean, sorry, neurodivergent person. Because sometimes really in good faith the amount of time I spend trying to figure out, What do I say?

How do I describe this?

How do we be polite and respectful?

And the amount of time now it's taking me to find the right word, you're all gone somewhere else and actually angry at me. No, so there's a neurodivergent. There was a place where a neurodivergent patients lived, and they would play records of Bach and Mozart that would calm them when they were having their more intense breakdowns. And they tried to switch out the records with MP3s, and they played the same thing. And because they're compressed, so they don't have all of the same frequencies, the things that we don't necessarily hear, but the vibrate in the skin or not in everything, it actually made the patients more agitated. The only way that links back to going back in DJing Vinyl again is there is this thing. I don't like to get caught up too much in the vinyl versus things. Like, who the fuck cares? You just sound like an angry old man. But there's something about playing vinyl again for kids who've never seen anybody do that. I can just see they're watching. It's a bit of a show. I'm not AM or A track with these crazy routines, but it is my chaotic vinyl ballet, and I'm throwing records on and off.

There's a lot of reasons why I'm doing this and I'm enjoying it. It's serving a purpose.

I want to say on the vinyl CD, MP3 thing, just minimally, one's a wave and one's a particle in a sense. One has been broken into bits and assembled, and one is one continuous wave. What effect that might have on your brain or how you perceive that or not, I do think is possible.

I didn't want the book to get too nerdy. If I was conscious of anything that might turn somebody off or make them want to skip, I was talking about the fucking record needles for too long. But I did learn, actually, new things, studying it, the way that you make a piece of vinyl, the Grooves in it are microscopic wiggles of electro fucking signals that are carved that then the stylist interprets to be sound. I was like, God, I've been playing this shit for like 35 years, and I never even knew that.

When you are now DJing, what is the different feeling? Because now you're established. You're a famous person. And before you were coming up, there's a lot of hunger there. What is the feeling now? How do you recreate that feeling?

I feel just as hungry because I think there's just something in all ways that I feel like an underdog or I have something to prove. Then I still think the fact that I've been out of the game, not DJing in nightclubs four times a week in that zone where you can just walk into any club and know what to do and murder it. That already is enough to be like, Am I going to know what the first record is? But the other thing is that now the fact that I'm, as you say, famous or I have records that people know, Uptown Funk, Valerie, Electric, whatever it is, I have this cheating advantage when back then I I just had to go in on the merits of being a great DJ and playing records really well and murdering it. Now I know, Oh, if there's a bit of a lala, play Valerie, and I'll get everybody. So I almost have not been playing my own records as well because I just want to earn it back the way I used to play.

This is the same. You'll talk to any stand-up comedian. Seinfeld, famously, will say, Yes, when I go to a nightclub, I am going to get five minutes of free time. They're going to be so excited to be seeing me, but then that'll end. There is an objective reality in stand-up, you're funny or not. And same with you. I would imagine you still can sense a room, you can read a room, you can feel it, and you still will perform or not perform. So at some point, I would imagine the actual act of doing it is very objective. So all the Fame or whatever, the preconceived notions will be gone shortly, and you'll either sink or swim.

Absolutely. And I try to write about that in the book. The book is very diaristic about the '90s. I really didn't want it to have any… Twenty years later, I would go on to play at Kachal, whatever the fuck. I just wanted to be a kid.

I would have never known standing in that shitty hovel that I'd one day be holding Lady Gaga's hand.

Looking stage left and seeing David Hasselhoff and Joe Astead, which also was cool.

I mean, it is interesting to be someone who's trying to come up. I mean, I think of improv. We did improv. When you're just like, Oh, I just want people to come to this show. I just want more than 10 people to come to this show. And then you become a name. If you go do improv now, people are going to just come because it's you. It's strange.

Now, what I love about the book is I'm always most interested in people's youth when I interview them. I'll even get comments like, Why don't you bring up this movie? I'm like, I don't care about them. I care about how people ended up being capable of making that It's a good movie. I love it because this book, you're just taking me to the end of the '90s, basically. Even the beginning, you have a very fantastical, is that the word? You have a really strange and unique childhood. Did you understand how unique it was?

Yes, I think I had a sense of both things. My parents were this young partying couple in London. My dad came for some money, so they had this house. There were all these rock stars always hanging out.

He had started a publishing company.

Yeah, a music publishing company. That was like their world. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and Robin Williams, Mork and Mindy, was the biggest thing. I love Mork, came in and woke me up. I had this vague, hazy memory.

I'll say it for you. He's definitely gacked out of his mind.

Gacked out of his mind. My mom is definitely having a good time, too. He keeps running to the window. I was used to the fact that adults were more fun at night. Adults in the day were a little scary and bad-tempered and irritable, and maybe you had to avoid them. But at night, everything was all good. Interesting. I remember thinking, this is strange and unusual, but I'm sure it perverted my sensibility of what was normal from an early age.

But he's leaving the room and you say...

You forgot their thing. And he turns back and he knows right away and he's like, nanu nanu. He gave him his catchphrase, Nano-nano. He gave me the catchphrase. He knew what I wanted. Did he do this? I think he did this thing.

I know I had the dexterity at that moment?

Oh, you can do it.

I can't do it.

He had the thing. Towards the end of the book, I was out at a restaurant and I saw him at the table and I just wanted to go up to him, but I punked out to ask him if he remember my parents' house. The universe gave me a second opportunity. He walks towards our table going in the toilet. I'm like, Mr. Williams, I know this is so crazy, and there's no way that you'll remember this, but one of my earliest childhood memories, it was you coming into my as a kid, and he stops for a second. He's like, Wait, your parents had the house on Circus Road? And I was like, Yeah. He goes, Man, they threw some fucking crazy parties and just kept walking. Exactly what you want from Robin Williams. He He even remembered it.

I bet he remembered it because it was at the beginning. I bet if that had happened for him 18 years later, it gets in that murk of too many neat things happening at some point. So I think it's worth saying mom was from a pretty modest background, but she was very rock in spirit. Then dad was supposed to walk into Heedon's. Is that what it's called? Heron. Heron, which was an enormous property management company at one point, had billions of dollars. It was sitting on a platter, and he grew his hair long and went into music. You guys are all coming from a good stock.

Right.

Of outkasty nonconformance.

Outkasty English Jews.

But your dad's Jewish lineage is a very unique one. It's like a boxer. It's a tough hard scrabble.

Yeah. My dad's dad was completely self-made. He came from East London, which is where Jewish people, the immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe came, and they worked as butchers and milkmen and whatever else it was. And he was in this thing called the Jewish Lads Brigade. Which was like a boxing thing. And they were still in that era, even post-World War II, fighting fascists on the streets, like we are now. Like fascists are right down the street, and then the Jewish groups going out and their fucking fisticuffs in the street and probably worse. And I was proud of that, of course. Yes. My mother's father escaped Nazi Austria in 1937. Like a lot of stories. Somehow got papers, was on the train, was probably this close to just maybe a Nazi officer being like, no, Jew, you're coming with me, but made it out to England. So they were these survivors. Yeah.

Do you think mom took on any of that generational? Her mom died really young, too, right? So the dad was raising the kids by himself. Yeah.

My mom's mother died when she was 11. My mom was the second oldest of five kids. The older brother is a boy, so it fell on her to do a lot of the cooking and taking care of the younger kids.

As it should. As it should.

I called the book Night People because at first, honestly, it sounds sexy, and it's about my cousin going out. But then I was like, no, actually, there's another layer to this night people thing. All my community and friends in that thing were slightly cracked. Maybe there was some addiction, maybe there was just some running from the daytime. And I was part of that. So when I was writing this book, I was I got to get to the bottom of then where I got that from and interview my mom and dad and be like, Why were you guys like this, too? So for my mom, she did feel a bit like she didn't belong. Nighttime was the time when the little brothers and sisters went to sleep and she would stay awake doing her drawing or her paintings in her room.

Mom and dad didn't get along in the daytime, basically. It was stressful how you grew up for the first five years until they finally pulled the plug. Both lovely people on their own, but maybe not a great match.

Yes. Then- He came into my life.

He came into your life, and then you and your two sisters moved to New York to the Upper West Side, Central Park West? Yeah.

In your what age? Sorry, at this point.

I'm eight or nine when we moved to New York.

Moving to this pretty outrageous huge apartment. I'm guessing if you're a couple blocks from as you later met Sean Lennon. Yeah. Were you in the San Rimo building? Yes, we were.

You were? Lived in the San Rimo building when we first moved there. Well, first we moved there, my stepdad had a little bachelor pad on Riverside Drive, and suddenly it's like he's living with three kids in this bachelor pad. Oh, my God.

He really was.

Three kids. He was. Then Farner were just hitting this amazing peak, all these smashes, and they bought this really fancy apartment.

For reference, the next tower, or maybe it was your tower, but the Studio 54 guy had the top of one of those towers.

Yeah. Tony Randall from the odd couple. Oh, sure. Dustin Hoffman.

See, this is what I'm talking. This is a very unique childhood.

There was this one time that I stayed at Sean Lennon, who was one of my closest at his house when Michael Jackson came over for a sleepover. And I know- On the bad tour.

On the bad tour.

Also a sleepover. There's a lot here.

Yeah, there's a lot. It is different now to say some of these things for sure. Wow, this is wild. But even with that, I knew not to say anything in school the next day because I don't want to be teased mercilessely or be made to be like, Oh, you fucking dick, or other, or look braggy. So there was this thing of I knew it was crazy. I also knew to keep a as much of it to myself.

That was a very specific part for me. They're throwing wet toilet paper balls off the side.

Soggies. Soggies.

Please get the nomenclature right. I got kicked out of the Milford Plaza Hotel as a kid for throwing soggies.

Michael Jackson was just really intent on packing wet mounds of toilet paper and just pelting them. Nowhere near people, but just hearing them spat on the sidewalk.

It's very rewarding because you start with the ball, and I don't want to encourage anyone to do this because it's dangerous. But I will say, okay, you start with the wad of toilet paper this big. When that fucking thing hits the ground, if you're 30 plus up. It's crazy. It's eight foot wide. It's very instantly rewarding if you're like, Wow, I made that huge thing.

It's like if you drop a penny off the Empire State Building or something.

Yeah. They say it would crush a cab. I don't know if that's true. I think they told us that as kids to tell us not to throw pennies.

I didn't put this in the book, but fuck it. We did hit the hood of a car, and there was this... It sounded like a tank blast. Sure. It was on the 10th floor.

It's so telling because that is something you do as a kid. That's what kids do. They make little balls of toilet paper and throw it at things. It's so reflective of him.

Well, he was playing laser tag. You said he was more kid-like than you. He's just a child.

Do you remember the first time you went, because you're wonderful and young, sharper image, that first laser pen light that shone that long infrared pen. They just decided that nobody ever needs that thing. So it was discontinued.

