The Future of Music: Embrace or Avoid? | Rick Barrio Dill DSH #778
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I love the independent creators, the independent political creators, you know, reach out to us on Slap the Power, please, because we're looking for people that are interested in crossing art with social progress in any kind of way, as opposed to, for me, for the longest time, it was like, you need to not do that because you want to be afraid of the backlash. It's like, no, honesty. Yeah. Yeah. Let's how about let's start there.

All right, guys. Rick Barrio-Dill here, one-fourth Vintage Trouble and founder of Slap Media. Thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. We just met, and this was unplanned, but... I know, I know. You know, that's what happens when somebody dips out. It creates a vacuum for somebody else to jump in on the opportunity. Absolutely. That's why I like studios. You never know who you're going to meet in a podcast studio. Absolutely. That's why we created this space. There's a...

Slap Studios LA. We created the space kind of after the pandemic to have more of a convergence of independent creators coming together and to pool their resources to make sure that there was no limitation or the limitations or the pain points are minimized as much as possible for making better and better content. And we realized we're selling agency here. Agency for independent creators and agency for anyone that

wants to lift their voice and you know have it heard so your props to you for for what a cool show and just your whole team is so on point it's inspiring because yeah no it's great yeah for real no that's cool because you've been in hollywood a while so you've probably seen a lot of gatekeeping tons yeah so i've made a little bit of background about me uh i've been in uh los angeles about 20 years my wife is uh she's in the marvel universe her name is anjali bimani

And we have a, it's an incredible relationship in that we're both in the entertainment industry. I'm a musician by trade. We're touring the world and, you know, blessed to do that with, you know, my brothers in a band. But it's different than the acting industry, right? So if you're pursuing an art career,

It's very complimentary. And now post-pandemic, there's just so much content is art to me. And so our worlds have kind of come together in this situation now where we have all these productions that started to merge. And we were like, oh, well, let's have a production studio that we do that also, you know, we open it up to people like yourself. But

But have a place where you can do anything from tabletop role-playing games to do a master class or to do a podcast. It's just empowering people, and that actually feels like giving them agency. It feels... That's inspiring to me. Yeah, bringing the power in the creator hands, right? Exactly, yeah. That's inspiring to me. Yeah, because it probably took you a while to penetrate the music space, right? It did. Yeah. I mean, my entire life. I've been playing music since I was five, I think...

We toured with Lenny Kravitz, for example, and he said something that sticks with me. But it's that certain musical moments have brought me closer to the creator than any other time in existence. Wow. And he's like, and I just go after as many of those moments as I can in one lifetime, right? And I was like...

Yeah, that explains it. That's kind of what I got into music for. I didn't get in it for the music business, right? You know, it's also a lot different now, which I love, but it gets back to content. You know, to me, we toured with last year, we had this amazing tour. We started on Saturday night in Glastonbury. It's one of the biggest festivals on planet Earth. Yeah.

And Saturday night, we're one of the top five stages and everything like that. And it kicked off a two-month tour. It was all over Europe and everything. Amazing. But then when you're done...

you're kind of done, you know, and it creates this, well, no, you can, you can then focus towards America and you can kind of do things and keep it going. But when you're done, a vacuum is created that some, something else is going to jump into nowadays. This is what I love about what you're doing in content creation is it's something that you can do on a continual basis with your, with your fans or with your art, just getting it out there on a continual basis. It's not a,

It's not an old school paradigm where five years to make this movie or documentary, right? And there's this long promo cycle and stuff like that. We wanted to go live today. It took us 10 minutes to decide to do it. Absolutely. How cool is that? Yeah. It's fucking best. And I want to talk about the changes in the music industry because before this, you said there's a million songs uploaded a week now. Yeah. Yeah. So...

And, you know, double-check the edges, but it's close to a million songs a week. It's 120,000, I heard last time, 120,000, 125,000 a day uploaded to Spotify. And five years ago, it was 60,000, you know. And that's great in the sense that, obviously, you know, we have this joke around here. It's amazing because when Steve Jobs... This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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Jobs put GarageBand in every computer overnight, right? It was, you had just millions of producers and engineers were born. And I think this is the healthy result of it. But it is not, it is something to also not, you know, to be very sober about, you know, it's, it's, so it's gotten difficult in streaming because, you know, a lot of the money is in the center. It is, it is,

It's going to the people in the center, but the same problem is what the studios are now having in town. Now, post-pandemic, post-two strikes, what Adam Conover says all the time, it's plain the model doesn't work on streaming, which is why you're seeing advertisements now come to streaming, which is just cable. That's what it was called 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And so the music business is kind of the same thing. Things get aggregated into a streaming model, right?

