Yeah. I I it's that's so true. And I feel like the best creators that I've witnessed are the ones that seem to to not care. Yeah. I've I've witnessed it with actors on set or on, you know, on stage where they go to a place where when you see the final finished product on film, you're like, well, that's brilliant. But when they're in the room and they're just doing their acting thing, they're like, well, that's kind of embarrassing and awkward what you're doing right now. It's really weird. You you've look at it like that's what you do. It's like, it doesn't seem very creative. It seems very odd. And you realize that they're just completely they they they lose that self consciousness, you know, that we are all we all have, and they're able to just let themselves go. And the same thing happens creatively when you when you just let yourself go and you you lose that self regulatory filter that you put on everything and you just, you know, put out ten ideas and and see which ones you really love. Maybe there's one or two, maybe there's zero, on that day, and you move on, and, you go for a walk.

Yeah. Well, you're right. Absolutely. It's funny that that you mentioned that. I've found that too, and I don't know what it is. But if I do have to come up with new ideas, I could sit at my computer all day and stare at my screen, and they're not gonna come. And sometimes, as you say, I am up against the deadline, and I'm like, I've got, like, two hours to come up with something. And I'm like, as hard as it seems, I'm gonna go outside, and I'm gonna go for a walk even though that's like, what happens if I go for a walk and I come back an hour and a half and I haven't come up with anything? Then I'm really screwed. Yeah. It's counterintuitive. Working. Yeah. For sure.

So what are you doing in walking? I thought you were so busy, Bob. Matthew told me you were busy, and you're out walking around.

Yeah. Hey. It's billable time. It's billable. I'm thinking

Yeah. That's right.

One of the things that I've I'm always interested in so when I listen to interviews with artists, actors, whatever they may be, I swear there's one question that they all get. And it's when you're if you if you have a child and they come to you and they say they wanna pursue a career in, in your case, music, what do you tell them? And I'm I'm interested in your response to that because I know that you've got a son that's doing that. But I'm actually more interested in why do you think that's such a common question? Because the undertone seems to be you would never want your kid to do this, would you? And we always seem surprised when the artist says, actually, I would love that. I would encourage them to do that. I think that's a great idea. We're all like, seriously?

Yeah. I think part of it comes from we all have a state, and it doesn't matter if it's in music or whatever your job is. We feel like if if you've had some success in in whatever that is to the point where you're able to, you know, have a family and raise kids and support them, you think to yourself, boy, I just got lucky there. I I don't have these skills. I'm not really I shouldn't be here. And so you you you impose that on your kids going, you know what? Don't do this because I just got lucky. Don't don't try this. Don't try this at home. This is not supposed to happen. And I did and so that's kind of the the joke we always have is that we we want, music because my wife is a musician as well. We wanted to skip a generation. You know? The your kids, you don't want them to do that. Their kids can do that. I think as a parent, what you ultimately want for your children or for anyone who who's in your circle that you you love is you want them to be happy. And that's a whole other question is what does that mean? You know, what is happiness? And that's another podcast, I think. But I think what for me, what it means is you want them to to feel fulfillment in their lives and whatever they're doing. And if they can find that in whatever they do, if they wanna be a dentist or a painter or a musician or a public speaker or whatever, then I think as a parent, you feel fulfilled somehow or you feel that, you know, you you feel you're happy for them, and that's very important, I think. And so I don't put any restrictions on my children on what they can or can't do. And my son does wanna become a musician, and he's already resigned himself to to to saying he he jokes, but I think, you know, part of him seriously, I'm gonna live in a basement apartment for my whole entire life. And I guess it's good to have, lowered expectations. But, you know, he he recognizes how difficult it can be to just do anything really creative. And I think that's partly because as a society, we we don't put a value or we can't we can't figure out how to monetize creativity necessarily, which is not a bad thing. That's a good thing. I think we it's it's a mystery. And I think it's an essential component of being successful is being able to express yourself and finding your own self expression, I think, is the pursuit it should be a pursuit of all humans. It's because it's it's really where we can find personal fulfillment.

