WEBVTT
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Hi, and welcome to this episode of Assassin's Sips Spotlight.
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Today we are talking with sound artist James Errington.
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I'm Lisa, I'm one of your hosts, and today I am sipping on coffee.
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I'm keeping it simple today.
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Is it caffeinated?
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It is caffeinated.
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Absolutely.
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And I'm Agnes, and I am just sipping on a seltzer.
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I don't even know what seltzer just came out of the fridge.
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A lime seltzer.
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I have errors to run, so I have to be you know.
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Thank God for mute.
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And James.
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So I'm uh I'm drinking some Bailey's Irish cream.
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Very nice.
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Nice.
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Me and my wife, we always joke we have um well I joke that we have the tastes of like a hundred-year-old woman in England.
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Sweetened, creamy drinks and uh awful.
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You know what?
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If that woman lived to a hundred years old, she's probably tasted a lot of things and knows what she likes.
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Yep.
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So nothing wrong with that.
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I want a white Russian, but I was at a bar in Philly and the bartender goes, I have something for you.
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And he made it taste like a Snickers bar.
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He used um frangelica instead of I don't know, whatever.
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Taste just like a Snickers bar and it was creamy and cold and nice.
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And next thing I know, I was like, Whoa, I'm really fucked up.
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It was amazing.
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I mean, it was like six shots later, but my friends used to make uh pint of black of uh White Russian, um, sometimes black Russian, usually white Russian, before they went out clubbing.
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So it was four or five shots of vodka and four or five of Kaluwa, and then usually milk, sometimes Coca-Cola, but yeah, just down that before they went out.
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So nice, terrible.
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It was nice, it was nice, but yeah.
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I don't know what that does to you, just drinking that much or one go.
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I don't know if I could do that now at my wise old age.
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Um, but I'm willing to try.
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Funny because when I first came of age to have alcoholic beverages, that was one of the first things that I used to order was a white Russian.
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Really?
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Yeah, yeah.
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And then I was like, We don't say in the big Babowski, I guess.
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Yeah.
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My first drink was a long island iced tea.
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I didn't say that that was my first drink.
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I said that was one of the first things I that was my first legal drink.
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You know, we got if you couldn't do it, do it well.
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I'm from um the the bit of England I'm from, we we make uh cider, what you call hard cider.
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So um at the age of 16 or so, we were going out and drinking lots of cider, and I got so sick on it, I yeah, I couldn't even take the smell of it for another five years or so, just ruined it for myself.
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But you did go back to it?
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Yeah, I I got over it eventually.
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Okay, because sometimes yeah, sometimes you can't go back to it.
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I've I've I've had an experience like that with Fireball, and it's been almost 10 years, and I'm like, yeah, no.
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No, I can't do it.
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Welcome to Alcohol Induced Podcast.
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All right.
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I'm going to ask you my yeah, cheers.
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I'm gonna ask you my silly question.
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What is, according to you, the silliest pizza topping?
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Um I've I've kind of come up with a I have an order of dominoes that I make, which I think is um perfect, but I'm sure most people wouldn't like it.
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It's uh ground beef, pineapples, and uh pickles.
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Um I always get that.
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I've found some people go along with it, some people.
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Most people don't, but I'm willing to try it.
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I'm willing to try it.
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I I I would never have thought of that combination, but I'm I'm a person who as long as the ingredients are things that I eat, I'll give it a try.
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It doesn't matter the combination, as long as the ingredients, yeah.
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Yeah, so I would eat that.
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Well yeah, the other the other one, um, which I I think is really good, but I um yeah, when we were in China, a common thing, well, something you see sometimes is uh durian pizza.
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Do you know durian?
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It's the famous uh the the fruit, it's a giant spiky fruit, and it smells like old sauce.
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Oh, okay.
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So they make duries.
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I've never had it, but I know of it.
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And durian pizzas are amazing, but um yeah, you have to kind of get over the the fragrance of them.
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But um, they're so good.
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They're kind of the sweet pizza.
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Um I use it instead of the tomato sauce, right?
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Um, so I'd recommend that to most people.
