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[00:00:01] I don't live in Brooklyn, I live in Manhattan.
[00:00:15] I no longer have a house upstate.
[00:00:18] So you were in LA for, it seemed like a while there.
[00:00:21] When did you move back to New York?
[00:00:24] I was by coastal.
[00:00:26] Oh, okay.
[00:00:27] I never actually left New York.
[00:00:29] Yeah.
[00:00:30] But I...
[00:00:31] When did you give up, I guess, your houses?
[00:00:33] I moved from LA to Hudson in 2012.
[00:00:40] Yeah, I had a house in LA from 2006 to 2012.
[00:00:48] And then a house in Hudson from 2012 to 2022, I guess.
[00:00:58] I saw that now I have one bedroom and two big storage spaces.
[00:01:05] One for books and one for instruments.
[00:01:08] I was listening to some, I guess I would say relatively recent interviews.
[00:01:13] It happens at the last time you did a number of interviews was right at the beginning of
[00:01:18] the pandemic.
[00:01:19] And it sounded like you rode at least the early days of it out in the city, which was
[00:01:25] surprising to me because at the time you had property upstate.
[00:01:30] Yeah.
[00:01:31] Well, Post Speedos ate the first floor.
[00:01:36] It wasn't habitable.
[00:01:40] Yeah.
[00:01:42] Yeah.
[00:01:44] Yeah.
[00:01:45] I mean, again, I'm in Astoria myself and this was kind of a pretty...
[00:01:51] Pretty miserable...
[00:01:52] No, I don't think there was a good place to ride out, a global pandemic, but being in
[00:01:57] an apartment in New York City was pretty miserable, I would say.
[00:02:03] I have a friend who has a large sprawling estate near Philadelphia.
[00:02:09] I think he was fine.
[00:02:12] Did you consider yourself a social person?
[00:02:18] I forced myself to be a social person.
[00:02:21] Yeah.
[00:02:22] I and my mother and her brother.
[00:02:27] So my family is composed of three people, myself, my mother and her brother and all
[00:02:33] of us are moody loners who just haven't gone on a killing spree yet.
[00:02:43] Yeah.
[00:02:44] Yeah.
[00:02:45] Have you ever felt close?
[00:02:47] Do you want a killing spree?
[00:02:50] Yeah.
[00:02:51] None of us own guns.
[00:02:55] So in terms of efficiency, it would be too difficult to go on a killing spree with
[00:03:00] like a knife or something?
[00:03:06] I mean, I guess we could go on a killing spree with battery acid really.
[00:03:12] Sure.
[00:03:13] Yeah.
[00:03:15] You know, it strikes me.
[00:03:17] I don't know.
[00:03:18] I could totally be misreading it, but it seems like you are maybe a happier person or at least
[00:03:24] in a better place than you were maybe 10, 15 years ago.
[00:03:28] A frame of mind?
[00:03:30] I am in a different frame of mind.
[00:03:33] Since I got COVID, I have not finished a song and my IQ seems to have been lowered
[00:03:40] and the neurologist says that my temporal lobe is out of sync with the rest of my brain.
[00:03:46] Things like that.
[00:03:49] So I don't think of it as like being happier or more content or anything.
[00:03:57] I'm just sort of...
[00:03:58] I guess I think of it as brain fog.
[00:04:03] It's always struck me that highly intelligent people tend to be depressed,
[00:04:10] so maybe there's some positive outcome that can come out of that.
[00:04:13] I've had it four times myself and I have felt very...
[00:04:17] Four times?
[00:04:18] Four times, yeah.
[00:04:19] Do you feel good?
[00:04:21] I don't.
[00:04:22] I travel, I mean, not that you don't, but I travel a bit for work and every time I've
[00:04:26] gotten it, I've been at like a conference or something else and doesn't get easier,
[00:04:31] it turns out.
[00:04:32] Last time I had it in January and I was stuck in of all places, the Las Vegas hotel
[00:04:39] room for a week just feeling very fear and loathing.
[00:04:43] No, no room service.
[00:04:46] We were at the one hotel in Las Vegas without room service.
[00:04:48] You've never heard of that?