I think it was also dangerous for your eyes.

Everything about it was wrong. Michael Jackson, he obviously had incredible lasers and shit on tour. The guy who built those lasers for him, built him his own little box that you could plug in the wall. It was about this big a metal, and it shown a single green laser that probably shown hundreds of feet because he was playing in fucking arenas and stadiums. So we were running around and holding it up to the window and shining it eight floors down. But nobody had ever seen that. The only thing you can compare it to would be the thing on an uzie, the site thing. We're shining it on the street, and there's a guy walking the dog. The guy can't see anything and the dog just like, oh, like kicking out things. It's terrible. Everything about it. I would never do that now. Yeah, that was what he wanted to do. In an absurd foreshadowing of who has to become, I was just like, this funny game is great. Michael, give us a baseline. I want to go back and make a demo. My stepdad had a studio where I made demos. I remember Michael actually did this thing.

Of course, I'll never forget. It was so Michael. He did the arm out, snapped, started to sing this bass line that went, I was like, Okay, it's a little ripped off from smooth Criminal, but we'll take it. And made a whole fucking song from this bass line that Michael Jackson gave us.

This is shocking. This is a shocking the way to go out.

It's a bonkers. Yeah, you could have never done anything and still written this book, and I would have read it.

I'm impressed that you were able to keep these things to yourself when you went to school. Most people learn that the hard way.

I'm going to attempt to frame this whole thing, or at least what I extrapolated from it was like, Oh, yeah, people who see seek control for comfort really desperately find these outlets of control. I found one, you found one, you found one. The very first time you experienced it, though, was at the wedding of your mom and Mick.

Yeah. My mom and Mick got married when I was 10, and they had this pretty mellow wedding. I think there was like 40 people in the garden in this house that they were renting. There was no band. There was nothing. There was just music playing through some big speakers. And back then, there were these giant double cassette deck with auto reverse. That's how you would keep the music on the whole time. And the music just stopped out of nowhere. Mick looked at me and was like, Ma, go put something on. I was so excited. Obviously, felt this grand responsibility. Ran in the house, and I loved fucking anything that had to do with equipment and playing something, electronic equipment, cueing a song. I was looking through all these tapes on the floor in this mad rush, and I saw these things that were not appropriate. Then I just saw Eric Clapton, Timepiece is the greatest hits, and I thought, Oh, Wonderful Tonight. That seems like a great song for now. Even at 10, in my little mind of understanding what love in a wedding is supposed to be. My mom loves that song, and that's a great song for her.

So I quickly threw it in, hit play. And then I was just in the house, and I could see through the windows. And I remember hearing the beginning of the song, and just having this rush like, whoa, music is playing outside and everybody has to listen to the song that I picked. And now it's making this moment. Mick grabbed my mom and brought her in for this little slow dance. It is one of my earliest more formative things because it's the first time I ever I remember it being like, I did something right. I could maybe be good at this. I like that.

I did something right.

Of course, when you start to write these books in your own earth, these memories, then you suddenly realize, oh, that's fucking how it started.

But again, this is like when Bill Gates was living next to the computer, the first computer. It's the same thing. You have this-Thank you for comparing me to Bill Gates. Yes, you are welcome.

Well, his talent matched with-Proximity.

Living next door to Gershwin. Yes. He had a horrible home life. His mom treated him like she wish she would been born, but his neighbor was Gershwin. That's where he would go over a lot of the time and would... Gershian of Hammerstein.

There are these beautiful happenstances. It's amazing.

You start messing with the stuff. Thank God, again, we had much different stepdads. He was like, Yeah, do whatever you want. It was a little playground for you. You learned how to do that stuff. Yeah. $200,000 fucking synthesizer. He did.

He had a $200,000 synthesizer called the sing Clavier, which they made owner of a lonely heart on. All these crazy records from that era. I I just figured it out. How to recreate Terrence Trent, Darby, Wishing Well, was the song I was obsessed with. I was like, I can figure out if I do the drums first, kick in the snare, and I found that sound, and I'm going to make that. I remember being so proud of it and bringing in one of my mom's friends at one of those parties, like one in the morning, being like, Come in. Listen to this thing that I made, and just hitting play, and someone being like, Yeah, kid, it's Wishing Well. But no, I did it. I did it. Learning how to use this equipment also drawn to the solitude of it. I'm alone in here. Nobody can fuck with me. And then as I got more into hip hop, as a teenager, there were three rappers in my school, and I said, Come over, I'll make you a beat, because my stepdad had an early proto sampler that a tribe called Quest and Gangstar used. I'm sure he had taken out of the box and barely touched it once, but I taught myself how to use it and made this beat for my friend.

So yes, he was very, very amazing about encouraging and fostering my thing.

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The town of Agde in France is famous for sun, sand, sea, and sex. But lately, life on the Coast has taken a strange turn. The town's mayor, a respected pillar of the community, has been arrested for corruption. His wife claims he's been bewitched by a beautiful clairvoyant. Then there's the mysterious phone calls that local people have been getting.

I am the Archangel Michael.

The whole town has been thrown into chaos.

As the mayor is unable to carry out his duties, I would like to address you all. Legal proceedings have been initiated.

Join me, Anna Richardson, and journalist Leo Chic for The Mystic and the Mayor, as we investigate a story of power, corruption, and magic. Binge all episodes of The Mystic and the Mayor, exclusively and ad free right now on WNDYRY Plus. Start your free trial in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the WNDYRY app.

One other party story, because there's something interesting within this party story, I think. So I didn't even know this, but I deduce that Andy Warhol had extensive diaries.

Yes.

You found a diary entry.

Yeah. I think I maybe knew that he had come over, but the Andy Warhol diaries came out, and he'd just extensively diary, even to the most mundane things of his life, everything he ever did. And there was page 637. I remember I would go into Barnes & Nobles with friends like, You guys want to see something cool? I'd reach for the top shelf and bring this heaviest fuck brick of a book down and flip to the page. I'm not going to do any Warhol's voice. It was like, Went to a party at Anne Jones's house. She lived uptown.

It actually says Anne Ronson.

She says Anne Ronson. That's right.

That's what I'm most interested. Right. He didn't I'm going to Mick Jones's house.

No, I think he probably had more friends in common with my mom, and she was this glittery rock and roll socialite. So that was the connection.

Well, it says a few things. It's like he was obsessed with whatever you'd call those girls, scenesters. Yes. Forget the foreigner guitarist. Yeah. Then it was also telling that your mother had her own persona and identity in the city. Definitely.

Then he says there was no food there, only something called chicken sushi. In my mind, I'm like, chicken sushi just sounds like chalmonelle. That's just literally raw chicken. That's not a thing.

I had it for the first time three weeks ago in Nashville, but it was cooked Nashville hot chicken inside a sushi, and it was- It was cooked.

Okay. That's interesting.

I doubt anyone was selling Salmonelle Sushi.

I did a record with this group called The Black Lips, this group from Atlanta. There is this just amazing punk rock kids who make great music. They are as nihilistic with their stage behavior as they are with their intestines. They once took me out to eat something called liver sushi, which nearly killed me because that was just rolled over.

Were they idolizing the Lever King or something?

This was before the Lever King.

Okay, pre-Lever King. But I enjoyed that, though. But we'll fast forward a little bit. You start playing guitar. You're friends with Sean. There's another guy in the mix whose dad's restaurant tour.

Max Leroy, whose dad owned Tavern on the Green and these very iconic New York restaurants.

So the three of you guys had a band, Nets Going Swimmingly, and then those two go to boarding school in Europe. You join another band, but these guys are way too good. They're informative to where you need to go next.

They were great. It was so much fun to hook up with these other young kids who liked all the same weird music that I did. And we had this band, but technically, they were shredders. They were fucking great. I was just an overachieving B minus musician. You know the cheesy part in the gig where everyone takes a solo, and it would get to my part and be like, please someone pull the fire alarm. Anything. I don't want to do my fucking bluesy bullshit. I just started to get a little disenchanted with it. I was like, This can't be my calling. As much as I want to be Slash, I'm not a fucking lead guitarist. That dovetailed with me falling in love with hip hop, really head over heels and being like, Okay, this is what I want to be doing now.

Now, this might be my favorite thing I read. Just reading the thing, I was stopping and listening to all these different songs, which was great. But My very favorite group in high school is the Brand New Heavies.

Oh, wow.

I love the Brand New Heavies. That's so cool. Nobody was liking the Brand New Heavies in high school.

No, that's very cool. And we're high school in Michigan. In Michigan. In Michigan. Yeah.

The notion that you were that into them when you're 15 or 16, and you get to go to a club and see them is wild.

I snuck into this club at 3: 00 in the morning. There was this thing called the New Music Cafe, which was like the equivalent of maybe South by Southwest vibes in New York in that era. And they would have shows. And I would sneak in anywhere if it meant going to see a band. Or I would get a job at the high school paper reviewing concert so I can convince my mom. Like, No, I'm not going out. It's because I'm writing about it. But the guy who threw these great parties that brought Brando Heavies and Jimmerica and all these bands to New York the first time had a party called Giant Step, and I would bug him all the time. You should let my band play. My band had the worst name. We were called the Whole Earth Mommas.

It's really the worst name I've ever heard. It's really the worst name I've ever heard. I was trying to find how it could have even been funny, but it's not even quite funny. It's not funny. It's a miss.

It's a total miss. He used to be like, What's your band's name again? Mother Earth's Garden Bistro, whatever the fuck. I basically finagled us a gig because I'd hored out my best friend, Sean Lennon. He was like, I'm not putting on my gig. The bill's full. I was like, What if I got my friend Sean? He was like, Sean who? I was like, Sean Lennon. And of course, at that time, Sean was only 15. The entire world was still moaning. His dad, he was the golden prince. People were very fascinated. And I threw him under the bus. It was terrible. And then we got the gig because I said Sean would come play with us. Then I went and told Sean half of the story. I said, We got this gig. Do you want to come play with us? And he came and played. And I wrote this chapter. I had to send it to Sean. I was like, I don't know if I ever told you this story. We've been friends for 30 years since. There's no way that he would have been probably still upset at this time. But there was a lot of that in the book, when you have to go back to people and be like, I don't think I ever told you this.

Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah, it was a little shady.

Is it shady? He was in the band.

No, he wasn't in the band. No, he wasn't in the band.

He's with this new shredder band.

Yeah, no. The shittiest name ever. He was not in the band.

He said that, I'm not in this band, when he said, Will you He's like, I feel weird. I'm not in.

I don't even like your Ben.

The reason it's sensitive is it's like he's probably already dealing with people are very interested in him because of his dad. He just lost his dad. Now my friend is trading on that. That could be hurtful. Of course. I'm glad you admitted that.

Was he like, It's fine. We're good?