Once you have that model for the artist, it's a different paradigm. This is why taking your own content into your hands, creating it and going straight to your audience is the way to go. If you got the goods, it doesn't matter that a million songs are uploaded a week. I truly believe you got the goods, you stay at it. It happens. It will happen. Do you feel like your space in the music industry specifically is making a comeback?

You mean as far as like rhythm and blues and, you know, for us, rhythm and blues was, you know, kind of like at the time when we started the band in like 2010. It was right around that Amy Winehouse kind of time. And our love was for early 50s or 50s and early 60s kind of rhythm and blues, Ike Turner,

But really, really dope-ass stuff like Otis Redding and Stax and Motown and so much of that. And I think when you do partnerships nowadays with something like that, that's where the mix-ups or the mash-ups and that's where you do...

if we're playing a festival, we always are going to look for somebody to sit in off the cuff, right? Because we want to kind of create some sort of magic hybrid of that. Because that's where we did with our music. We just kind of came out and did that. We were very fortunate to play one of the biggest music shows on planet Earth called the Jules Holland Show in the UK. An amazing show, by the way. Shout out to Jules Holland, a tastemaker kind of in the world of music.

But our lives changed before we left the BBC parking lot, you know, and that but that was in 2011 and as you've seen streaming in the last 13 12 13 years

the best thing to do now for us, the reason why I brought up the Glastonbury comment was because in, after doing two months on the road, it was amazing, but we, we would also be better to do a year's worth of podcasts to accompany, to accompany our music. Yeah. We played with the chain smokers not too long ago. They were for the, in front of the SoFi booth.

for VIP for the Super Bowl, and they were promoting their podcast. Wow. That's crazy. And of course. It makes so much sense, right? If I was a musician now, you got a 10-song record, make a 10-episode podcast and have everybody or everything that's done right. There's a great, great, great...

kind of thing about it, but it's a, I don't know if your listeners are familiar with a rapper by the name of Connor Price, I believe, but he's got this fascinating story on how, same thing, he was touring and it's cheaper for one guy to tour than it is for, you know, like a guy, you know, we had 10 of us in a band, yeah,

but nonetheless, it was still expensive for him to tour. And his wife had this brilliant idea and they basically made this kind of skit. She was coming home one day and he had been in the pandemic, had been working with a bunch of artists from all over the world as we were figuring out

ways to, you know, expand and kind of feel connected through all over the world. And that was where the, I think the good part about the internet and just being able, you know, to connect with people that way. So he did a bunch of content and everything, but,

What he did is put it together with its, I think it was called the Spin the Globe series. And he would go, and because the TikTok algorithm at the time was, you know, they wanted first three seconds. And he was like, I'm going to spin the globe and I'm going to work with any artist where my finger lands and boom. And it would be, I think it was like Ghana or something like that. Right. But he had already been working with this artist.

And, but it was just, it was just a way to kind of skit base the intro to his music because then you, he was like, oh, and he lands on Ghana. He goes, oh, and then he tells you this story, but he does it through, you know, a loaf, kind of this great kind of the way you do, but he, and then it falls in to the Spotify page. It falls into the produced music and it, or it falls into the produced video.

And so you get sort of this in to the story that you just don't get in any kind of traditional way. You're not going to get it by uploading your music only to Spotify, right? Yet it expands...

the story or the ability to catch and connect with people in a way that's so much more powerful than just putting a record together and having a promotional team and thinking about, ooh, cool, everywhere we're going to do it. It's like, no, make some fucking cool podcasts. Podcasts are super personal. I feel like fans never got that connection with the people they liked before. I just tripped over this too, but I don't know if you're old enough to remember this, but there was a time when U2...

put their album on everybody on planet Earth's iPhone. It just showed up one day. And the world lost its focus.

fucking mind right because it was like how dare you automatically put your art in front of me right and now everybody you know it's kind of like done sort of willingly once you say yes to you know something in a podcast it's like there we go we got it we had a channel to deliver our message in our art and i just think that's really empowering for content creators and for independent artists of all shapes absolutely performing a lot in vegas yeah at the sphere yeah uh no my partner went there um

He went there for fish. I don't know. Yeah. No, no, but, but, uh, it's good. I rib him about fish all the time, but they're, they're amazing. Um, but the, I, I looking forward to going there because that's a full sensory experience that I think is kind of the future. We have a friend of ours, uh,

Matt Wallace, he's one of the biggest producers on planet Earth and he produced Maroon 5, songs about Jane and tons of these massive records. But he's leading in the Atmos space, which is the way that Apple's kind of doing now and Atmos mixes are...

