VALUE FRIENDSHIPS

“To me, the bass is one of the only instruments that when you play a bad note, everybody notices. As much as I love to play the guitar, and I love to play the guitar more than anything, I think, but the bass really defines what the quality of the chord is. Because you can put the root in there. You can put the third of the chord in the bass. You can put the fifth in there. So the bass player has a lot of power.”

“Elton John just walked into our session, and he said he's a big fan. He said to come over when we're done and hang out in Studio A. So we did, and he was there with Bernie Taupin. They were working on a song, and we talked there for an hour, and he was talking about recording two records a year and then they'd go on tour and they'd write and record the whole record in two weeks. So Bernie would give him lyrics, Elton would go out and spend fifteen minutes writing all the melody.”

“My dad gave me for Christmas when I was in tenth grade. And he said, and this is not like my dad. My dad worked for the railroad. He was very, you know, few words spoken, born in 1919. He said, if you ever learn to play guitar like this, you've accomplished something with your life. And I was like, What? So, this record state was unopened until about March after Christmas, and one day I was like, Okay, I'll open it up, and I put it on, I start listening to it.”

“My theory of my channel has always been make videos on things I'm interested in. And at first, I thought, oh, nobody's gonna watch an old white haired guy on YouTube. That was kinda my thing. Well, that was not correct. And then it's like, we'll just make videos on stuff I'm interested in. It just so happens that other people are interested in the same things I'm interested in, and keep learning.”

“When I first started making these AI videos, it started back in 2023. I would take my phone, come up in the kitchen, I'd play a song, and my youngest, Layla, soon as I played, why are you listening to AI? And I was like, oh my god. Instantly. I was like, how do you know? Oh, it has this ringing sound in the thing. So it took me probably about four or five days to figure out, okay, what are they hearing that I'm not hearing?”

“When I interviewed Ron Carter that played in Miles' sixties quintet, I asked Ron, because Ron did records. He played bass on 2,200 famous records. And I said, did you guys ever rehearse with Miles? No. Never. I said, so what would you do? He goes, we'd just show up at the studio, and he'd have the charts, put them on the stand, and we would just roll. And I said, well what about the live records that you did when you'd record at clubs and things like that? He goes, we never knew that we were recording.”

“I think it's very similar to learning languages, which kinda is like my theory on perfect pitch, that every child is born with perfect pitch, and they start to lose the ability around nine months when people become culturally bound listeners, when babies do. They start out as citizens of the world. They have the neural pathways to hear the sounds, the phonemes of all 6,500 languages spoken on Earth. But then around nine months, they begin to lose that ability.”

“If you go back and you watch videos, The Beatles, any of their movies, they're smoking all the time. The Get Back documentary, they're smoking constantly. Every singer smoked. Every musician smoked. This is the reason that so many of these virtually every famous singer, no matter what genre music, jazz, soul, rock, they all smoked. Nat King Cole, he smoked, I think, four packs a day. He died of lung cancer.”

“Beethoven was sick all the time too. What would motivate you to write music, this beautiful music that you can never actually hear except for in your head? The amount of time it takes to write a thirty five minute, forty minute piece, all the parts, you gotta hear all the orchestration in your head. There's a thing called the Hellagerstatte Testament that he wrote. It was a letter to his brothers from eighteen o two. He felt a sense of shame and humiliation because of his hearing loss.”

“Fight these content ID claims. If it's fair use, if you're not just playing the song and listening to it. A lot of stuff that are reaction videos or whatever that are not where they play the whole song. I'm using these things and I'm talking. He went through my entire catalog. I have 2,100 videos. He's fought 4,000 content ID claims and won every single one of them. Historically, YouTubers never would fight back. They were like, oh, this is easy money. YouTubers never fight back because they're afraid to have their channels taken down.”