Yeah. And I was thinking about that. You've always we've known each other for, a number of years, of course. And I was just act actually having a conversation with my son who's, in a gap year right now. He's trying to figure out what he wants to do next year. Like a lot of eighteen year old kids, doesn't really have any idea. And you've always been the singular example to me of somebody that just seemed to know what they wanted to do, maybe like Thomas, your son, from a very early age. Like, there was never anything you ever wanted to do, and that's so unique. And I don't know whether that's true or not. I do wanna hear whether that's true or not. But it just seems like a bit of a fairy tale. Like, somebody that was absolutely born to be a musician, never wanted to do anything else, committed themselves to it, and then was wildly successful in lots of different areas. And I'm curious. I know it's not as simple as it sounds, but it does seem like a bit of a fairy tale. And it does not seem very normal for

Yeah. Be beware of your dreams, I guess, in some ways. Because I I you're right. I did always want to do music, and I didn't really feel I would be satisfied doing anything else other than music. And I've been very fortunate to be able to have a very sort of diversified career in music. And that's that's part of, I think, why I've I've had some success is that I've been able to you know, the music business is is a little bit fickle, and it it's constantly changing. And so I've been able because I wear a few different hats, I've been able to stitch together an existence, which I really like. In addition to beware your dreams, I could use another sort of common phrases, the grass is always greener. I mean, we we all are in a place of perpetual progress or destination. This idea that, you know, you've made it, I think is a big myth, because people look at me and go, hey, Carly. You've made it, man. It's awesome. I'm like, there's nothing to there's no making it. And this goes back to what I said earlier about how we are conditioned at a very young age to have this idea of achievement and goal setting and getting to, you know, passing grade eight. Now where are you gonna go to high school? Now you have high school. Now you're gonna what are you gonna do next? What's happening next? And you're constantly being evaluated because this idea of I've arrived at a place. And I think many of us realize that there is no arrival anywhere. It's just a constant journey that we're on. And it's evolving and life changes quickly, sometimes unexpectedly. We don't know what, and we can be disappointed by those changes. Or we can adapt the idea that, you know, these changes are part of life. And, you know, you might lose your job or you might have to move, to a different city where you start over again, and it's these are kind of often scary or daunting, circumstances. But they are really part of life, and they're really part of a journey. And I think, if we remind ourselves because I'm not saying anything that is is new or that you don't know already, but the idea that we really are on a journey and not on a destination path. There's no arrival point. I know lots of artists who are super, like, very successful, and you think, oh, wow. Your life is perfect. And it and no one's life is perfect. Their lives are just like your lives because they just have a series of goals and and things they wanna achieve, and they do those things. But then when they when they've accomplished those things, they don't look like, okay. Here I am. I'm gonna sit down now and and relax. They never get there. And and you can look at almost any you can look at the top CEOs of companies, and you think to yourself, well, you've you've made enough money. Why are you why aren't you just on a beach somewhere? Because that's not what life is all about. It's not trying to get to a place where you've arrived and you retire and you sit on a beach. For some people, it is, and that's great. But for many people, this sense of fulfillment that I was talking about earlier doesn't come from sitting on the beach. It comes from doing the work or just working or having a sense of utility is really something I always come back to. Because if you can find work that you can get fulfilled doing, I think your life becomes a little easier.

Yeah.