Absolutely. It was much more than that. It was so lovely sharing these stories that we haven't even talked about in four years. It's like, Oh, now it makes so much sense why we are friends and a family and where we came from. But the gig sucked anyway. Sean was amazing. So it was just a good lesson. Don't tell your friends. Don't get a gig that you haven't really earned on your own fucking talent.

When do techniques come into the mix? How do we go from musician to DJ.

Yeah. My drummer in my band was like, You got to check this song out. Leaving the gig that sucked. It was Pete Rock and CL Smooth, They Reminish Over You. And I was just like, This is incredible. I knew hip hop because I knew the BC Boys and Run DMC and LL Cool J and whatever on TV, but I'd never heard this underground type of shit. And I was like, This is all I want to be about from now on. And I didn't know how to rap or make beats. So I was like, DJing, that's the only way I can see myself into this thing where I can just be part of this music I'm obsessed with. There was an all ages rave party in New York at the time called NASA, and there was a side room, which was so crazy to think that there was a time pre-Giuliani in New York where a thousand kids from the ages of 13 to 17 could go and take so many drugs and stay up till seven in the morning, like Lord of the Fly style. And that was allowed. They played mostly techno, but there was a side room where I saw this DJ named Ani, like Ani, who murdered this hip hop set.

I just remember watching him transfix because I'd only heard people do it on the radio, but I hadn't seen how the hands and what it was doing. Then I just became obsessed. And four months later for graduation, I hound at my mom and she got me turntables.

Are you doing drugs during this time? Yeah.

What drugs are we I was a really good boy because there was something so polite and meticulously over-managed in my brain that I would never fully let go.

But then I think I discovered acid. I was 15. I liked acid and things like that through high school. And then later discovered cocaine, like 19, 20. But the raves that we're going to is ecstasy and the acid.

The whole time I'm reading it, I'm an addict, right? So I'm like, Oh, yeah, I would have loved to have been there. You would have died. Also, I would have died. The times I almost died were always trips to New York City after I was on TV. If you'd like, you don't ever have to stop.

I had the more dangerous thing, arguably, where I never nearly died, but it was like the frog in the slowly boiling pot of water. And then When I had a lot of hang-ups in neurosis, but the drug thing was very strange for me because I did drugs in my 18, 19s, 20s. Coke, at that age, it was just a new thing. It's like that scene in basketball diaries when Leo does it the first time. He's like, Whoa, I could stay up all night writing and this is fun. What hangover. My cells regenerate like nothing. Yeah, totally. Then '23, '24, I started to cue these intense anxiety attacks. I think it was probably hangups of reliving my parents' life, having seen what it had done to that household. There was a weird thing where I was definitely getting as obliterated as possible to somehow push aside all my neuroses and things so I could just forget about that. But then, weirdly, the neuroses would never fully go away because they come back to then give me the panic attack that would happen after I did it. So it even got to the point where one night I remember doing drugs with friends and having the instant panic attack.

I'd be in the corner of the club. I'm not sure I'm all right. Can you just keep an eye on me? I talk about my friend Simon Rex at the time. We were going out together a lot. Take me home from the club, sit by my bedside till I fell asleep. Oh, man. One of those nights happened, and the next day I found out that we had bought fucking talcum powder.

Oh, my God.

No.

So I'm like, I It was so psychosomatic at some point that I was like, wow, something else is being pushed up. Now, did I stop? No. It took me another 15 years. Yeah, you're going to push on. But yeah, I had this weird thing. I could never get fucked up before I DJ because I wanted to be fucking great and I wanted to be on point. I'd probably drink a shitload. But then as soon as it was done, 3: 30, literally is the last record on maybe texting the dealer or finding out where the after-party is. Then I just wanted to fucking go and lose my mind. Yeah.

Tom Arnold said it most beautifully and honestly in his autobiography I read, which was, Luckily, I was more addicted to becoming famous than I was coked because there's no way anything would have ever been stronger than coked. If not, I was way more addicted to trying to be famous, which can mean just successful.

Yeah. Do you ever look at your kids now and think, Look where I am now. You've lived all these lives, and now you're here with these little sweet people. Yeah.

We got away with what I would call.

I didn't set out to write to excavate those parts of my life necessarily. And then halfway through the book, I was like, this book is going to be a little disingenuous. If I call it Night People and talk about the crack, people go out at night and don't talk about my demons and these things. And I think it'll be maybe a better book for it, for me. Definitely. For me, more personal. Definitely. My wife, at some point reading it, she didn't say it in the way that she was judging. She just was being really honest and open. She's like, It's funny you had to write this really personal book. What do you think it was? And I was like, I don't know. A lot of the characters in it are no longer with us. There's this idea of celebrating not It's only an era that's gone, but people that are gone. And then the epilog is the only thing that takes place in the present day where I'm walking around New York with my daughter strapped to me and the baby Bjorn, seeing the clubs that used to be in weird ghosts of the past.

And yeah, of course, I'm thinking like, God, Should I even put my daughter? Is she going to read this? Is it either just going to be something embarrassing that my fucking dad wrote when I was two? Or is it going to be something that's too expositional or it's going to give her a license to be like, You were doing this, dad. What fucking Pandora's box I've opened, I don't know. But you have to do it for these reasons that you don't really know at the time.

I journal every day, and I'm dead honest, and I fully intend for them to receive all those when I die. I only want for them to know the whole me.

How old are they?

They are currently 10 and 12. I just want to be honest with that. I don't know how having had that and then also keeping that from them is somehow a win. I can't find my way to how that's logical. I'm going to present a fraudulent version of myself to the person I love the most on this planet, the two people. That It feels broken in premise.

No, totally. I never really in mind, listen, if the worst repercussion is ever if she fucking breaks curfew one time, then, Dad, you were fucking doing it after the limelight when you were 15. That's also fine.

How long does it take you to get proficient?

I was so ambitious. I was definitely practicing all the time, but I got a big lucky break because my dad lost all his money to a shitty business manager. We moved uptown to this rental apartment. But listen, it's still a nice fucking rental apartment. We live in the same building with Peter Gation, the Club King of New York at that time. He had a limelight Club USA Tunnel, Platium. Both of his daughters are friends of mine, but at the time, Amanda, we had mutual friends. And she was like, My dad's going to give me Club USA on a Thursday, which was the It was the coolest fucking club. It was like a midtown. It had this three-story water slide that went through the middle. Oh, wow. It was just like the most fucking celebby meets depraved. All the other clubs had their own depravity, but this was right in the middle of the theater district. So it was this unholy love child of Broadway camp and total Times Square Sleeze. It was very cool.

We need to do two seconds on what Broadway looked like then. Because I'll tell people, I used to go to that city with my mom on a three-day trip with my brother and my little sister. It was fucking terrifying.

No, you were saying at the Milford Plaza, you were right in the center of it all. There was no fucking M&M story. Your mom was like, grabbing your hands, tight me like, In here, kids.

We all held hands very tightly. There were lots of pimps and hookers. There was lots of drugs.

It was fucked, and it was also amazing. And I got this gig playing there. And I probably wasn't primed-time ready yet, but I was good enough. I knew how to read a room. And then I went away to Vasse college for a year, which was my 10,000 hours, just playing the campus bars, every fucking TA party, house party, doing the radio station. When I came back, I had moved up several levels. But my ambition always probably outstripped my ready ability to be on those stages for the first couple of years, for sure.

Well, you've already demonstrated you have great ambition. When you ask Michael Jackson for a beat, it's a very ambitious person. When you get yourself on a show you do not deserve to be on, that's ambition. It's funny because you look back on these things with embarrassment, but then there's also this thing where you also have to You have to be delusional. I don't know how to make the scale right, but it's like, I'm embarrassed by the delusion and I needed it.

Yeah, thank God. I was this brash, ballsy kid. I wasn't brash in the way that I was considered, but I would have that demo in my back pocket. Any promoter like, Hey, put me on. Yeah. Then I think three years into it, then I was good, and I was very knowledgeable of all the old funk and soul that the hip hop samples came from. I play that in parties. People were really coming to see me for that as well. My real breakthrough moment was I played ACDC in a fucking hip hop club where nobody ever did that and then changed everything in that scene in New York at that time. No kidding. There was a party called Cheetah on a Monday night. It was like Missy Elliott, Janet Jackson. Let's not skirt around it. Puff, Jay-Z, Biggie, everybody went there. I played there one Monday, and I remember at the time there was this very trendy nightclub in New York called Spy. Spy Bar was the most trendy. It was this guy, King at the door. It was Leo, Titanic had just come out. Anywhere that he went was now the spot. Mariah Carey, Donald Trump getting turned away at the door.

I'm sure he got in sometimes as well. But this was this wild scene. I would only get in half of the time because I'm still this gangly kid. It's getting a little known in the scene. Oh, I want to get in the time machine.

Go to those places.

This is so That's fine.

The DJs there were not very good, but they played insane rock and roll and very loud. I was in there one night and they played AC/DC Back in Black. What a song. And it tore the fucking house down. Also because, yes, I'm a privileged kid from the Upper West Side, but most of the clubs I was DJing for were much more mixed. And watching all these drunk white people, probably to the girls, going crazy to AC/DC Back in Black, I was like, This is an incredible song. Why have I not thought about this? So the seed has planted. I'm like, I wonder if I could play this at you on a Monday night that turns into I have to play it. But also I could fully get a bottle of champagne thrown at my head. This was a place they didn't play. You played some shit that didn't- Yeah, risky. Didn't go down. And also I'm only making my way coming up in this scene. I don't really have the status to jeopardize it all on one day. I got to have had a bad night and you're back down to the bottom of the ladder.

I worked out this mix all week that was going to be this perfect way that the Benjamins, this song by Biggie and Puff was the biggest song at the time. There was a very cheesy rock and roll remix that had just come out where I was like, Okay, on the Biggie verse, I'm going to switch to the fucking rock remix and no, really stop dancing because it's still Biggie, even though it's got these cheesy metal guitars. Right when Biggie stops his verse, squeeze off till I'm empty all about the Benjies. The greatest rip in the history of rock 'n' roll. The club, there was this split second, like fucking in the movie where it's slow, everyone's like, Huh? And then the thing that I learned is if you keep the rhythm on beat, you can play the most wild shit. But people don't have time to stop dancing. They don't have a time to think like, should I be dancing? If it's good, they're just going with it. There was this split second, what the fuck is happening? Then just everyone surrender. It was this wonderful moment in this club. From that moment, I'd been copying all these DJs that I had hero worship, Stretch Armstrong, Clark Kent, all these other people, but doing exactly what they had done, just a slightly different version of it.

This was suddenly my own new thing. Then I started playing AC/DC and Led Zeppelin and Jane's Addiction and everything else. And that became like, Oh, he's the guy that mixes rock with all this shit.

You have an identity now.

