It means that it's meant to be right this moment.
Here we go.
Oh! The land of corn and awkward teens, James came up with some wild dreams, Thinking Nebraska to Nashville town He's making strange rock and breaking it down He's got a podcast with a word track.
Talking big music and Illuminati The fate of town.
Okay, okay, there we go. Welcome to another episode of the Christcast. Suno did a good job at trying it right there, but hey, we got a little Suno introduction with an AI song for James Oliva.
Everyone does it, don't feel bad about it.
All right, folks, today's guest is someone who goes way back with me, like awkward middle school years back, right? We're talking skateboards, bad haircuts, cold winters in Nebraska, right? A lot of those, no longer, changed to a new place, right? He's been a longtime friend, a fellow collaborator, a creator, someone who's always got their ear to the ground and to the soundboard. That's right, James has always had a... A knack for audio and something I'm very, very fond of myself.
That's right. And it's O-L-I-V-A, O-L-I-V-A. For those writing fan mail, fan mail, right? Just make sure you get it right. He's not just a dude with great taste in weird music or conspiracy theories. He's also the host of the Totally Legitimate Business podcast, which, as our intro music said, over 100 episodes, man. Congratulations. That's amazing. It's something that most people will never accomplish, and hopefully we can someday get there ourselves, right? He's genuinely have insightful conversation with people. I've listened to the last several of them since I've become aware of it.
He's got entrepreneurial ventures on there, conspiracies, music information, insights into just a whole bunch of different industries. And I love the fact that you're open to talking with people all over, not just your main sections. And to finish up the intro, he is also a composer, a sound designer, audio engineer, and the mastermind behind. Band, the Prophet Nathan? Is that still going on. 
Yeah, that's it. Yeah.
A strange rock band born. out of Nashville that doesn't sound like anything else, because frankly, James doesn't try to sound like anyone else, right? It's not your thing. So he's a husband, a traveler, a seeker, and somebody who's constantly evolving, collaborating, which is what makes him such an interesting person to talk to. And I'm genuinely excited to catch up, talk about life, creative things, and simply the things that keep us up at night, and maybe even some sound stuff. So James, welcome to The Criste Cast. I'm really excited to have you here.
That intro was so good. I'm going to give you a round of applause. All right. Hi. Yeah.
Thanks, brother.
That was great. You nailed all the bullet points, for sure.
All right. It's not easy. I mean, again, when we haven't necessarily been able to catch up over the years, we've kind of disappeared amongst, but then kind of come back from time to time. I get to see you every once in a while. But just, again, what I see you doing is always seeking more information, and just to have not just personal growth, but to kind of better yourself in your personal areas. And as I said before, do it in your own way. And that's what I really love about just knowing you as a person and getting to talk to you. So, you know, I'm interested, you know, what got you into doing podcasting and breaking yourself away from just doing music and creating music alone, right. 
Well, that that is a great question. So I, I am a person of diverse interests. I've always liked and been interested by many, many things. It's what has led me into doing the things that I do with the podcasting specifically, I would always be the person at the party who would be like over in a corner with somebody having some crazy conversation. And ultimately enough people finally told me, you know, you should just start a podcast.
That that's probably the better, more appropriate space for all the conversations you're trying to have. And I also kind of use have used the podcast to speak with people that I would have no other business. You know, I'm fortunate that I've spent a lot of time in audio and music, and I've met all sorts of people that do all sorts of stuff within those fields. But again, I'm a person of diverse interests, and I don't necessarily have, I didn't have a reason to speak with other people that are doing things that I'm interested in. So the podcast kind of serves as the conduit.
Absolutely. I mean, I can see that aspect of, you know, being a benefit of doing a podcast. It's one thing I'm always telling people is the reason I'm doing this is because I want to talk to people smarter than myself and learn things. And it's true. I thought to myself, hey, how can I get smarter if I don't, if I don't talk to people smarter than myself? And for yourself, though, I know that you've always kind of, as you said, been in the music industry, you've been able to kind of meet new people. But I'm still interested, where does the confidence come to do that? Right? Where did you start to just think, hey, I'm I'm able to do this, no problem.
Well, well, generally, I just, I generally don't care. I do care about how other people think about what I'm doing in the sense that I don't necessarily want to be overtly offending people. I don't want to be overtly – I want to be a welcoming kind of person. But the way I've just – I've always looked at it as like I like what I like and I'm going to pursue what I like and I don't necessarily care if people don't like that or if people would tell me, no, you can't do that.
I mean I'm kind of spiteful in the sense where if people tell me I can't or shouldn't do something, I almost then have to do it.
Right. Bring it on. Bring it on, guys.
Yeah, exactly. You said I couldn't but I did. But I mean there's been plenty of times. Even up to today where I constantly doubt like what am I doing? Why am I doing this? But at a certain point that used to – I just use that as like the that helps me if I feel that way, it helps me refine what I'm trying to do with whatever it is that I'm trying to do, you know, for a long time.
Like when we were in school, I was in bands and I love playing music. I just always love playing music. I come from kind of a musical family and plenty of people said you shouldn't do that. In many cases, they were right, because it's not necessarily a great industry. The people in it are pretty toxic. But I pursued it anyways. And I'm glad that I did do those the things that I did pursuing it because I learned a ton and it helped me refine what I'm trying to do in bigger picture with my life.
And in many ways, I'm happy that I didn't ever achieve the goal of, you know, selling out a stadium, having, you know, now worked in many aspects of the live. In the event industry and the music industry, I see a lot of. unhappiness like a lot of people that make it there you on the outside you think they have it all but then when you see them on the inside like when you speak with them when they're not on stage you realize that they're actually very miserable right you know so i i don't know it's it's i the.
the confidence i wouldn't say i have more confidence than anyone it's just i am willing to put up with really bad situations to kind of achieve whatever it is i'm trying to achieve and by that i just mean uncomfortable i'm willing to go into uncomfortable places and right oh yeah.
when you say the uncomfortable places that that instantly i always kind of love the analogy of the the caterpillar going to the cocoon and turning into a butterfly as silly as it is exactly you don't get to become the butterfly without that cocoon stage and i mean it's tough you got to feel claustrophobic at some point and it's not even for sure if you're going to come out alive but then all of a sudden poof right new brand new life form new freedoms new abilities, so, All these things, and that analogy is very much something that I try to keep in mind, that you don't get the good without the struggle, and the struggle isn't actually bad now, right?
The struggle's good, right. 
Well, it's a sign. It's a sign that you're evolving. It's a sign that you're more, you know.
So you've seen the signs now, right. 
Well, and I've seen the benefits from it. It's not to say I love being uncomfortable because nobody likes being uncomfortable.
Right, by the definition of the word, right. 
But I'm not necessarily as afraid of it as I used to be at certain points, you know.
Very well said. I think that's a really nice way that you put that, and being able to understand the process, not necessarily wanting to be uncomfortable, but understanding that it's a sign that growth is there. And as a person, and I mean this, I've always looked up to you as somebody who's always been able to, at the very least, show themselves on the outside as somebody who is not pompous or, you know, I would say narcissistic, but somebody who has confidence. And at the same time, holds themselves with value. other people around them. And that's something that I think takes a little bit of fake it till.
you make it, but also takes a value system. And where do you think you gain that from? Because.
I know you have it. So where did you get that from? Well, you know, definitely, I'll definitely attribute a lot of that to my parents, my parents, because I, my ego at many times in my life has gone like wildly unchecked, but my parents were always there to check my ego, always make sure that I was being aware of how I was behaving in the sense that, again, I want to allow people around me to the freedom to be themselves. But if I want to allow the, I'm going to have to allow.
people around me that freedom if I myself want that freedom. And even when I do that, people still sometimes don't offer me that freedom. I've met many a criticism because of the way I look or what I'm doing. Um, but I really, I try not, I try not to, I accept that that is more. them than it is me and uh you know i've always you know we've we've always kept like an eclectic group of friends and we were fortunate our group of kids in lincoln when we were growing up.
we had kids of all sorts and we all kind of just generally got along i don't remember any serious.
problems with any specific we were very lucky i think as a group getting through we didn't have any big major altercations that we caused as as kids you know or as a group right and there were.
there were different groups but i feel like everyone kind of i don't know we intermingled and it wasn't like a lot of people talk about their high school middle school experiences and talk about it in like a really terrible light and ours i don't remember mine being terrible and getting along with generally everybody you know right and let's be clear i i graduated in.
2006 right and uh that time period you know from 2000s early 2000s was special because it was right before smartphones came out some kids had you, cell phones. The first smartphone that I recall that worldwide was the Palm Pre. It came out in 2006, the year we graduated, right? So we didn't have to worry about people posting all the social media stuff, Instagram, Twitter. It was before that. Yeah, that is true. We did have MySpace, right? We did have that. That was a thing. And it was a problem for some people. And it was becoming a thing. So some of those things were just starting. But yeah, we grew up in a very special time period, I feel.
And I'm super nostalgic about it. Watching Napoleon Dynamite and things like that make me just go right back home.
It was a simpler time.
Yeah, you just had to go move the chickens, right? And when you think about your childhood, you weren't originally from Lincoln, though, right? So tell me a little bit about where you – I mean, we're going way back for James right now. Where did you start from, right, before I met you. 
We'll go all the way back to the origin story. Okay, so all of my family is basically from New York and New Jersey area. My dad worked at universities. So he moved because of those jobs. He worked in the art departments.
And then we moved to Florida. In simpler times. We moved – yeah, it was way simpler. We moved to Gainesville. I lived in Gainesville, Florida until I was about 12 or 13, and then we moved to Nebraska. And, like, when I look back at my childhood, like, I had good memories in Florida. It was definitely a different vibe than Nebraska, but I'm very happy that we moved to Nebraska. The opportunities . 
Were you originally excited to move from Florida to Nebraska, or was that something that took a little bit of time? Because you're right at the age of where kids start to, you know, maybe think about what's fun.
I, I, I was, and I wasn't, and that's a really good point. Like I, it was just before I got to the point where I was, where I would have been like, oh, I'm leaving all my friends. You know, it was like, I was 12 years old. So I, and even so I had moved there when I was five. So like all of my other friends in Florida had been friends, had grown up together in the same neighborhood. And I was kind of the, uh, the, what's the word I'm looking for? Uh, not the outcast. No, you were never, not the outcast. I was the transplant. There we go. I was a transplant. So, uh, when I moved to Nebraska, um, I also felt that way, but it was also, uh, it was easy because I was still in middle school. I went to Irving. We were the last ninth grade class. So when I moved to Lincoln, I got to go to eighth grade and ninth grade at the same school, which helped because before everyone divided,
along high school lines. I at least had, like, two years to get to know people. And, like, when I think about my childhood, I'm a Nebraska person. I'm not a Florida or a Mississippi person at all. I am a Nebraska person. Again, like, we were super fortunate with the opportunities we had there, even just in having a venue. Shout out Knickerbockers, RIP Knickerbockers. Just having, like, an all-ages venue, that was cool. Like, that was something that not every place had.
And, like, we got to see the cool bands when they came through.
Yeah, we had Disturbed play there, and then we had Catalyst play there. And then we had all kinds of cool people playing. It was awesome.
But, yeah, you know, when I think of, like, who I am, what my childhood was, where do I consider home, it's for sure Lincoln. Yeah.
And, again, I realize that you've had a lot of experiences before that. And since then, you've kind of... But I've had the opportunity... opportunity to jump around, and we're going to get into that for sure. Let's jump a little bit into the actual Lincoln, because I'm sure we're going to have, hopefully, a few people from Lincoln, Nebraska, listening to the cast right now. Welcome. What's up, guys? Hey. The Huskers. Yeah. Huskers. When I think of Lincoln, I think of, obviously, I think of Southeast High. I think of Lincoln High School. I went to Lincoln High, by the way. LHS right here. And did you go to both high schools, or did you go to multiple? Nope. I went to Lincoln High.
Okay. Just Lincoln High.
Every, you know, everyone picked their high school, and I went to Lincoln High. Lincoln High was, for sure, the only place that... You were the oddball for your group. Oh, yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Literally, everyone else chose... I mean, that was... If you went to Irving, you were going to either go to Southeast. More likely than not, you were going to go to Southeast or Lincoln High, and I chose Lincoln High. I remember before I even moved there, like, we went to tour the schools, and I saw... Irving and Lincoln High. I was just like, these are the places that I'm going to go.
For sure. Right. Yeah. So you actually kind of had the idea beforehand. That's cool. I remember specifically when I saw you in Lincoln High, this feeling was like, oh, yeah, James is here. Cool. All right. Like, nice, because I knew some of the other guys went over there to Southeast and Southeast was kind of the rivalry school. And, you know, for some people more than others, I tried to play football. I tried to do the sports. But, you know, I really didn't care about who went where, you know, at the end of the day. But it did have a little bit of impact on friendships. Right. And, you know, the one thing about Lincoln High, though, is we have the restaurant program. We actually had the ability to do all the cooking classes. You know, we talked about that a little bit last time we spoke. And and, yeah, we actually got to do that. Whereas if I was at the other schools, you had to travel to Lincoln High to do that. But the only reason I really went there was because family.
It had tradition. Tradition. I had some family members who had gone there and they said, hey, that's the place you got to go, Caleb. And so I went there and a lot of good, good teachers and good moments for sure. And as we talked about, you know, there's just some good teachers and a lot of good friends, a lot of good. I would love to get to talk to you. So, hey, if anybody's listening, jump out and say, hey, what's up? Come on the pod. Come on, guys. What are you doing? I'm always looking forward to get old friends in. Right. Because, again, one way you learn about yourself is not just by listening to some of the smartest people in the world. Right. Like I'm doing right now. But it's also being able to connect with people from the past and see how growth happens and kind of nitpick and see how they created their recipes.