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But um bucket list item.
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I think we need to try that, Lisa.
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My bucket list is all about food, and it's funny, um Lisa and I don't really not really, we don't know each other's silly question at all.
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Yeah, but since we've been doing that, I have to say our questions have aligned.
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It is so weird.
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It's just really weird because my we probably share a brain, or at least some of the cells.
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So yeah.
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And Lisa has a brain today.
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I don't need my okay.
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Okay.
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Gotcha.
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What is a food combination people eat that you just can't get behind?
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Hmm.
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You know, in England we don't do uh P, B, and J.
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That's not a thing in England.
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And I tried it one time and I didn't, I didn't get I didn't like it.
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This was 30, maybe 35 years ago.
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So maybe I, you know, I didn't eat many things at that time, but it didn't it didn't work for me at that point, so I didn't try it again.
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Uh I have a question with your peanut butter.
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Do you guys have the peanut do you guys have peanut butter like in the jars like we do, or is it like iced peanut butter?
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Okay, I don't know if there's like okay.
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I'm just curious because different and did you textures have it?
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Did you have it with grape jelly?
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We don't have that kind of jelly.
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It was it was it was jam, it was strawberry jam.
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It was creamy peanut butter, I think.
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Okay.
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I don't remember.
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Grape jelly is the best jelly for PBJ.
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That's hard to get in England though.
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Um I don't think I've even seen it.
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It might be somewhere.
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I could love it.
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You'd rather just come here and try it.
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He's like, I still don't like it.
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Um I'm sure that your food quality will put our food to shame.
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They don't care if we die and we're poisoned by our food here.
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It it I think in England we have a weird relationship with food, and because I've been out of the country so much, um, I I see it as weird now, but I think most people in England don't see it as weird.
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Um, but it's um I'll say there's there's lots of kind of good quality food.
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There's you know, the organic or whatever.
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Um, but people just they don't really care about food.
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That's the way I put it.
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It's just not something that's generally part of people's um like uh when I was in China, if you ask people what what food do you like, they can give you a half-hour speech about it.
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Um, but I I know people in England who treat it it's like fuel in your car.
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That's that's all it is, yeah.
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And um and nothing weird because that gives me upset uh stomach, you know.
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But um that's uh yeah, for a lot and you know, people talk about what they like, but it's always like being naughty or uh health food or uh protein these days, and it's very rarely about enjoying food.
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That's very rarely what it's about.
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So I I don't know.
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Um there's always a debate on uh like uh social media about uh uh American versus British food, and I feel like it's the second most toxic debate that I see, transatlantic debate that I see.
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Um probably so it's it's it's bad, it's bad.
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Yeah, and I'm sure you know, ever people people in the US, um, you know, everything is personal, right?
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Like this this country is a very narcissistic idea ideology.
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I promise there's no alcohol in here today.
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Like maybe that's the problem.
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I think that was the problem.
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You know, somebody in another country could say, oh my god, like this restaurant makes this food amazing, and someone from the US is gonna be like, oh my god, they don't make the best food, we make the best dude.
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Nobody said that.
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Like, whoa.
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And I'm I'm sure that you have probably seen examples in like many places, but I just know that when discussions around food come up, it's a common occurrence that the ingredients that are allowed to be sold and consumed in the US are a lot more liberal.
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I wanted to use a fun word like liberal, because you know how people hate that word, right?
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But um, but then when you go to other countries and England included, there you don't see like you know as many roach parts in your food.
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You know, it's like no, we're not gonna eat roaches here.
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We're not gonna eat these chemicals here.
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We're gonna make sure our people, hey, whether they like the food or they don't like the food, it's gonna be okay for them to eat.
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Like, not like here.
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It's gonna get worse, apparently.
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It's gonna get worse now.
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Because apparently it's the FDA wants to start, and that's our food drug administration.
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Um, that's supposed to protect consumers.
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They want to base their ratings and fines and whatever on company productivity as opposed to what's good for the consumers instead of health and health.
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So, yeah, it's just gonna get worse.
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Well, it's gonna be great until all the people are dead and then no one can buy the product, and then what?