[00:04:50] Miserable, a Mariette residence inn, which are those are the ones that are basically
[00:04:55] like getting a hotel room at a college dorm.
[00:04:58] You got a refrigerator but no room service.
[00:04:59] Absolutely.
[00:05:00] Yeah.
[00:05:01] But how...
[00:05:02] Like day to day...
[00:05:03] Like a hundred-plus things on Amazon or something, I suppose.
[00:05:07] That's right.
[00:05:08] Well, it was like Uber Eats-ing for a week.
[00:05:10] But day to day, I mean, how does that manifest itself?
[00:05:13] How is your life and how have your interactions with people changed since you contracted it
[00:05:19] back in 2020?
[00:05:20] I suppose I actually probably don't want to focus entire interview on my medical condition.
[00:05:37] I have become more aware of the benefits of hanging out with other people.
[00:05:47] It became phenomenally difficult to hang out with other people.
[00:05:54] You realize the benefits because you weren't doing it as much as you used to.
[00:06:00] Right.
[00:06:02] And I had to choose who I was hanging out with in ways that had much more significant effects
[00:06:09] than usual.
[00:06:12] I ask partially because reading some interviews that you've done and talking about your early
[00:06:19] life with your family, it sounds like you had a lot of alone time and that you, to
[00:06:26] a certain extent, got really good at being alone.
[00:06:31] When I read Huckleberry Finn, which has long, whole second act about being essentially imprisoned,
[00:06:42] I was in Hawaii on a Buddhist commune, Zen commune, where we were forbidden to talk.
[00:06:58] And I was the only child there, which was often true of my childhood.
[00:07:06] So I literally couldn't talk to anyone for 23 hours a day during the brief periods when
[00:07:21] people could talk.
[00:07:22] They didn't particularly want to talk to me because I was an eight-year-old.
[00:07:29] So I read these scenes of being cooped up.
[00:07:38] It's Jim in the book who is cooped up and then, as I recall, Huck is trying to get him
[00:07:48] out.
[00:07:49] It's been a long time.
[00:07:52] It's been half a century since I read Huckleberry Finn.
[00:07:53] I should read it again.
[00:07:56] And I totally identified with that.
[00:08:01] It's weird.
[00:08:03] I'm reading about the exact situation I meant, not exact, but a directly analogous situation
[00:08:09] that I'm actually in while reading.
[00:08:12] Yeah.
[00:08:14] How did you cope?
[00:08:15] I didn't think of it as a situation in which I didn't think of it as needing to be
[00:08:28] coped with.
[00:08:30] In hindsight though, when you look at it, I guess maybe how did you survive that?
[00:08:35] Did you have any survival mechanisms?
[00:08:40] Well, I wasn't suffering.
[00:08:47] I was perfectly okay with not talking.
[00:08:51] That's changed though, obviously.
[00:08:53] It sounds like you've gotten to a point where you need people and you need some socialization.
[00:08:59] Probably.
[00:09:06] I don't experience it that way.
[00:09:10] But my mother was in the pandemic a lot more alone than I was.
[00:09:17] She's in her 80s, so it was a lot more important, even more important to not get COVID from
[00:09:29] me in particular.
[00:09:30] She did eventually get COVID, and she survived it pretty well.
[00:09:37] Yeah.
[00:09:39] It strikes me that in those early days that it was a bit of a perfect storm because another
[00:09:46] element I understand of your inability to really write at the time was that you have a very
[00:09:54] clear process and it involves you actually going out in the world, whether or not you're
[00:09:58] actually interacting with people directly, and obviously like the rest of us, you weren't
[00:10:03] able to do that.
[00:10:07] I was so much better off than my mother though that I guess I'd say it's pretty fortunate.
[00:10:13] Yeah.
[00:10:14] I just mean in terms of the impact that it had on your songwriting.
[00:10:21] I don't want to overdo that because I do have hundreds of songs sitting around the
[00:10:30] table, and no one would ever know if I never wrote a song again in my life because I could
[00:10:37] just use the ones I already have that I haven't found an album for yet.
[00:10:44] But also this morning I had a bit of a realization.