There's a great quote, and I don't even know who said it. And I even googled it, recently trying to remember where I heard this, but I love it. And it's it's only work when you're thinking about it. And the idea being that as we sit on Sunday night and we ruminate about what we have to do the following week, we're thinking about all the work we have to do. We're like, oh, we got work to do. But when you get in the zone and you're actually doing the work, you forget that you're working. If in fact your work is something that you've you've carved out for yourself and you've created and you and it's what you wanna do. And so I often look at the pile like, the schedule that we have. I just got a new schedule for one of the shows I work on, and we're doing an episode per week, nine episodes in nine weeks on top of a musical and a symphonic episode for a show I work on called the Murdoch Mysteries. And I'm like, wow. That's kind of, daunting and scary, and I'm gonna have a heart attack. And I'm gonna go to bed now and never work again. When I get into the zone, though, and I'm just working, I I forget all about the work part, and it's quite nice. So hooray. You know? Like, I think that's something I keep reminding myself of is that our relationship with work is is complex.

So one of the things that that makes me think of, Rob, and I was talking is, just coming back to my kids one last time, is that, you know, with the some of the advancements in AI, and maybe we'll talk about that in music, later if we have time, but it's not inconceivable that our kids will or will have friends that live to be a hundred and twenty years old. Like, that is coming in our kids' lifetime or their kids' lifetime.

Yeah.

And so this idea that having you're gonna have one career. You gotta pick what you wanna do when you're eighteen. You're gonna go to school for four or five years, and then you're gonna work for fifty, sixty like, you're gonna have five careers. And so you don't have to decide your purpose in life. Find something that you're curious about. You and if you love it, you will find a way to make a living doing it. And I think that's something that I was probably told when I was a kid, but it wasn't real.

It went in one way or the other.

No. You need to go to you need to go get a business degree and get a job out of school and buy a house and follow the plan. Yeah. That was right? And I do think that when you when you think about your life in terms of a big, you know, hundred year hundred well, I don't know, sixty, seventy years of working, you don't have to have all the answers right now. And I find that at my age at fifty three, I'm like, I'm just I'm reinventing myself for a whole new career that I never could have imagined ten or twenty years ago. So I'm experiencing it too.

You're absolutely right, Bob. The narrative has changed, so much in the last couple of decades. And this idea of a prescribed, existence is becoming very outdated, I believe. You know, some of the things are still there. We still we we live in an economy, and we still want to, you know, contribute to the to that economy in some way so that we can benefit from, you know, things like an income and you wanna have security. And we have to be very wary of what that looks like and and be be wary of being over overprescribed on what you need to do. And and also not be afraid to to look at our lives as, like, many different chapters. And I think that's gonna become more and more common, this idea of of many people having many different careers, wearing different many different hats. Some of us really can specialize and do one thing very well, and we should do that one thing. You know, if you're a heart surgeon, great. Do that. If you have a brain for that type of activity or if you just enjoy the one thing you can do and that's you you you can build bridges and go ahead and do that. That's amazing. But there's many of us who don't necessarily have that specialization. And instead, we have, you know, a jack of all trades, master of none mentality. I remember when I was in university, the dean of music came up to me as a in my fourth year and said, you know what your problem is, Carly? You do too many things, and you don't do any of them really well. And he was absolutely right. And I think what that did for me actually, I didn't I didn't take it to heart. I wasn't offended by it. I just thought he was actually speaking the truth. But it was that diversification of skills that I think made me a better film composer because in in the world in the world that I work in and the work I do, it really isn't. It is, in some days, highly specialized, but there are a lot of different hats you have to wear, and there's a lot of different styles of music, for example. I mean, sometimes you'll be writing a very orchestral classical music score, and sometimes it's more EDM, and sometimes it's synth based, and sometimes it's sound design based. Or sometimes you're not even writing music, but you're consulting on something. And so you I find that diversification has has been a benefit to me, and I think it's I think it's a common experience for many, many people that coming out of university or coming out of, high school, they're like, I I don't know what I wanna do. I can do a lot of little things, and I don't do I don't do any of them really well. But it's that idea, and you mentioned it before, is that just try like, be curious and try different things. And if you ever lose that, I think it's at your own detriment. I mean, that that curiosity and curious mind is something that should hopefully carry you all the way. I I look at my retirement or whatever that means. My autumn of my youth, I'll say. I look at my later years. And I hope that I'm always curious and wanna find new music and go to concerts and play new music and or different music and discover because that the act of discovery is really what I think keeps us going.

