It's a daily talk show, and we are live in Burbank, California. And we've got Josh Simons back on the show. Hi, guys. Do you remember what we were doing last time when we had you on the show?
We were drinking samosas. Yeah, not to be mistaken with samosas, which is an Indian. Which I had yesterday. Really?
Yeah, because we have where we take our dog to get, you know, health stuff. Fixed. That's the words. There's an Indian store, but it's a vegan Indian store next door, so they have samosas.
Nice. Well, I've actually just gone vegetarian. Have you? Yeah.
Oh, my God. Tommy's being sarcastic because I've brought it up in every interview. It's been three weeks. Can you...
Yeah, I guess you can say. I mean, this has been challenging for him, this trip. Yeah, because you can't... Yeah, everything here has cheese.
Yeah, yeah. Well, cheese is okay because I'm not vegan. That's why there's everything else. The other thing has a meat patty or some kind of smoked meat in it, but the Impossible Burger is taking off right now, and everyone is...
Every restaurant has it. So I think you'll be okay. We went to the Cheesecake Factory, and I had the Impossible. But I had it on, like, a mac and cheese thing.
All right, I'm going to steer away from food chat because we're only in LA for a few days. Can I just say that I tried going vegan. I announced it on my 365 Grateful Instagram page that I did last year as a little year-long mission thing, and I did it for a week, and I forgot that I was doing it. I just kind of stopped doing it.
I just felt like a burger one day, and that was the end of that. It's one of those experiments that you don't commit to, so you just give up. Can you paint the picture of where we are right now? Okay, so this is a recording studio.
Well, you guys can't see this, but you guys can see this because there's people watching. And so I work with a company called Young and Vicious. It's like a management slash publishing company, and so this is one of their songwriter rooms. So you come here to work on material if you're developing a new act or writing a song for a project.
So I thought I'd bring you here to show you something other than my apartment. How do you know what lyrics are cheesy and what are genius? The reason I bring it up is because we're just listening to the Chick-fil-A song by Kanye. Oh, have you listened to the gospel yet, the whole album?
Yeah, I like it. It's growing on me. Yeah, I hadn't heard all of it. So Kanye's released an album.
It's called Jesus is King, and it's basically a Christian album by the biggest rapper in the world. That's right. I like it. It's grown on me a lot, too.
I think it's cool that he's working with a whole different group of people. In fact, the studio that we used to work at when you last saw me was his studio, Good Music. And then that was shut down in April, and then he's kind of replaced his whole team since Coachella. He had a bit of a moment, and he was already doing this thing Sunday Service, which I'm sure you guys all know of it.
I actually don't know of it. Sunday Service is like every Sunday he puts on a mass, basically, but they sing gospel tunes. But they also reimagine his old songs and change the lyrics so that it's more, I don't know, service to God and they get rid of all the blasphemy and all the, you know, swearing and stuff. So anyway, he's been doing Sunday Service since January, and he's always had this dream, apparently, of bringing church to the masses.
And Kanye can kind of do, I mean, he can sell sneakers on mass. He can sell baggy pants on mass, you know, pink shirts. He's had the history of bringing anything that he wants to make big, he generally can make big. So he's tried it with the church, and then I think actually at some point he decided, actually, I'm dead set serious about this.
And he redid his whole album that he'd been working on called Yandhi at that point. And he worked with a couple of people who, you know, have spent their whole life dedicated to the church and the gospel, and rewrote all the lyrics and made it very God-focused and it came out recently as Jesus is King. Well, I put one on because I said, Josh, this song reminds me of you, because Josh told me, fun fact, Chick-fil-A, not open on Sundays. And then I heard, I was running, I had it in my ears, running around West Hollywood and that came on, and I was like, this is classic.
I'm a genius, I was rapping, I didn't even know it. There you go. The funny thing, I actually drove downtown for, I got a hair on this microphone that I have here because I'm driving this shit. That's what you call them.
I guess I was driving, I was getting an Uber downtown a couple of days ago for a meeting, and people, multiple cars along the way downtown, because I had the window down, were blasting this Jesus is King album. And so it's amazing that he's brought all these people, these hardcore people in their, you know, cool cars, and it's LA, are blasting the church. That's great. I think it's amazing.