[00:10:49] I listened to a song, and I realized it's kind of, it's a song I really like.
[00:10:59] It's a, you dropped a bomb on me.
[00:11:02] Oh yeah, the gab band.
[00:11:03] It's a really delightful song, but as a song as opposed to a track, it's really hard
[00:11:14] to say that it's finished in any way.
[00:11:19] It doesn't, it's essentially formless.
[00:11:28] Basically all the instruments are doing exactly the same thing over and over.
[00:11:34] It's what I call a loop song.
[00:11:37] Only the vocal really changes, and once in a while there is the delightful sound effect.
[00:11:45] But how would one decide that this song on paper, pen and paper, how would you decide
[00:11:55] that it was finished?
[00:12:01] I think when I think of myself as not having finished a song in four years, it's probably
[00:12:09] really that I haven't finished a song by my standards.
[00:12:18] The only song that I have arguably finished was for Anthony Roth-Castanza and Justin Vivian
[00:12:24] Bond's album of duets, and I finished it by writing on those sheet music ad lib here.
[00:12:38] But some people would call that finishing the song, and definitely the gab band would
[00:12:43] call that finishing a song.
[00:12:45] It's like this is where the ad lib goes.
[00:12:49] But for me, traditionally I only really have one song in my entire career that has any
[00:12:56] ad libbing at all, which is Love Is Like Jazz, which is entirely ad-libbed and part
[00:13:01] of the way it goes is that it can never be rehearsed, and that nothing about it
[00:13:07] can be agreed upon beforehand.
[00:13:10] So it is essentialist free jazz.
[00:13:16] It's like whatever instrument you're holding is the instrument you're playing on the song,
[00:13:23] and you have no idea what the song experience is going to be like before you start.
[00:13:31] The only different, only form of it is that there is a lyric, and the lyric can be
[00:13:38] sung to any melody in any style for any length of time.
[00:13:47] I grew up loving experimental music, and this is the KGN version of free jazz.
[00:13:55] It's maximally indeterminate.
[00:13:59] But how did I decide that it was finished?
[00:14:01] I don't know.
[00:14:02] In a very real sense, it never really is finished, right?
[00:14:06] If it's a new version every time.
[00:14:08] Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:10] The melody cannot be described beforehand.
[00:14:16] Does that song exist on paper in any way?
[00:14:19] It's on Sixman and Love Songs, so it exists as part of the lyric sheet of Sixman and
[00:14:27] Love.
[00:14:28] Yeah.
[00:14:29] But not KGN in the sense that there are specific instructions with how to play it.
[00:14:38] Yeah, when I wrote the lyric on some notebook somewhere, there is the lyric for Love Is Like
[00:14:45] Jazz and the instructions that it can't be rehearsed and is not expected to be repeated.
[00:14:56] And after recording it, I would have added that the record is not considered a definitive
[00:15:05] version in any way and shouldn't be a guide.
[00:15:10] Are there any other songs that you'd point to in your catalog that you feel like fill a
[00:15:14] similar role that are experimental in that same way?
[00:15:19] Well, having said that it's unique, it's not unique because there's also experimental
[00:15:24] music love, which is also a lyric whose performance is indeterminate.
[00:15:33] And we did it a particular way on the record and we do it pretty differently live.
[00:15:43] But as of the last two weeks, we actually have the technology to do it essentially
[00:15:53] the same way we did on the record, which is new and novel and fun for us.
[00:16:01] So we actually are making it sound basically just like the record, which is funny for us.
[00:16:09] An in-joke, I guess.
[00:16:11] Is that ever, aside from that song, is that ever the goal to make especially, you know,
[00:16:17] I mean, it's interesting.
[00:16:18] Absolutely not.
[00:16:19] But we usually prefer not to sound too much like the record so that it doesn't sound
[00:16:23] like we're trying and failing to exactly reproduce the record.
[00:16:27] Yeah.
[00:16:28] I saw the band, the Chameleons, the UK version of the Chameleons at CBGB.
[00:16:37] Everyone sounds terrible.
[00:16:39] Sounded terrible at CBGB.