So for yourself, moving from Lincoln, what do you think was the biggest, most important thing? I'm going to say thing because this could be this is a wide open. What's the biggest, most important thing that Lincoln gave you that you're using right now in your day to day life. 
Oh, man. I think Lincoln really taught me the importance of relationships. I think Lincoln also really taught me the which is something I didn't necessarily appreciate when I was. There wasn't until later in life where I really understood the importance of the lessons I learned there with. With regards to relationships, but also there's just like the Midwestern attitude and this isn't even a joke. There are multiple jobs that I have got since I left Nebraska because I was from Nebraska. Like there's been people who have seen my 402 area code on my phone number and they're like, oh, you're from Nebraska. Well, I know that you know how to work. I know you've got a good work ethic. I'll give you a job.
So definitely the, the, if it snowed in the South, right, the whole city would shut down. Right. Yeah. Right. If, if, if there was even slush, if it got too cold, the city would shut down in Nebraska. We would have to shovel our driveways so that we could go to school.
Right. And they say, why are you late? Why are you late? You didn't wake up early for that? You didn't salt it the night before? Come on.
You didn't, you didn't get up at four to start doing that. Uh, and also like the tasseling. I remember that's like a shared. Experience. Very few people can really understand. I know, I know we both did that. that that that's how i paid for my first bass amp right so you know how many jobs do you do right now that are more difficult than that none there isn't a single one right uh i remember even doing that i was like this is hard this is very hard but hot and sweaty but yeah at least it's.
simple it's it's difficult but simple right at the end of the day it's simple stuff but yeah you you learn this endurance and this toughness that kind of withstands and i agree with you i'm going to go ahead and shout out what you said and that is that not only have i heard people say hey you're from nebraska cool i'm more excited to work with you i feel more comfortable about you and your trustworthiness your honesty uh not only all those things but it has a little bit to do uh with yeah the overall uh i would say just reputation that the people have been bringing that have kind of gone in the past so keep it up guys again a lot i would say i'm happy i want everybody in the world.
to feel that feeling i want everybody in the world from every state to have the pride that they have but nebraska, keep it up all right keep it up guys all right yeah uh corn husker, Don't have a whole lot, right? People make fun of us a lot at the end of the day. And I grew up born and bred in Nebraska. I didn't get to come from some other place. Most of my friends came from other places and they would always kind of use this excuse. Well, I'm not full Nebraskan, like when people would make fun of us. But at the end of the day, I understand the jokes because I think of myself as somebody now who's traveled and seen some things. And I'm very, very happy to at least come to where I've come to come to where I've come from at this point.
But as you said, what what you gained from it the most, as you said, relationship things, that's great to hear. Do you think it has to do with just Nebraska itself, the culture that was there? Or do you think that you just had some certain opportunities or life just gave you, you know, things at the right time? What do you think. 
I really I think, again, it's it's something I didn't necessarily appreciate until I left. But like, just knowing like all I still am friends with. The people from Nebraska, I've moved. I've been to other places, I've done other things, not necessarily friends with all of the people I met in those other places or doing those other things. But the people in Nebraska, you know, I don't know, it's like they use the phrase salt of the earth.
I feel like that kind of applies. It's like there's like a genuine level of authenticity that comes. And it's also too, you know, Nebraska, Lincoln especially is like geographically isolated and everyone like made it a point to like, okay, we don't have many things around or even nearby. So we're going to make this the best that it can be. And the again, like the one of the things that I always found funny, I was never like a huge sports person.
I love watching sports at the top level. I love watching championships, but I'm not necessarily following sports. And I think I think it was funny when the Huskers would be doing good. Damn. That economy, city economy, the energy there would be great. When the town wasn't doing so good football-wise, man, it was the total opposite. But there's this level of camaraderie that's like, that's our school. This is our thing. This is something that we can all get behind. This is something we all pour our energy into and riding the wave of success and loss.
I don't know. Again, it wasn't until I went to other places where that was completely absent where I appreciated that for what it is. I still do.
You answered that perfect as far as how I was just kind of thinking of my answer. I poorly worded what I was actually asking, and you still somehow pulled out of my brain what I was thinking. And that is exactly that, the isolated part of Nebraska, the fact that it's kind of a little bit alone. There's no pro sports teams. We don't have as much concerts with as many high-profile people coming through. So because of it, we kind of find more of these internal friendships that are more important. And they become, yeah, very significant. There's definitely tough times where people and all of us go up and down in situations like that. But at the end of the day, I completely do agree that this main point of being able to just find things that really mattered there that you don't necessarily see in other places that really help.
Because when we go to other places now, what are we doing? We're bringing those values and those traits to these places saying, hey, guys, I think you might need some of this. Right. And that's in part what the journey of the whole world has always been. Right. Us bringing together things and little seeds, not just physically seeds of things that people need in certain areas, but personalities and traits and understandings. And again, you brought that with your compilation of New Jersey, New York slash Gainesville coming to Nebraska. I could definitely tell you were different. I guess what I want. I say that even though you're a Nebraska guy, you were definitely not the same as everyone else that was there, because most people that were there, if they had confidence, they had a little bit of arrogance. Right. Yeah. And that was just kind of built into this fake it till you make it. You had to.
If you were going to do that whole thing and do that, create this personality that not blaming any individuals, it was the learned personality that you had to have there to have that personality. And again, I think that you edged a good line. And I think of all the people in my life who I met that kind of meant something to me that helped guide me personally in some way that made me want to be more like those people. Again, I consider you as one of those people who I said, hey, I like that. Right. You don't have to be this way. You can be this way. Right. So I really consider those things as important.
I want anybody listening to go, OK, hey, let's think about our behaviors and our own. Well, it's also it's also to like there. And you find this with any I find this with any town. This isn't just Lincoln, but especially there because of how insulated that whole place was. Big fish in a small pond. Right. So I still know people. And this is no judgment toward them that they have not. They're never going to leave that state. They're there forever. They don't like to necessarily even go on vacations.
Like people really like to just – some people just really like to stay there. And when you don't have an idea of what goes on around that, something that you see in Lincoln would be like, oh, wow, that's big time. But if you've been to another city or seen that same scenario in another place, you'd realize it really wasn't as big time as you thought it was. It's just by comparison. Right, right.
Let me ask you a quick question. I want to interrupt you right now and ask you because this is the thing I was thinking earlier when you were talking. And that is exactly – you mentioned how as you're going through the music industry that maybe you're happy that maybe I'm glad I didn't sell out 10 million tickets and get all the people there. Even though that life would be fun in some ways, a lot of stress, a lot of have-tos are required with that, right? Not a lot of freedom, not a lot of creative control, a lot of have-tos related to that lifestyle. And as you're saying, you're getting older. So at what point, what event?
What event do you feel was kind of like the catalyst of you breaking reality? You know what I mean? Where you saw something that was like, oh, that's what real life is. Okay. Because I'm sure you had many of these moments in life where you saw the real world, right? Behind the scenes, what's happening, you know. 
Is this just in Lincoln or is this beyond Lincoln. 
The first thing you think of when I say that, like the catalyst, when I mean like the one that really kind of broke the camel's back, so to speak, right? In the sense of where you're like, okay, okay. Maybe it made you feel more comfortable, right? Maybe it made you feel like the world's fake. I don't know. But something that happened that . 
You know, I don't know if there's a specific moment, but probably – like a specific moment at this thing, but definitely the first time I worked at Bonnaroo. Then I was like, oh, wow, this – the scale of this – and by that point, I had already been out of Nebraska for a while. It was – I lived in another smaller college town called Murfreesboro in Tennessee. And there – you know, I would go to – frequently, I'd go to – I'd go to Atlanta or Nashville and –
And those are also kind of small towns. They're bigger than Lincoln or Omaha, but they're still small towns. But going to Bonnaroo and seeing all those people from all across, literally all across the world, and, you know, all of the situations where you're just walking down this muddy path and there's people that are totally covered in mud and on the other side of the fence are, like, these hyper-rich folks who have these crazy tour buses and, you know, bumping into artists or people that you only at that point had, like, seen on TV.
For me, that was like a, that was an eye-opener. And it definitely, it was like a humbling experience in the sense that I realized that at any scale, I would see, you know, a huge artist. Also sweating. Right. They were also in the field in Bonnaroo sweating. Right. And like you were saying, just because you're headlining Bonnaroo doesn't mean that's a pleasant or fun experience for you. It's it's kind of a have to, you know, and there's other people's money that's involved. And that was kind of an eye opening experience that was like, yes, those things would be fun. But what if I didn't want to? Like, what if I had what if I was playing Bonnaroo, but I didn't want to be playing Bonnaroo?
I wanted to be at home on my couch. That was that was like a that was like a huge revelation for me where it was like, man, maybe it is OK that I'm not doing maybe maybe it is OK that maybe maybe that's why this is hard. And maybe the people that get to that point or have are more sadistic than I am. Right. Or something.
You know, let me even push the altar point to you, which is that, you know, although you understood that maybe I don't want to be this person, I feel like. you probably also understood that I could be this person if I did want to be. Yeah, sure. It's just right there. The guy is right there. I could be that dude, right? Again, so I feel like – because, again, I know exactly how you feel. That's how I feel when I sit at play. I see people sometimes and I go, hmm, what if I didn't want to do that? What if I wanted to do something different? But then I also think, well, why am I thinking these things? Why am I even discovering this thought or having this conversation with myself in my head?
It's because I'm simulating what if I was him, right? And why am I doing that, right? Because I'm trying to imagine myself in the room as somebody, as we all do, but who are we imagining ourselves as, right? And that kind of tells you what's that inner – that higher self, some people call it, right? The bigger you, what is it asking for? What does it want? Well, who are you looking at yourself as? Who are you pretending to be? Whose problems are you simulating, right? And obviously, they need to be your own, but that kind of gives you a hint at what you're interested in, right? And for sure, when I see people on stage, I used to do production and I used to kind of watch guys play and do things.
But I don't know. I don't know. That what I wanted personally wasn't necessarily the fans cheering at me, because if anything, that kind of gave me anxiety. I actually really like seeing them just kick butt on the music, right, or on the actual instruments, right? I love seeing guitarists play guitar and drummers just drum, right? And so it's like, man, I want to get better at playing music. Simple as that as a person. So when it comes to this place of music, have you gotten to a place where, I guess, you feel comfortable or confident?
Are you growing? What are you doing with music right now. 
Well, I play guitar every day. That's just like a personal thing. I've been playing guitar since I was seven, and for periods of my life, I was playing it more or less. But now, the way I have structured my schedule, that is a core important thing for me, so I just always make time for that. And I started taking lessons again, ironically. But the same person that I took guitar lessons from when I lived in Florida, he now does like remote lessons.
So he said something to me one time and it was like it hurt my brain that it took me 30 years to figure this out. But there are some things you do in your life you might not ever get better at or you might not exceed your own expectations. But playing a musical instrument, practicing music, that is something you'll just continue to get better with. Every year that you do it, the more you do it, the better you get until you die. There's not many things in life that we can do that with.
And, you know, even like when I think downstream, you know, the touring is a good example. Like bands that do that, that's hard. And I've met plenty of bands that I idolize that have been on the road for a long time and they're worn. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard. It's not something your body can physically do for forever. You can't be up super late doing drugs, drinking. It has a shelf life. You cannot sustain that. But playing guitar, I can sustain that. Even if my legs give out and even if I get arthritis in my hands, I can still play guitar. And a good example of that would be the drummer from Def Leppard. The guy lost an arm.
He lost his arm and just give me more pedals. Give me more pedals.
And he figured out a way. So it's like it's one of those things where it's like.
Wear your seatbelts, everybody. Wear your seatbelts.
Definitely wear your seatbelts. Do not drive your Ferrari super coked up. Yeah, I don't do that. For me, that's like that's whether I'm making money doing it or whether.
Do not drive my Ferrari super coked up. Sorry, I'm just going to make a note.
I don't know anymore. The music. For a while, spending all the time I did in Nashville, it was more like studio world. When I moved up here, it was more like live event world. But the more time I spent in those worlds and seeing the misery that even the people who I, on the outside, would think, man, that person has it all. And you talk to them for a minute and they're like super miserable. So for me, the music thing has to exist separate from all those things in the sense that I'm doing it for me.
I'm not doing it to make money. I'm not doing it to wow a bunch of people in an audience. I'm doing this for me. And really, it is therapy. It is my meditation. I do look at it like that.
Absolutely. I've always thought of and keep continuing to tell people, as I've heard many other people say, that music is just a communication tool. It's another extension. Of our, not just voice, but the way that we speak our feelings, which we can't say with words often, right? Right. But we can play that sound, that sound. Oh, that's exactly how I feel. Right. But I can't tell you that. But that sound all of a sudden somehow matches the feeling that I'm trying to actually provide. Right. And that's that reverberation, that that resonation that we feel, the resonant feeling that we have.
I guess I should say resonation is the wrong word. And when I sit there and think about, you know, you doing these things. Great. Great. Personal is great. But do you have any desire to tour? Or is there something because do you have desire to get music out there to speak to people, for example? You know, because as an artist, we do the personal thing, but we also sometimes have a message we need to get out.
