The Sunlight Moonlight podcast starts now.
We're talking to Jonathan Roberts,
composer, sound designer, and audio engineer
about Wisconsin slot machine music, podcasts,
Bible music, something next, living with rabbits,
and artificial intelligence.
Ryan, you ready to go?
Let's do it.
Let's get at it.
Here we go.
The Sunlight Moonlight podcast starts now.
Judge, not by what you see or know by what you hear,
but wear your faith round your waist.
Now with righteousness, favor the poor with righteousness.
Favor the poor.
Raise a banner high for the excite.
Raise a banner high for the scattered bodies.
Raise a banner high over the water.
Wave over the water.
Break it up.
Break it down so we can cross over on the land.
Music
You, quiet and assured, standing as a banner,
dependent on the wind to reclaim.
All the excites and every one, everyone who needs help.
Raise a banner high for the excites.
Raise a banner high for the jealous ones.
Raise a banner high because depending on you,
depending on someone, we're all dependent on the wind.
Wave a sign.
Wave a sign over the water.
Wave over the water.
Break it up and break it down so we can cross over on the land.
Music
I'm a wolf and you're a lamb.
My friends are goats and leopards, a calf and a lion and a lamb.
And a child will lead us all.
A child will lead us all.
Oh, a cow and a baby bear with a lion will all lie down.
Oh, the viper will babysit the baby and nobody will see it.
A harm in the lamb.
Oh, raise a banner high for the excites.
Raise a banner high on my home mountain.
Raise a banner high over the water.
Wave over the water.
Break it up and break it down so we can cross over on the land.
Wave over the water.
Break it up and break it down so we can cross over on the land.
Cross over on the land.
Oh, cross over on the land.
Music
Man.
I love that.
That is some talent.
I love that tune.
My God.
It's so good.
I also love a good male falsetto with conviction.
I think it's really important that if you're going to go for it,
you go for it.
And Jonathan goes for it.
And he gets it.
He goes for it.
Yeah.
And Emily is, I mean, they're great together, you know.
It's really cool.
And I'm glad, you know, Jonathan Roberts here on the
Night Moonlight podcast program today.
We're very excited.
Jonathan is so talented and wearing so many different hats.
Quite perfect for the program and what we're trying to share
with folks here today.
I'm Dom Dorman.
We've got Ryan Havers along as usual.
And Jonathan Roberts, our guest today,
composer, audio engineer, sound designer,
has done so many things, so many things to his credit.
Jonathanroberts.com, just going through the website in this
gentleman's career, is really super inspiring,
especially for somebody like me who is, you know,
trying to do a bunch of different things with my own life
and seeing everything that Jonathan has accomplished to date
is really inspiring.
And I'm not really exaggerating.
It's really cool to go through and see what Jonathan's been
working on.
Absolutely.
Ryan, what have you been working on?
How about that?
Oh, man, I've been working on trying to get my family out of
this sickness illness loop that we've been in for like,
seems like over a month now, it was my oldest son got sick,
then my youngest was out for a week,
and then I got sick, and then the oldest got sick again.
And right now everybody's good.
We're all well.
You know, it's funny, I feel like we've had this very similar
conversation several times on the show here just because,
you know, having young children is like living in a Petri dish.
It is.
But the kids have off for a few days,
so I have to find destinies for us all.
So we're not just hanging out on screens and not interacting.
The screen is the double-edged sword, right?
Because you want, like, I want my kids to be technologically
adept, right?
I also sometimes...
I thought you were going to say,
I want so badly to escape my life.
I mean, that's me.
Well, that's the, I was getting there.
It's basically, it acts like the other part of the sword is that
it acts like a really horrible digital babysitter.
You know what's crazy?
I realized the other day, it's so bad for your sort of capacity
to focus and maintain focus and see something through to the end,
especially with, like, I mean, I'm on social media a lot because
I post for my music project and I post for our project here,
so I'm like, moonlight.
And I, so I'm just on it all the time.