Yeah. One thing I was I've actually I don't know if I've ever asked you this, but I wonder if you can go to a movie or listen to a piece of music and just enjoy it like I enjoy it. Or or are you, like, now that you know how the sausage is made, are you sitting there in a movie, like, why would they make that choice with this music? And they're and you're thinking about keys and all the mechanics of how the process would work, and can you just enjoy it for what it is?

I think you you do a little bit of that regardless. I think and you Bob, you're, you know, you're a public speaker, and you've done a lot of speaking in front of groups. And so when you go listen to someone speaking, I think it's part of just who you are that you'll listen to what they're doing and and look at their delivery and their and their tactics and go, okay. Those are good ideas or bad ideas or whatever. But at the same time, you're also able to just absorb the content, the delivery of that content, and just enjoy it or just process it. And I think I'm and this I do that with films. Sometimes I'm not even noticing the music or the score or any technical aspect of the filmmaking process, and I just, I get really involved in the story and the world that the director has created. And then sometimes I step out of it too, and it depends on the quality of the film. You know, a good a good example, Oppenheimer was a great film. I just watched it a few weeks ago over the holidays. Really liked everything about the film, including the score, which I thought was very well done. There was a lot of music in the score, probably too much. And at certain points, I turned to my son and said, boy, there shouldn't be music in the scene. And he said, yeah. There's a lot of music in here. And I think part of that is is a I mean, they they made a film about a physicist. So on paper, it's like, this is not gonna be very exciting. It's not this is not a blockbuster. And I think, you know, when when they make speaking of making the sausage, there are so many notes that come from distributors or the studio that would be like, we need more music. We need more propulsion here. And they don't trust the instincts of the director necessarily. And they often can override, sometimes not. But I'm sure with Christopher Nolan's case, he would have the final say, but he would listen to the critics who might say or the focus groups and say, yeah. It's a little slow in this part. And so he his response to that was let's create a lot of music to propel us. And may and maybe that is the right answer, and it works. For me personally, you know, I it it the the story held my attention. I didn't need to have music under certain dialogue scenes where they were just talking, and there was a lot of like, in a classroom, and there was music underneath that scene. So I do switch gears a little bit. I to answer your question, I I do scrutinize a film or when I hear a record, I'm listening critically. But I also just let myself more at a concert, I just let myself go and listen to whatever's happening and not try to figure out what what kind of harmony they're using or what kind of chord progressions are happening. I mean, I'm listening. I'm always listening to the notes. I'm always I always can hear what what notes are being played. And but you also can just sort of release that too and just let yourself, you know, enjoy it in a different way.

I did like that movie. I went to see it with, my son. And it was an interesting story, amazing movie, but I did leave always thinking about, like, when's this fucking bomb gonna go off? And so and I thought about, like, what is the Marvel Universe done to me? Like, I just can't sit there and listen to an intricate intelligent story for two hours without something going on.

Big bomb explosion. I mean, they did a pretty good explosion. And I, it was funny. I listened to my studio intentionally because I want you to really hear the sound of my studio. It's got better sound than any other place to watch a movie in the house, and it's got a very big subwoofer. I shouldn't say big. It's just a subwoofer, but it's it it can really kick. And so there was a few moments when I could really hear the subs starting to kick in. I go, oh my god. There's gonna be a bomb going off in a minute. And I can see the countdown. Actually, they're warning me to maybe just turn down the subwoofer because I'm actually gonna I'm gonna change the foundation of my home if I keep it at this level. And and sure enough, I mean, I went down a good twenty five percent, and it still was like I think my wife was, like, coming running down. Says, what happened? What broke? Like, what's going on? Is, you know, was there an explosion in the house? And it's like, no. It was actually on on TV.