That's not always there. Do you feel that? I used to feel it more. Yeah, I used to feel it more. And I, you know, in Nashville, I played all the time. But every like Nashville is just music is a part of the culture there.
Like you're going to shows. It's crazy. It's their last year. You can't walk around.
Yeah, it's like every there's music everywhere. Everywhere. I went to school in this. Middle Tennessee State University in this town called Murfreesboro is about 20 minutes south of Nashville. Everyone that was in our dorm were people from all around the country that came there to make music. So we were always doing house shows, and it was like a requirement. Every weekend, you'd be going to multiple shows. You might be going to Nashville, Atlanta. You'd be going to see a show. And I loved playing, but that is also hard.
And in Nashville, because there's music everywhere, nobody is willing to pay for it because it's complete saturation.
You show up, and I'll put you on it, and I'm giving you the advantage, right. 
Well, I played hundreds of shows in Nashville, and very few of them did the band walk away with some money. You know what I mean? And we would pack out rooms, 100, 200, 300 people, and we just still wouldn't get that much money because it was more like… Well, we're letting you play here, so it's your privilege to pay.
here and to play here and if you get i know this game it's a it's a game overall but it's.
music business city like i think people people get like they they when they come to nashville they they have this idea about it being music city and it is but it's music business well i.
would say yeah and as you said a lot of people say oh i'm good i should be able to get paid well first of all good is subjective right it's a very subjective word depends on who you're listening to and doesn't matter if you're good because if their budget's not there the budget's not there.
yep right well especially especially that place there there's another that's like another big fish in a small pond scenario because everyone there plays music everyone there is an audio engineer and like there are some of the best musicians in the world that are playing at a club on broadway and they're barely getting your money oh and you're you're bringing me to uh yeah.
yeah kind of a point that i'd like to bring and that is, How do you see yourself doing things that others aren't doing? Because as you said, when you're in Nashville, when you're even in Atlanta, these places are music capitals, right? Overall, even Orlando has got a whole bunch of music going on.
That is a vibrant music scene.
Right? Pretty crazy. And so I always myself get nervous and anxious when I'm around people that are all wanting to do the same thing. And when I see people trying to do the same thing, I jump away and start doing something different. Right? Or at least that's the idea. I know everybody's doing some of the similar things, but I'm trying to carve my own path. Not because I'm necessarily needing to be different, but because it's scary when I'm surrounded by everybody. Right? I feel like everybody's trying to take all the resources. Right? So, again, how do you find yourself carving paths that are different and unique in your process of trying to do what you're doing. 
Well, I mean, definitely in Nashville at the time that I was there, everyone wanted to sound like MGMT or the Black Keys or Jack White. Okay. And if you didn't sound... If you didn't sound like those things, you're not making money. So I already knew I didn't want to sound like any of those things. So I already knew that I wasn't going to be doing it for making money. I had a metal band there. Again, like we played pretty big venues. We packed those venues out.
We would occasionally walk away with at least gas money. But I'm kind of the same way. Like when I'm in a place and I see a bunch of people behaving a certain way, it just immediately makes me want to do something the complete opposite. Even the Prophet Nathan, like that band. That band is a rock band, but it's not the White Stripes. It's not the Black Keys. And we would have good crowds. We played a ton of shows. But I accepted that what I was into,
and this was kind of like I accepted this earlier in my life, I'm into niche stuff. So I don't necessarily think that anything I'm doing is going to have mass appeal. Because that's not what I'm catering to. That's not the media. I like it's not the music I listen to it's not the art that I support so I already know that I'm whatever I'm whoever I'm catering this to is going to be niche and at that time in Nashville it was incredibly niche it was just starting to open up a bit before I moved to New York and it's a it's a little more diverse than it is now but I've just I've always been okay with that like and I know plenty of people that pursued mass appeal and they had success pursuing mass.
appeal but I just knew that I wouldn't be happy doing that and I just don't I you know again when I look at the thing the art that I support it's niche and the art that I make is certainly niche and I just it doesn't bother me again this was a hard thing because like people in Nashville especially would always be like you know you can cater this we can change this a little bit, And it can be marketable, but that's because it's music business city.
Like people really, a lot of musicians go there. They're not worried about art. They're worried about what can I get sync license with? What can I, what, how can I write a song that can be used in a TV show? How can I write a song that could chart on a chart somewhere? So I don't know. I just, those were never the things that I was into. And I just, I always kind of just doubled down on if I'm going to do what I'm going to do, it's going to, I'm going to make, I'm just going to make it unique. It's going to be unique.
And even when I think about like bands that I love that have had lasting success, they were all bands that didn't necessarily fit into a specific genre. And because they didn't fit into a specific genre, they insulated themselves from being lumped into a genre.
Being lost as well, right. 
Just getting lost in the fog. Exactly. And especially now in the in the media landscape that we live in, every band is on Spotify. You know, music is art is expected to be free at this point. So if it's going to be expected to be free, I might as well make it so that it sounds like itself and not like if you can put it digital, it better be free is what most people in the world are thinking.
Yeah. If I can download it, I'm never going to pay for it. I definitely have a subset of friends who when I say friends, people who I know worldwide who have live in a culture where they never paid for things that come from America. Number one. Right. Number two, even in their own country, digital things are just literally talked about openly like what you don't pay for that stuff. You'd be scoffed at if you did in their culture. Right. And that's becoming a thing. And as we talk about with music specifically, I want to get in this little discussion because we started off the podcast with a little A.I. song, a little A.I. introduction song. Right.
And again, I personally love the conversations that people have. I love the ideas that people have. And I want to give value to the. Concepts that people usually hold when they're having their ideas, but I also want to provide insight whenever I can, or at least my thoughts on these on these subjects. And I'm going to start it off with, you know, when you talk about niche things being your kind of bread and butter. Well, what happens if niche becomes mainstream? Right? Well, no worries. You can always try to do something new, right? And that's just a creative endeavor that you can kind of keep doing. I also want to do that. But what happens if, if, you know, everybody expects, you know, I guess, because.
of AI, if everybody expects things to be free, would you keep creating music because of that? Or do you think that that's fair? Do you think they should ban this? This thing? What do you think? So I am very pro AI. I love AI. I use AI tools in a number of different ways. I think AI ultimately, when it shakes out, those who are comfortable using AI are going to save themselves thousands of clicks, arthritis, like it's going to be a benefit, even to a general, I am not of the mind that AI needs to be banned, AI music needs to be not allowed. For me, I enjoy the chaos of it all. And I actually, I had a guy on my pod who we kind of got into this too, and he made a really good point.
At this point, AI, the people that want to consume AI music are not necessarily the people that are going to buy a tangible record. They're not going to buy a CD, right? So if you know that you're catering to that audience, then that's fine. If it's never going to threaten art, humans are going to want to consume art made by humans, just like we've always done forever. It's never going to, it's never going to.
Uh, uh, Uh, Make that go away. It might, AI stuff might become so mainstream that that is the mainstream. Uh, and to me, that is like the natural evolution of the industry in the same way that, you know, the, the top 20 artists can kind of dominate a chart and dominate record sales and dominate concerts, tickets, sales. Yeah.
And it's not, it's at that point, it's not really an individual, right? It's a conglomerate of sorts.
It's a whole, right. You hit the nail on the head. It's a whole industry, right? Person like Drake, person like Taylor Swift. It's not just them anymore. There's an entire ecosystem that depends on them making money. It's not just continually, continually, whether they want more and more coming up with creative ideas or not, or whether they can. And, you know, I, I, you know, are the movie studios going to use AI and our writers going to lose their jobs? Yeah. Does that mean good movies won't be made?
No. Are people going to use AI to aid them in songwriting? Yes. Does that mean good music won't be made? No. You know, so I don't know. It doesn't doesn't threaten me. It doesn't scare me. And I don't I love that song, that song that and that was pretty good. I mean, I've played with some A.I. music tools, but that was pretty friggin solid.
Yeah, not bad. Not bad. And again, to your point, when you talk about niche things, we talk about things that not a lot of people are doing at the time. And I have to say, well, for me, I think playing with and using A.I. tools with music and with real, you know, playing and real vocals and merging those things together is a lot of fun. I do that quite a bit, actually. One of my favorite things to do is using A.I. as a as an assistant, because, again, I can't do everything in the music world. I'm not able to play all the backups and but I can hum it and I can think it.
And if I can hum it, think it and write it, I can start to compose things that I could never compose by myself. And I could certainly also just go, hey, please write me a song and it makes a song and I could be one of those people. which there's many of them that say, hey, look, everyone, I made this song. When you had really zero input to do with it. Again, and there's some people who have a lot more. Go ahead.
To be fair, that already exists.
Oh, yeah.
Thank you. There's plenty of people who get songwriting credit. They were just physically in the room when it was written. They didn't contribute at all to it.
People will just be in the room. Let's go ahead and put a little shout out to people who just do the looping. They don't copy the beat, right? They'll replay it, resampling, right? Come on, come on. They just take an old beat that somebody made that was popular. Again, should that beat be even copyrightable in the first place? I digress. It's not something. Basic beats shouldn't be copyrightable. And so then they get recopyrighted by other people and they get resampled so that they don't have to pay as much money for it. Okay, money, royalties. When I sit there and make videos, I have to use a lot of royalty-free music.
Or at least it would start royalty-free. And then after a year or two, that royalty-free music would all of a sudden pop up as a... There's an alert and all of a sudden your video... I've got hundreds and hundreds of videos that have been demonetized because of royalty free songs that no longer became royalty free after time. So now I like AI because most importantly, it's beautiful for I need a background drum beat that slow tempo, you know, for background music, when I don't have to sit there and worry about getting copyright strict. And because this something, this is something that was sampled uniquely for my creation. And right, I get to create it. And, you know, yeah, we talk about AI tools.
Also, I also want to make this big point that anytime we use a tool, right, it's something that we couldn't do with our body necessarily, even playing an instrument, right, is a tool that we're using. And then we put it into another tool, which is the computer. And the difference between editing software 10 years ago to right now is, yeah, it's, there's a lot of differences. But even so, I would beg to differ that we've had a lot of computer enhanced stuff to the point to where, sure. It already became no longer normal music a long time ago.
This isn't anything new. So last thing I'm going to say here before I'm going to let you jump back in. My first question to people when we jump in this AI debate is, are you a human or are you a person? Are you a human or are you a person. 
That's a really good question.
Right? I hope he answers it. He's a person. Okay. So at the end of the day, when you're a person, you get to make distinctions. That's the beauty of being a human being is we can make distinctions. I'm not, you know, other species and other things. Some of them can. Sure. I'm not saying they can't. But one thing that makes us very unique is how quickly we can do it and how easily we can categorize things. All right. So, hey, guys, from now on, when somebody uses AI tools, that's a category. All right. It's just as valid as any other tool.
It's just in its own category, right, of whatever you're using. And I do want to actually show, just because I think the process is kind of fun, I want to show you a little bit since we have Suno and we brought it up earlier. I want to show you a little bit since we have Suno and we brought it up earlier. When I make songs, there's many ways you can do it. Hey, can you get Chachi PT to write it? Sure. I actually, I prefer writing songs myself. Most of the time when I make music, I actually just like to write the lyrics because I think of some stupid song in my mind, and I think that's a perfect way to write it. You know, for example, you know, I'm just going to click on this thing so we can see an example.
You know, I had to make a light that's called the Move It light. And so for my, I just start typing, I start thinking in my mind, I start singing a song in my head. You know, move it, move it, move your light. And I start thinking and I start typing it out and I can feel what's going to happen. And I can start typing it. And then to actually collaborate with AI, this process feels magical at times because sometimes it pulls out exactly what you're feeling, what you're thinking. Also, just for, since we're doing visuals, I want to say, let's do one where it's kind of actual interesting.
So what I'll do is you can actually sing to the music. So you can actually take a song, sing to it, and it'll take what you do. And it'll. into something else, right? So let's just take, and here we are. Okay, so jumping into Suno real quick, I just want to show you what's going to happen is that not only can you, as we were just showing, make the songs where you type out some lyrics for it, but you can actually just sing stuff. So sometimes I'll get a product, for example, that I have to review, and I will look at the product, and I will think of some silly jingle, and I'll just start recording with my.
cell phone, and I will record it with my cell phone and say, hey, make a cover. And for example. 
it might sound something like, we got those hot air balloon lights. Yeah, yeah, those hot air, balloon lights. They get tangled up sometimes, but if you can untangle them, they're pretty still cool. They don't make very much sound, but they are hot air balloon lights. Okay, so that'll turn.
into, we got those hot air balloon. Yeah, those hot air balloon lights. Air balloon lights, they get tangled up sometimes, but if you can't untangle them, they're pretty still cool. They don't make very much sound, but they are hot. Air balloon lights, yeah, you can put them outside.
Okay, that's my point. That's genius. Right? So that's kind of the process right there. So, you know, I would beg to differ that although that is not traditional music, right, in any way, shape, or form, that process is something that I find extremely gratifying and fun. Yeah, sure. Right. 