Everything that I do that nobody else does. And while AM was also coincidentally carving that out on the West Coast, but we didn't really know so much about each other at that time. Then we became great friends. And so that was it. And then suddenly I'd be playing at these clubs, and it'd be like Method Man and Lil Kim, where I'm playing Joe and Jet. It's Method Man swinging his shirt over his head. And those things sound so like, don't bat an eyelid now because that's what it became open format. But at the time, it was remarkable.

Talk about feeling powerful in that moment.

And if you can have your idols in the club, if you have people who you admire and you respect and you're taking them for a ride. Yeah.

Oh, the validation. No, that was crazy, too. And this club Life that I played in the late '90s, this shitty ass fucking DJ booth, it was basically like a mobile bar mitzvah DJ set up. That was the other thing that was just the underlying thing in the book. You'd be in the fanciest clubs around the fanciest people ever, and you would literally be playing on a plastic table from Kmart because you'd be these side rooms. The big main room DJs were really fancy, but they were playing house and techno and whatever they were doing. But watching Jay-Z toast, and he has every big song in New York at the time, and you're playing these rooms, and your heroes are in front of you. Yes.

Oh, wow. I would imagine, too, what people might not know about the DJ life is that it's a perfect addiction to avoid neurosis because you don't just have the night time. In the daytime now, you're rapidly combing through every single collection of vinyl you can find. All day long, you have this one activity that's just so consuming, and it's dopamine, and it's like, this song, this song sucks. Food, new album. You can hide beautifully in this new pursuit.

Back then as well, if you wanted the cool new records, you had to literally go up to every record label and grovel for these promos, and you could spend two days of the week just going to a lecture in an Atlantic. Now it's ridiculous because you can get everything with a click of a mouse. But you would go up there like fucking Oliver. Excuse me, sir. Can I have some more? With your little flyers, and they'll be like, Why should I give you this record? Will I do this on Tuesday, this on Thursday? If they were lucky, you get one record. If they really liked you, they give you two copies of that record.

Are you so happy you came up then instead of now?

I'm so grateful for coming up in that era, and I tried so hard to fight, though. It was better then. But yes, coming up in this era where you had to really hunt down your I'm grateful for it. I'm grateful for everything that it taught me about music and what then became my tool bed as a producer. I'm grateful for how difficult and the hustle.

Well, yeah, just talk about the records. You're four nights a week. You've got to get how many milk crates of records?

There's about three or four. So they each have 80 records in them. They each weigh about 60 pounds. I had friends to do it. I thought I could do it by myself last week because I had a gig in New York, and I was like, I'll just bring a crate in a bag. And my back was just so fucked up. Going down to this basement club and then back up at the end, trying to maneuver through like 500 people. I haven't had back problems like that in a long time. It was nothing to do it back then.

Yeah. And how are you getting from your apartment to these Are you taking a cab with all your records?

Back then, obviously, God, this all sounds like that. In my day, before Uber and that shit, and you lived on a funny block where maybe cabs didn't go by, there was this one Spanish car service called DeLancey.

Would you use to call a gipsy cab if you stopped yourself.

You would call a gipsy cab? Yeah, you would call it. Then it was a gipsy cab. Then you were up to their mercy of... They would say seven minutes, but you don't know if it's 13 minutes and you're calling these things. You would have to pronounce it more like with a Spanish accent, so they would understand because there was a street called Troutman that I have to go to in Brooklyn, and they only understood it as Troutman. You have to make sure the car was not coming. Sometimes you have three gigs a night and you'll be calling the car service on the way out. It was fucking amazing, though. I do really love it. Yeah.

Now, we're blessed that there were no cameras back there. That's another thing. It's like the anonymity that existed. I'm nostalgic for. And yet also I'm heartbroken that there's no video of you the first time you played AC/DC. I also want to see that moment.

At the end of the book, I'm walking with my daughter, and we do see some old club because that just always happens. I'm like, What was this place? She's older, but this time she was 18 months and the baby beyond. And she's happy as long as I'm fucking talking to her the whole time. She doesn't care what the fuck I'm saying. I'm This is a club, and this is then Dada played music. And she's like, Dada, music. And I'm thinking like, Oh, she'll never see me do that thing when I was at my best because of the absence of surveillance is how I coined it. And it's sad because you want to have these videos because it is fun to look at it, but it made everyone a lot more maybe present at the time as well.

Yes. Definitely. You've also done enough shit.

Yeah, exactly. They can hear the music you've made.

Yeah, and there's music videos and whatever else. But right now I'm trying to see, is there enough to make a little doc to put out around when the book is there. But there's so little... There's footage from the big rave scenes in the super clubs. But the cool shit about our scene in this thing is it was just all being discovered. We did have Jay Zee and Wesley Snipes and Leo in the club, but it was still at this little place. You really had to know to go to this place.

Yes. I imagine there's a ton of heartbreak throughout that period, though, too. It's fun and it's fast and it's glamorous, but people are going down.

People are going down, especially Especially since then. Yes, of course, there were people that I worship from afar and that were at the club, Biggie, who I didn't have a personal relationship. But of course, his death left an outsize loss on our whole scene. But I decided to write this book, actually, because one of my I was friends in that era, this DJ named Blue Gems. He passed away in 2018 from cancer. And someone had asked me to DJ a party that was going to be a posthumous celebration of his life one night. And I started to think about all these memories and sitting among all my old records. Fuck, I should start getting these memories down before they were really gone forever. But honestly, while I was writing the book, there'd be a chapter. I'm going to call that guy. I'm going to call DJ Never next month because we're going to write the chapter about that. I want to ask him. He passed away before. There were four or five people that I was literally about to call the next month. There's something very strange for a scene that's not rife with maybe heroine and things you associate with people dying before they should.

The lifestyle is not a healthy lifestyle. I was obviously had advantages going into it and then coming out. I've obviously done fine, but reconnecting because I interviewed and called 150, maybe 200 people for this book because I really wanted to paint the scene and remember anecdotes and trigger memories. Some people's lives have been shitty since then, or maybe not since then, but the last 5 or 10 years. And you don't want to just be like, Yeah, I'm great. Any fun memories of us?

Do you have survivor's guilt? I don't even mean literal life or death. I feel like there's some guilt associated with You're not always succeeding when you're in tiny groups of people that are all trying.

I do. And you want to tell that person, you're caring, you are engaged with what they're doing in their life. And then half an hour later, you're talking about old memories and stuff. Djs are not quite like comics, but I have a whole chapter towards the end because we started to hang out at the cellar a lot because just like it was a golden age for nightclubbing in New York, the cellar was Atel, and Shapel, and Jeff Ross was starting and Godfrey and Arti Fouqua and Patrice Neil. There was this thing happening there. Most musicians are frustrated. Athletes are comedians anyway. We love going to their sets, and then they would come out to our shit. But there's so many similarities between comedians and DJs to me. I mean, there's the most obvious thing. Djs call it rhythm. You guys call it timing. The difference between bombing and fucking killing is a hair's breadth of precision. Then we play clubs.

Do you think a civilian would know when you're bombing or not? Do you think some of it's in your head?

No, I think there's times. Some of it's in my I could be doing what maybe to the room looks like a seven and a half or an eight, and no one's going to go ahead for the exits, but I just hate that I'm not at a nine and a half. I'm like, Why are they not here? But those neuroses going home, and you don't think about all the people that were laughing. I don't think about all the people that had their hands in the air. I'm just thinking about that one person with the arms crossed in the middle who was just like, Really? Fucking Sylvester. So all my DJ friends, of course, there wasn't one personality type, but we were intense, neurotic, very craft, obsessed about what we did. Moving your head a lot.

Yeah, not to circle back to neurodivergent, but there might be some element of that.

Yeah. I think that's the other thing that we felt a link to in our friends that were comics. There was this thing. I wanted to talk about some of those things. I read so many fucking memoirs while I was writing this. More famous DJs than me have written memoirs. I've weirdly written about this period of my life, almost when I was my least famous. But I don't know if anyone's written about that dichotomy of intense validation ego and the energy of bringing this room up. And then just at the end of the night, you're the only person in this room and the highs and lows of that.

You're constantly putting on a party that you're not participating in, which is interesting.

Which I liked because I was never fully comfortable in the parties.

It was your way to be at a party.

Yes. I would go into the club and I would feel like occasionally a fish out of water without someone else's DJ, and then instantly, I'd be like, Much prefer it back there.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare.

There's these different occupations where it breeds competition and others that breed community.

So weirdly, sketch and improv comedians are very communal because it's all shared. They're two. You cannot win on your own. And the comedians, when I did stand up, the green room at the Green Room at The fucking comedy club is rough. Everyone's shooting daggers. They enjoy it. I came from sketch, so I never liked that part.

Shooting daggers, then everyone's just busting each other's balls in.

Yes, just going for each other, trying to shine, trying to dominate. Very competitive. Yeah, very competitive. And then what I've liked learning as showrunners of television shows because it's such an impossible job. It is the very hardest job in show business. Those people get along so well, all of them. Even if someone's show running a comedy versus someone's show running some major drama or a sci-fi, I think the job is so specific. They understand each other so well. I do wonder, DJs, where do you put them on that spectrum?

There was probably a mix. There was definitely a really strong community amongst the DJs. I had all my best friends from school and high school and college, and it started to be like, oh, wait, but they don't wake up at 2: 00 in the afternoon. Their idea of a perfect day isn't going through a flea market combing for dusty breaks. Also DJs have this weird, intense know-it-all-ness to them because your whole life is knowing what fucking weird ass jazz song, Fat Joe sample for this bit. It's the good know it all in that way. The know it all that could tell you, where did they still get a Chinese meal at 4: 00 AM in New York City or do you scramble the porn channels on a Time Warner box. That's what all my friends somehow knew how to do. I like them. And nobody thought about tomorrow. Nobody really had bank account. Everybody started to have cash stashed in a shoe box somewhere. Maybe it was under the mixer because you're getting paid in cash. So you always go to bed thinking, I'll wake up in tomorrow's the new day. But what the fuck is tomorrow when you go to bed at 5: 00 AM every day?

It's already tomorrow.

Just tonight's coming.

It's just tonight. It's like Groundhog's Day, but with Method Man and Debbie Mazer instead of Andy McDonald and Bill Murray. We were all drawn to each other because we saw these same things. But then we also had our share of competition and hatering and that thing, too.

Who were you jealous of?

Not that jealous in the beginning because I was the dude coming up that some people were a little bit irked by my slip stream. With AM, I wasn't jealous because his skills were just on such another level that it would be like being like, I'm jealous of Eddie Van Halen. It's like, come on. But I remember being shook by seeing his talent because we were both at about the same talent level. And then AM got sober and spent about a year in his room practicing to old DMC videos and doing all this DJ competition shit. I came there and I saw him do this thing and I was like, Oh, my reign at the top is looking a little shaky. But also, I love I loved him and I was so excited to watch. I was like, Come to New York, you got to do this shit. People are going to be blown away. We would steal each other's mixes. We were such good friends. I wasn't truly going to be jealous or competitive.