But I don't know, his spiritual journey and just the idea of transformations and what he's done in a period of a year fascinates me at the moment, because I think I've had, just personally, a year of also like setting some goals and wanting to be a better person and trying to kind of find, I don't know, not find myself, because I never really, I didn't lose myself, but just, I just wanted to be better, frankly. When I saw you last, like I was probably living not so healthy life, not as clean as I'm trying to be now. And so I kind of, I relate to it on that level. Like, I think it's great when a major megastar artist has a message that's really just try and be better.
Could he be the next, like, Hillsong church? Like, could we see Kanye go all out and be a pastor? Conspiracy Jimmy, friend of the show, he, he said to me, oh, I reckon he's trying to, I heard that he's trying to create the church, tax write-off for Yeezus. There's actually, I've heard some stuff around that too, that maybe there's something, in terms of like the merchandise around it and who, who, I don't know how they're going to address that, but because it's costing him, well, it's costing him a lot to put on these shows every Sunday anyway, and that's out of pocket.
So that's an expense. I don't get into his tax return. I don't know, I'm speculating, but I would hazard a guess that there's some sort of, uh, clever account. Can you go to these services?
Yes. Recently, not, not to begin with. When it started, it was like celebrities and, you know, Orlando Bloom and people like that. Now that you can usually reserve tickets on the weekend.
I haven't gone. Um, the ones in LA have been at the Forum, which is in Inglewood, which is on a Sunday, which is like the only day I sleep in. It's just a little bit too far from my house. So it's just laziness is why I haven't gone.
Um, but probably should. And you get to see him perform? Yeah. He stands in the middle of this big circle.
It's a little bit, well, it's, it could be perceived as a little bit cultish. And I think that's, if it goes more in that direction, maybe that's when I step out a little bit. I don't have any issue with like God and all of that. I mean, my wife's family is totally, um, non-secular and very much, you know, my brother's a, I think he's a pastor.
I think he's a pastor. Yeah. Anyway, so it's in, it's in our family kind of. It's not, it's not a hundred percent me, but I have no issue with it whatsoever.
And Wesley, with the school we went to, it was like, we went to church once a week and sang hymns and didn't sneak out and smoke cigarettes. But now everyone just goes to this one wearing Yeezys. So they're much cooler than the Wesley kids. Yes.
Yeah. This church is wearing Yeezys and baggy clothes. And so, uh, last year, 198, that was the episode. I think we were at 198, was when you were last on.
The best one, right? Oh yeah. Huge. 6 billion.
And so at the time, Vampyr, your tech startup, at what point does it not become not a tech startup? When do you move out of startup phase? That's a funny question because I was liaising with, um, the head of South by Southwest the other day, and they said in this email very confidently, well, you're not a startup anymore. So we've got to find a different way to get you involved, whether it's speaking on panels.
Well, that's cool. And then I went to a conference like a day or two later and, um, they told me why we were very much still a startup, like at this particular VC. So, you know, I think it's, it's, people still call Uber a startup and Airbnb a startup. I think you're a startup until you list, really.
Until you go public probably the most boring thing in the world, and we may have touched on that last time, and I still believe that. Most people don't want to have to network, you know. It's kind of an unfortunate thing you have to do in order to get ahead. So how can you gamify that, and how can you take something that might take seven years to do, like, for example, Baz and I, it took about seven years to find our bandmates, and the projects that ended up making us money.
How can we do that in seven seconds? That's Vamper. But now we're trying to do that for more creative fields, and we've just started, so I can't really comment on the success of that. I can't say we've helped introduce a filmmaker with an actor or anything like that.
But that's kind of where we're going, but yeah, music is still, I suppose, in our DNA as musicians, and we're in a studio right now. How has being in LA dictated features within Vamper? It's certainly helped us map out features we want to do. There's some really exciting stuff we're starting to look at around content, from our users.