Yeah. That's awesome. So you mentioned earlier, kind of a sense of purpose, and I'd love to talk about the awesome music project because I've gotta believe that that was, somewhere in its origin story was a sense of purpose and because it was very different than anything you had done, up to that point. So I'd love to hear about sort of what it is and how it how it started.

Yeah. Well, the the Awesome Music Project is a not for profit that I started with a neighbor and friend of mine named Terry Stewart, which explores the intersection of music and mental health, really, very high level. And, you know, to get more detailed about it, we started by, well, Terry really was the one who had his idea was, you know, he was experiencing more, witnessing more depression and anxiety in his life through his colleagues and friends and through his own journey. And he was like, why is it that we all are walking around like zombies and no one's really that happy? And how can I improve my life? And, you know, there are pharmaceuticals and there are things we can do, but I've always loved music. And why can't I use music? And so he went down a path of looking at how can we use music to improve our lives. And initially, he he said to me, how about we just collect a a playlist of songs, of happy songs, and release that to the world, Rob, and everything will be better. And I'm like, well, that is a dumb idea, Terry, because I don't like your music, And your happiness is gonna be really wrong for me. And it, you know, it speaks to the idea that music is a very individual pursuit and that we all have our own tastes. But instead, what what we started doing was collecting stories about about the power of music and how it can be a healing force in our lives. And that those stories formed a book called the awesome music project songs of hope and happiness, which was released at the end of twenty nineteen and really was the start of our charity. And then, you know, we went through an interesting journey with the pandemic because we were doing some events and raising some money, and then, of course, everything shut down in March. I never did make it down to, South by South West where we were going to speak on the on the matter. Oh, man. That would've been awesome. It was gonna be great. And we had really, you know, had had a lot of success early on, and we were really happy with everything. But then we just like many, many organizations, we had to to really change what we were doing during the pandemic and really change our focus. But that's how it all started. And it's evolved into a place now where, it's not just about storytelling and it's not just about some of the programming that we do, like things like the awesome music hour, which is a one hour drop in that we do for youth at different community centers throughout Ontario. Our our mission has become, like, to try to inspire people to use music as a tool in their lives to improve their life. Like, how can we do that? And there's lots of different ways, and we don't need to get into all that. You can visit the awesome music project dot com for more details. But going back to your question about purpose, I mean, when Terry came to me with this idea, he was really asking for help. And I said, you know what? I I can help you. And I think my my my motivation was I I will help because I can, because I think I think I know what you wanna do, and I I'm willing to go along for the ride. It was a completely new world for me. Terry is chief innovation. At the time, he was chief innovation officer at Deloitte Canada, partner there. So he introduced me to his world, so we would have, you know, working sessions or, we'd have a consultancy kind of format down at Deloitte where we would look at brainstorming ideas. And and I was like, what's going on here? How how are we what are we doing here? I I don't know anything about this and the idea of these calls. And, you know, I had never heard of Zoom at the time. And we were doing Zoom meetings, and we were doing and I would go down to these meetings, and we'd have facilitations. And I was like, what's this guy doing? He's a facilitator. What does that mean? I had no idea. It was a totally new world. It's a world that, you know, you know very well, and most of the people listening to this possibly know as well. But to me, it was brand new. And I you know, at up to that point, my experience of a call on something would be, like, ten minutes with a director. Like, let's talk about something. And Terry would go, okay. We're gonna have a call. It's gonna okay. Great. It's gonna be on Friday at three to to four thirty. I'm like, that's an hour and a half. We're gonna be talking for an hour and a half. And, you know, you get six people on a Zoom call or, you know, whatever. And sure enough, you know, the time does get eaten away. And I I learned a ton to go back to your question. I mean, I really learned a lot about a lot of different things. I had no idea how to how to run a charity. I didn't know anything about the not for profit space in Canada. I didn't know, a lot of things. And I and I and I'm constantly learning new things, and that's that's why I'm here. I'm that's why I'm doing it still is that because it's a challenge for me. There are times when it eats up a lot of my free time, and I'm thinking, what am I doing with my free time? And then I think to myself, you know what? What is free time really? If I wasn't doing this, what would I be doing? I'd be looking for other ways to distract myself or fulfill myself. And this is what the Austin Music Project is as well. It's a I don't I don't wanna say distraction, but it is a way of of getting that sense of fulfillment, that you would get from doing any activity. So it's really important to me, and, we're currently you know, just to give you a quick update, we're looking ahead to twenty twenty four with expanding our board, up to seven members, which is an exciting prospect for us, looking for people nationally, really, because we are a national charity. We've been really, inspired by a group called Reverberation, which is a for profit company in New York City, which is made up of three people, a fellow named Michael Herman, who we've gotten to know very well, and Peter Gabriel and Anna Gabriel, his daughter, who's a filmmaker and photographer. And they've created reverberation as really almost like a think tank about how people can use music in their lives, and it's very inspiring. They have a book called Do Everything Better with Music. It's written by an author named Keith Blanchard. And we find it like almost like a playbook for us. And we've gone down to New York a few times now, and they've really got a big mission, and they wanna just spread this, almost in an evangelical sense to the world. And it's really it's really inspiring to watch. And we see the potential now in what we're doing and how the Venn diagrams of our two organizations are basically one big circle. And it's that's kind of what, twenty twenty four looks like.