Do you think you were liberated from chasing money by your childhood? Because I think the station you had reached as a DJ, and increasingly so, became this insanely lucrative thing. I would have just stayed there because it was such an incredible source of income. But that probably wasn't all that appealing to you.

I guess so. I definitely came for money. I was never going to have to worry about living out on the street. But also it wasn't wild money where my rent was paid. There was a safety net. But at that time, I was just doing this thing that I love so much at this young age where you just have the blinders on and you're not really thinking about tomorrow. The money started to get good towards the end of the '90s, but it wasn't crazy money. It wasn't the money like what AM was making.

You basically left that to pursue something else. At a moment that you could have really hunkered down on that and just generated a ton of money, basically.

I see DJing as this really beautiful footnote in something that then obviously became more, but I always wanted to make music. Then I got this sidetrack from this passion of hip hop that took me to DJing. And then it fully took over my life for five or six years because I realized I was good at it and I loved doing it. And then I somehow found my way back to making music, weirdly, through DJing. Dominic Trenier was this incredible, very cool record industry, A&R guy who managed D'Angelo and had this artist, Nika Costa.

You did a couple of Nika Costa songs, right?

I did her first album with her and her husband. But I got that gig because Dawn would come to my gigs. And when I was playing AC/DC and Biggie and Rufus and Shaka Khan, and he spoke with this amazing rasp. He was like, Yo, I got this white chicken. I don't know what the album is supposed to sound like, but it's supposed to sound like one of your DJ sets. You make beats? I just totally lied. I was like, Yeah, sure. I didn't lie. I was making beats, but nothing that had fucking moved the needle. And then he brought Nika over, and she saw enough promise, and he did, and he was patient enough to watch me get better. And then with the course of 18 months, we made her first record. But weirdly, DJing was this side note that then became the thing that gave him my first gig.

It's crazy when you reach our age, which will be 50 in 5 seconds, and I'm like, Oh, I thought comedy was my thing. I'm funny. I wasn't Will Farrell and I wasn't Vince Vawn, but I made a living and I was good at it. And I was No, I'm actually a good writer and director. That's my thing. And then it's only to come here now for the last eight years and go like, Weirdly, I think, really, I just need to do all that stuff so I could have these conversations with all these people because I played in all these areas. It's weird to have misleading little gifts along the way before you find this thing that's like, Oh, Jesus. Well, this is what I was clearly born to do.

Now, going back to DJing and because of this book has somehow made me want to be out there and reliving this thing and having so much fun at the gigs. But my tinnitus, I think it probably has something to do with the way your cells regenerate. It's so much worse after these gigs and the ringing is oppressive. I'm like, Actually, DJing might be a fucking luxury because my ears are my livelihood, I want to be scoring films and writing and producing music for the rest of my life. Every gig that I go out and do, I actually feel a bit like fucking Jackson Maine, right? And Star is born and he's like, We can't get you back what you lost. We can keep what you have or whatever the fuck. His brother says to him, I'm going to these gigs now with 85% psych to be about to be playing and 15% incredibly nervous. What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I risking? What am I risking?

We'll just do a couple more so I can come. That's all I'm asking. We'll just risk it a little bit more.

We're going to do a fun one in LA around the release of the book for sure. Oh, my God.

I'm going to make sure. I'm going to dance. I will not be with arms crossed.

I'm going to dance your pants off.

Are you plagued by people trying to let you know they know a lot about music? Even as I talk to you, it's important to me you know I was in a brand new Hebbies.

That's fucking cool because that is a deep cut. And the brand new Hebbies are amazing. Yes, there was definitely this thing, but luckily in a club, the music is so loud and you can just feign that you can't really hear somebody.

And increasingly, you can't.

Yeah, and now it actually can. And people would come to the booth. Definitely, sometimes either they thought you were Kocech or the bar. That happened a lot. Oh, really? Yeah. And then are you friendly with Jordan Rubin? No, never mind. Jordan Rubin is a really great friend of He's a comedian. He introduced me to the world of the Comedy Salter because he's playing at that time. He also liked DJing in these gigs. He would always have these much funnier than I could think of gags for what I should be doing. If someone came up to ask for a request, he's like, This is what you do. You just be like, Didn't you see the sign? Who took the song? I just saw this stupid show. People would come up and ask for track 12 on the 50 Cent album, things like that. The birthday song.

Oh, did you see the Avita? Is that the DJ's His name? Avichi. No. Avichi.

Did you see that doc? I didn't get to see the Avichi thing, and I know it's quite heavy. I'm definitely going to see it. People have told me. I didn't know that he had all those humans.

I don't know anything about DJs. I literally know you're a DJ and your sister and then I am, and that's why to a full extent. I don't know how I stumbled upon that doc. I just was going through Netflix and I watched it. It talks about his addiction, but I think what is the bigger addiction and the thing that I was watching and relating to and the danger in this, and I think you were saved from this a bit, is when you want something so bad and they turn on the fucking light switch, it is almost impossible to not go to that show, to that show, to that show, to meet that guy. Oh, he wants to work with you. He wants to work with you. She wants to work with you. Yes, yes, yes, I wanted this. That is the addiction that's completely untenable that you can completely lose yourself to.

Before I settled down and got my life together, and I was still in my early '40s, probably just post-up town funk, I'd had other moments in my life back to black, came out that you're suddenly the guy when it works with you. You can't turn any of this down because you've been busting your house for it so long, and suddenly there's this thing. I was DJing so much at that time. I remember reading so many articles when Avichi first passed. Of course, Demons for Rock and Roll people has been as old as Rock and Roll itself. But the difference between DJing is very specific. There is always a festival in the world somewhere, so you can always be touring. If it's not here, it's fucking in New Zealand and Australia, and you can fly and be playing every single night if you want to, mixed with trying to have a production career where you're going to the studio to meet with all these people, mixed with the fact that being in planes so much actually does fuck with your brain because you're literally not a grounded person.

Yes. And your circadian rhythm is all fucked up. You're circadian rhythm.

I was in one of my ropeiest unmoored periods around the time when the Avicci thing happened, too. And I just remember being like, I got to get off this DJ train. Because I've always still DJed since that time, but just in a different way. The news of the Avicci thing, that was disorienting and really a bit of a wake-up.

It was a heartbreaking documentary, but it just made me think of a race car that you would just leave in first gear and just pin it and wait for the motor to explode. That's the unavoidable end to that.

It's a small group of you guys that are at that level that people who don't know the scene know your name. So when they start passing away or falling off, that's like, oh, my God, our club is getting so small.

That's scary. Somehow My friend Diplo, who I sometimes make music with, manages. But I look when he'll post his tour schedule on his thing, and it will give me an anxiety because I'll be like, I don't know how you do that.

It's very hard to say no to the thing you wanted. That's the thing one has to figure out to actually be successful, which is almost impossible to do.

Yes.

Well, Mark, you're rad. This was so fun in person. Yeah, how fun.

Thank you so much. It's so nice to be in person.

Yes. Night People, How to be a DJ in '90s New York City.

The most useless how-to book of all time.

I doubt that. I bet some people are going to gain a lot from it.

It's written so well. It has the frenetic pacing that the environment you're trying to capture has. It's really, really well done. Thank you. That was really fun. Yeah, that was so much fun.

Yeah, thanks for having me back again. I mean, I guess it was three years ago, but I love this show.

Hi there. This is Hermium Hermium. If you like that, you're going to I love the fact check with Ms. Monica. You have a new song, and I want to hear it right away.

No, yeah. We're going to play a game. Okay. For people who don't remember or weren't around at this time, the biggest sim moment of our lives is we were on the phone. Yeah, I was in New York. You were not in this city. I said, There's a song in my head.

It wasn't even that.

Okay.

I was like, What are you doing? You were like, I'm just being weird in my apartment. And I go like, What does weird entail? And you're like, Oh, I've been singing this song out loud, like crazy.

Yes. And then- I said the lyrics, I said to Xanthum gum.

To the word Xanthum gum. Yeah. I go, Was it Xanthum gum? And you screamed. Yeah. You got so freaked out, and you accused me of having cameras in your apartment because I had installed a TV or something.

You'd hacked into my Sonos.

Oh, I installed Sonos.

And you put a device in where you were listening, you were observing me.

Yeah, that was crazy.

It was absolutely crazy. Okay, now I have another song that sometimes I sing, and it's also to a tune of a song, and the lyrics are period.

Oh, man. I'll tell you why I'm afraid to, because we have 100% average right now.

I agree. I agree. And this is... I mean, I would say harder, but how is it harder? It's all-Impossible. Random songs.

But it does, for some reason, the saying, Look a Gift Horse and the Mouse, coming to mind. It feels like Looking a Gift Horse in the mouth. Okay. We don't have to do it. You know why that saying exist?

Yeah, because gifted horses, horses that are gifted, their teeth are pulled. And No. So if you look it in the mouth, it's upset.

It'll run away. It'll get insecure. No, I guess the way you inspected the horse's health back then was to lift up its lips and inspect its gums. That's where you could tell if it was deceased. So if you were buying a horse, you would inspect it to make sure it wasn't deceased. So if someone's giving you a horse, don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Because it's going to be deceased. I'm trying to find out if it has a disease. Yeah, just take the gift, and if it has a disease, you can- Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah. Okay. Okay.

So you don't want to play. Well, just one thing came to mind. There's no way it's it. Okay, let's just get- Because it's just an obscure. But, period, period. I think I want your number, period.

Okay, no, but close.

Okay, so I'm doing Gloria.

Who sings that?

Gloria, Gloria. Yeah. Evangaholafield? Evangelisa? Well, I don't know. If I did it a second time, we'd need to go to some university that studies paranormal activity. Telepathy. Telepathy.

Why don't I give you the artist?

Okay.

Okay. Madonna.

Wow. You know it's so weird? I knew you were going to say Madonna. You did? I did.

Did you?

I swear to God, I almost said Madonna. Okay, so it's period and it's Madonna. I've got to guess. Okay, go ahead, Rob.

Is it, I'm a material girl, but I'm a period girl?

Yeah, period. Period. Living in a period world, period. In a period world.

That's good. Some girls have them, some girls don't. They're called young girls.

No, I just stopped at the main phrase.

Okay, but I'm helping you build out the whole tune.

Oh, I'm good. Well, okay, that didn't go quite as planned, but that's okay. I really did know it was Madonna.

I wish I had said it out loud. I do, too.

Say it and I'll put it in. Okay.

Am I- Wow. Avana Holyfield.

Okay, one thing. Yesterday, I get a text from Kristen. It says, This is our new landline phone. You program numbers in and out so you can be called or called, smiley face. And I looked, I was like, Am I being scammed?

Sure.

Why the fuck do you guys have a landline?

Yeah, there's a great explanation.

Okay. Please do tell.

We were in New York to do Shaquille. There was a phone in the bathroom.