Right now, we tell our users' stories on Instagram, and they get a decent number of hits, like a few thousand people watch how someone else has used Vamper. We realized that these people have really rich stories to tell about their experiences on the platform, and their experiences of meeting someone from the platform, then they've gone on and toured the world together. I think we did a story the other day, we did two stories on three different marriages that have happened from Vamper. And even though that's not the focus of the platform, that's phenomenally cool, right?
Something we built has led to people getting married, sharing houses, building studios. So we want to find ways. We've got some ideas about how do we exploit that content a little bit more for everyone's benefit, for the people that it's about, for our sake, just to kind of, I guess, just let the world know about what's going on in this little small community that we've built. And that's what it feels like.
It feels like a little small army that's getting bigger and bigger by the day, and it's our job now to sort of, I guess, take that to the next level. And that's where we're at. So we're looking at some content plays. We're also looking at ways to get some passive income for both sides of the table.
So us as a company, but also our artists, they all have incredible content, a lot of them, whether they're musicians being unsigned or fine artists not having a means to get their work out there and exploit it and make money for it. We're looking at maybe some ways that how can we make money for everybody? And this was not where our head was at a year ago. Our head was strictly on the sort of the LinkedIn model.
And we're starting to think, well, maybe we still think that's applicable, but how can we get some other passive revenue streams? It's really exciting. In some ways, I feel like right now, we're back at the blue sky place because we have cash and we've committed, we've committed to not spend it quickly. We've committed to try ideas quickly and let those ideas either win or fail quickly, but not just go out and say, this is the one idea we're going to throw $1.5 million at it.
And if it fails, we're going to break it up into much more granular little projects. And we're going to go, let's see if that little project works, and we'll try that one. And one of them will stick invariably, and then we'll hammer that, and that will be the story next 12 months when I see you guys. We turned into a record label and we have the biggest catalog in the world.
I don't know, but there's a lot of things that could happen between now and this time next year. And it's very exciting for us that we've finally raised that money, that we're very close to being able to shut off the crowdfunding and get on with building the company. How do you look after yourself personally? You're talking about how often I think.
How do you make sure that's dialed in when you're in the building of a business? I'm finding sleep's getting harder and harder. And so I'm probably getting healthier and healthier. I don't smoke anymore.
I've definitely cut back on drinking massively, eating pretty well as well, as well as you can in LA. But I find sleep so important, and I don't get anywhere near enough of it. And so I try and compensate for that with meditation, because when I don't get a lot of naps... Naps are bad, actually, but I do, I do.
Naps are all good. Yeah, do you think? Yeah. I never used to be a napper until...
I think naps are fine. I only started napping after I quit cigarettes. It's strange. It kind of makes sense as well.
Instead of a sticky break. Yeah, exactly. Or something you can sort of re-energize from a quick nap. It's like the revive and survive.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if you have a... How do you take care of yourself? I think you just have to be conscious of or aware of how you live your life.
Because if you're ignorant to it, well, you're just going to keep powering on through. And I believe me, I've had phases, even in this last 12 months, where I did that, where there was so much, like I'd have to fly across the country, get back, go overseas for a week, and then every single city in Australia, and then get back to LA, and then back on the East Coast again. It was so insane. And I definitely put my head down in that time and probably drank my way through it, frankly, because it's just so many flights and so many different hotel rooms, and it's stressful.
But it was incidents like that that actually made me go, okay, I need to stop and work out how I can do that same schedule without drinking, you know, a couple of bottles of Pinot each night. So what does that look like? Is that the thing of, I need to wind down? Like, when did you notice?
I was looking sick. Like, I was putting on weight, even though I wasn't really eating much. And my bags under my eyes were bigger. And just things weren't working, and my hip was sore.
And I was just... I mean, I'm smiling about it, but I was feeling pretty, pretty worse for wear. This was probably first quarter leading to the second quarter of this year, before we launched the crowdfund just before. I was just feeling really crap.
I'm not a word of a lie. I watched your thing on New Year's Eve, not on New Year's Eve. I think when you said you wanted to try being sober for a year. And I was back in Melbourne for like a day or something crazy.
And I was at my parents' place. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. And I was watching a couple of your things. And that was one of them.