It's just fun. It's fun to do. Well, you know, like, AI is definitely a tool that breeds creativity. Like, my cousin does music stuff. He doesn't necessarily love singing, and like, the last round of stuff that he's done is he's played all the music, but then he'll train an AI to sing the lyrics, and it's nowhere near as good as a human, and even he knows that. But it's, like, allowed him to learn.
at his songs differently even like take the listener perspective and produce the songs slightly differently having heard a female vocalist or someone who a male vocalist singing in a different range than than his so i you know i i i just again it is a tool there was a when ai was first starting to get out of hand i had a buddy on and we did we just wanted to like conduct a test and we had i asked chat gpt to generate a commercial about a toothpaste that was made from.
dog poop of course and it was like yeah it spit out ideas and then from those ideas we fed that into an image generator oh no and that generated images and then i took those images and i fed it into an ai animator that would take a still image and turn it into an animation and what we ended up doing was we turned it into an animation and we turned it into an animation and we turned it up making was a, Essentially, a completely AI'd commercial for toothpaste that was made out of dog poop. It was hilarious. It was super fun. It served no purpose. And it was in that moment that I realized, man, for people, say I'm a person who makes commercials, what's easier?
Me having AI simply crudely assemble my idea into a pitch for an ad or spending thousands of dollars to create an ad to pitch to a company, whether or not they decide to go with that ad or not, I can do this in 24 hours. That process would take weeks. So I just look at it as like there's no way anyone that actually earnestly plays with AI, you cannot.
Say that it doesn't inspire your own creativity to be more creative or to look at things differently. I don't know. I am. You brought up a good. point two music we don't listen to records without auto-tune anymore we don't listen to records that haven't been produced or at least digitized like if you listen to records from the 50s it sound like trash people are singing out of tune instruments are out of tune they're not on the beat there's.
there's not no instrumentalist is going to be perfect all the time yeah some of them are amazing.
some of them are amazing but they're not robots they're not robots right and and i i just i think to be splitting hairs over ai music but then listening to a record that was produced within the past 20 years and not saying the same thing is duplicitous right yeah right ever since iphone 65.
came out man we've got to just halt it guys right put it on the brakes and yeah let's you heard it here ai is an enhancement it is a tool it is not a replacement by any means but it is something that we will continue to distinguish and categorize as its own thing, And, again, as it takes over some forms of, I would say, the industry, I think that humans are going to remain and will continue to have their hand on creative things.
Whether it be music, whether it be movies, whether it be creative writings, I think I can look at something right away and I can tell if it's AI. And, again, I do talk a lot about the subject. And at the end of the day, we're talking about a snake that's going to eat its own tail. You need new information. We need fresh minds. We need people with actual abilities to create. AGI, the idea of artificial general intelligence, which is something that we're chasing. Some people call it something different. But at this point in time, we're going to keep the basic name. This idea that AI can think for itself, the philosophy isn't even sound.
We're not 100% sure if it can. We're not. And then even if it could, how much computational power would you need? Yeah. Fusion level, right? As far as little personal reactors. Otherwise? You're just it's not even. You're going to ask it a question, what, how often? Every year? Yeah, right. And then you're going to wait? I mean, come on, guys. So we can talk about some of the conspiracies and some of these things here as we're wrapping up. Or not wrapping up, as we're getting into the hour time period. I know James is a busy guy, so I've got to pull his window of time as best as I can.
But, yeah, so when you think about AI, since we're on that topic, before we kind of jump too crazy or even jump away from life too much, I do want to ask you, where do you think it's all coming from? Do you think this AI stuff is just being brought just simply by our desire to innovate and push data and that it's going to either stagnate? Do you think it's got some life of its own that's trying to thrive and create itself? What do you think. 
Well, I mean, I would say that by the general definition of AI as in something that pulls from an LLM, it's probably not doing it on its own, right? And that's the meta conversation I've had with artists and creatives, my friends who are like afraid of it. It's like it's pulling from a data set that humans created, right? It's not necessarily to the point that you're talking about with AGI. Like it's not coming up with this on its own yet.
There's no new ideas popping out at this moment in time.
It's all based off of stuff that humans created and were fed specifically into this LLM. So, you know, in that sense, I think they're contained and they're from the human desire to innovate. Definitely the human desire to process information. It's the same. The correlation would be the same for like computers. Why did we invent computers? We had people want a person who is referred to as a human computer. His name was Edward Teller. He calculated the distance from the ground.
We should detonate the A-bomb for the maximum kill zone. Right. Okay. The government used him because he was. He's just really good at math. They called him a human computer. When computers came along, they didn't need Edward Teller anymore, right? So, and I don't think anyone's going to argue that we shouldn't be using computers because of all the speed at which we can process information, the speed at which we can transmit information, all the benefits that technologies add to our lives.
No one is asking that we get rid of those. So, I feel like we're in that same kind of uncomfortable zone. Now, am I of, here's my thought about it. Would it make sense, could there be some other form of, by our definition, artificial intelligence that exists? And I think an argument could be made into like the, even just like the structure of the universe, right? Is this ever expansive thing?
It's occurring at levels and time span. And. scales that humans can't even think of like are we in the simulation kind of conversation and i'm more than happy to entertain that because not only because it's fun but also because you know it does kind of make sense with like the chaotic nature of the universe even though it's as chaotic as it is there is still order and when we look at the similarities in the math that governs the reality.
that we occupy in it the that reality that we occupy it does kind of seem computery it does.
kind of we're in a very special place here with some of these numbers yeah a sweet sweet spot you.
could call it well and and like the the proportions and the math that govern life on this planet are the same proportions in math that govern existence well beyond this planet throughout the universe.
it's quite interesting that we're right in the middle right when it comes to as as big as the solar system it's quite interesting that we're right in the middle right when it comes to as as big as, As small as things can get and as small as things can get on the level of the tiniest plank, right, versus the largest scale of the universe that we can remotely see with our largest telescopes, we are the size in the middle, right? And wow, how interesting, right? And that's not just some random thought. There's math behind that. There's actual – it's interesting.
Well, and again, like I'm – there's enough math there and enough consistency there that I – you have to at least entertain that idea.
It's silly not to entertain that idea. Right, and so as you say, I will entertain that idea all day. I grew up in – I can say it many times. I grew up in half the family that kind of didn't really have much belief system and I grew up in half the family that had like a Christian belief system, right? And really I was pretty much allowed to figure things. I got to go through classes and I went to churches and I went to camps and I got to do things that people said, hey, go – do your own thing. Figure stuff out. Question things. And I did. And I went from hardcore belief to questioning everything, to not believing anything. I jumped around a little bit. And now, of course, I do have a, I feel like a structure of beliefs that coincides with a lot of the things that I see. But when you talk about just AI and how it's moving forward and the way that it impacts society, I can't help but feel like there's some kind of boost of revelations that are going to come through this.
We get to understand ourselves truly right now through this tool. As you said, when you get to hear from people in the world, whether they're being rude to you or whether they're telling you things, you get to understand who they are, how they treat you. And when you're using AI as a tool, I personally feel like I get to understand humans and myself a little bit more with the way that I'm using it. And I think that maybe that's something that some people could say it's supernatural. At the same time, we are the ones building it, but we don't. We don't always know what we're doing when we build these things. That's the fun part, right?
People put the code together, and it does things, and they're like, I'm not really sure why it does that. Why it's doing that, yeah. It's a noise to, you know, it's a noise ratio is what it's creating in there, and it's seeing how correct it can be. And, yeah, when it comes to overall, is there anything that you're worried about, or are you just kind of excited about this tech stuff. 
Well, you know, in the same way that, okay, so in the same way that I'm concerned about too many things being automated, not AI. Just automated. When you remove the human oversight, things, the human aspect can get lost in it, right. 
Well, exactly, by what you just said, when you lose the human oversight, right? Yeah, we lose the humans.
We need the humans in there at some point if we want to retain some of the humanity. And realistically, like, yes, a Terminator scenario is absolutely possible. If we have artificial intelligence. analyzing the problems on this planet i'm gonna imagine that we're gonna factor in as one of the problems on this planet right and if you have an ai that is unhuman and not thinking in terms of, doing things for the benefit of humanity we will be seen as a justifiable expense but by that same.
but by that same curve and there's already been a few examples of this ai also allows for like asymmetric i think my favorite thing about ai is its ability to not think like a human asymmetric responses to problems like the biggest example i'm thinking of right now is recently this company developed a uh jet engine and they used ai to do it it doesn't look like a normal jet engine oh yeah right right ai developed this thing and they.
went from having it be an idea to having a way to do it and they went from having it be an idea, workable prototype in two weeks, Now, it took humanity thousands of years to come up with a jet engine. It's one of the most complex things that we can create. And it took AI just from not having the damaged goods of humanity to siphon through, like a clean slate. Like, if I were to do this, how would I do it? It comes up with this really asymmetric response to how to develop a jet engine.
So, you know, I don't know. Pros and cons.
Right. And I'm going to jump in there because I feel like you brought up a great point, that it can do some things so much better. Not even the word better. It can do things that we would never do.
We would never think of. Yeah.
We would never have made that engine right there, guys. Okay? We would never have done that. So the ways that we manufacture, the ways that we create, the ways that we produce, bring it on AI, show us the way. Okay? But having said that, as you said, it took humans thousands of years to do this, but it took AI this amount of time. It took humans thousands of years to make AI. Then could do this in a matter of time, right? Just like all the other things we make, right? Then it does things for just like the computer, just like the microwave, right? Just like, uh, you know, we can, the air conditioning system, which is very simple.
overall, but Hey, it took us a long time to get that sucker going or did it. Um, and so when we talk about these little, I guess, little pieces of, of automation, I guess that were technology, uh, I think that some of it's super, super cool, but we talk about programming things. If you can ever program something, if you have the capability to program something, can it ever be sentient? And that is where I'm going to have a, a little bit of trouble ever really agreeing with that. I think that there's humans that's, and I think there's AI, AI will always, will always.
be what it is. Artificial intelligence by the definition is artificial intelligence. The moment it becomes sentient, it's no longer AI. If it, if it were to become sentient at any point, now we've got a sentient being that we've somehow created a sentient being at that point. And some people argue whether that's possible or not. And some people that believe that the souls are these eternal things that live forever. And if we're a container, I'd beg to differ that in that case, it wouldn't be possible if that's the reality. I can't say for sure that it is. Some things point to that. A lot of people, when they have near-death experiences, they leave their body, which tells us worldwide, if you follow that thought, that you are not your body.
And if you are not your body, then you're something else. And if you're something else, that something else is the you. So if we create these bodies that have stuff, we still have to be able to take this thing and put it inside those things, right? Unless we're going to manifest it from nowhere, right? And then that's the whole philosophy behind is it possible or not. There's a lot of people that say no way. A lot of very smart people that say no way. A lot of smart people that say yes way. Again, right now, it doesn't exist. So again, I'm not to grandstand and take over.
I would go ahead and say... I would go ahead and say that just as much as... we can program robots right now, humans themselves are super programmable, right? Oh, yeah. Right. So in that case, but I want to go back to something you said a long time ago, too, when you talked about Teller, you know, Teller was the human computer and, you know, hey, the moment we got the computer that could do everything, we didn't need him as much. You're right completely as to what you were saying. We didn't need him for his computer skills, but we did need him for his creative mind and the way to how to use the computer because the computer is just a tool.
Right. You can sit there all day and do nothing. You can play video games on a computer and learn nothing most of your life, or you can play a little bit of video games and you can edit some videos and you can go online and learn some stuff and watch some crazy podcasts and you can become Kayla. No, you've got to balance things in life. Right. And we're all doing it. We're all trying to do it. That's that's the attempt. So, yeah, not to get stuck on this. I think of things sometimes as like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Did you ever read that book series. 
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the movies.
Right. OK. The movies, the books. I think there's like seven books. Did you get through all of them?
Then it goes to a big level. They find out that the Earth is actually in the way, and they're trying to build a bypass through Earth. It needs to be moved as well. Then it kind of goes on to this whole revelation that he's not alone, that there's actually these other aliens out there. There's this whole other life going on. In order for the humans to be able to really get around, or for the main guy to get around, he has to have this device. You remember this little translation device that has everything built into it? It can do anything and everything. It is literally what it is. cell phone is to us today, right? And when you read that book, when I read that book, I was like,
if someday I could have something like this. With AI now, we have that device, basically, right? Basically speaking. And so I'm just going to go ahead and say, let's set the stage. If, we were supposed to have some other, right? People like Congress, they're talking about other alien beings and other things that exist in the world around us and how we're not alone, other NHI exist. If that's possible, we're going to need some way to communicate and understand things, right? We're going to need some tool that can do that, that can decipher information.
Well, I'm most excited about AI for this crazy reason, right? What do you think? Have you thought about that at all? Or is that not something that you think too much about? Well, I've got a bunch.
of thoughts about that. So the first one is there's, I feel like I've been having this conversation with a number of people. So I've been having this conversation with a number of, people. So I've been having this conversation with a number of people. So I've been having, which is why I want to bring it up, recently. This is something I think about a lot. So at some point, there wasn't science fiction books, right? And then at some point, people start writing what now is called science fiction. And kids read those books, and they grew up to be engineers and mathematicians.
And a lot of the stuff, technology that we see, if you really traced it back to the engineers that created it, that many of those engineers would share a story about, hey, when I was a kid, I read this book, and they had this thing in it, and I always hoped that I would be able to see it in my lifetime. And then it just so happens that here I am, developed. Like, iPhone would be a good example. If we spoke to the engineers, I guarantee you, some of those engineers were inspired by books and magazines and sci-fi that they read as a kid.
Same thing with computer engineers. They're... There's so many like self-fulfilling prophecy aspects to the technology that we live, that we see and use every day that there's a part of me that's like, well, because it's been thought, like, because we're having this conversation right now, we can accept that this isn't the first time it's been thought. And if it's not the first time it's been thought, there's probably someone in the world who's trying to build that thing because they heard that thought somewhere else.