It's insane. It is true spatial mixing. I think it's something on the order of like 190 independent tracks inside an Atmos mix of something. So that means you can throw it to 180 different speakers or 109 different speakers, right? And they'll have different effects on things. And when you put that in the 3D space...

it gave me hope for music again. We had a demo at Matt's studio in Sound City and he would play old records that you've heard, right, that have been redone in Atmos and it is a completely different experience and it's way different than anything you could ever get in just a two-dimensional sort of flat, you know, earbud speakers or coming out of your laptop speakers and stuff like that. So that's why the Sphere interests me is because it's incorporating that. I

I was forever moved when we had the Atmos demo. And Matt Wallace is one of like 30 guys that really know this space, you know, that kind of high-level...

you know, mixing and, uh, but, but it changed my life. I was like, I was like so restoked in music again as a, as a commercial thing. I know how it works to the heart and to the soul, right? That we talked about that, but as a commercial viable thing, it may, it makes me hopeful for the future. And then you add in real immersive venues like the sphere and that is the future. It is exciting. I heard they use sound beams. So you actually can't lose your hearing in the sphere because it's only a certain sound level.

See, that's awesome. Yeah, because the problem with concerts, it's awesome to be front row, but if you don't have the earplugs, your ears are ringing for hours after. As a guy who's in a band with guitars and drums, my drummer beats the drums like it owes him money. So yeah, I know, volume and decibel level. But I can't wait to go to the Sphere. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be exciting, man. What do you think of modern day music? Do you even listen to it? I do, man. Um, so I have a show, a podcast called slap the power and, my cohost, um, the incredible, insanely dope Maya Sykes. Um, one of the top,

three singers back bb's in this town she's out with um ray she just did coachella with ray and she was before that she was out with um billy idol but she's done uh she was out i think with doja there's all kinds of stuff she's been out with but my she turned me on to ray and i saw the ray performance on saturday night live my mind was i was like even me and my me and my girl were like oh

holy snacks. Like, I don't even get like that. It's hard, you know, it's hard to, but I liked that. Her band was smoking. I mean, the band was just killing. So I, I, I like, you know, I like the fact that

Some of the biggest tours have the baddest bands on them, you know, and that makes me really because you that's way different than the experience of a recorded, you know, every frame of its meticulously put together live, especially if they're letting it run and not all like, you know, all on backing tracks or something like that, like letting the band run it. There's nothing like it, man. Yeah. No, you said you were inspired by 50s and 60s music. What is your favorite decade to listen to?

Uh, well, I'm a, so I would say fifties and sixties was, was where, and I only say that from a rhythm blue standpoint, cause that was kind of where the birth of like so many, everything else was sort of a subset of that because I, I'm a Prince disciple all the way. Um, my favorite, I would say I'm a Motown guy because I play bass and, um, and something like sliding the family stone and, and more like, um,

you know, that music. But modern now, like Bruno's band is ridiculous. Bruno Mars? Yeah. Yeah. Ridiculous. So, you know, and everything they put out is jamming, you know, and I mean, I love all kinds of stuff. There's, that's the thing is,

I like anything that's good. Okay. So you just appreciate the art of music. Yeah, absolutely. Again, you know, it does something that is really, it's, it's beyond. So we've, you know, we play in Japan a ton and that's the thing about playing a place where they're, they'll sing back our lyrics to the verses and it's not even their language, you know, but it's a connection with, with music and it's a connection, I think with their, the people around. And that's why it's,

It's so special. It transcends language to me, which is why you go with your friends to the festivals and stuff like that, because it's more the thing it does that we can't explain. It's universal. It's spiritual, right? That's a good segue into the next topic, spirituality. Yeah, yeah, sure. Have you had some journeys there? Oh, my God. Man, I was on a rock and roll tour bus for 10 years, man. I'm writing a book about it, so put a pin in that. But, yeah, I think if the former...