And I thought, yeah, he's not that much older. And like you explaining why you wanted to do it. You were lacking energy and you wanted to... I can't remember exactly what it was.
I can't remember this, but it's good. It sounds like what I'd say. It resonated on some level. And that and a few other things.
I just thought, I'm just going to try. First, I tried to cut everything. I tried vegan. And then I realized, no, it's actually just about doing one little thing at a time.
So I stopped smoking. Stopped drinking coffee. Chilled out on drinking a lot. You know.
And I think when you introduce those things one by one, then it becomes sustainable. So what happens if you go to a hotel room and you're used to having a glass of wine to relax? What's the thing that then replaces it? Or like, how do you catch yourself and what do you...
Do you go for a walk? Lots of walking. A lot of walking. There's honestly so much work with Vampyr at the moment that right now, I'll probably substitute what would have been drinking time just for emails and pretty mundane stuff.
I will say, though, about two weeks ago, I was stuck in the rain in Houston. My plane was forced to land because there was a cyclone. Good reason to land. Yeah.
It's always fun flying through a cyclone. So were you halfway? We were halfway back to LA. And we couldn't...
We were allowed to... We had to stop over at Houston anyway. But we weren't allowed to take off again. And so the pilot had to circle until he could find like a break in the cyclone.
Got down and then I had to stay the night in Houston. And I was not going to be sober that night. So I ran through the rain. I checked into a hotel.
And then I found a bar nearby. And I had the funnest night. There was a piano in there. There was all these angry Texans.
And we played music and laughed and drank and smiled. And then I got on like a 7 a.m. flight back to LA. And it was just like, this is a nice little, nice little colorful moment.
But I think the thing is, you know, you can do that once in a while. You just can't do that every night of the week. And that's where control and discipline comes in. And that's probably what I was lacking for a minute there.
And that's what I'm trying to relearn. Do you think it's possible to, like, the grind, you know, having a business and the thought and attention that needs to be given to it. Do you think it's possible to do it without the personal investment? You know, like the connectedness to you as an individual We're at a real turning point.
What would you do? Or can I speak to someone else that you've worked with who's been in a similar role, and how can they advise me so I can help make this decision better? That's the kind of investor you want. I've met both kinds.
I think the ones that we've got are phenomenal and patient with me. And they get to know you during the DD process. They've asked me all kinds of pretty personal questions. You know, they really know my character well.
They've seen me on good days. They've seen me on shit days. That's... Yeah.
I think we've done a good job finding people who are okay with I'm not sure. But I'll definitely deal with people who don't like it. Do you think there's a culture of, like, you need to be stoic in the startup space? Yes!
Of course you have to be a little bit stoic. You're a leader at the end of the day. If I walk around with my shoulders hunched and wasn't projecting some sense of a vision, I don't know that I'd have much of a team. And I don't feel that way.
And I don't think you could... I don't think you could get a startup to this level or any level if you didn't naturally have some part of you that believed in yourself. Like, you guys believe in yourself. You're committed to this 10-year vision.
Even though, as you said, there'll be days where you go, am I maybe no good? You know, that was a terrible interview. Obviously, there's a part of you that knows that's bullshit because you committed to the 10 years. Well, yeah, it's not even...
It could be 100% a shit job, but you're okay with the... You're okay with the one misalignment of a brick if you're building the Great Wall of China. What's the big wall in China? Great Wall of China.
Thank you. Good memory. That's the name. Since your last one.
Yeah, the brick of the brick wall of China. Yeah, the big wall. And so, what has changed in regards to perception or perspective of Los Angeles? I feel like people go through ebbs and flows of loving it, hating it.
Where are you on the spectrum? I've learned to appreciate it. I definitely loved it, then hated it, then loved it, then hated it. I think when I last saw you, I said I was learning to love it.
I've since hated it. Right now, I think it has a role in my life. It's a... I wouldn't want to be anywhere else for the business, but not for my wife or my dog or my friends.
I think we know now in mind that we'll be done with Los Angeles at a point in time. Right now, it's great. And we'll look forward to saying goodbye at some point, too. As I said to you actually before, I get to go back to Melbourne on Tuesday.