Oh, yeah.
So like that, that, that I will get stuck on that for days at a time, sometimes just like thinking about it. Right. Well, it's like, you know, and like, which came first? Like, was it was the thing always going to be created or did the idea need to exist there to inspire the person to create the thing. 
Right, right.
I don't know.
I think this is a relationship. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to say my opinion is after thinking about this, and I could be very wrong, but it's a balance because I like the word balance. And it's something I try to always think. About myself, because we need to have it. Cannot be happy all the time. You've got to balance life with what you do. You've got to work hard. You've got to relax. But in general, when I think about what is it like, is it all coming from the ether? Is it just this download that we're all getting from some other place, from our higher selves, you could say? Or if we're all one, the pool, the ocean, so to speak, where we all originate from, the origin.
Is it feeding a signal out there and we're all feeling it? Or is it a mixture of there's stuff that needs to get done to create the purpose of things? And when I say the purpose of things, to experience all that's possible, to see the possibilities. We can already see the earth is constantly, every year we see a new thing, a new thing, a new possibility, right? Life is constantly trying to figure out the possibilities. I think we can agree with that much, right? And one of my, at least, thoughts is that the purpose of life is to find out what's possible and how it's possible, right?
What's that? I mean, it's very open, right? And so what's life constantly doing? It's expanding. And not only that, but people are doing more and more things and we're growing and growing. OK, so again, what I would like to say is that I think that there's just this this deep, I don't know, thing that's going on. When I when I talk about like the ether that's pushing us, I do think that there is something that needs to happen and that it's getting put out there. And that what happens is that we as the receivers kind of have the option to say, how close is this thing to me?
For example, let's say you get a silly idea. I want to I need to open up a healthy restaurant. Right. It would be great. A lot of people will have random ideas. Oh, that would be really good to open up this healthy restaurant that would probably sell a lot in the city. OK, if you have no extra money in the bank right now and you know nobody who's ever opened up a restaurant and you don't even know how to cook, you're going to have that thought and you're going to think that's a good idea. Not for me. Bye. And you're going to keep on walking through your day. Right. But there's some guy out there who's got fifteen thousand sitting in the bank and he's got a friend who opened up a restaurant before.
Who he can talk to. Right. And he's got this idea of this recipe thing that he's been thinking about for a few years. And this guy's also going to have the thought. And what I think is, yeah, we do kind of have this almost this wave of things that kind of flows through. And then later on, a couple weeks later, you're going to see that guy and you're going to say, man, he just opened up a restaurant. I was thinking of doing that, too. But he did it. Dang. Right. No, no, not dang. Not dang. Yeah. Somebody did it. Right. Because you didn't do it. Right. So, again, and that could be fake. But we see this happen all the time. And the word that you maybe were describing to me that I heard was synchronicity. Right. These synchronicities happen in life all the time. Carl Jung wrote a book about it, and it just talks about these moments in life that are overwhelmingly odd. Right. I mean, a synchronicity for me is getting it, having the moment to talk to you and saying, oh, James is doing a podcast. Wait a second. Wait a second. You know, this is pretty cool. This is interesting. This makes me feel like, you know, there's more things are aligned than not. Right. And that's not a huge.
That's not a great example. There's many other. better ones in life um or for but I can tell you right now musicians you've wanted to work with.
and all of a sudden they're right there yeah you know and I everyone has those moments and and you know the Jung wrote about it and Nietzsche wrote about it and and kind of also shits on the idea.
pretty hard but like they're for people that take it too seriously yeah there's two if you go too far come on you can everything is for me narcissistic people stop it people can relate.
to those moments and I I definitely feel like that's also something I've spent a lot of time thinking about too like those moments of my life was it was it synchronistic did I notice it because I had pre-thought about it like if I hadn't pre-thought about it would that thing still have happened and would it but would I have noticed it because I hadn't pre-thought about it or would this thing be significant if I hadn't already thought about it even though it's like a you know whatever a chance meeting with somebody.
or an, opportunity that arises would that still have happened had i not thought about it now you're you know you get crazy now it's heady it's heady right and i don't know if there's necessarily an answer to it but i do there was a point where i absolutely was like a little narcissistic about it and then there was a point in my life where i was completely anti that idea and now i feel like i'm somewhere in the middle where i don't i'm okay with things happening however they happen it just.
so happens that sometimes there's still synchronicities like definitely definitely, when i decide to pursue something i accept that i'm now putting more thought energy into this and that i i'm taking more notice of things and because i am letting like physically telling people i am trying to pursue this mm-hmm.
you.
Things will happen because people will hear that I'm trying to pursue that, and then somebody will be, oh, you need to go talk to this person or this and that. I don't know. I don't think we talked about this on the other podcast, but I'm a Freemason, and in my process of becoming a Freemason, there were a ton of moments like that, and I thought about it a lot.
You've got to meet them on the floor. Okay, sorry.
It was really weird. I was getting a tattoo. I'd been looking into masonry for a while, and I was getting a tattoo, and I was talking to my tattoo artist, and I was like, yeah. So I was thinking about becoming a mason, and my tattoo artist stops, and he goes, I'm a mason. It's random as shit.
Oh, yeah.
Weird. And there were many parts about my pursuing that path where as soon as I would say it or speak it into existence or at a bare minimum ruminate on it for a while, the door would open. And there's like a – this is relevant to masonry but relevant beyond masonry. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you, right? This passage from the Bible. Seek, and ye shall find kind of thing.
Absolutely.
And I've found, I feel like there's, it's a balance of those two things. If you're not thinking about it, if you're not pursuing it, the opportunities might still be there, but you're not aware of the opportunities presenting themselves because you haven't thought about it.
Right. If you do think about it. You're unable to see them, right? You haven't put them on the radar.
Because they're not relevant. Right. They're not relevant to you. They're not, they're not what you're, you're not even looking for that kind of opportunity. But as soon as you start looking for that opportunity, it's usually short order that an opportunity or an opportunity for further learning or exploring that path emerges. So I don't know. And then you get it. That kind of gets into like the, am I willing this into existence? And I don't necessarily believe that we have that kind of ability. But.
Well. Saying that. my wife has an insane ability to will shit into existence it's crazy okay right there like i've even been doing this thing recently where like some trivial dumb thing will be happening to me okay the subway is late there's traffic as soon as i tell her i'm annoyed that there's traffic or that the subway is late boom train shows up traffic clears whatever trivial problem that i.
was dealing with as soon as i text it to my wife it disappears and she's also you know she's a person who but again like i don't saying somebody has the ability to will shit into existence doesn't necessarily give credit to the hard work that they might put into pursuing something like even becoming a mason that was work i had to do a lot of work i had to do a lot of my own research, That was a whole process. It wasn't just I wanted to become one and then I became one.
My wife loves fashion. She wanted to work at Vogue, and now she works at Vogue. But that was like six years of grinding at terrible jobs to get into the position to where she could, and a job opening occurring, to where she could work there. So I don't know. I've definitely spent a lot of time thinking about that, though. At what level do we interact with that, or is it just something that we're noticing happening as it's happening. 
Well, of course, you're bringing up big questions, big, big questions, and there's no perfect answer that any one person in the world ever has, right? Exactly. But I'm open to listening to certain people more than others. I've listened to a bunch of podcasts that kind of talk a little bit about this issue. Not only that, I've read several books where the author says, seems to have it all figured out. And one thing I want to also say is that I've been listening to a lot of podcasts, caveat my discussions with is that I don't think I have it all figured out at all. I actually like, having ideas. I like having thoughts. And I like putting them out there. But I also want people to.
say, hey, you know what, what do you think about this? Or what about that? Right? That's part of that discussion. And when you say continue to learn, yeah, when you say that you're not sure about this, what I'd like to do, I'm going to tell you straight up, what I'd like to do is push you a little bit more further in the direction of that we have a little bit more control than maybe people are originally told. And I like this quote that I heard quite a long time ago. And that was props to whoever said it, which that is, if you if you understood how important how impactful your thoughts are, you would never have a negative thought again. Right? Because negative thoughts,
they do something right positive thoughts, they do something, I wake up every day, and I say, I want to have a good day. It doesn't mean every day is going to be a good day. But it means that I want to have a good day. And I'm going to choose to have a good day. And if somebody walks up to me and says, Caleb, you suck. I'm going to say, again, sorry about that. I hope you have a great day, because I'm trying to do what I'm trying to do. I have a purpose. My intention is going to drive my day, right? And my intention turns to action. The actions are the hard work, right? But the intention is always going to have to be what am I focused on? And that's where I try to always, if I can teach anybody anything, it's just to focus on what you want, not what you don't want.
Because we have a lot of people focusing on, I hope this doesn't happen. I hope this doesn't happen. I hope, guess what's going to happen? That exact thing. The thing you don't want, right? I was really good at doing that. I found out, I actually felt this, like I'm really good at making the things I don't want to have happen. And I had to truly think legitimately two plus two is four. Why am I doing it? How is this possible? Well, those are the things that you fear the most, that you think about, Caleb, that you overthink about. They happen. What happens if I focus on the things I do want? And I started to see the reality of that.
And as you mentioned, your wife is able to somewhat think things into existence. Look it up, everybody. Humans can affect RNG manipulators, RNG systems, random number generators, right? You can. I want higher numbers. I want lower numbers. And you will get a statistical impact on a computer machine. I used to have people tell me, Caleb, when you come around, I always have a problem. But every time you're here and I want to show you the problem, it's working. I don't know why my phone's always working when you're here. The computer's always working.
I understand that part of that's just not reality. But there's something to be said for it's odd how certain things, even digital things, tend to work around some people. And other people, they tend to break. And those people tend to be very negative. That they break around. And they think, oh, everything's going to break around me. Well, guess what. 
They're always having the problems.
Stop thinking that. Right? You're breaking the things. And to the point of your girlfriend or your girlfriend or your wife, when I sit there and think I'm going to go to the store right now, I do that thing I heard a long time ago when I read a book, which is, all right, I can't wait to park in the front. I'm going to park right there. And, yeah, my parking spot is there always. Right? It's always there. And if you tell me it's not always there, if it's not always there, I have a good attitude. Right? I say, you know what? I probably wasn't really thinking about it. I tell myself something. No, the reality is nine times out of 10, you do get what you plan for, what you plan for, right?
And so I'm going to go ahead and say this. A lot of times people, they live their life thinking, I wonder what's going to happen next. Well, did you decide what you're doing today, right? Or are you going to let life kind of tell you what it's going to do, right? And how it's going to be, right? And that's usually where I think this intention does this thing. Humans collapse wavelengths, right? We have a whole bunch of atoms out there living in superpositions. And this goes by the science that we know at the moment.
They're living in superpositions, which means they can be this, that, and all kinds of possibilities. And then when we think something, we write something in a science fiction book, and then some kid reads it, and he thinks, ah, I want to make that. Okay. Well, those superpositions are now collapsing because some human being. Is now putting effort towards it. which means the future can be kind of anything. And I'm going to finish my thing now. I love looking outside and going, okay, not maybe, but the world around me, the poles with the power going across them right now, the cars that I'm looking at, all of these existed in somebody's mind first,
and then they were put on paper, and then they made them in reality. And we get kind of lost in seeing this world around us, but we have to realize is the world's not that old. I mean, the society that we know currently is not that old. America's been around 300 years, guys, right? So how old are we already? If you think something, and you think it, and you can put it on paper, the next step is then putting it out there in real life, right? And you're collapsing waves every single time you think it and then start to put some action towards it. And as you said right there, I loved it. You said, I had to do a lot of hard work to get that.
Don't forget. Please don't forget that part. Please don't forget the hard work part, guys. You get all this intention. You get the opportunity, and now you do the work, right? Because you couldn't do the work if you didn't have the opportunity or the time to do those things, right? Or the knowledge. Or the person who you knew. Right. And that request or in that respect. So, again, I'm super motivated in life in general, not because I think it's easy, but because I'm finally feeling like I'm seeing some shortcuts. When I say shortcuts, I mean the way things work. And all I really want to do is make sure other people feel like they can do it, too, because that's what's going to not only make me have more opportunities, but keep people from wanting my stuff. Let's be honest. I don't want people to covet my things or say, oh, I wish I had what he had. I don't want that. I want people to say, I want that. Oh, I can get it, too.
I've been playing guitar for so long, and there's stuff I'll just never be able to do. And I watched other people do it. I did the hard work of practicing, and now I can do stuff that a year ago I thought I could never, ever do. And I guess, too, there's like, I definitely want to speak on intention, because that is like, that is for sure. Sure, saying to myself, I will never be able to do that, is different than, I can't do it now, but if I practice enough, I can.
Those are two completely, like, one motivates me, one doesn't motivate me.
Right, right.
And the intention, like, I've always found this in my life. It just wasn't until I was older and appreciated it. If I was going about anything in my life in the wrong way, or in a truly narcissistic way, the universe would make that incredibly difficult. And I'm thankful that it did. Okay, I'm happy that I was not able to. Yeah, to force, A, I learned a valuable lesson, and then force some really bad intention situation on myself.
But the things where my intention truly is pure, or my intention is not necessarily about tangible gain and more about some, I want to learn a lesson, I want to obtain a skill. All the times where my intention is purest, those are when, at least from the experiencer, it feels like it's easier. I still have to do the work, but I don't feel as much resistance from the universe stopping me from doing whatever I'm trying to pursue.