president of the United States would take mushrooms. For example, I think all of our lives would be fucking so much better. Um, because yeah, well, 45 Donald Trump. Yeah. I mean, that man needs a, uh, a mushroom trip like nobody's business, but that's why we kind of, one of the reasons why we started slap the power of the show. That's what I do with Maya. And it's, um,

On a journey tip, I've done plenty. Steve Jobs said it when he went in his book. He was like, he's so thankful that he did LSD because it completely changed his life. I was in college when I did LSD for the first time, but I thought I was going to be a studious, and I was doing my paper on it so I could really get into it. I always look at that event as I was one guy

the day before and I was a different dude forever the day after because it gives you a sense of the internal, the third eye. It gives you a sense of however you want to get to that kind of spirituality but...

um, we're going to find out in generations past ours that, you know, there's so much in mushrooms that are, that are, they're, they're us. You know, it's like what Terrence, Terrence Howard the other day was like, you know, it's like, we're all God, we're all the same. You and I, you know, we're all brothers, we're all sisters. And I love that, that, you know, on, on journeys or mushroom kind of things that I've done. One of the things that I've done is I've done a lot of,

One of the things it always tells me is I always get a message if I go on a trip on mushrooms or something like that. And most of the time it starts out with stand up straight because I'm 6'4". And I saw you talking about it earlier. I was like, all the time it's that message of stand up straight because I just feel so much more empowered.

empowered when I stand up straight, but it's a, in a world where, you know, you just get kind of used to slouching and stuff like that. From school, man. Yeah. Yeah. So I get the littlest things from mushrooms, like stand up straight to the, to the most deepest, uh, you know, I, my life. Yeah. My mother-in-law, I'm very, very fortunate. My mother-in-law,

She's one of my best friends, 85-year-old Indian woman, speaks six languages. And she's learning her seventh right now, Spanish. Brilliant. Yeah, and she does the crossword puzzle every day, like just on point.

But there's a, we talk about it, the Bhagavad Gita and, you know, from an Indian and from an Eastern perspective, it's, it's a lot of the, it can almost after a mushroom trip, like, like you read that and it, and you put it, I've put it together with just other sort of personal and Kabbalah and spiritual practices and stuff like, and you're like, oh, it's kind of like what Terrence Howard was talking about, right? There's a, there's just a oneness there.

that sort of transcends even you and I here, right? You know? Absolutely. And if we can get in touch with that and relax, you know, and to entreat each other, like we are the same and we are one, you know, that's, that's where, that's where we can all transcend. And, and so, yeah, that's kind of why we created this space here is I want to, I want to create stories like that and opportunities to talk about that. You know, I don't think we, there's enough talking about it. It's easy to distract us with so many things.

Things that are insanely important right now, you know I we have I've say all the time and I stole it from my hero John love it from positive America and love it or leave it but Everything is insanely stupid and incredibly important right now all at the same time What a quote right and it's the truth. It's like some of it is so stupid the guy who's the frontrunner is facing 91 felony counts and and it's like yeah, I

I saw it the other day that the Supreme Court kicked the case on whether or not classified documents that he stole and is allegedly putting on the open market. That should be a subject that we should kind of... Why is this guy even able to run, right? But we are in a situation now where...

we're in a various degree of cult and algorithmic control, right? We live in two different, where we live in very algorithmic. Yeah. Polarized. It's designed that way. It's designed to keep us at each other's throats as close as possible. Right. And, um,

Yeah, it's concerning to me because it's not, it's a little concerning. Do you think social media is designed that way to get more engagement? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. We know for a fact. And we know that they've known a lot of this data for a decade. And it's kind of like, it reminds you of like the oil and gas companies in the 70s. They would do studies to say, gee, I wonder if this is really hurting the planet. And then they'd find out, yeah, this is really fucking hurting the planet really bad, but just hide the information. Hmm.

And, you know, teenage female suicide rates, right? Right around the time of the invention of Instagram and the front-facing camera. Just hockey stick, right? And now we've gotten control of that in a way, and now we react, but we're going to be in charge of our own future. There's not a bunch of septuagenarians and 90-year-old people in Congress who are going to know what to do with AI or whatever.