And I'm going back for five months. We're setting up a new office and hiring some new people. And it's just going to feel good. That'll be the longest time since 2013 that I've lived in Australia.
And I just can't wait to spend time with friends. Yeah, what are the small things? Like, what are you going to get? Just seeing friends, going to...
What food places are you going to go to? I'm going to my old cafes in Elwood that I used to... They're probably all gone. What's it called?
Elwood Bakery? There's a bunch of new ones that popped up. The Butcher's Kitchen or something. And then they changed the name, I think.
There's a bunch of new ones that popped up. Where are you going to live? I'm going to live down in Mornington Peninsula. Oh, great.
But I'm probably... Towards the end of the five months, I'll get an Airbnb for a month or so in Elwood because I like that area. It's sort of my old home. But, yeah, it's just exciting.
The thing I'm looking forward to... I'm looking forward to seeing my friends. I'm looking forward to going to my old GP. I haven't been to a GP in like two years.
It's so fucking expensive, right? It's too expensive. We've got a healthcare plan, but you've got this thing called deductibles here. So you've got to spend $6,000 out of pocket at normal retail rates before your plan kicks in.
Why are we even paying this $450? I don't want to get into it. It's just... Stuff like this that makes America not a great place at all.
And they need serious reform. That doesn't need to be Medicare for all, but they need serious reform. We're not going to get into politics. You have to have the healthcare system to get blood tests to test out testosterone against each other.
But I used to do that, too. I'd get an extra roll, and my trainer would say, go and get your cortisol levels done. But here, it's like, all right, well, you have to then go and get quotes for different labs who are prepared to... You know, no!
I don't have time to go see the GP, let alone... I used to, in St Kilda, I used to be a frequent at the free bulk billing clinics before we had partners. You know what I mean? So again, I miss that.
Not that I want to... No, no, I'm saying. I miss the free healthcare, you know? So hang out with my doctor while he's on my boys.
How's the blood look this week, Doc? The grind of... You've had a few grinds here. You've done the music thing.
You've done Vampyr, sort of the tech startup space. What's the difference between the grind to become a musician and the grind of a tech startup? Well, both require hustle, and, you know... And this is what I was talking to an artist manager an hour ago.
Both require you to work the phones and network, network, network, unfortunately. Do you have AirPods? I do. They're useless.
Yeah, bad with wind. But there's the pros now. I wonder if they're any better. I know, I saw them.
I was expecting one of you when I kissed the watch. We're all tied up. But both require you to work the phone a lot, and both require you to be really good at what you do. That's the other thing I think I've probably only just appreciated, is that sometimes in my life, whether it was music or even Vampyr, I've turned down deals that seem small.
Like, for example, small record deals, small acquisition offers. And I think, in hindsight, I wouldn't maybe have taken the deals, but what they were were they were signposts of someone going, you're quite good at this, but this is how good I think you are, based on the amount that I'm offering. And so what it made me appreciate is that you need to really work on your skill. If you want to get a huge exit or you want to get a huge record deal, get good at your craft.
And I think that's what I've only just started to appreciate, is maybe focus more on what I do, and actually get really, really, really good at that rather than just try to sell it. You know what I mean? I've been trying to find a way for a while to articulate this sentiment, but I just... Yeah, I don't know.
I've tried. It's the same mindset of, why do we do hard things? There's a bunch of things that would be way easier to do than what you're doing and what we're doing. But then it's like, okay, and then take that a step further.
Why am I doing a hard thing and then not working really hard on some of the art of it? And so the art of being a businessman might be conflict resolution, dealing with third-party contractors, setting a vision, then selling the vision, then cold calling, going to networking events, going to conferences. I mean, the list goes on. So it's having the tenacity to say, yeah, I'm going to fucking do it, but then when you actually get to it, It's like, I'm going to sleep till 9am, I'm going to sleep in.
And then you compare yourself against other people and they go, they're getting up at 6 every day. But then also I'm working till 4 because I've got people in Australia, so it's like, well, maybe I wouldn't be alive if I was going to sleep at 4am. So you're constantly judging yourself and comparing yourself to other people in your field, but I keep coming back to the same thing of like, just focus on being the best you possibly can. Because then it's not just about so much saying to your investors at the end of the day, I gave it my best shot.