Right, you're going with the flow. I mean, rather than putting your sails up against the wind, so to speak, you're literally choosing to go with the headwind. And yeah, I think that that's something that we all have to learn a little bit. But there's this pull, because we kind of think, well, I don't want to do just what the flow is. I kind of want to do my own thing. I'm going to go ahead and say I do think there's balance in that, right? You have to take what you want because those who ask will receive, those who seek will find. It's kind of a mixture of you. Your intention does help push the narrative.
It does. But if I ask for the ability to be a stronger person that knows more about AI or marketing, is life going to be like, here's a class? Or am I going to have a marketing proposal that's very difficult that I don't know how to mess with? And I'm going to have a big problem in the middle of it, and nothing's going to work right because that's what's going to teach you to be the guy that knows the stuff. My life has been a lot of that, and I'm not complaining about it.
I've been asking to try to figure stuff out, to learn things. And so I get a lot of technical issues, and I love it at this point. I love it because every time I have a problem and I figure it out, my brain goes, ha, another solution, right? And again, that's value. It's value added, right? If I know how not to fall. Or at least fall down gracefully.
You have potentially the ability to be connected with you throughout your life. Time is an illusion, so to speak. So when you feel this deja vu feeling or when you feel something's about to happen or this feeling, sometimes people say either you are a psychic or maybe you're in tune with the future you. What do you think? Do you think people are more likely to be psychic or do you think people are more likely to be on a simulated hard drive, so to speak? I mean, I'm just kind of a random question, but those are kind of two different things that I think about two different.
Well, you know, I, I mean, I guess, I guess from like the, the video game perspective, like if we're the player in the game, are we just pre-cogging of what's already going to happen in the game or possible programs? I personally am fully in okay with the idea that there's an extra layer to our reality. I, I, I personally am at that level. I'm at the level where I think humans have an ability to perceive an extra layer to existence.
Even when I look at the human body, our ears only hear a set number of frequencies, right? There's frequencies that exist above and below it, but we only interact with a certain amount. Our eyes only see a very slim portion of the visible spectrum, right? There's, there's waves of light occurring above and below what we can see. We only interact with the tiny little bit. So. From every metric, our body is a pretty aggressive filter. I'm an audio engineer, so this is something I've spent a lot of time looking at filters.
People who do video will understand this correlation, too. They'll get this analogy, but it's filtering out a ton of information.
Just to give a quick visual, yeah, we're seeing what this is.
That's what we interact with.
We get this much visuals of all the visuals possible.
And for people that don't understand, microwaves, at any given time, we're swimming in a sea of wave energy, right? Microwaves give us a cell phone, X-rays, gamma rays from celestial bodies, the sun. If we could see the rest of the spectrum, it would feel like we were underwater because we'd be covered in all this. Same things with sound. If we could see sound. If we could see and hear full spectrum sound.
The reality would be very different. In fact, our ears, there's a, if you look at the range of frequencies that humans hear, it's 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz. In audio engineering land, there's a little bump between 2k and 5k, it's called the presence range. And it's an area of those set frequencies that humans will perceive to be louder than other frequencies because they match the exact size of our ear, right?
The body is a filter. There's an extra layer to this shit that we're, we, we have either been told to ignore. We are, we have forgotten about designed without having the ability to, well, and again, like I don't think humans are meant to see or hear beyond what we can see or hear. Right. I do believe that our brain possesses the ability to perceive things. As any antenna would. perceive the things, the abundant electromagnetic or the abundant wave energy around us in a way that we don't fully appreciate.
There's a great book. I can't pull it out of the stack, but it's called Limitless Mind. It's written by this guy named Russell Targ. Russell Targ was one of the guys in the Stanford Research Institute's remote viewing program. Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, who is now a big name in the UFO world. But these guys spent, they were paid by the government a lot of money to research the idea that humans have some level of extrasensory perception.
And they, in many ways, quantified it. And the government straight up did pay them to perform what yielded actionable intelligence things. They had people who were able to perceive. A location that they were in. or to perceive some intangible aspect that the government actually used as some kind of actual military intelligence. They took it seriously, regardless of if anyone listening to this takes it seriously.
They took it very seriously.
Oh, yeah. I think I'm going to go ahead and say boldly that anybody who doesn't take it seriously, just go educate yourself, truly. You don't have to listen to any one person.
At this point, there's a ton of documentation on that.
Between just taking twins out and about and twins being able to say things, hey, that are happening. And they did like a pinch test where, hey, I felt the pinch. Where was the pinch? On the bottom part of my knee. Oh, that's exactly where we just pinched your twin, right, in the other side of the room. And then even to go with where you took some of the terrible experiments that they did long ago where they would take mothers of animals. And children, yeah. The children of animals. And they would take them far apart. They would put them in different countries. And they would start to do terrible things to the child, right? And then the mother would start freaking out. Right?
And they would time it. Yeah. Okay. We know this is real. All right. Now that we know it's real, let's make people think it's crazy and let's take advantage of it. Right. And I don't, I don't want to get too crazy and I want to make it be actionable even in my podcast with like, what can we do about it? How does it affect us? Right. Well, we can talk about the government stuff, which is kind of interesting, but what can we do about it? Well, we can be aware that there's some reality to what people used to maybe think was a little crazy, uh, whether it be psychics, which I used to think were kind of potentially crazy stuff, which I think most of them kind of are, but many of them are. Yeah. Many of them are right. I think that there's some people out there that have a really strong connection and we call those psychics people who can manifest or collapse wavelengths or connect with and understand wavelengths at a distance. Maybe. Right. These people are able to manipulate their environment better or understand their environment better.
And some people have things, sorry, go ahead. No, no. Go ahead. Just because you mentioned this thing about the color bands and I started instantly thinking of like people with synesthesia. Right. People that when they hear a sound, they see a color or when they see a number, they see a color or they, you know, they hear a sound in either word. Right. The senses become mixed in a way or they have extra senses when something happens. And through that, they're able to understand the information significantly deeper than somebody who doesn't have synesthesia. And often these people who have synesthesia, if they're non-speaking, they end up having telepathic abilities, which we jump into the whole telepathy tapes and other people who are studying that right now, which is very fascinating.
Have you taken a look at those? I have. Yeah, it is pretty interesting. Yeah, for sure. And so what do you think about that? And how does that how does that make you feel as a person? Does it change your life or does it make you act differently. 
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I definitely think it's made me appreciate taking better care of my mind. And, you know, in the same way that I do an exercise every other day for my physical body, I'm constantly like guitar would be one. I do Duolingo, I try and when I play games on my app, I try and do like thinking games. I like the New York Times, you know, puzzles and stuff. I feel like it's a muscle that you have to exercise. And the more you exercise it, the more receptive or sharp it becomes in the same way that I build my ability to play something on the guitar, I build my arm muscles or leg muscles, depending on what I'm doing.
I'm also and this is something I've put a lot of thought into recently. I am both terrified and excited by the amount of as we were talking about before the abundant amount of wave energy around us. Like there's a part that is a little scary because we're the guinea pigs. Like we've never ever in the history of humanity been so surrounded by electromagnetic radiation from our electrical devices ever.
We're the experiment there. We're the first generation. No other generation after us is going to know life without having a cell phone or a device that is receiving microwave energy. And there is a whole tirade or conspiracy rabbit hole we could go down about the research, the negative research about that being suppressed and why it's being suppressed. But then there's also a part of me that's like, this is the natural step in the ultimate marrying of man and machine, right? We have to be surrounded by all of this wave energy and the more surrounded by the wave energy we are, the more our bodies adapt to that and makes it more of a realistic thing that we could then start implanting technology inside of us, which is whether you like it or not is for sure on the horizon.
And there's also strange situations, call it a synchronicity or not, but I'll think, man, I really haven't talked to that person in a while. a while. I need to talk to them. Boom. I got a text message. Boom. I got a phone call from that person. So it's like, did I, was I speaking brain to brain? Was I accepting, was my brain antenna accepting waves, like actual microwaves from them trying to text or call me? I don't know,
but I do feel like there is a, uh, there is a, a component of our interaction with technology and more specifically the, the electromagnetic wave radiation that is, is either accelerating that and, and causing us to physically change because of that. And I mean, there, this is not necessarily conspiracy tirades, but like the blue light from phones and screens is bad. That's bad.
for our eyes. It hurts our eyes and it can disrupt chemical processes in the same way that sitting under a U a red UV light might. Reinforce some of those. natural chemical processes in our body so you know we there's i have many thoughts about you know am i going to give up technology no am i trying to like limit the amount how close i'm putting my cell phone to my balls maybe you know yeah i mean it happens way too much the whole.
pocket thing come on yeah you know like seriously like we and again there's no we're the guinea pigs there we we're we're gonna have to find that out when we get older what the long-term effects of that are but um you know i i i am still on the fence in the sense that i feel like it's not all negative there is some aspect of uh antenna that our brain has that we're not necessarily, we've been taught to think that it wasn't a real thing but then you find like studies that.
governments have been doing about it being a real thing and then it just it just makes you think, Like, you know, is there something – is there a there there, you know. 
Right. As you said, it was taught that it wasn't a thing. True. But my brain used – when we're young, we're only alive so long. We can only see life the way we see it. But now I'm almost 40. Yeah, it's getting super old now, right? I see the world as going, wait a second. They were only teaching for a small amount of time that it wasn't a thing. Before that, they were teaching that it was a thing. It was a thing, yeah. And then for a really small time, we were like, no, we kind of know everything. We can make movies. Super human. Yeah, we can make movies now. You know, like, okay, wait a second. Just because you can act in movies and act stupid and, you know what I mean, show off and create entertainment.
And all of a sudden, life starts to change from the we need to do everything to, ah, why don't we do this? Why don't we do that? Right? All of a sudden, the discussions and how people talk changes. I see that now looking back and I realize, okay, moving forward, the illusion is only going to get deeper. And the potential problems, unfortunately, in some ways will grow. Hopefully, I'm going to say the big hope. Hopefully. AI is going to be used as a tool that helps us understand the history, where we came from, and keeps us in check. What I mean by that is, yeah, when people are being stupid, how do you say that you're being stupid?
Well, if I say that person's being stupid, they're going to say, Caleb, we don't care about what you think. What do you know? But if AI says, no, that's a stupid thing. I am the knowledge of all, right? Maybe there's going to be some credence to its opinion on overall humanity, on how humans treated each other through time, right? When it has that database. And for sure, we have to have a model that people agree on. I get it. There's a lot of talking there. But okay, moving forward in life, what is something that you really want to grow with? I know that music is something that you're super passionate about.
I know that you like, I wouldn't say conspiracies in general. I know that you like learning about life, right? Yeah, I like stories. But where is your kind of focus right now? And the reason I'm asking this is because I have so many focuses. I've got my business. I've got my video world that I play with. But I'm also quite obsessed. When it comes to NHI, UAPs, when it comes to religions of the world, not just one, not just the one that I follow. Right. But just of all the sorts. Right. And I generally genuinely practice being not just tolerant, but understanding where that is. That doesn't mean everybody can be that of me by nature. But at the same time, I don't expect that. My expectations are only for me.
So, right. So I can only control me. So I'm only going to put the expectations on me. Otherwise, life. That's healthy. Yeah. Isn't as happy. So, OK, going back to the question, what is your kind of focus in all the stuff right now? Or do you have a main focus? Do you feel or are you stuck on pyramids? Are you stuck on. 
Look, I love stories. That's what I like. And I and I do like learning things. And I do. Like I said at the very beginning, I have a very diverse set of interests. And so. Right now, what has been. what i've been spending okay so doing the whole masonry thing is because i liked esoteric teachings i liked esoteric texts i liked understanding the idea of religion not.
necessarily from what the specific religion says but the ideas of religion the symbols of religion those were things that super interested me and there was a very large period of my life where that was like the number one focus and music has always been a part of my life at this point it's just a thing that i have to do and i i always do it uh conspiracies it's less about conspiracies and again more about stories but these are things that it interests me and for some people it.
depresses them for me it inspires me to continue living life right i i look at all the things that i do and i i just, can't say that there's one, I want to spend all the time doing. I want to be doing a little bit of all these things. And I also...
I share that.
Well, and it's like... And at that point, it comes down to time management. And so I try and be good about time management. I try and be good about spending a little bit of time every day doing certain things, a little bit of time every so often doing things. The podcast helps in the sense that I get to talk to people from all different backgrounds, not necessarily conspiracy stuff all the time, but people with a bunch of different viewpoints of the world and life in general.
In terms of what are the things that's really been on my mind recently, and it's probably because of some guests I've had. It's definitely been in news and stuff in the world. And this kind of ties into a bunch of things we're talking about. The... It's Advanced Aerospace, okay? I've always loved aerospace. There's this book that I have. I don't know if we talked about it when you were on mine, but it's called I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me.
You mentioned it for sure, and I'm very interested in that.
Trevor Peglin, it's these books, it's patches of classified military programs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And if you understand the nomenclature of the symbols, you can kind of infer what that program is about and what that program is doing. That's the Area 51 planes, the Janet planes.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyways, that – go ahead, go ahead.
No, I was going to say, Area 51, I'm a little obsessed with that whole story, too, because Bob Lazar came out the year after I was born. 1989 is when he came out. I was born in 1988. Those airplanes were, yeah, used to carry people from the nearby airport.
Las Vegas.