So we need leaders out there and thinkers that realize, okay, yeah, this is maybe not the most perfect system we have over here, but this is the system that we all need to make work right now, which means we need to feed into that with the right positive energy. Absolutely. Who do you think wins the upcoming debate? The election? Yeah. So I'm not hesitant at all to say that I...

Us remaining a, what you, a con, us remaining a democratic, what I consider a democratic nation relies on Donald Trump not getting into office because he's fighting right now for what he was unsuccessful doing on January 6th, which was overturning a free and fair election. We know this to be true. And yet because of the limited, uh,

the way that it can get controlled through, you know, through right-wing propaganda networks, to be frank, and left, there's some on the left, but it's in no way equal at all. There's a right-wing propaganda network that's, that's dedicated to the top 1%. Bernie Sanders is out there every day talking about this very thing. Every day, the guy does every day, the billionaire class is,

is out of control when our old manager, shout out to Doc McGee, one of the biggest managers on planet Earth, he had a saying that was when the cat shit gets too bigger than the cat, it's time to get rid of the cat, which I thought was fucking great. And in so many ways...

that, you know, we have, we have industries that have taken, that are bigger than our government. Yeah. So they, they have control the government. There's, you know, you pharmaceutical industry and that, you know, they have 10 lobbyists to one in Congress, right? That's, that's what we call, that's not capitalism, it's corporatism. So, and that's, and that's, you know, that's one issue to deal with. But the election, I think there's almost nothing that we can be more focused on is making sure that

Donald Trump does not steal this, the entire country, because if he gets in, he's not coming out. The only reason he's out last time is because a gentleman by the name of Mike Pence at the last minute did the right thing. That's the only reason Donald Trump didn't invoke the Insurrection Act and bring in whom he had part of the Pentagon set aside to do it. And on January 6th, he was going to do it. The reason why he sat there for three hours and didn't say shit while the Capitol was getting attacked on was because he was going to try and see if it was going to fucking work. Hmm.

And to me, we can't be animated enough about not letting that dude back in because by the skin of our teeth, he got out. Whatever you want to say about Joe Biden, you know, Joe Biden has done more for progressive policies in this country than any president in my lifetime. And that includes Barack Obama. The problem is,

he's old and it's, and Democrats are shitty at, at touting their own victories. Right. And there's a lot of problems that can be dealt with, but there's one side that actually wants to deal with problems. And there's the other side that just wants to tear it all down. Yeah. And that's not, that's not governing. That is, that's just tearing it all down. If that's your thing, then let's, let's stop. Let's have a good faith argument and say, that's your, that's your angle. You're coming from your, you want to tear it all down. Yeah. Let's start there. But to get me to start talking about, you know, uh, uh,

you know, you using Ukraine and the way that everything is getting leveraged nowadays, it's not a good faith argument. And that's the problem is what's going on in the media, what's going on in Congress. And so it's not even a good faith argument, right? They're holding the entire United States economy hostage, uh,

Over the last several years because of one man's wish to use it for political power, right? Donald Trump's. So he tells his minions in Congress to do this or gunk up the works. And it's one man's agenda that is making life harder for millions of people. And that's why people are so frustrated with Joe Biden is because at the end of the day, does it shake out to the bottom?

Right. You know, does it shake it to the bottom? And some of this stuff does. The student loan forgiveness, you know, the investment in the CHIPS Act and how much it's paying off right now in our economy. We're leading the free world in the economies right now and rate of economic growth. Yet you would not know it because it's so easy to sell a misinformation or disinformation campaign online.

Wow.

You know, you got to get good at, they're busy doing the work rather than making signs and saying how the other side sucks so bad. Yeah. You know? That's impressive. I didn't know we were leading compared to other countries. Yeah, yeah. And on many indexes, we're post-pandemic.

we're, we're killing it. And a lot of it has to do with the investment that has been made begrudgingly. Like the right wanted to shut down things. You know, Bernie wanted a bigger, but there was all kinds of, we could have, he's not right though, right? No, no, he's left. But I'm saying he wanted a bigger bill when we had a shot to get the inflation reduction act. I think it came down at like 3.6 or something like that, which had 1.8 for climate in it. Right. But it started out as a $9 trillion bill and would have had a lot more for climate in it. And,

And it would have had a lot more for helping kids with public schooling. We've already got a great infrastructure act going through, but that's something that Joe Biden's going to be dead by the time that reaps its fruit, right? He's looking, yeah, he might have to. Well, but the thing is, everything he's doing right now is because he's trying to do as much good as he can before he gets off planet Earth with respect to the hand that he's dealt. And the other guy is just trying to stay out of jail. Yeah.