It's also about saying to yourself, I did my best. And I think that's when you turn to drinking and drugs, is when deep down inside, you kind of know that you probably could have given that little bit extra, but it was easier instead to open the Mello. You know what I mean? Also, like the easy things can be really hard.
Like it can be opening up your resbox. For me, it's like, do you remember when you were 16 and going for your first ever job and how hard it was to hand out that first resume? Yeah, yeah. But you procrastinated.
It's not even hard to hand it out or even write it. You just procrastinated doing it for some reason for like six months. Everyone went through that experience. Except him.
This is his first job. 97. What do they call it? ATAR?
What did you get? Do you remember? Did you finish? You finished.
I went back and finished because I dropped out and then I went back to school and I... You did a pass? I didn't. It was fine.
It's fine. I'm fine. I had a bad cough since the fires have started, so that's why I'm over hydrating. How did I feel when I was mowing lawns?
I was trying to feel connected to, this is going to sound so hippie, but I was trying to feel connected to the earth again. Quite literally, like I was, I don't think any, it was as stressful as Vampires, but I had the tools to handle it now. But you don't have it when you're 17 and, you know, you haven't even finished puberty and your brain's certainly not even near finished developing. So I was just trying to reconnect with, you know, humility and because, yeah, when you're directing and producing a film and you're doing all that stuff you do have a different sense of probably who you are versus what everyone else is.
You're task focused and not, you can't really let external things throw you off what you're focused on. Yeah, that's right. It was so laser focused. You almost probably call it manic focus.
And I think the key is to not get into manic focus, to get on that ball. It's like that scale of anxiety that shows you when anxiety is useful and then there's a point where it becomes no longer useful. Did you feel the weight of your shoulders? Like I've done short films and you've got crew and cast and they're expecting things, like especially if they're putting in free time.
Did you, did you feel the weight on your shoulders? Well, I was lying to them the whole time. They thought I was 24. And there was an article that came out in the newspaper the day that the film wrapped production that said the real deal, play on the word real, the real deal and only 17.
It was the front page of the leader newspaper all around Vic- Victoria. And so one of the cast members brought it to set and it started off, thank God in hindsight, it never got legal because they all had agents and stuff, but it started off a bit of a lonely few months for me because people lost a lot of confidence in me. They called me a liar. And I was doing it actually for their own benefit.
If no one had found out, then I was allowed to create. It was always, you know, everyone had equity in the film. Everyone was happy with their equity in the film. Does it really fucking matter if I'm 17 or 24?
And so what was it? It was legally, you couldn't do it at that age? Well, you just told them one thing or, I wouldn't have gotten the actors I wanted to get. I wouldn't have gotten some of the favourites from Victorian police.
You know, they let us use their cars and stuff. In hindsight, what we did was pretty cool. Which is the story that comes from that, right? I'm going to pass back to this a long time.
I wasn't planning to do this. Well, we, like if you think about the, the stories, if you, what's the alternative, right? It lands and it becomes the big thing, which is what we all want, right? You start a business because you want it to be- We sent it to Sundance.
So that was always it. Because, and we would never have gotten it anyway for the simple reason that we didn't clear the soundtrack, but I didn't know anything about that back in the days. Um, but you know what? If we'd gotten accepted, you would have found financing to clear the, to clear it.
But anyway, um, but I don't know that now as a, as a seasoned business person. But no, the thing is we sent it to Sundance. That did happen on schedule. Um, that was what our, our editing cut deadline was September.
I still remember the date, September 20, 2008. We had to get it in by that day to Sundance. So that was where me and Reese were working towards. Um, but when they said no, um, that's when we kind of lost sight of what was the purpose of doing this again.
Because we're trying to do that Tarantino Rodriguez thing of, I think, was it Robert Rodriguez's first film that cost $20,000 or something? Didn't he try and sell it? Like, I remember there was a, a book called Rebel Without a Crew. Yes.