[00:16:41] I saw Tom Tom Club at CBGB and they sounded terrible.
[00:16:45] And, you know, they played CBGB hundreds of times in the 70s.
[00:16:50] So they were recording a live album that never came out because, of course,
[00:16:57] it sounded terrible.
[00:16:58] I was very happy to be there, but you can't sound good at CBGB, except that Chameleons
[00:17:09] sounded exactly like the record.
[00:17:11] It was really uncanny.
[00:17:13] It was just like they were playing to tape, but they really weren't.
[00:17:17] They just happened to know exactly what effects they used on the record and in
[00:17:24] what proportions.
[00:17:26] It was crazy how much they sounded like the record.
[00:17:32] Are there instances you can think of where the songs, do you feel that the songs have
[00:17:38] gotten better over time?
[00:17:39] Do most of them get better over time?
[00:17:41] Wait, let me let me finish that anecdote with what I realized was sounding exactly
[00:17:48] like the record is really boring if you already have the record.
[00:17:54] It's just like playing the record only louder.
[00:17:58] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:18:00] What what's the point?
[00:18:03] Yeah, you know, it's so much like recording specifically is really just kind of capturing.
[00:18:10] A moment in time and not for me.
[00:18:13] No. No, I have never recorded more than two musicians at the same time.
[00:18:20] And that only once, I think.
[00:18:23] I just mean from the standpoint of, you know, versus continuing to like perform a song live
[00:18:28] and taking on different meetings.
[00:18:30] It's like a snapshot of a of that period.
[00:18:37] OK, well, from my perspective, it's often so long.
[00:18:41] Many sometimes decades between the writing of the song and the recording
[00:18:45] of the song and sometimes the recording of the song takes itself takes
[00:18:50] months, not usually years, but sometimes.
[00:18:53] But.
[00:18:55] That it's not it doesn't feel like a snapshot of a particular time at all.
[00:18:59] It's just a year of the last 10 years or something.
[00:19:05] And once it's on the record, it starts aging as though it were.
[00:19:09] Captured in time, but.
[00:19:13] The way I make records snapshot would not be wouldn't occur to me.
[00:19:18] Who use the word snapshot?
[00:19:24] It's more like a palimpsest of different actions at different times.
[00:19:30] And curious what you mean when you say it's aging as though it was captured in time?
[00:19:42] Well, once there's an official version of something, I at least don't make
[00:19:48] more official versions of it.
[00:19:49] Although I guess if I were a jazz artist, I would.
[00:19:54] In fact, do.
[00:19:57] A hundred versions of my favorite things.
[00:20:01] That respond to each other, but.
[00:20:06] The way I make records is I only make one.
[00:20:10] And then it gets.
[00:20:13] Copy and distributed and that's the end of that.
[00:20:21] I don't revisit things.
[00:20:24] The only exception being plant white roses, which exists in at least two
[00:20:29] different versions with different singers.
[00:20:33] Yeah, I mean, there's a sense in which this tour is revisiting in that
[00:20:38] it's going back to a specific album.
[00:20:43] Yes, we noticed that there is.
[00:20:50] Reference to the Clinton administration.
[00:20:54] In the song Blue You, the lyric is that the president played
[00:20:59] the saxophone sounded so alone it was on the news.
[00:21:03] And that is a clear reference.
[00:21:06] If you were there at the time to the Clinton administration,
[00:21:11] which was the current administration in 1999.
[00:21:17] And things sure have changed.
[00:21:27] And somehow noticing that made us really.
[00:21:33] More vividly aware of specifically how things have changed.
[00:21:41] And love has changed and definitely love songs have changed.
[00:21:48] In 1999.
[00:21:51] A lot of the genres on the record were ongoing.
[00:21:55] Some were not, but some are.
[00:21:59] Scott's ballads and they're not ongoing.
[00:22:05] But some of the record, some of the genres on the record have just died out.
[00:22:11] Yeah.
[00:22:13] And we are like at the time, many of them had died out.
[00:22:17] But in the last 25 years, even more of them have died out.