Right. And that's ridiculous. Why? You know, why? Why aren't we talking about, you know, that should be it should be that should be the kind of the end of the conversation. He's not Donald Trump's not qualified to be given the keys to the nuclear codes again. He's still trying to fight for being able to overthrow the election that he was unable to overthrow on January 6, 2020. And if so, what the reason why the Supreme Court is letting him go and kicking it down the court is because they want to know if he happens to win, they work for him.

The Supreme Court? Yeah. Think about it. Even though it's... Even though, you know... But they were appointed by him, which is why they're kicking it down the court. Because if you rule against him and it's a federal case, he's going to pardon himself if he wins. And then he's going to go after the Supreme Court that put him... That said that what he did was illegal. Wow. So rather than answering that question, what they're doing is they want to push it down past November. When in all reality, as voters, we should want to know right now the truth on...

It should not be legal to steal the election, to not give up to the lawful and peaceful transition of power is baked into our agreement. Whatever you think, red, blue, whatever you think. And that motherfucker is not interested in giving over power. The only reason he didn't do it last time, I circled back to Mike Pence, which is why you can't give the guy the keys to the castle this time because he's

He's still trying to say that stealing the election last time was legal. And I just... We're not having a good faith argument if we're not talking about that. Damn, I didn't know you were this passionate about politics. Well, you know, man, it's one of those things. We're lucky. I've traveled the world. I've seen governments... We had...

During one tour, we had three shows canceled for terrorism. Whoa. On one tour. Which country was that? So the first one was the Battle Clan in Paris. Wow. When that was shot up by ISIS terrorists and over 100 people died. It was one of the friend of ours in the band. It was terrible.

traumatic. The second one was we were in the air of trying to land in Nice and there was a bus or a van that had come and mowed a bunch of people down on the Cote d'Azur. And the third, when we were there in the same tour, Istanbul had a coup and it was the military took over in Istanbul and we were on our way there. But I only say that to say it gives you perspective when you see these things and you get to go and you see

Norway and Iceland, you see these kind of New Zealand, you get a perspective and you bring it back to America. The American experiment is not perfect. It's never going to be perfect. It's built on an original sin. And we can all come to an agreement on what we think

it should go. But right now, we don't agree on what it is. The interpretation of being able to be white nationalists or Christian nationalists, it's just rebranded. To me, that is... That's just a rebranding of something that...

do let's start here. Do we believe in a multicultural, multiracial democracy? Right. And if you can get a yes or no question there, then I think we can, then you can figure out where to go from there on a conversation. But if you can't have a similar answer on that, there's no reason to push forward with the conversation because we want completely different agendas and we have totally different ideas on what America is about. Um,

So I say that because in Los Angeles, this is la-la land. This is why I live here. To me, it's the greatest city on planet Earth. Eight million people on top of each other. I can go from little Russia to little Tokyo in 15 minutes in this town. Depending on the traffic. Depending on the traffic, right. No, but it's everything, the weather, the beach. We've got other countries that are just south of us, right? Mexico is just south of us. We could...

You could hop to there's just everything in Los Angeles. It has every color I've ever seen on planet Earth in one place at one time. And in a way that because we're spread out and because we have nice weather, I actually believe, as opposed to like a New York kind of grind, where we rev on a little lower frequency, which allows us to, you know, we have a different we have a West Coast, a little bit of a different perspective, but where we deal with.

I think we have two of the largest ports on planet Earth next to each other. You go down there and you see the amount of just life and commerce that comes through those ports on any given day. There is no bigger than Los Angeles. So we're kind of jaded a little bit here because we're also Hollywood, and this is where we create. It's delusion that we create all this shit, but delusion is what creates all this cool stuff, right? Right.

And so I think Los Angeles is great, and I think we have, in all things considered, a great governor, and we have a super majority in a democratic state. So I think this is a lot of the reasons we get to enjoy the freedoms that we do here and that people flock here. I live in West Hollywood. It's one of my favorite cities on planet Earth. Yeah.