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Or we're just complete zombies.
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Oh, it's complete zombies and just giving us the you know it'd be fine.
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It's fine, everything is fine.
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We're living in a fucking dumpster fire here.
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Okay.
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Sorry.
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If the flames get too close, I'll excuse myself while I blow them out.
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So um looking into no little research.
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I just want one now, but thank you.
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I grew up on them.
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I don't think I even have jelly.
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I think I have peanut butter.
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Anyway, we always have peanut butter and jelly here.
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So a little, so you have a very eclectic life.
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You lived in Prague, lived in China, you went to film school, and now you are now a sound artist.
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Did I get that right?
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Yeah, I think that's that's the best way to describe me, although it does usually erase more questions, but those are good questions, so all good.
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Great.
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Okay, so my first question is how did you fall into that?
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Oh, my first question was gonna be well, what does that mean?
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Well, I listen to somebody's podcast, so I mean so maybe that's why I I skipped that part in my head.
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Okay, but let's but let's pretend that's forget.
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You know what does that mean?
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Our buddies who are listening don't know.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Exactly.
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Um, well, so the my main thing is called Centuries of Sound.
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I'm making a um mixtape is the best word for it.
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Uh uh a mixtape of every year of recorded sound, starting with the earliest recorded sounds in the 1850s and going all the way through to the present day.
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Um it's not just music, it's an immersive experience to evoke that time, and it's not the best music of that year or whatever as well.
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It's you know, um the things that work best, but painting a picture of that year.
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Um, so that's my main thing.
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I do also make some music, I make some have another podcast as well, uh, which is kind of a more experimental kind of thing.
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And um, I do some commissions sometimes for things, um, but uh yeah, that's uh a little bit different.
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Um it's not my day job.
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I do have a day job as well.
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Um, but yeah.
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But we it's getting towards the point where I can quit the day job.
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Good for you.
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Hopefully this year.
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We'll see.
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We'll see.
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Yeah.
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I have a I have a side question.
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So I know that your personal podcast is called Texture and Artifact.
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And that's right.
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Artifact is spelled A-R-T-E-F-A-C-T.
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Is that like a British spelling?
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Okay.
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I was I wasn't sure or if it or if it like signified something else.
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Okay, thank you.
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That is something I mean I did when I chose the name, I didn't realize that it was spelled in two different ways.
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Or I never knew that either.
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Yeah, I never knew that either.
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Yeah.
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So how did they get into it is the other question.
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Yeah.
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Um I always uh I always played around with with sounds.
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I I had I was making mixtapes when I was uh eight years old, maybe.
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Um that was my favorite thing to do.
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I just never realized it was a job, and all the way through high school and you know, um university, and it was only when I got into my 30s that I realized that this is some like this is the thing that I want to do.
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Um so it was just uh I was always messing around with it, really.
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Um, and I never learned um instruments.
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My dad plays 10 different instruments, and uh I play none.
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I like to say I'm uh multi-talentless as far as music is concerned.
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Um I love that.
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Um so I just oh yeah, I I I've tried to learn piano and guitar a few times, but it doesn't work.
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Um so uh I think this is this is my way because I I love music and I love sound, and this is the way I see the world is through that.
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And um that's that's the way I can make my contribution to it, I guess.
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Yeah, that's fascinating.
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I had a question and I lost it that quick because we you have to write stuff down.
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No, but he I know I really bring my handy dandy notebook so I can remember.
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All right, Steve of the Plues.
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That's why Steve is the Steve is the man.
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Let's let's not beat on Steve.
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He said he's not talented.
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I was just like, wait, that's cute.
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I gotta remember that one.
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Threw me off.
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Yeah.
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Stilling me.
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I'm listening to listen, not listening to answer.
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I figured I know, I know.
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That's right.
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It's hard.
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Multitasking is not my forte.
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So, in the interest of transparency, I had my grandkids last night and two toddlers, huge bed, but somehow between the two kids and the cat, I have nowhere to sleep.
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So I didn't sleep well.
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It was kind of like one of these numbers.
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Oh, it's taking his toll.