[00:22:23] So things that were meant to sound contemporary at the time
[00:22:28] now sound like it's 1999,
[00:22:36] which I wouldn't have expected because I thought that I was being very
[00:22:40] conservative about.
[00:22:45] Dating myself.
[00:22:49] I always thought that if you use the latest technology
[00:22:53] that it will quickly sound dated because
[00:22:56] the next year, everyone knows that that's last year's technology.
[00:23:02] Whereas if you play a lute,
[00:23:05] no one's going to say that sounds like last year.
[00:23:10] Lyrical references are another way of dating songs.
[00:23:18] Ordinarily not. But in the case of Blue U, yes.
[00:23:22] Yeah, nothing on 69 Love Songs refers to
[00:23:28] computer dating.
[00:23:31] Excuse me.
[00:23:33] And there are no three ways or throuples
[00:23:39] and the expectation of monogamy is
[00:23:44] definitely not something that would occur if somebody did an album of 69 Love Songs now.
[00:23:56] So love itself has changed and
[00:24:02] now the typical
[00:24:07] typical song on the radio, the archetypal song on the radio is wet ass pussy.
[00:24:13] Mm hmm.
[00:24:15] As part of this experience of reengaging with the songs in this way,
[00:24:21] been this consideration of how you would go about it.
[00:24:25] Were you to start it in 2024?
[00:24:32] Well, I can't imagine that I would start it in 2024.
[00:24:35] Sure.
[00:24:37] But it's an interesting thought exercise to consider how,
[00:24:40] you know, the subject matter of the songs themselves would be different.
[00:24:48] The category of love song.
[00:24:51] Seems itself to be
[00:25:00] no longer in public use.
[00:25:07] Like that's not the way we would put it now, I think.
[00:25:11] I mean, you probably just say it's the song is romantic or
[00:25:21] not sexy enough to be a bornacating.
[00:25:25] Do you feel though that that the fact that love songs are
[00:25:29] aren't, you know, as you said in use in the same way that that in and of itself
[00:25:34] would dissuade you from taking them on?
[00:25:38] Not so much that, but that it might not have occurred to me in the first place.
[00:25:43] Like it's not one of the categories that one works with anymore.
[00:25:53] Like punk funk or
[00:26:04] what did Lincoln Park play?
[00:26:06] What was that genre?
[00:26:07] New metal.
[00:26:08] New metal, yeah.
[00:26:10] There's no new metal anymore.
[00:26:14] And it is no longer the
[00:26:18] new wave of British heavy metal.
[00:26:19] You wouldn't that that category is not a current category.
[00:26:26] Nor can you make grunge music now.
[00:26:30] It wouldn't all that.
[00:26:32] It's a post-crunch historical category.
[00:26:35] It strikes me that constraints are a really important part of the songwriting
[00:26:39] process for you in terms of at least giving yourself direction.
[00:26:47] Yeah, I do word games in the morning.
[00:26:51] I do crosswords and other word all in such and
[00:26:58] like Stephen Sondheim, I think of songwriting as a whole lot
[00:27:05] like doing a word puzzle.
[00:27:11] You have to find a certain number of rhymes.
[00:27:16] You have to fit what you are trying to say into a certain number of syllables
[00:27:21] without hopefully making it really obvious that you're filling in syllables
[00:27:28] as much as you are saying something.
[00:27:34] The great unacknowledged innovation of Bob Dylan
[00:27:39] is that he called attention to the process
[00:27:42] by intentionally making it silly.
[00:27:49] The pumps don't work because the vandals took the handles.
[00:27:52] And all, yeah.
[00:27:55] Actually happened.
[00:27:56] I don't know if you know this.
[00:27:58] I don't know the story behind that now.
[00:28:00] In the middle of Woodstock, there used to be a pump for the public well
[00:28:06] and literally happened when he was in Woodstock
[00:28:11] in Big Pink, I guess, or maybe at Albert Grossman's house.
[00:28:18] He heard that you couldn't use the pump
[00:28:23] because someone had taken the handle.
[00:28:28] And he turned it into the immortal line.
[00:28:31] The pump don't work because the vandals took the handles.
[00:28:36] Um, which just sounds like it's a bit of nonsense
[00:28:42] that rhymes vandals and handles.