But we have that here. The rest of the country is not like that. So we need to circle back onto what is our agreement on what the deal is, right? Got it. Yeah. And that's fine. Bill Maher has it, and he says, look, there's city mouse and country mouse, and there's two different agendas. And we need to figure out

can these two agree on what America is? Is it multicultural, multiracial democracy? Is that okay where everyone is equal? Are we starting there? Because if we're not... Yeah. So some states, that's not the case? Absolutely. Right now in Florida, if you have...

If you're six weeks and one day pregnant, you can't control your own body in Florida if you're a female right now. You can't get an abortion? No. And there's other states right now that I might be wrong, but they're either pushing for it or they have it with no. I think in Arizona, well, they walked it back, but Arizona had it where there was no. Even if there's no abortion at all in certain states is what they're pushing for. If Donald Trump gets in,

The party that put him in there, that ultimately controls him, we were talking about earlier, the corporatism, they're going to push for a federal abortion ban. Make no mistake about it. The writing's on the wall. You can listen to... They don't let cameras in the Supreme Court, right? But they record the audio. And if you take the time or if you follow people that listen to the audio, they're telling you what the game is. They've been telling you what the game is for 30 years. Wow. Which is they went after Roe.

They got their guy with Donald Trump. Mitch McConnell at the time blocked Barack Obama from being able to put in the Supreme Court justice that he wanted for an entire year, which is unheard of, right? Because to Mitch McConnell and the uber rich, right? The justices are everything. If you're playing chess, that's

That's the whole game. Yeah. So you get Donald Trump in there, even with the help of Russia and unwillingly, most Republicans at the time didn't want him in there. But once they get in there, everybody, they bow, they kiss the ring or they'll be removed. You remember Dick Cheney? One of the worst, like most, most hated Republicans. His daughter is no longer, she's persona non grata in the Republican party anymore. Liz Cheney. She was, she was Senator Cheney.

and they kicked her out, right? Mitt Romney, one of the preeminent sort of middle Republicans from Utah, no longer his persona non grata in his party because Donald Trump and the MAGA movement has kind of taken over. And,

I think at the core of that movement, if we were able to, you know, live in a world where we shared the same information over the course of periods of time, there's so much more there that we could agree on, you know, on, then we would disagree on, but the money is in the fighting, right? The money is in the agitation. The money is in outrage. So, um, that's what, you know, I think it's going to be interesting to see how the news channels cover Donald Trump because, uh,

because all these judges are afraid that he appointed, they're afraid to rule, there's only going to be one case that we'll know by the time of the election. And that's going to be this Stormy Daniels case, you know, with him paying off an adult actress. That's been going on for years. It has been going on for years, but they finally got it. There's going to be a ruling, so it's conceivable that he'd be a convicted felon by the time that we get to vote. So if he's a felon, he can't run? No, he absolutely can't. Got it. Yeah. But here's the thing.

There's not a provision that says you can't actually run president from jail, to my knowledge. So we're going to deal with, in the same way we're dealing with a lot of things we've never dealt with before as humanity, be it climate change or AI or the fact that the Supreme Court has been stacked with

conservative judges that they wanted Roe versus Wade. That was, you know, that's what they wanted. Now they got it and it's like the dog that caught the car. They kind of don't know how to deal with it because it's unpopular. You can't have women have rights for 50 years and then go take them away from them. It's ridiculous. It's absurd that we're in America and we're even talking about it. Yeah. Right? But it's because of Donald Trump and it's because of the manipulation by the right. So now this is the thing where I feel like

you know, concern of that should be our concern in November is it just can't Donald Trump will usher in a federal abortion ban without a doubt, you know, and in addition to tons of other things, if you're curious, go to Google Donald Trump, 2025 plan. It'll frighten the shit out of you. If you're anyone like us artists, anybody even remotely wanting to, you know, live in a, in a big tent and have as many, uh,

you know, views, but, but respectful and peaceful and everything. Yeah. That is not, that 2025 plan is not that. That has not, they don't give a, they give a shit about any Democrats to them are worse than the enemy. Then, you know, it's worse to be a Democrat to a lot of the, the super right than it is to be Russian, you know, right now, which is,

Any intelligence will tell you Russia right now is one of the – they just two days ago launched a satellite into space that's designed to shoot down our satellites. Really? Yeah. Russia did? Yeah. Holy crap. Yeah. So maybe they're not – maybe Joe Biden and the Democrats aren't as bad as that. I'm just going out on a limb. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? I mean, one side is actually trying to help Russia.