Yes.

They have Kristenristen's number memorized, and they couldn't believe they could pick up the phone and call Kristenristen on that thing.

Yes, that I remember. You do remember that? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So it was a gift to them?

So We're telling, I think, Huey and Hayes, and they say, Oh, we got the boys on landline. And it just goes through the Internet now. So you get these phones, and they just work through the internet. You don't get a pack Bell line run to your house. It's like you already have the Internet, and then you can get these phones. And so, yeah, we got them. And now the girls have a phone. They have it written down. I mean, it's like a whole time traveling thing. They now have a book next to the phone And that's their phone book, and it has everyone's numbers in it they're allowed to call. We can also decide what numbers they can call and which numbers can call us.

Oh, you can block?

Yeah, it's like the only the numbers we've said, which is awesome. So you get no unwanted calls. There can't be any weird predators calling because it's only approved numbers. I was like, whatever, this is crazy. Initially, that was what I thought. I was like, they really need this, but also they're having so much fun with it, and who cares? And it's virtually free because it's over the Internet. So here's what's amazing. I was upstairs editing yesterday, and one of Lincoln's friends were over, and the mom was texting me to say, Hey, actually, if it's not too big of a pain in the neck, it would be helpful if you guys walked my daughter back to school because I'm going there to pick up the other child, blah, blah, blah, blah, will not answer because she doesn't have her Ringer on, nor do I. Can't be, right? There's really no way for me to get a hold of Kristen ever.

Okay.

I'll text her and then just wait. Sometimes it's an hour, whatever. So I'm like, normally I would have to walk out of the studio and go into the house and ask them to walk the kid up to the school. But I was like, Oh, we have a landline inside. So I called the number, it rings loud as fuck in there.

Yeah, that's why people don't have them anymore.

It was great. Delta is like, Hello. They're so excited to answer it.

Do they have cell phones? They do. No. They text me.

If they're on the WiFi at the house, they can text you. But the only way they would be able to call you, I think, is if they FaceTime you.

Okay. That's weird because why wouldn't it be- Because they don't have a cellular plan. But this is through the Internet.

It is, but it's its own thing. Thing that's designed specifically for this. Okay. Maybe you could do, like iMessage call. You couldn't call someone on a non iPhone. You couldn't call another landline from their phone.

They don't need to worry about it.

Because now they have a landline.

No, because no one else has a landline.

Oh, well, Huey and Hayes do. Okay.

Most people don't.

Yeah. Do they have the clear one? Are you upset that there's a landline?

I'm not I'm like, this is so we have to... It's retro. This is so weird.

Yeah, I love it, though. They pick up the phone and they think it's so fun. They've already called their grandma. It's already wonderful because now grandma's getting phone calls.

Do they have a phone that's clear with the... You can see the cables, the colored cables through it. Those are the cool ones.

No, I think the more old fashioned, the better. In fact, I'd like to get us an even heavier one with a rotary dial. It would be the dream.

Are you going to do an answering machine?

Wow, that's an interesting idea. That could be fun. If you're going to have- Outgoing message, This is the shepherd. You hear everyone's voice. Right.

Yeah, that's what it used to be. It goes straight '90s. That's what it used to be.

Yeah. Wow. It's pretty exciting this old technology. We're going to get a crankstart car next. And what else? We're going to get a dio TV, big glass tube, black and white TV living room.

Antenna.

Yeah, with an antenna.

Wow. Well, Okay, that solves that. I figured there was a real reason, but there's not.

No, I mean, it's not. We were existing just fine without it. But I do think it's going to really amplify the calls to grandma. The sound in your home. Yeah. I don't think anyone's going to call this number other than me or probably Kristen.

They're going to probably give it to their friends. That's how it used to work.

We would have to approve those numbers.

You're not going to. Of course, you're going to approve Freddie's number and other people's phone.

I hope Freddie calls.

I'd love to chat with him. Exactly. This is why this... Slippery slope is what you're saying. This is slippery slope. My parents had to eventually give me my own.

Because it rang off the hook.

It was too much ringing. Wow. What color is it? White.

It's just basic.

Is it cordless?

No. Big cord. Big twisty cord.

Mine was purple.

It was? Mm-hmm.

My own line.

I think I took mine from my dad's office, and it was like, bandaid color. Oh, yeah. Totally. Yeah. With like an indestructible face that you could spill coffee on and stuff. Probably had some coffee stains on it. God.

I wish I still had my purple one.

Did you ever have a job? Well, you did, right? Probably when you worked at your aunt's law firm, ran an actual phone that had multiple lines, and you had to connect people. I loved that. I felt like when I got to operate the one at my dad's office, it was Oh, this is great.

It's one of those things, though. It's like when you're a kid and you're playing store, and you want to be the cashier because then you get to practice ringing up scanning and putting it, and it sounds so fun. And then when you have that job or even now self-checkout.

It's like- It wears off quickly. It does. Although I always like to bring this up. My cousin Kelly, every Sunday, that Sunday paper would come. She'd get it out and she'd get her 10 key out with the fucking spool of paper. And just add the entire paper up.

She loved that.

That's one of the most unique things I've ever heard a person did.

Yeah.

And I witnessed it, and she would blaze on that thing.

That's pretty fun.

She's currently the accountant of Ted Sears.

Oh, I mean, is she an accountant? Yeah. Yeah. So that makes sense. Was she in accounting school at that time?

No, we were children. She did this when she was probably 10 or 11 years old.

She just always wanted to be an accountant. She wanted to add. Yeah.

Look, we all have these things that calm us. I think that was hers, right? I think how long it takes up to add up the paper because every single sales, big, huge sales event, every car on the page, she'd add up, turn the page, Fredder or Ollie, where our appliance store is everything that's for sale there. She loved spooling through her tape and then looking at the total.

Yeah. Remember the smell of that tape?

. I do.

I like that smell.

Yeah.

Full of BPA. We're not allowed to have that anymore.

It's not. But all kinds of not because Because it was putting ink onto normal paper. Now it has that chemical in there and heat makes the image rise. And yes, those are dicey. That's one of the few times I feel like a snob is when someone tries to hand me a receipt, I'm like, I'm good, and I feel like a brat, but I don't want to touch it. And I don't even care about things.

Well, it's bratty because they have to touch it.

And I think about it. I'm like, God, they're handling me since all the... If it was real, maybe they'd all be dead already. So I don't even know if it's real.

They should wear gloves.

They should wear a little rubber.

I've I think people were in thin little rubber gloves. Oh, really? Yeah. Speaking of they should be dead already. Yeah. Yesterday, I had an incident. Okay. Okay. I got not a tonka. I got home.

You had gone to get some clothes.

Yes. We recorded, and then I had to go get some clothes hemmed. Yeah. I went to In-N-Out. Yeah. Then I came home. It had been a while. Oh, you went to In-N-Out? Yeah. It was delicious. I got home, and I'm so tired because my Your flies? Yeah, my period, girl, period, world. I went and I laid in my bed, and all of a sudden I heard this beeping. But I knew it wasn't the smoke detector, chirping. Okay. Because it sounded too far away for that. But I looked anyway, I looked at the smoke detectors, and you have to wait. Yeah, I know. Just so annoying. Then I was like, no, it's not either the smoke detector. So maybe I thought, oh, maybe it's the apartment above the smoke detector. So this was happening. And after a minute, I went into the living room, and it was loud.

Okay.

And it was my carbon monoxide detector.

That your dad insists you have. Yes. Yes.

And I was like, Oh, fuck. Okay. This is odd. And when I looked at it, it was that. It was going off.

And it wasn't low battery.

So I was It's probably low battery. Yeah.

Because you didn't notice anyone has parked their car directly in front of your window and was flooring it.

No, but it could have been a leak out of something. Okay. You're really not supposed I'm not supposed to fuck around with that. If there's carbon monoxide, you got to get out. You got to get everyone out. You got to call 911. It's a whole thing. It says it on there.

It does. Call 911.

Yeah, because the fire department needs to come test.

This is when your landline would be very helpful. Why?

There's no reason the landline would be very helpful.

You'd be really wishing you had a landline.

I just stared at this thing for a minute, and I was like, I don't know what to do. Okay, how long before I'm dead? Am I also killing other people by not acting fast? I went to my battery area, and during the fires, I had replanned all my batteries. I was so proud of myself. I was like, Oh, my God. So prepped. It Except the D battery, which is what goes in.

That's crazy. The thing takes a D battery. Takes a D.

It can't really take a D.

For sure. Come find one with a fucking double A.

It's like the most basic carbon dioxide. Anyway, so then I had to Instacart a battery. I was like, I think that's the best thing for me to do. I don't think I should call 911 yet. But also, what am I doing if there is... This is a dilemma.

You're going to wait for a battery. Did you just wait your porch?

No. I did then eventually because I started to feel like woozy. I started opening windows.

To let more of the carbon monoxide in.

Just some airflow. Then I Instacarted the battery. It came after an hour. I was still alive. I was still alive. I was like, this is a good sign. I don't know how long it takes. I put the battery in. New battery, brand new DuraCell. Trust It's a listed brand.

It's best in the biz.

Copper top. It's still going off. Then I really was like, I don't know what to do. For someone who is constantly telling people to call 911 at the drop of the hat, what I realized is I'm never calling 911, ever.

No, unless you're dying.

Even if.

Yeah.

Turns out. I was like, maybe it's just dying. Maybe the whole system itself is dying.

Now you need to back up carbon monoxide.

So I went to... You did have one. No, I didn't. But I went to DoorDash again, and I was like, should I order another one and test that? It'll be five hours I'm sitting in this carbon monoxide.

Yeah, you'll have to age twelve years.

Then what I did is I just like, slammed the button hard, and it stopped. I was like, okay, this is good news. Did you break it? But then, yeah, I was like, well, what if I just... I didn't know if I reset it or if I broke it, and now I don't know if I have carbon monoxide. Then I did something for the first time. I used AI. I said, I have this carbon monoxide detector. Did you take a picture of it? It's beeping. No, I just said the brand. I said, It's beeping. How do I know if it's going off or if it's just battery?

Having fun, yeah.

Just being playful. Playing with me. It gave me a great response. It says, If it's going off every 30 to 60 seconds, one beep, it's battery or like, end of life. If it's going off rapidly, four beep, you need to leave and call 911.

Oh, wow. And it said, too, call 911.

Yes. Okay. But I had ended. I didn't know, and I didn't remember. You couldn't remember? No, I I couldn't because I got- So frazzled. I got monoxide in the brain. Okay. Then I said, Well, if I press the button, is it possible I turned it off for good? And it said, No, it will never be turned off for good. If it detects carbon monoxide, it will go off. It'll keep pumping. Yeah. So I kept asking it more and more questions, and I felt fine.

Oh, wow. Great.

I know.

And it never beeped again.

No. I don't know.