[00:28:47] Randomly, and it's during the fade out of the song.
[00:28:51] So it sounds completely tossed off
[00:28:53] and it doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the song.
[00:28:58] In fact, I can't remember which song it's from.
[00:29:02] Is it Subtranian homesick blues?
[00:29:04] One of those.
[00:29:05] I'm not sure anything else in Subtranian homesick blues has anything
[00:29:12] about relating to other parts of the song.
[00:29:13] Yeah, it's a pretty free association song.
[00:29:17] Yeah, it's abstract expressionism.
[00:29:19] Yeah.
[00:29:22] What's your sense of why that silliness or why Dylan's sense of humor?
[00:29:26] Like he's somebody, you know, there are more words written on Bob Dylan
[00:29:29] than just about any other artists short of the Beatles.
[00:29:32] Why is that so relatively unremarked upon or underappreciated?
[00:29:43] A lot of people don't have a sense of humor at all.
[00:29:47] And um,
[00:29:51] only somewhat smaller group don't appreciate humor and art.
[00:29:58] Some people hate humor combined with sex.
[00:30:01] Some people hate humor combined with art.
[00:30:04] Some people hate humor combined with food.
[00:30:11] They maybe think these things are too holy to be contaminated
[00:30:15] with humor or irony or play.
[00:30:23] I find those worldviews really bleak
[00:30:28] and I'm happy to say that I find humor
[00:30:33] almost universally appropriate.
[00:30:39] You probably want to avoid humor
[00:30:44] while testifying in court, but other than that, I think
[00:30:50] even at a funeral, humor is welcome.
[00:30:53] Yeah, especially at a funeral.
[00:30:55] Sure. Yeah.
[00:30:58] Either humor or not welcome at a funeral.
[00:31:01] Sure.
[00:31:02] But yeah, yeah, there's the it's called Gallows humor for a reason.
[00:31:07] Yeah.
[00:31:09] It's like my therapist about this last night and I was
[00:31:13] mentioning that I feel like for me, humor has been as an introvert
[00:31:18] as somebody who has difficulties relating to people one on one
[00:31:22] in person, that it's it's like a shortcut that I found for
[00:31:26] interacting with people and interacting with the world.
[00:31:30] But what's that?
[00:31:32] It's like a shortcut.
[00:31:34] It's like punching them.
[00:31:37] Yeah, it catches them off guard.
[00:31:39] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:31:40] And suddenly you're in a different conversation.
[00:31:43] Yeah.
[00:31:44] But but my the reason why I brought it up is because I, you know,
[00:31:47] from a I was worried from a professional standpoint
[00:31:50] that in certain situations that people might not take me as seriously
[00:31:57] if I was.
[00:31:59] Quick to a joke with things or would feel that I was making full
[00:32:03] of light of things or that I wasn't taking things seriously
[00:32:07] because I had a humorous take on them.
[00:32:10] It's almost always bad to be sarcastic within 10 seconds
[00:32:13] of meeting someone, even at someone else's expense.
[00:32:22] But after that, I think.
[00:32:25] Full speed ahead.
[00:32:27] Do you think that there is an extent to which not that this
[00:32:30] is something that bothers you?
[00:32:32] But is it an extent to which that people
[00:32:37] maybe don't take art or music as seriously if it has humor in it?
[00:32:44] I think it's more that people are puzzled by humor.
[00:32:50] The whole category of novelty songs.
[00:32:54] Used to be maybe that's another historical category.
[00:32:59] There used to be compilations, lots of compilations of novelty songs.
[00:33:05] Dr.
[00:33:06] That meant to Dr.
[00:33:07] DeMento was an entire genre for a while.
[00:33:14] And that has gone away.
[00:33:19] And we no longer call anything a novelty song, no matter what it is.
[00:33:23] You could. Yeah.
[00:33:26] If you write a song about cooking naked with.
[00:33:36] Nancy Reagan.
[00:33:38] It's not a novelty song anymore.
[00:33:40] It's just not called that.
[00:33:44] And I think a lot of people would
[00:33:50] not think of it as an attempt at humor,
[00:33:53] but just think it as an artistic license or something.