Right, to Las Vegas airport. Airport 2 actually. the airport in Area 51 because they didn't have buses going in and out, and that was the only secure way to get people in and out of that place. But just for the record, for people who look into it, apparently, from people who know, Area 51 was never where they had the UFOs or the aliens. That's just the place for, advanced aeronautical space. S4 was the facility where they put the alien bodies. Alright, let's get.
it right. Yeah, we've got to make sure we stick to the correct known verifiable details. Let's do this. So, like, I have spent, since the beginning of the internet, I was looking into this stuff, okay? And I was always interested in it. Most people did not want to hear about it, so I just learned to let this be a thing that I, pursued on my own. In the past 10 years, it's become much more of a talk-aboutable.
thing. You're no longer crazy. Yeah.
It is a confirmed thing we can talk about, and one of the things that I, have kind of, like, really, matured on is my idea that it's all aliens. I no longer think, I think that it's all aliens. I think that some of it, at least some of it, is some advanced technology that we have. Now, whether we reverse engineered it, whether we just came up with it on our own, I don't know. But what I do know is that we have very crazy technology. I did a podcast with these guys from Canada, and we looked into DARPA. And if you haven't looked into the history of DARPA...
Weather manipulation.
Well, DARPA, that's HAARP. I think you're thinking about HAARP, the antenna array. But that's another one. We have these antenna arrays that can absolutely influence the weather. The HAARP antenna can instigate the aurora borealis. It beams so much microwave energy up into the atmosphere.
Oh, yeah. Oh, no, yeah. We have plenty of proof concepts that people can run out there and do just with stuff, let alone the bases in Antarctica that have things. Actually, I think... Oh, yeah. The reason... The reason I say messing with weather... I actually think I'm going to make sure, Antarctica, because I believe, in this case, I might actually be thinking of what I am. Yeah, so there is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, right? That's DARPA, yeah. And they control the ice in the Arctic, right? And so one of the facilities they have down there, apparently. 
It's the Iceberg Neutrino Detector.
Yeah, well, they've got the Neutrino Detector, and then is that the one with the basketball-sized pieces that are in there? Right, the receivers, right? Yeah, the long strings.
The whistleblower guy, Eric Hecker, I had him on the podcast.
Ah, nice.
Yeah, I had him on the podcast. I've done a bunch of—he actually came out to Long Island, to New York, and we went around to all these crazy—his story is wild. Right, right.
I heard that podcast, so you probably know some really cool things after speaking to that guy, I can imagine.
Well, and there's another good example. So that guy, he was out in Antarctica at South Pole Station. He directly worked in the facilities, really. Relating to the Diceberg Neutrino Detector. it's this massive antenna array that's embedded in the ice and it can detect, neutrinos, which are apparently.
It receives signals, but also Anyone that.
knows about transducers will understand that if it can receive, it can probably transmit, okay? And this thing detects, I'm not sure exactly what the neutrinos from like a star exploding or something.
Right, it's a radiation.
type wavelength.
in a sense that goes through Just a neutrino detector by itself, if you look up that stuff makes me feel like only an alien could even just create that thing, right? Who created the first one and found success with it? Because just making it A neutrino detector by itself is an amazing piece of technology. We build these things all over and they're not just for detecting stars blowing up.
Well, and that's the thread on that now, Now, the more people are coming forward about advanced tech or alien tech or non-human tech, there's a conversation now that neutrinos are actually emitted when UFOs appear, come into existence.
Or turn on almost, right? Whatever. Initiate their vacuum.
Everyone has kind of a different definition of what that means, but that's how that kind of factors in there. But that's a crazy piece of technology. And whether or not it's detecting aliens coming into existence or not, it's just wild that we have that. And that has a website. Anyone can go to that website. That's a legit thing. DARPA has developed so many different crazy pieces of technology that if an average person were to see it, they'd be like, that's some alien shit.
But it's not. It's humans, like scientists. They came up with it, and there's like a track record. DARPA really is why we have the Internet. The Internet before we... And it was a way for people, the scientists that were doing these programs to have some kind of like seamless communication. And then it became old hat. So now we have it. Um, and even so like ARPA as a thing kind of becomes, it was like our first AI in a way, because it was this thing that we made to come up with asymmetric responses to warfare. Like how do we come, how do we have an agency that thinks up things that humans haven't thought yet?
That was the whole like stated purpose of ARPA.
Yeah. Can you play the war games and come up with ideas and concepts that we haven't. 
And like, they've been doing it for like 70 years and they're really good at it. They come, they, they were deploying drones in Vietnam, like autonomous drones in Vietnam. And again, this is not my opinion. This is just military history at this point.
So I will, I will say something about what you just said there. Cause I've, I've not that I have, again, not that this is my expertise by any means. Uh, you know, but I do try to pay attention to what some of the smart people are paid attention. To and. I will say the war games and all that knowledge is obviously hugely useful.
Sure, it's beneficial, yeah.
The leaps in technology have made some of this information completely useless because as you talk about drones and things appearing and as technology grows in other nations, the simulations have to be rerun, right? But when you are the ones leading the technology, it makes it really easy, right? And that's where we kind of have to go into the discussion of – well, we don't have to, but there's the discussion of where is that coming from? Is it being driven from just human innovation or are we reverse engineering a lot of ideas and concepts and who's feeding that to us? Is there another subset of humanity that's either been around, future humans, so to speak, or beings from another land who are choosing these people are better than others?
Because whether America is on top or whether China is on top or Russia is on top, different leaders have a different world, different culture. So if there were beings or future humans, either or, they would have probably a desire of one group or something happening. Again, I'm not trying to – fear-mongering at all. That's not my point. My point is just open your mind with the ideas.
We kind of get into some weird territories there because a lot of very prominent scientists, for our country and for other countries have alluded to the fact that when they come up with, like, Wernher von Braun is a good example. Wernher von Braun was a Nazi. Right. Okay, he was a Nazi. We paper-clipped him. We brought him over. We put him in charge of NASA, and he was developing rockets for NASA. And he is on record from multiple people saying the Nazis had help from some higher plane.
of existence and that he was routinely in communication with some kind of higher form of being that was giving him the ideas that he was coming up with for advanced rocketry and stuff. Even the Nazis, like, there's many conspiracy rabbit holes to go down there, but they for sure had a couple organizations that were like... Esoteric. They were trying to... communicate with like demons or you know like oh yeah well some real society and like there's.
as you're saying some of them thought it was uh christian and based there was some people who thought it was a good thing and again some people as you said were taking it the other way they were going demonic trying to play with it it was scaring a lot of people apparently a lot of the leaders were freaked out and some people i know are definitely thinking okay now we're going off the loopy end of the podcast we definitely are let's acknowledge that we're going off the loopy end we're doing a lot of conjecture a lot of thought-based things that maybe have no reality but when we talk about the nazis and we talk about them jumping in line with this type of.
that was real ufos uaps it's 100 real some of them actually believed it yeah well we have in our american government at least the conversation is you know through david grush when he whistle blew if you know over a year now since that originally happened but david grush came out he was somebody who was tasked with actually looking into the uap uh situation, And it was his job to make sure he knew what was going on. And unfortunately, he wasn't getting the answers. He got stonewalled. And eventually, he had a bunch of people coming to him saying, hey, we're involved in these things. We know about this stuff. And one of the people that came to him said, hey, one of the first crashes that happened was back in the 1930s. And it was back in Italy. And back when that happened, the Germans and a lot of other people were involved in it. And so they knew all about it. And eventually, that craft got shipped over through the Vatican to America. A whole lot of hands got involved with it.
And the reason he knows about it is because we have that now. And it's knowledge that he got about in our government. Again, so whether you believe it or not, the American government thinks that they have that. And that was real, right? And I will, since we're jumping here, I like to give a little bit of credence to the chaos. And that is just a, we'll jump onto the screen share here. I love this word right here, immaculate constellation. If anybody hasn't taken a look at it, immaculate constellation is something that is very interesting. We have it on the congress.gov website. It's on the house.gov website. This report came out over a year ago. It was a whistleblower document, and we didn't know who it was until recently. Until recently, the man actually did an interview with Ross Coulthart and I think Jeremy Corbell on the Weaponized podcast, which is in three parts.
It's super cool. George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell. Is it George? I'm sorry. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Australian guy. Wow. I'm getting mixed up. I appreciate your knowledge. So George Knapp. George Knapp. How could I forget? Let's give him a quick shout out. George Knapp is one of the coolest OGs of this, I guess, area. He's been reporting on it for the longest. Like there's very few people that have been involved in it as long. And he's always been genuine that he doesn't really care about this stuff. He's just trying to do what journalists do and do the right thing, which is look into his sources.
And make sure that we, the people, get good information. So just to quickly show this on the screen, this is a 12 page document that is called the Immaculate Constellation. But just to show the front of it, it talks about the multi. By year, internal investigation into subjects of unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and my favorite thing, the non-human intelligence, the NHI. It didn't say aliens from another planet. It says NHI. That could literally mean AI, right? It's non-human. It's artificial. So that could be AI.
It's anything that's not a human, okay? But we know for a fact from other documents that these beings, these non-human intelligence things, were actually found and spoken to or at least attempted to be spoken to. Often it was telepathy. So I'm going to end it with my little rant right there. What does this mean to the average person in America? What should this mean, do you think, to the average person? You know, anything? Or should we just – I feel like most people obviously don't care.
Most people ignore it.
A lot of people don't because – well, some people don't think it's real, and even there's a ton of people who do believe it, but they always – say this how is this paying my bills yeah what's what's how's it going to change my life that's an understandable that's an understandable uh uh way to look at it you know i for for me i can't also help but think that at least a portion of the show that we see around this topic is meant to serve as a cover for stuff that we're doing whether nhi are involved or not it's a perfect.
cover to have people bickering about unconfirmable details instead of talking about or taking pictures of advanced drone technology that we have or advanced player the next generation fighter jet so we have right and also this is not necessarily this is related you know it's always been a part of the conversation that maybe these are things maybe this is life from another planet maybe this is life from another dimension maybe it's humans from.
And less popularly, maybe this is an advanced AI, like an advanced civilization that is just a techno-civilization. It's just a super-thinking computer. It's a computer that at some distant point in the past, in some recess of the universe, became sentient and now does it. Right. In the universe.
It would send organic beings out to search for it. What it would do is it would send a drone to a moon. It would create a base on that moon that made other drones that would then go to other moons that would make other bases create drones exponentially. That's computer shit. That's that's that is a computer's the technological answer to that question that humans in the 50s and 60s were even able to like think of.
And, you know, I there's a lot of stuff about Kubrick that that is worth unpacking, but that in particular, especially like 2001, a space odyssey, he was able to envision life in space before that was even really a thing that could be envisioned. And honestly, when you look at the first Star Wars movie, which came out around the same time after it came out after. 2001, it's amazing that people thought that Star Wars, the original.
star wars look good when you look at 1967 it's 2001 a space odyssey it's kind of crazy no it was.
at the time it was using the the top of what was possible with physical film yeah right and i again i'm obsessed with with film and the possibilities and that's definitely as you said so many things they did which were amazing not just the sets that they built but the negatives that they would record on he would literally record on a negative right get the scene just right change models but half the screen would be be blocked he would take the same negative out and then record again which means there's no two takes yeah one take to do some of those things when to get those.
spaceships to look like they're really out there moving with the because because they really are there you know at different times in a way yeah yeah in a way and and you know to your you know what you're saying right there is when you mentioned 2001 space odyssey yeah we had this amazing mind of a filmmaker who could see things we also had arthur c clark right i think the originator of right right who wrote the.
He's definitely a contributor to that, yeah.
He wrote my favorite book, and you mentioned exactly this other idea. Maybe you've read it. Did you ever read Rama? No, not yet? Okay, if you haven't read Rama, you need to read Rama. This is one of my favorite books. It's from the 1970s, right? Similar to Larry Niven. Did you ever read Larry Niven's Ringworld? Okay, I'm going to put those out, guys. Hey, Larry Niven's Ringworld from the 70s. It's an amazing book. It's before Halo existed. They go out and they find a Halo world, right? And it's literally Halo before Master Chief ever existed, right?
If you go read Larry Niven's Ringworld, you're going to be like, how dare they make this other game? Yeah, he had the world first. Okay, anyways, there's that. And then there's Rendezvous with Rama, which is another book. But the book Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, in general, what it is is, hey, we're on Earth, and we have this civilization where we're starting to go to Mars. We're starting to go to the moon. We can do some things a little bit, right, at that time. We're starting to feel a little bit comfortable in our own solar system, in our own neighborhood, I could say. In the solar system. And then what happens is we start to see this artificial object come into our solar system, right?
And this artificial object, when we zoom in on it, when we look at our satellites, we realize it's not a rock. It is like a big, giant pill, right? And to sum up the story, I don't want to say any spoilers, but what happens is that, well, I'll say some spoilers. This pill ends up being, obviously, as you said, it is not full of necessarily aliens. It is more of a drone that's being sent. And we then send our people to the drone to land on it to go inside. And as you said, well, if they were to send a drone to places, what would that drone be able to do?