I was thinking back about you and I, and I think you were just starting the Austin Music Project. You know, if you could talk to that young Rob Carley and, you know, I don't know if you were in some fancy boardroom in Manhattan with Peter Gabriel, and you'd say, oh, yeah. This so fifteen years from now, this is what you're gonna be doing. You'd be like, what are you like, how on earth would that ever happen? And it just goes back to something you said earlier, just chasing your curiosity. Like, you have no idea where these things are gonna end up. Who knew that your neighbor would be working for Deloitte and start awesome music project, and then it it would evolve into what it's evolving into now. Like, it's it's incredible how these things happen.

Yeah. If you sit down and look at your life and start to try to look at all of the intersections that you've taken and all the turns that you've taken and paths that maybe weren't your own choosing, you can get overwhelmed going, what? The all the what ifs are like, oh my god. What if I hadn't done that? You know? I heard a great podcast. What was it about? It was about doctor Seuss and how he became an enemy a children's book author by a chance meeting. He was an app very successful advertising executive or not executive, advertising artist, and how he was walking down the street, and he happened to run into a fellow who was working for a children's book publishing company. And I know his as a character, Theodore Geisel is his name. You know, there's some questionable ideologies around the around the man. But the fact that he's just a really great children's author is, you know, we can't really dismiss that. And his idea that he had the idea that he had this book and he was just walking around with a manuscript, and he happens to run into, on that particular side of the street, this old, acquaintance who was working for this book publisher. You know, he he claims that that's kind of how he became a book a children's book publisher because it wasn't he he had no other interest in it. So it's just a fascinating when you look at all of the things that can happen in your life that can change your course. And so, yeah, go back to, like, me fifteen or twenty five years ago. I, you know, I could not script any of this. You have ideas of what you wanna do, of course, and you have goals that you wanna set for yourself. And I think that's important to have kind of a vision of what you think you could be doing, but I think it's important also to just not, like I said before, overly prescribe those destinations because you don't know where they are because it it's really just one long journey. There isn't like I said, there's no arrival point. We just keep moving.

Yeah. And yet we still try to imagine what the next ten or twenty years of our life looks like, not recognizing that we never could have predicted the last ten or twenty. But we're still intent on having a plan, and this is how it's gonna work out. And it's like, nope. That's not how it's gonna work out at all.