[00:33:57] Or social commentary.
[00:33:59] Right. I guess it depends on who did it too.
[00:34:02] There's
[00:34:05] there are racist and misogynist
[00:34:09] inflections of who is considered to be sophisticated enough
[00:34:14] to be funny and.
[00:34:20] So some people.
[00:34:23] No matter how incredibly silly Lil Nas X is,
[00:34:28] some people just don't realize he's joking.
[00:34:31] They just don't get it.
[00:34:33] They don't see it as humor.
[00:34:35] They don't see it as intelligent.
[00:34:39] He's just gay and black.
[00:34:44] And they think that that's like.
[00:34:48] The entire description of his brain.
[00:34:52] Rather than that he's
[00:34:55] hysterically funny.
[00:34:57] I think he also has the the obstacle of there are certain subjects
[00:35:03] with certain people that if you joke about them,
[00:35:05] that they will never find funny and religion.
[00:35:09] Satanism is one of those things with large swaths of people.
[00:35:14] They will automatically think everyone else finds it funny.
[00:35:18] Like, yeah, because it's a sacred cow for silly people.
[00:35:24] The rest of us joke about Satanism all the time again.
[00:35:31] We we stopped in the 80s for a while, but now it's back.
[00:35:37] And what is sillier than the idea.
[00:35:43] That as a satanic cabal in a pizza
[00:35:47] video is eating babies as a part of the Democratic Party regime.
[00:35:59] It would be.
[00:36:02] It wouldn't be so silly if it were the Republicans.
[00:36:06] It's just the Democrats are so banal that it's yeah, silly.
[00:36:15] I think you I think you might have backed into another point there, too,
[00:36:18] which is that again, this is it's a hacky thing to say.
[00:36:24] But probably for a reason that that there's a certain threshold
[00:36:27] that you cross where satire is no longer satirical,
[00:36:31] you know, where that's where that's a reality that people are living with
[00:36:36] so they don't find much humor in it.
[00:36:39] It's very difficult to satirize Marjorie Taylor Greene.
[00:36:43] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:36:49] How do you exaggerate her?
[00:36:51] It strikes me, you know, knowing what I I do know,
[00:36:54] what little I do know about your your backgrounds and your your early life
[00:36:57] with your mother, you know, that that that that Buddhism,
[00:37:02] that that ritual that a lot of her.
[00:37:06] Explorations, I guess, of what we would call spirituality were really big,
[00:37:10] played a really big role in your life and where you grew up.
[00:37:16] But were you
[00:37:18] even at a young age, were you able to find humor
[00:37:21] in some of those things in religion?
[00:37:24] So my mother was raised Catholic and her approach to Tibetan Buddhism
[00:37:29] has been very obviously.
[00:37:37] Colored by her background in Catholicism.
[00:37:41] She loves the pomp and ritual and gold leafing
[00:37:46] and brightly colored costumes.
[00:37:54] For me, having not been raised Catholic,
[00:37:58] I find that all absolutely silly, absurd, preposterous,
[00:38:05] dumb, pointless, hugely wasteful
[00:38:14] and at this point, I just won't be around it.
[00:38:16] But I no longer have to be around it because now that I have COPD,
[00:38:20] no one expects me to go into a room with incense burning
[00:38:24] because I can't stand up for very long in a room with incense burning.
[00:38:32] Fine with me.
[00:38:33] I don't want to be in a room with incense burning.
[00:38:37] Catholic or Tibetan Buddhists or other are just.
[00:38:41] Yeah, intentionally polluting the air to give people less oxygen
[00:38:47] in order to give them a religious experience.
[00:38:49] For me, that's totally transparent.
[00:38:54] They're making you dumb to make you religious.
[00:38:58] And that's how it works.
[00:39:02] My mother doesn't understand this and never will.
[00:39:08] And she doesn't think it's silly at all.
[00:39:10] Which is she's missing that gene
[00:39:15] that allows her to use humor as an analytical tool, as it is,
[00:39:26] to critique her own so-called spiritual.
[00:39:40] And I could make you fly away.