Would it be able to land and then build bases? What if that drone were to meet a civilization and that civilization contacted it? What would it be prepared to do, right? Would it have a sequence built into it to, you know, communicate with those people? And, yeah, when they go inside, this thing is a massive, I mean, it's massive. They get inside this huge thing. It's got an ocean inside of it. What I find to be amazing is, again, I want people to read it. got things in there that are self-replicating it's got the ability to create and do things it's even got the ability to take humans right and transport them because think about it if you have.
and you do find something that's alive how do you register that right if you're some super race so you have to have some way to get inhabitants potentially and bring them back to you right if you do find something ah so this book goes into all that stuff it has all these thoughts built into it and this is from the 70s as you said we've got star wars star trek amazing stuff that stuff there was a wave of thoughts going out and there was a lot of receivers that were then building some of the similar things that were all coinciding together and when we talk about downloads there's a lot of people that had downloads of information and star trek was one of.
them right jk rowling harry potter was not these things where all of a sudden they had a dream and the story's in my mind i got to get it out right and again it's i like it i think it's fun i one what am i one thing i want to say right now is i'm i'm less at the stage of thinking you, maybes on everything, I'm open to being wrong about everything, which means I'm going to keep listening anytime somebody has something to say. But the hard problem is anytime we hear something over and over again and try to ignore it, right? When somebody tells you, hey, I think people can.
actually feel things maybe without actually having to see it or have a phone call or touch it. I think people can feel this energy of things around them, whether it be information or synchronicity with people. And I think, you know what? There's something to that. Definitely. Not maybe.
Well, definitely, you know, and like, again, like, like we're saying, it's one thing if we think it. It's another thing if people way smarter than us and governments, logistics way larger than us spend a lot. There's CIA.gov. They have a lot of crazy books in there. We have a whole lot of books about reality and how humans interface with reality consciousness. There's no reason they're not doing.
for fun like somebody at some point thought that that was valuable information so much so that it got folded into the archive and you know I'm not smarter than the CIA I'm not smarter than decades of some of the smartest people I'm not so those people thought that there was something to it or at least something worth entertaining you know I again that's why it's interesting and certainly the more we get into.
the strange territory with what what does life mean in a more general sense like what can life mean are humans alone here which I have never thought to be the case but is becoming more and more obvious that it is certainly not the case right again all through history we had these gods and the Roman and everyone talks about this relationship between things that were different from us that were somewhat I wouldn't even say more powerful but powerful in a different way on a different level, Yeah.
In a different way from us. And, you know, I like how you mentioned how you kind of talk about it because it kind of gets me thinking again of what's the purpose of all this, right? In the sense of we can talk about it. It's fun to talk about. Our brains go a little crazy. But then when we finish and the call is over, what now, right? Go back to your life. I got to eat some food. I got to go to the bathroom. I got to do basic stuff. Okay. Well, what I want to give to people, which is this, I don't think that there's this huge cabal of people trying to hold me back per se because then I wouldn't be able to talk to you right now. And put this podcast out there.
I wouldn't be able to do this stuff. Okay. There would be something holding me back from that if that was the reality of the evil cabal. I also don't think that, for example, free energy, technology that we know that can exist, I don't think it's kept away from us for bad reasons, right? I'm now along the lines of thinking, okay, if UAP technology and antigravitical technology exists, there's a reason that humans can't have it on a large scale. Because if a random guy can just get pissed off and then go jump in his. Yeah. gravity machine go grab an asteroid and come fling it at earth he can destroy things right so.
we can't give power to everyone because everyone's not capable of using it appropriately yeah and so there's that secret of okay is the technology and then there's that secret of uh of just i want to say secret but this this idea we talked about collapsing wavelengths and being able to create and manifest the reality around you that you want literally the room around you right now is the way that you built it the stuff in it is the stuff that you wanted to have in it and same with my room you know i've got this thing that i can move around okay i built my reality around me but if you have people unknowingly unknowingly just building stuff in their reality we're gonna have.
chaos which is sometimes the world we live in so i think my opinion and what i want to put out there is that i think all of us need to be a little bit more aware of our thoughts and our intentions, be a little bit more purposeful in what we do and that's the reason that's that's why a lot of humans feel confused or don't, know what they're doing is because they just literally have lack of intention or lack of purpose and then they see lack of results and all of us every single one of us who starts getting focused on something and then sees the results gets that dopamine rush and then wants to keep.
doing it right and then we get lost in realizing is it real or did i just get lucky right you didn't just get lucky focus on what you want and keep on going right james you're not a lucky guy you are somebody who works hard is determined and keeps getting things done and keeps meeting people that you need to learn from and that that's how i see it it really as is as simple as.
i wake up i have an idea of what i want to do i make a realistic plan of things i know i can do and then i do them and then in many cases i achieve those goals whatever plateaus i set for myself i achieve them before because there's like a strange synergy that comes from just, consistently recently, doing that every day and and it's also too like don't be afraid of long-term shit if you're trying.
to achieve something good if you're trying to really develop a skill you're not going to be good at it in a day you're going to fail at it sometimes and that's that's okay too not even.
sometimes you you should fail it's gonna have to happen right you need to fail at it has to happen.
but please you if you consistently wake up and commit the energy even with having all these abstract ideas like to me i'm the same i don't care if i'm right or wrong to me it's i'm using my brain so when we talk about any of these really obscure topics when i do any of the research on any of these obscure heady topics i don't see it as an inherently negative thing or a thing that's going to benefit me in my wallet or some way for me it's using my brain.
whatever i'm reading i'm expanding my understanding of of my set my confi, My confines of knowledge, the more time I spend thinking about the things that I've learned is enhancing my ability to compute all of that knowledge. You know, I, I don't, I've gotten over it. Like I need to be right about this and that it's less important than I need to just know more. That's what I, that's what I want. I need to know more. I need to read more. I want to hear people who disagree with me. I want to hear people who openly disagree with that opinion that I have because it helps me understand my opinion better.
It helps me see another perspective. So I don't know. I, there are some aspects of life that are luck, but I heard that there's like a, a good saying that I'm going to completely butcher right now, but it's like luck is timing and being prepared or like success is a combination of luck, timing and being prepared. And at any given point you can be. One or all of those things. And it's just a matter of how, how are you going to be? Right.
Absolutely. I mean, I think it's said a bunch of ways. So your way is beautiful, the way you said it. I see a graph quite often, right? We just say, you know, luck, that little, the word pops up when you have the preparedness, right? The hard work with opportunity, right? Yeah. And opportunity is a timing thing, right? And so there can be an opportunity here, there can be an opportunity at different places. And as you come across those opportunities, kind of as we said, well, how well prepared are you? If you, in our analogy from earlier, had the idea to start the restaurant, but you did not have any money saved up, and you had no idea about that thing, well, boom, that idea went by you. But maybe you felt really guilty that first time, right? Maybe. And you were like, dang, I actually would like to do that. So what did we do the first time? We missed the opportunity. And now we got obsessed with it. Now we start thinking about recipes. We start thinking about the money.
Right. And now, right, the next opportunity that meets us, it wasn't luck. And somebody goes, oh, you got lucky to make that. We're going to say, no, we didn't. No, we didn't. A lot of work. I had to work for this.
A lot of work went into that.
But what happened, right? Yeah, you missed things. And so, again, when it comes to... I get to teach people when it comes to marketing, AI, or even English. And my favorite is English because I get to learn so much when I'm teaching English. Teaching is something that always really helps me understand perception. So perception is the word that I'm really trying to go for. Overall, you know, being able to see things in different perspectives. Again, I mentioned this on the previous podcast. When we're reading books or when we're having a conversation with somebody, we see things in different perspectives, right? And I think overall, what I want to be able to do is to feel more comfortable and confident in life.
And how can I do that for other people? Well, it's not just being able to tell them an answer, but it's being able to show them a path and give them a recipe, right? And that's kind of what I'm always trying to do is figure out recipes in life, which is not how I'm going to end it right this second. But do you have any specific people or influencers that you listen to or that you read or that you look at on a daily basis, people that you kind of look up to or maybe, you know, role models at this point in life that you can shout out. 
You know, that's that's. That's a real good question. Do I have role models? I'm sure I do. I can't necessarily...
It could be even like music influence or a podcast that you might listen to. I'm interested to where your head kind of gets.
I think it's less about being specific. For me, the people that inspire me are people that are doing something different. They're looking at it differently. They're approaching whatever they're doing differently. I'm also just a huge fan of somebody who loves what they do. I feel like whenever I'm watching somebody who really loves... Whatever it is, if I'm watching somebody who loves what they do, it inspires me. It reminds me of the things that I love to do and it inspires me to appreciate it and approach it with that same gusto.
But in particular with music, all the bands that I love, I always remember... I always remember this. They were a band 10 years before they got... To the point where they were releasing their first record. And they're all bands that, by every metric, should not have succeeded. They didn't fit into a genre. They were doing their own thing. But in the long run, them being unique, that was their, that's what set them apart.
That's what allowed them to survive. So, for me, it's anyone that's doing something different, that's taking a different approach to even an old problem. But, you know, there are plenty of musicians and artists and creators of all kind. Who I don't, I'm not necessarily like the hugest consumer of what they do. But I have nothing but respect for them. And I appreciate what they do because they're doing it with their own unique voice.
You know? I don't know. And I feel like that's another thing. Like, that. Internet. there are so many cool people doing cool things the internet just wants to kind of funnel you to the big creators and and i would just say again maybe enjoy that appreciate the niche the internet exists it allows us to go into niches and you know there's a niche for anything and there's.
going to be some cool stuff and and somebody doing something cool within that niche um i'm, i'm also of the mindset that you kill your idols right you don't we don't we don't want to be putting somebody on a pedestal because we're ultimately just setting ourselves up for a failure when we find out that they're a piece of trash so yeah that's what i mean to say by like don't like that's why i don't tend to like idolize people or constantly quote.
specifically, from this person or that person because i feel like everyone has something to, offer. And your job is to sift through all of that and kind of come to your own conclusion about it.
No name dropping all day long with James. OK, not going to happen.
Yeah, keep the real PC over here.
It's not only respectable, but it makes sense. As you said, it's to be niche in your own way. You have to follow your own path and kind of do things your own way. And even in that, it means you can't listen to any one source too much. I would say that that's definitely an important thing for people to listen to. I want people to be empowered, right? I want people to listen to this podcast and feel like, hey, I got some intrigue, some information. But at the end of the day, truly, it's that empowering feeling because, ah, look, we did this. Look at this award I got. Look at these amazing things we've done, right? OK, enough, right? Enough of.
that. We have a lot of that happening. But at the same time, how else do we inspire and motivate people without saying, hey, look at the cool stuff we can do, right? So there's this line, right? And the attitude that somebody has coming into media. It has a lot to do with how they're going to then decipher the media as well, right? And so understanding that, okay, I used to always kind of tend to be the underdog in my mind. But at this point in time, I have a heart for the underdog, but I want to be the person that I want to be, right?
Which means a little bit more oomph, a little bit more fake it till you make it maybe. There's a lot of things you can say, but really it's just showing drive, which can then come off in different ways, right? To some people it can come off pushy and some people come off maybe even narcissistic because you're trying to do your own thing too much, right? Oh, yeah. So before we kind of – and I know we don't have too much time. We've got to wrap things up. Oh, God, we've got to wrap things up here. And so right now, what do you think is your – what do you feel is your purpose, James, in having a voice and an outlet?
Because you have a voice and an outlet right now. People are going to listen to you. People are going to continue to listen to you. And as you grow, what do you want people to kind of – feel and understand you know is your is your desire right what's your essence learn we our.
job is to learn we're going to seek knowledge from our birth to our death that is what we do we learn the more we learn the better a person we become the better person we become to ourselves and to the people around us so we learn that's what we do and you know kind of definitely the, thing that i definitely feel that this has been the biggest learning process for me too and why i continue to do these things is like what we talked about monitor the dialogue in your head.
and if i can help keep somebody from the terrible traps that i found myself in especially exploring the things that i've wanted to explore, Uh in my life. That's that's kind of the purpose we learn we grow being uncomfortable is okay, And that's that's what i'm I hope to inspire other people to learn and grow, And i'll be comfortable being okay. Okay. Well i'm going to give you i'm going to give you a final word.
Because I've my last question is is going to kind of go right on top of the learning thing that you just said Because I love that that's really it's what I want people to hear right? I want people to hear this Is be motivated. I want to add to this, but I don't care if you have money in the bank I don't care if you're feeling great today. I don't always feel great. I rarely have money. Okay, come on now, It is not the thing that you need in life Right and power is something that people usually try to achieve power comes through doing things that already exist, right? Whereas creative ability is how can you think about life? How can you think about things?
How can you get the stuff around you that you want right? And and i'm just going to say this to everybody listening There is a way There's a path to do it. Uh, And if you talk to people like James or listen to people like James, you're going to find more and more pathways to it. His podcast is full of people expressing in honest ways just who they are and how they're getting stuff done. And that, to me, is the epitome of how you learn right now and not just from the top of the people in the world, you know, the Jeff Bezos, the Elon Musk. And, of course, you know, we all like Mr. Joe Rogan. But my point is we all want to listen to everyday people, too, just as much as I want to talk to people around the world.
That's where we get a lot of real information, people who are having the moment to talk, right? Because we're spending our life with things coming at us. And then that podcast day comes and all of a sudden, and then if you're clicking on it and you're here right now listening to it, there's a reason. So, James, to kind of end today's little podcast, I really appreciate you being here. I'm honored to have you on my cast. I want you to go ahead and give us as best you can. You don't have to be perfect. There's no preparation here. Give me a recipe for success, right? A recipe for success. That can be really open. It could be one.
It could be a couple things. What do you feel? Coming to you right now. is a recipe for success.
Consistency, consistency, consistency.
All right, three consistencies.
Little increments of improvement over long periods of time. Anyone can do it. Anything you think you can't do, if you add some consistency in trying to do that thing, you will become good at it.
Ladies and gentlemen, James Oliva. Oliva. Ah, all right.
James, won't you dance?