Look, Barack Obama said it best. Every decision that gets to my desk is 51-49, and they're both shitty. Or else somebody else would have solved it by the time it got to my desk. So there's a lot of problems right now. And one guy is a good man, has heart, and the people that work for Joe Biden are some of the best you could possibly want.

in both government and brain trust. We want smart people, not just lawyers who are interested in making laws for their, you know, for the people that are paying them. You know, we need thinkers, scientists, you know, innovators. That's what would be great.

for the future to me, for our lawmakers and Congress and stuff. Why do you think these big companies want to push this abortion bill through? It's not big companies. Big companies want nothing to do with it. This is a far right agenda that has been there. It's the evangelical right that...

In even in theory, I think this is interesting because 10 years from now, I'm sure we'll have many, many books that have been written about it because it's only been two years since the Dobbs decision went down. But they've been going for this ever since Roe versus Wade because they had something to fight against.

Right. They wanted the right to life, which I understand. I understand wholeheartedly. And there's all kinds of discussions we had on that. I have I I would like to live in a world where there's a right to life and a right to have a women's choice. And I do think there's a Venn diagram there. It's not a binary thing. Right.

But the reason why they were concentrating on Roe versus Wade is because they wanted to chip at it. And when when when Trump got in and they got the justices they want, they put it up in front of the court. And lo and behold, they they got rid of it. Right. And so now we're dealing, you know, for ever since then, the Republicans have been losing most mostly elections, rightfully so, because women are pissed off, rightfully so they should be.

You can't take away rights. That's not what America is supposed to be about, right? We're supposed to add rights, you know? So I think it's a far-right agenda that now they're trying to deal with. They're trying to do damage control to some degree because...

There's a lot of hard line that really want this, but they actually don't represent what the majority of Republicans represent, which is a decent right, you know, right for women's women's right to choose and to some degree. And you can kind of have where that where they're drawing that line. But I don't even think they should draw it anywhere. Let the women and the doctors decide. Right. Let let old white men stay out of women's decisions.

But you put Donald Trump in and they're going for a federal abortion ban. So the choice to me is pretty easy. And that's why I appreciate you even providing a platform to talk about, you know, across generationally, it makes the biggest difference because the future has to be built by, you know, by the young. And there's been, you know, there's been some things that are horribly, you know, off track.

But there's also opportunity in a lot of the kind of things that are the pieces that are laying by the side of the road. Right. You know, and this is why we were talking about earlier agency, creative agency with voices. I'm seeing some political voices on TikTok, young, super, super young kids that are, you know, meeting with Biden and hang. And these kids are going for it. But their content is amazing. And it gets that gives me crazy hope because it's it's it's much more.

And it's from the bottom up as opposed to, oh, we're getting all of our information sprinkled down by the media giants that determine. John Oliver had that great piece where it was like they took hundreds of local news stations all over and everybody was saying the same thing. I saw that. Yeah, you put them on top of each other, right? They followed a script. Yeah, that's not a voice. That's a corporation. That's not authentic. No, no. So this is why I love the independent creatives.

creators, the independent political creators, you know, reach out to us on slap the power, please, because we're looking for people that are interested in crossing art with social progress in any kind of way, as opposed to

for me for the longest time, it was like, you need to not do that because you want to be afraid of the backlash. It's like, no honesty. Yeah. Yeah. Let's how about let's start there. Absolutely. Yeah. Rick, it's been fun, man. Anything else you want to close off with? Bro, I appreciate you coming down. I'm looking forward to the, the, the future and yo, check out, you know, my wife's always got so many things going on. I like to throw a shout out to sweet E E three sweet Ange.

online with three E's, but it's Anjali Bhumani. And then for us, we just launched Slap Studios here in Beverly Hills. It's slapstudiosla.com. And we're teaming up with another company to create a kind of mega company that's called 360Pod, where no matter where you are in the arc of your podcast journey or anything, we have a team that can kind of wrap around you and help in that respect.

because it's not hard to do a podcast. It's hard to do it consistently and hard to do it well. And that's what we just try to make that, you know, remove the pain points. Absolutely. We'll link it below. Thanks for coming on, man. Bro, thank you. That was fun. Yeah, definitely. Thanks for watching, guys. See you tomorrow.