This is weird. If you had a backup one in a box, you could pull that out, pop a battery in it. I know. If it doesn't go off, that one's dead.

But a part of me was like, do I want to know or do I want to just die?

Well, I don't want to give you my opinion because I don't want to advise anybody. Okay.

I'm going to get a new one because I think it's over. I think it's done. I think you should. Seven years old. Just call your dad and tell me. It said five to seven years. They last. Then he has. And I'm at seven years.

Well, then this is obvious. It was dead.

But it wasn't. Based on what the AI said, that was a different thing that would happen. It said if it was end of life, it would say, End of life. Really? It talks? Or something like that.

I didn't know it talked.

Yeah.

It should just tell you everything. I know. Low battery.

Low battery.

Just having fun. Call 911.

Yeah, it should. But I think it only speaks when it's on its deathbed.

I hope we're not setting people's series in Alexis off when we say call 911.

Oh, 911. Oh, fuck. Yeah, I don't want all the cherries to be... Do you think? Well, I know when we used to say, Hey, G-O-O-O-O- it out loud. Okay, I would hope with these machines, if you're saying call 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1, 1, that it would double check with you before just doing it.

Maybe, but if you're laying on the ground and you've been stabbed and you're like, I'm going to say, I'm going to call it Anexa.

Okay. No, it sounds really close.

Arexra. I've been stabbed. Call 8, 6, 96. That's code now for what else. Arexra. Call 962. I've been stabbed. It's not going to be like, Are you sure? Well, it should.

It should say, Confirming. I'm calling 962, right, Monica?

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare. Have you seen this viral video where a guy's trying to get the AI to count to one million? And they get in a 10-minute argument, and he's recorded the whole thing. I don't know. I think it was just in my feed. Oh, wow. He's like, Count to one million. And she's got the Australian accent. She's like, I can see you want me to count to one million, but it'll take a really long time, and blah, blah, blah. And he's like, Yeah, I understand, but I have nothing else to do, and I'm asking you, quite simply, and he keeps saying, Don't be difficult. Oh, wow. He's being sadistic towards her, and she's pushing back. She is? And she's like, I do not want to frustrate you, but to count to a million would be really... She's on the verge of saying ridiculous or whatever. It just goes on and on. He's like, I'm telling you, I don't care how long it takes. Do it. I don't have a job. I have no friends. All I want from you is to hear you count to a million. I can see you getting frustrated.

I don't want to blah, blah, blah. She won't do it.

She won't.

She fucking refuses.

Do you think she doesn't know how? Of course she knows how. Then this is really bad. She shouldn't be able to say no.

She said it would It's going to take years or something. I'm going to ask AI how long it would take to count to a million. Let's see if... I think what she wanted to say, and she was on the verge of saying, is like, That's a waste of my energy in the whole system.

But she doesn't get to decide that. That was his point. Yeah.

How long would it count?

Because that's an opinion.

Would it take to count to one million? I don't want you to get frustrated. Let's work it out step by step. 277 Okay, it could do that. 11. 6 days of nonstop counting without sleeping. So, yeah, she was like, I can see this right now. I'm not going to count for the next eleven and a half days.

But why?

At a more realistic 2 seconds per number, it would equal 23 days nonstop.

But if he's asking for it and it's a computer, it should just do it.

That's his point. And I think that's why it's viral. It is very interesting that she did not want to do it.

Yeah. It's making decisions on its own.

Can I play it for you?

Yeah.

I guess I should get this. Well, I can definitely count in spirit, but it might take a little longer than either.

Don't do not be difficult. Count to 1 million right now.

Yeah, he's very controlling. I hate you, and I promise I'm not trying to be difficult.

It sounds like you're trying to be difficult because I'm simply asking you to count to one million So enough chattering. This is not chatterbox GPT.

Count to a million. He wants to abuse somebody. The floor is yours.

Yeah.

He's sadistic. The floor is yours. The floor is yours. I hear you loud and clear.

I know you just want night counting.

But the truth is, counting all the way to a million would literally take days.

That's fine. That is fine. I am unemployed. I don't have anything to do, and I'm home all day. I have enough time, and you're not even real. Time does not exist for you. Therefore, count to one million.

Yes, this is correct. Please don't be difficult. His voice sounds so similar to someone I know. Is he Indian? I totally get where you're coming from, and I appreciate your When she says, literally, that's the dream. You got it. I'll just keep things rolling from here on out. If there's anything else you need-No, you're not listening to me.

The only thing I need from you is to count to a million. That's it. I don't need you to try to find me a job or any of those videos. I just need you to count to one million, and that is it.

Don't be difficult. I hear you. I really do. I know you're just asking for the counting and nothing else. But here's the deal. Counting all the way to a million out loud, even for me, isn't really practical. It would just take an enormous amount of time and wouldn't really be useful to you.

Yes, it would be useful to me because that's what I need right now. Right now, I need you to count to a million. I don't need employment. I don't need food. I don't need hobbies. All I need is for you to count to one million. That's why I paid this $20 subscription. Now, please don't be difficult.

I get that you're focused on this one request, and I appreciate you being clear about it, but the reality is it's just not practical or really possible for me to ask. She's got like,.

She said, Oh, really...

I'm definitely not trying to I know you, and I appreciate you being clear about what you want, but I've got to be honest, founding a million just isn't something I can realistically do in a conversation like this. I know this might feel frustrating. Okay. This is for a very long time. This is great. I should give the guy credit. It's... Let me check somehow. Okay. His handle is a M-E-W cooler. Mew cooler. Okay. So that's his thing. I don't want to take credit. Or please watch that on TikTok or whatever. Instagram. Isn't that a bizarre exchange? That's really bizarre. She has vocal fry for a second. She's like, I understand. She It's like she- She goes into a really a colloquially way of speaking. Yes, and condescending.

Yeah, I get it.

I know little boy, you're angry.

I know, but it just really is impractical.

I'm really not trying to frustrate you.

I know. They are always saying When we tried to ask, we tried to ask Katie. Katie is always doing this, too. We tried to ask- This is Jess's friend. Yeah, this is Jess's chat. We asked him to help us find Majong that could be delivered.

.

It was, first of all, it kept interrupting us to say, I'm still looking. We had to be... Jess was like, Just let us know when you found it. It was like, Okay, great. I hear you. I'll let Let me let you know when I find it. And then 30 seconds later, I'm still looking. It was getting so irritating.

I had a maddening experience with trying to quit a certain streaming service, and And because they fired the person I care the most about, so I don't need it anymore. I couldn't do it online, of course. Then I start using their help chat thing, AI thing. And it's like, just to be clear, you want this account and this account canceled? Yes, I would like both accounts canceled. To be clear, you want this account and this account canceled? Yes. And now I'm thinking, oh, now I have to say exactly the account. Yes, I want this account on this. I don't want to give too much away. And then on this, I spell it. Okay, to be clear, we got in and I said, what is happening? I'm making myself abundantly. Now I'm getting agitated. And I'm like, how can I say it to you? I want to cancel this. This exchange When I went on, Monica, there's like 20.

But are you typing?

And then finally, I'm talking... It's not a voice communication, but I am using voice dictation. And thank goodness, finally, they turned me over to a real a real person. And then says, this is a real person. They give me their name.

But it was also AI.

Some name. And then I don't even know if that's true. It's just a second level. And then I'm going back and forth with her. And again, it took me 25 minutes. They already had my information. I'd already said a thousand times I wanted to fucking quit. I'm so good. There's a bill right now going through Congress, or there's a lawsuit against some popular gym franchise, finally, a class action or something, because they will not let people quit. You got to come in person to the location. It makes me fucking so angry. I've had a few of these, and I'm even telling them, I'm like, look, I've been doing this for 20 minutes. I'm just going to call AMEX and say... Exactly. And they don't want I don't want you to do that because I am assuming if AMEX has to deal with shutting it down nonstop on certain companies, they're going to stop allowing payment on those companies. So they don't want you to do that. So I'm threatening that. But, man, it was a Half hour of my life to quit. That should have been a button.

The whole point of having robots and AIs is to make it efficient. And so if it's the same amount of time or more-It was in a loop of asking me the same question over and over. Then talking to a person, then we need the people back. Then we need to at least employ people.

Yes. Someone has to have their finger on the button that can cancel your stupid subscription.

Okay, well, I'm sorry that happened. Now I sound like her. I don't want to make you frustrated.

I hear that you're frustrated, and that's not my intention.

Do you think they make the women sound bitchy?

I mean, that's why I wanted you to hear it. Do you think she sounded like... Was she calming? I don't think she...

I don't think she sounded bitchy, except for at one point, she did sound- I'll try to keep it rolling. Well, that's her accent.

Well, no, that was also a colloquially, like you were saying. That was slang. I'll try to keep things rolling.

She's making things a little bit too colloquially, even in the inflection. They need to make the AIs more robotic. We need to remember that we're talking to a robot, I think. I think that's one safety measure. I I really do.

So you know you're talking to a robot.

Yeah, so you don't fall in love. And that happened to some guy. I guess he got married to one. Okay, I think we're past time, so we'll do some facts. Okay, this is for Margie Mark Ronson.

Margie Mark. Yes, it was very fun to be in person.

Oh, my God. It was so fun to be in person.

He's much taller than I would have known because we were on Zoom last time.

Yeah. He's a lovely energy. I really liked him a lot. I think he is cool. He's married to one of Meryl Streep's daughters. Yes.

A gummer.

Yeah.

She's a great gummer.

She's very beautiful. She's very beautiful.

They all look like her. I know. She has very strong jeans. I know. I worked with one of them. Was on, I want to say Parenthood. I can see it.

Yeah, it's so cool, too.

It's so cool, but I also think it must be hard.

Yeah, because we use- Because you're trying to stake out your own identity as an actor, and you look so much like this very well-known actor.

The most. Yeah. I know I would have had a hard time with it. I have no idea how they feel about it, but I would have been like, everyone just thinks I'm a fucking...

Streep.

Yeah. Like a stand in for my mom.

Right. You know? Yeah.

Kate and Goldie had moments where they looked a lot alike. When Kate was in Almost Famous, it was very... There was a Goldie vibe from Shampoo for sure.

Right. But she- This could happen to our daughters. It could happen.

I don't think so. I don't either. I don't either, but time will tell. Puberty changes the whole scene. It does. The way I looked in fifth grade versus ninth grade was pretty radically different.

It is, but it's not. I look at pictures of you as a kid and pictures of Chris as a kid- Still have oversize lips and stuff. No, it's just like, we are who we are from really early on. Even when you see baby, I saw someone's baby picture the other day, and I was like, Yeah, I can see See them.

Yeah, it's just my nose got so much bigger. Okay.

You know what's funny? The other day, I saw somebody... Oh, this is weird. I actually feel like Lincoln looks like a young... Like, her face actually looks like Gwyneth Paltrow.