That's a really good point. I've never even thought of that. It's like, we're kind of like victims of our own stupidity. It's like, oh, yeah. You never you never projected this. So how do you think you're gonna possibly know the next twenty? Like, you know, I I I mean, there are obviously some aspects of that that aren't true. There are some things that we have goals to do, and we do, you know, have a certain, I don't know, some predictability, but you can't possibly know what's gonna happen next.

One of the last things I wanted to ask you about, Rob, was this idea of ritual because I find that anything important in my day, if it doesn't happen in the first two or three hours, those two or three hours that I have complete control of and building habits into that, whether it's exercise or journaling or meditation, yoga, all that stuff.

Yeah.

Once it gets beyond that, I have far less control over that. So I try to pack everything early on, but that's more about habits. And I'm wondering what is different about rituals and the importance of rituals and that I that you don't think people focus on enough.

Well, it's funny you mentioned that word because kind of double meaning ritual being something that is almost routine. But then there's, the idea of ritual where it becomes I don't wanna use the word sacred, but it becomes more about something honorable about it. And I'll give you an example. Like, with the Austin Music Project, one of the things that I've discovered about music, for example. You know, a hundred and twenty years ago, if you wanted to have music in your life, you had to create it. There was no recorded music. There was I mean, there was concerts. Obviously, you can go to concerts. This idea of assembling to create music, to jam, or to just sit around the campfire and make music and entertain ourselves and write songs was a lot more common than it is now. And I was thinking about that in the context of creating the Awesome Music Project because a lot of the people that I was meeting had no experience making music, and that's because they weren't musicians professionally, but also because it wasn't part of our culture anymore. It wasn't part of what we do, our routines. And, also, I was beginning to think about other rituals that we've lost like cooking. But this idea that if you wanted a meal, we would there was a sense of community in building a meal. And some of these rituals, we've lost them, and I think it's at the expense of a sense of connectivity to other humans and and a sense of community. And I think it's really important to our well-being and our wellness, and it's something that I think many people maybe struggle with. We don't even know we struggle with it, but it's where the idea that technology it's a great tool, but sometimes it can hinder some of the core essence of being a human. You know? That idea that these rituals are really important to our happiness and our sense of connect connecting to other people. And so I always wonder to myself, like, what if if we went back a little bit or if we did create those those ideas of assembling and, you know, it's almost going back to what I said earlier about play. You know, people used to get together in parlors and they would act out plays and they would do things like that. And they would have a it's a form of self expression, and they would learn things about themselves that we don't have that opportunity to learn because we have technology to do those things for us. This is not an indictment of technology. It's so important, I think, and it makes our lives better in many, many ways. But I think we have to recognize that technology sometimes takes away something that we need that we don't even know we needed. And I think we have to be very careful how much technology we wanna use. You know, I'm gonna go hear an artist tomorrow at a cafe, and I could listen to him on Spotify. But just going the ritual of going down to a to a concert and in a darkened room and not knowing what's gonna happen next, we might suck. And I might go, well, that was a waste of time. But it might not, you know, and it's this I think, again, it speaks to your idea of discovery and curiosity. And I think, you know, these are kinda like guiding principles that I try to live my life with, and I think it's really important for me to find those rituals and to try to see how you can incorporate them into your life. It's like, you know, we do the thing at, every year, we make sauce. It's a kind of a ritual. We make tomato sauce. It's an Italian thing. And I know you've made sausages in the past, so it's kind of the same idea, a bunch of people getting together in a garage. And if you did the math on the making of the sauce, we've done it before. It's like, this doesn't make any sense. You guys are spending all this money on these tomatoes. You know, some of them are rotten. Spending all this time, you guys sore back. If you if even if you paid yourself minimum wage to make these to me, you're not you're not making any money. These are expensive tomatoes, and it's like, it's not about that. It's not we're not doing it to try to save money. We're doing it to create a sense of ritual And that when you open up that jar of tomato sauce in January, you remember where it came from, and it has it it has purpose. And it it was something that gave you purpose and meaning and goes back to that idea of utility. It's like we need utility in our lives to feel that sense of fulfillment. So it all kind of is connected in a weird way.