I'm going through Reels, YouTube Reels, which is like TikTok.
And it's like, if you don't grip me in five seconds, I'm out.
And I'm just like, oh my God, I don't have the attention span to even
look at something for like 10 seconds.
Yeah, I mean, that's a problem.
That's a problem.
That's a thing.
But I think it's something we're all struggling with, right?
Especially our generation, Generation X being the last generation on the planet
that knows what life is like before the internet.
Yeah.
And, you know, when I explained to my younger nieces that I finished
a college degree without the internet or email or a cell phone,
I mean, their heads explode in front of me.
I can see them, I can see them cringing and writhing,
saying, oh my God, how is that even possible?
I remember going to the university library for a book that was required
reading and the book was out and you had to go find who had it.
Yeah.
Like that was, that was your life.
That was it.
The librarian would tell you.
Yeah.
The librarian, the librarian would tell you the person, the book person,
would tell you, oh, Vinny so and so has this book and then I had to go find Vinny,
like either in a bar or the cafeteria and be like, hey man, are you done with the book?
Vinny.
That's insane.
Give me the book Vinny.
You know, it's funny, I say Vinny because we had a friend in college named Vinny.
You went with Vinny.
We went.
He's such a good guy.
He's like the coolest guy.
We had a moment and I'll backtrack here and then we'll get into Jonathan.
We're here with Ryan Havers.
I'm Dom Dorman.
We've got Jonathan Roberts, the multi-talented composer and sound designer and audio engineer
here on the Sunlight Moonlight podcast today where we talk to working people about what
they do to be creative and what creative people do for work.
In college, we had a friend named Vinny.
We had an episode once where we had a band in college that was called Yed Face.
It was a completely meaningless, ridiculous name, ridiculous band.
We did originals and covers that nobody wanted to listen to, but we were kind of one of the
only bands on campus so we wound up playing a lot.
We all ate a huge bag of mushrooms one night and we had decided we loved Vinny so much.
We were like, hey, let's get Vinny.
We remembered this moment from this evening and so in the days afterward, we wrote a song
called Let's Get Vinny and we played it and then he found out it was about him and it
was very funny and it was all lighthearted.
When I think of my college days, it's like Vinny.
Vinny.
Yeah.
And if anyone from my college days is listening right now, they know exactly who I'm talking about.
But yeah, I think that the device thing, the double-edged sword, we use it as an incentive
like, hey, if you do this, you can have some extra device time.
We try and limit, I mean, our kids are both under eight and so we really try and limit it to the weekends
and really like, well, strategically place the 15 to 30 to 40 minutes in a spot where we really need it as parents.
It's not about when they want it.
It's more about like, when am I about to be a bad parent?
Like, let me take five.
Walk away and count to 10.
I feel pretty, I'm pretty grateful because my kids tend to self-regulate.
My oldest, he does, I mean, I think that's one thing growing up with, you know, Lori is a sculptor and a visual artist.
I'm a musician.
And so they've been doing these things and kind of in that world their entire lives.
So they do their own projects, their own creative projects.
Like my oldest is up in his room right now building a model out of the Titanic.
That's amazing.
He wants to take, there's another side to it.
He wants to take it to, there's a natural spring here and sink it.
Well, my first question was, does he know what happens?
Oh, he is, and his mind is like a steel trap.
He loves history and he remembers dates of everything and he's just like, you know, so he's really into the history of the Titanic.
He knows the sister ships of the Titanic, which I didn't even realize was a thing.
That's the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, right?
Yes, I think those are the official names.
Yeah.
I had when I was younger.
You can tell your history to be buff too.
I am.
I love history when I'm really good.
Growing up, there was a used bookstore on a lake near our house that is now gone, like most bookstores, sadly.
But I remember getting there.
I was younger.
I got this book on the Bermuda Triangle and I was like completely obsessed for like months about the Bermuda Triangle.
And, you know, back then it was just going to the library and getting more books about the Bermuda Triangle.