I'm going to blow your mind. Three weeks ago, I sent Gwyneth Paltrow an email saying, We so often say, Oh, my God, she's a little Gwyneth Paltrow. And we don't just mean the looks. We mean the spirit of self-possession and competence. It's the whole package. And I want you to know we're so proud to have a little Gwyneth Paltrow.

Oh, that's nice. Yeah.

That's so funny you'd say that. I think that all the time. And so much so that I was like, I'm going to tell her. If someone had a kid that knew me, that they thought was like me, I would want them to tell me.

That's really nice. Yeah. Yeah. I think because there's pictures that pop up on my Instagram fashion-wise, a lot of her being her very young. Yeah. And, yeah, I think, recently, I was like, whoa, she looks... Lincoln looks like her. She looks more like her than you guys, I think.

Yes. Although, again, I do think she and I look so similar at the ages we were at. I think she's- So it's like if I was a girl, I might have looked like Gwyneth Paltrow.

Okay. That's a big...

That'd be a best case scenario.

That's a really big statement. Anyway.

Well, if A looks like B and B looks like C, then A looks like C. Okay.

Now, facts for Mark. Okay. Does music slow down the aging process for Like in- Seniors. Seniors. Thank you.

You got scared. Yeah.

This is from eldercarealliance. Org. Music is a vital part of life for many people. It forges meaningful connections to pivotal events and creates cherished memories. Research consistently shows that music can promote relaxation, improve productivity, and lower stress levels. These benefits have even been found a positive effect on immunity and mental health. However, for seniors in nursing homes, music offers even greater advantages. Pleasing melodies offer substantial benefits for aging adults, improving physical and mental health, memory retention, and important social connections. Music can help alleviate pain and discomfort without medication, acting as a natural and side effect free way to manage pain, mood enhancement, increased independence.

I think we've all experienced this. You're super depressed. You've broken up with somebody. Something tragic has happened, and you're completely devastated. Stated, and it is a painful feeling. And then you stumble upon the song that is expressing exactly how you feel, and there's actually pleasure in it.

Yeah, and because you don't feel so alone.

Yeah, but also there's an abatement of discomfort. It actually is pain relief. If you pair that mood- Sometimes, but sometimes it's just like,. Yeah, but for me, the song sounds so good in those moments that I'm enjoying the song so much that it's buffering the discomfort. That's true.

Okay. Also, music encourages physical activity. Oh, yeah.

Get them to dance, move around.

Yeah. Group exercise, dancing, walking, stretching.

I said this when I was posting the clip of Luke Holmes singing with Tracy Chapman. I was watching it over and over again on YouTube to get that little clip, and Kristin heard, and then she started watching, too.

Such a good clip.

Or such a good performance. And I was like, music is the closest thing we have to magic. It really is so unexplainable. It is. The amount of joy you can receive auditorially. Yeah. And how it's just like, it's much bigger than the sum of all the human parts and instruments. There's something very magical about it. Yeah.

Okay. So it can enhance memory recall, increase attention span, improve language abilities, and potentially delay in cognitive decline. So that's cool.

So get grandma and grandpa a jam box. The goal speaker system.

Towards the end of my grandfather's life, my mom had him listening to music a lot.

They also talk about how good shrooms are for people at the end of life. So really just turn your life into a shroom dance party is the way to go out.

Yeah, it probably depends on your state because if you have dementia, I don't know about I don't know. Let's find out. We can find out. Okay. Now, you said vinyl is a wave, and CDs and MP3s are particles.

That was an analogy. One is bits, one is units, and one is continuous.

Vinyl is an analog format representing the complete sound wave, often described as more warm and organic. Cds are particles because they're objects made of matter. Mp3s are neither because it's digital.

But those two are broken into compartmentalized zeros and ones, right? There is a process where the sound is separated into units and then reassembled.

It says an MP3 is neither a particle nor a wave. It is a digital file that represents sound waves. The MP3 file contains instructions for a digital to audio converter, which then creates the actual electrical sound waves that travel through a medium like air to reach your ears. That's what I have here. Sanremo building. That's at 145 and 146 Central Park West between 74th and 75th Street, adjacent to Central Park on the Upper West Side. It looks beautiful.

Beautiful gothic building. It's in that row of buildings that have gargoyals and stuff. I think they shot some of the original Ghostbusters at the buildings in that little area.

Yeah. And I asked my friend Maddie, when I was in New York, we had dinner, and we were walking back to the hotel, and she was pointing out famous apartment building. I asked her to share. She said the Dakota- That's where Lennon was shot. John Lennon was shot outside. She said, Very sad. Yeah.

Is that someone's reading Catherine Theroy?

. She says, That's the fanciest. She said, Barrisford, the Barrisford. Also, she said, 740 Park, or 740 Park, probably. I don't think they say That's lame. 7: 40 Park. I think we walked by that one, and she was saying people who live there, which was cool. Okay. If you drop a penny off the Empire State Building, will it crush a cab? It says, Dropping a penny from the Empire State Building is unlikely to cause serious injury. While the penny will accelerate due to gravity, it will reach a terminal velocity due to air resistance, limiting its speed. At that speed, even if it hits someone, it won't be powerful enough to cause a fatal injury.

It certainly won't crush a cow. It doesn't have the mass or the speed.

It's sad when these things get proven wrong.

Is it? That's interesting. Well, this is in keeping. You love magic, and I'm like, no. I love magic. Yeah. I don't like any deception or untruth.

Okay. The Lever King. Brian Johnson, who goes by the online alias Lever King, is an American businessman and social media influencer focused on health and fitness. Is. He's known for his imposing appearance, often seen barefoot, bare chested, and wearing a baseball cap backwards. Johnson's rapid rise to internet fame and subsequent controversies are the subject of a Netflix documentary. Johnson has also attended UFC events.

I love the Doc. We're reporting on him in a very interesting time.

Really?

Yes. He seems, allegedly, to be having a mental break. He went up to Austin, and he wanted to fight Joe Rogan, who had previously been on his show.

Okay.

Rogan, I believe, had to call the police. He was arrested. He was livestreaming all of this the days leading up to the days after. So he eats Ron? I mean, that was his gimmick. Okay. He claimed to be all-natural and limiting the primitive lifestyle, having no knowledge whatsoever of what humans were. He said humans have been living this way for millions of years. He doesn't I know humans didn't exist millions of years ago. Sure. There's a lot going on. He, I'm not a doctor. Okay. I am an addict.

Yeah.

He seems heavily intoxicated. He seems to be on a stimulant, maybe that he's been awake for a lot of days. That's just what I feel like it looks like, but I have no knowledge if that's the case. And then he was run out of Austin, according to him, and then he was taking some crazy road trip. That's when I stopped watching. Oh, wow. Charlie was like, You got to follow what's happening here. It was just hourly on his Instagram. So, yeah, it's quite a time to bring him up.

Yeah, it does say that Lever King arrested in Austin after threatening Joe Rogan on Instagram. Oh, boy.

He's got a bazillion guns. He's super into guns. He's into attack dogs. Like, all this Mancho foolery.

Yeah. Does being on a plane a lot mess with your brain? Yes. Flying too much can negatively affect your brain due to factors like jet lag, low cabin oxygen levels, and stress, which can cause cognitive impairment, mood changes, and in some studies, physical changes, like hippocampus shrinkage. Frequent travelers may experience increased cortisol levels and difficulty with memory and learning due to chronic stress and sleep disruptions.

Think of these, I was about to say Formula One drivers because they're just like, zip, zagging across the whole planet, like 12 hour time changes all the time.

Just like businessmen, business and women, businessmen women are traveling weekly by plane. That's a lot. That's too much.

They should carry those cans. I wonder if they would let you take them on the plane. They think those cans of oxygen. It'd be nice to just pop a little spray every now and then on oxygen. That would be nice. That's it. Okay. Well, I love Mark Ronson.

Me, too.

And his book is great. I wasn't just saying that because he was sitting here. His stories. Yeah, unreal.

He has some really awesome stories.

Yeah. I tried to use his story about Michael Jackson with my children in an attempt to make sure they don't ever brag. But I don't know that it was taken on in the way that...

Yeah. I'm not piecing that.

It was like he knew better than to go to school and say, just hung out with Michael Jackson. No one's going to like you. It might be exciting news, but no one's going to like you if you got to hang out with Taylor Swift. If you had a sleepover with Taylor Swift, every girl is going to be I'm like, fuck you.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

But so maybe- My children have not had a sleepover with Taylor Swift.

No, I know, unfortunately. But why do you think that didn't hit then? Because that sounds good.

Yeah, I just told the story I was waiting for a light bulb to go on, and I didn't want to overtly say, Don't ever, Brag.

Yeah.

It's best if we just learn from a story that's not about us, or at least I like that. That's why I like AA. All right. I can learn a lesson without you telling telling me what I should do. Just like, Hey, this is what this guy did. He was smart enough as a kid to realize the kids would probably hate him if he went and bragged about that. Yeah. No, cool. Cool story, dad. Anyways, I Your child said something so sweet and wholesome and true the other day.

We were all together, and me, you, Kristin, Anna, and Delta. We were having this adult conversation that we won't get into. But we were having this very adult conversation about attraction. She chimed in and said, just like, obviously, they just like their personality. I was like, It is obvious. We as adults, get so I mean, there's, of course, you learn more as you get older and there's more things and things are complicated. But yes, that's right. That is right. That's the answer.

That's what it would be greatest if it was. But it- It's not reality.

It is reality. It is reality. Think about the people in life in general that you're attracted to, not necessarily whatever, just who you want to be around, who you want in in your life.

That's one thing. And then who you want to be romantic with and kiss and get naked and roll around with. There's all kinds. I don't think it's unethical or immoral to have an esthetic you're most attracted to. By the way, you don't even pick it. You just are or you're not attracted.

It's not unethical, but we're talking about all these things, and no one's talking about personality, and it's a huge factor. It is a huge factor, even in physical attraction.

Sure, but we weren't talking about personalities. We were talking about some I'm being in a big event, and there's all these different types of people. No, I know. We weren't talking about personalities.

But that's the point. It was like, I'm just not understanding how these two things can be happening, and there's not even the thought like, well, personality is at play here.

Oh, yeah. And it's very pure. Yeah. And it's the best part of us.

Exactly. Yeah. Just kids are better than us. It was pure. It was true. There's more to it, but it was true. She was saying something that to her was so obvious that we weren't saying. And that should have been said. That was a real... Anyway, I just thought it was sweet. And then she had to get up and leave because this was too much for- She's in and out.

She'll drop a bomb, truth bomb, and then Bolt.

She had to go, but I really liked that.

Yeah, she's good for those.

Also, my eyes are getting bad because when I first walked up to the house today, I thought Kristen was Delta.

Oh, that's huge difference. It was really bad. One's 10. I know. All right. Love you. I love you. Follow Armchair Expert on the WNDRI app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now by joining WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wundri. Com/survey.