And he talks about like, uh, in the U S you can do all the medical trials and shit and get cash for like that. And he got involved in all that. Yeah. It's um, the, the, the flipside would have been getting into a festival, the one, being that hero story, the boy who could, you know, boy wonder.
And that's what I was so desperately wanted to be. And now I don't care about boy wonder or fame, partly because I'm too old to be boy wonder and I've seen what fame does to people. So, you know, your priorities change, I think. Well then, so there's the work that goes in, which I think most people who find the success have put in some level of work, but then there's also the luck.
Yeah. It's like, you do create opportunities for luck to present itself. Um, I go back and forth on that. There's times in my life where I feel like you do create your own luck.
There's times where I feel like, no, actually some people just get straight up lucky. Probably the truth is somewhere in the middle. Um, I don't have the answer on that. So someone who pops on a platform, they've decided at that moment that they would put in the work and it's timing that has created this bit of luck in that timing.
It's like Lil Nas X, right? He founded a loop on YouTube that he thought was dope. He wrote a good, admittedly very good top line, very memorable top line on top of it. And he uploaded it online and then cut it up and he memeified his own stuff.
I don't, I've definitely worked harder than that for, and I'm not saying he hasn't worked hard since. I'm just saying like with Buchanan, you know, we would have massive studios and huge crews and, and you know, putting long hours and, and not sleep for weeks on end, getting the mix perfect and coming back from family vacations to work on mastering. So Lil Nas X put on SoundCloud and now, you know, he had the biggest record of the year. So that's luck in my mind.
It's zeitgeist as well, right? It's the, I guess some sparks, uh, can catch a little bit more. And I guess that's a good example of taste. I think it's taste.
And that was, I said something earlier. I was going to say the word taste as well. He might just know what the perfect melody is and it didn't matter whether he spent 10 years on the production or 10 minutes. He just knows name and tell me nothing.
Like he just knows that that's going to connect with the, with the zeitgeist. So he might have some sort of context, which is like every day from the age of five, listening to certain music. It's something he did some way. He was conditioned, his environment, um, his taste, because I don't think you can really teach taste.
It's just something you have. And then maybe something from not necessarily God, but something from above comes through you. Um, but all, I think all songwriters say that it comes through you when it's a good song, you're not really responsible for it. Something else is something in the collection of all your experiences today and something in the wind and the room temperature and whether you're comfortable with the people around you, all these different fucking things.
I'm sorry. I'm tired. I'm so tired. I got like two hours last night.
Um, but something does come through you. And so him again, that, that line, who knows that that could be the product of seeing his parents fighting an hour earlier. And anyone tell me nothing. Like it's that attitude.
I didn't have that when I was making my record. You know, we were in Brighton and Elwood. Yeah. But you know, plenty of privileged people have also broken Billy Eilish.
I'm not saying she's not great. She's fucking incredible, but she comes from a rich family. Lana Del Rey. Anyway.
How much do you think though, having things like a film that doesn't go well and, you know, the paper being shown to all these people, how much does it contribute to you then? Yeah, something didn't do well. I saw my movie at Palace Cinemas. How many people have seen it?
When you grow up in Melbourne, Palace Cinemas, you know, you've made it when you're there. There's something cool about that. No, but you know, plenty of privileged people have also broken Billy Eilish. I'm not saying she's not great.
She's fucking incredible, but she comes from a rich family. Lana Del Rey. Anyway. How much do you think though, having things like a film that doesn't go well and, you know, the paper being shown to all these people, how much does it contribute to you then?
Yeah, something didn't do well. I saw my movie at Palace Cinemas. How many people have seen it? When you grow up in Melbourne, Palace Cinemas, you know, you've made it when you're there.
There's something cool about that. No, but you know, plenty of privileged people have also broken Billy Eilish. I'm not saying she's not great. She's fucking incredible, but she comes from a rich family.
Lana Del Rey. Anyway. How much do you think though, having things like a film that doesn't go well and, you know, the paper being shown to all these people, how much does it contribute to you then? Yeah, something didn't do well.
I saw my movie at Palace Cinemas. How many people have seen it? When you grow up in Melbourne, Palace Cinemas, you know, you've