Yeah. I love that. Okay. Last question, actually, and I stole this from Trevor Noah's got a new podcast. Really, I really love it. It's called What Now. So I've got no shame in stealing things from people that, really know what they're doing. He had this two part question, you know, since we're early in, the New Year here. So what do you think or hope we see more of in twenty twenty four? And it might be something that we see for the first time. And then what do you think where do what do you think or maybe what do you hope we see less of in twenty twenty four?

That's a great question. I I don't know the answer right off the top of my head, but I'm gonna just riff here a bit. But how do we find the the balance between those sort of conventional things that have become part of our routines and things that are new and different. And I'm I'm being a little bit vague because I don't wanna restrict myself in my answer, but I think balance is really important because, you know, I've the old adage, you know, too much of a good thing is bad for you. And I think that's kinda true. It's just about really finding the sweet spot. To to me, having a enjoying a rich and fulfilling life is about having a lot of different things working together. You you can't just say, oh, I'm gonna just sit on my boat, and I'm gonna have a great time because you'll get bored of sitting on your boat. Or you you can't just say, I'm gonna I'm only gonna work because that won't work out as well. And I hope as a general society, we can sort of recognize that more. But to get more specific about what I hope to see less of, I don't wanna sound too lofty, but I just wish there was a little more understanding in the world. People seem to be getting more angry across the board in all kinds of places. I find it in the workplace. I find it in politics. I find it in just in our society in general. Our part of it is, you know, I think social media has created a an amenity for us where we don't you know, I think I there was a somebody who mentioned, you know, you don't you wouldn't stand in line at a bank machine and then treat the person in front of you the way you would treat somebody online. We we almost are masked by our by social media. We don't feel like it's the same as our relationships. And this is a complex question, but your complex answer, I guess, is the idea that, you know, when we don't know the person, it's almost like road rage. You know, the idea that you don't see the guy in the car, so you just honk your horn. You don't honk your horn when you're in line with somebody. You just say, excuse me, you're butting in front of me or whatever. You don't you don't act like a complete idiot, but people do it on the road all the time. One of my favorite new things I should say is, and it's probably a bad habit, is I've on Instagram, I've these crash diaries of just dash cam footage of people getting into ridiculous crashes. I'm like, wow. That's crazy. And you look at human behavior, you go, wow. People are insane. I hope I see less of that. Yeah. Personally, less of people just getting angry, and and their fuses are short. And I and I don't like that because I feel like there's a part of a part of us we're losing a sense of decency and decorum and just kindness, you know, just understanding. I mean, yes, you can be angry at someone, but don't let that be your first reaction to a situation.

This has been awesome, Rob. I can't, you know, I was reflecting on this conversation. I think I shared yesterday. You and I have spent hundreds of hours, different things with our families and on Lake Huron and biking around and having drinks. And we could do all of those things for another twenty years and never have these conversations that we've had today. And I've always found you I just want to acknowledge you and thank you for all the kind of inspiration and amazing times that, we've shared because it's it's meant a lot to me, and, this has been really awesome. I can't thank you enough.

Well, thank you, Bob, and thank you for creating this forum to have these discussions. I think the idea that we can learn on the unexpected from from listening to unexpected things, is really important. And I think that's a great idea what you what you're doing here, and, I appreciate you inviting me to speak about what I do, and I wish you all the success in doing this more. I can't wait to hear more of these podcasts. And, it goes right back to what you said at the core. It's like this idea of discovery in our lives. But just in what we listen to, this idea that you are trying to discover and learn from unexpected sources is really inspiring.

The Grow With Mixtape podcast with Bob Mathers is produced by Bespoke Projects, music by showmaple Walter Cronkite. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to follow and rate us. When you do this, it helps to raise our podcast profile so that more people can find us. If you wanna connect, you can find me on LinkedIn using the link in the show notes.