And it was basically, you know, it's the same like eight stories.
You know, it's not like there's the internet where you can go down a rabbit hole.
There's no rabbit hole in the library.
It's like, yeah, whatever people know, that's what people know.
Yeah.
And I have to apologize for my audio today.
There's a lot going on.
The windows in the studio here are open because we have no HVAC in the house.
We're renovating.
There's a ton of construction going on outside on multiple sites.
We also live very close.
And if you heard to the firehouse horn, which is always pleasant very early in the morning and very late at night.
I apologize for any, any extraneous sounds you guys may be hearing here on the sunlight, moonlight podcast with Dom Dorman and Ryan Havers.
That is life.
I expect my kids to be coming in here at some point asking if I can get them something to which I will say you are old enough and capable enough to go get yourself a glass of water.
At a certain point you realize as a parent, especially of young children that you are basically a butler.
You are an unpaid butler.
Actually, you pay to be the butler.
Yes.
Because we don't make any money for being the butler.
We actually lose money.
Yeah.
So it's like if someone came to your house and said, can I just throw money in the garbage to be your butler?
Can I pay you to work for you?
Right.
It's a, it's not a different kind of job.
It is. It's not for everybody.
So we want to talk with Jonathan Roberts about all the things that, not only all the things that he's done, which are myriad, but all the things that he wants to be doing and things that are coming up for Jonathan.
What I like about that song, Raise a Banner, is that it is, it is a sort of religious song, but you kind of wouldn't know it, right?
And I think that it's, it's very sort of upbeat and it's got great, you know, I hear a little, obviously going to the piano folks, right?
I'm going to Ben Folds.
I'm going a little bit to Billy Joel.
And especially with the harmonies and the falsetto, I like the sparse production, the spontaneous performance.
I think it's, I think it's really cool.
And I always think it's cool where you can sort of like have a piece of art that covers a couple of different things.
You know, it's not just like, you know, there's layers.
Right.
You can tell with Jonathan's music, there are layers, which is, I think, I think really good art has layers, you know.
As opposed to maybe a song like Girls, Girls, Girls by Motley Crue, which is pretty singular.
You haven't gotten into the subtext of that song.
Oh, there is.
There are several layers.
You're missing.
There's a hidden narrative.
There's a lot of history. I mean, they're going back, they're pulling from classical music, Baroque, you know, really.
There's a lot about, there's a lot of socialism in there and social commentary, social commentary.
There's Jonathan.
Oh, he's not, he's not here.
Yeah, we don't have him.
There he is.
I jumped the gun.
I'm sorry.
You know, Jonathan, as soon as we started talking about Motley Crue, I figured this is a good time to bring Jonathan.
Yeah, great.
Right away.
Thank you.
One of the, one of the great religious bands, Motley Crue.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
What shape, culture?
What about Striper, though?
What, I mean, Jonathan is being a composer of, of music that, that sort of covers religious scripture and things like that.
What are your thoughts on Striper?
I have little, I don't really know Striper.
I'm so sorry.
Well, they're like a Christian heavy metal band.
Oh, really?
Oh, you know, I dressed in stripes, black and yellow stripes.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, some of those, some of those metal Christian bands are like, can be really dark and like surprisingly heavy.
There was like a little station in the town where I grew up that just only played that stuff.
And I was, I was a son.
They really went, they really went for it.
Well, it's also amazing that you can have a station that just plays that.
I know it didn't survive, but for a while.
Wow.
Yeah.
But getting, getting back to your, your music.
Yeah, there are definitely layers there and you definitely are inspired by your religion, which I think is, is really cool.
I think you do it in such a way where I got some of the, the religious references in that last song, but it's weaved in, in sort, in sort of a way that it's, it's, it's you, you know what I mean?
Like there's a life lived there and it's, and it's not, it's, there's a deeper connection and a deeper meaning there is what I get from it.
Thanks, you all are so nice to say all that about my, my stuff.
Yeah, it's, it's something I really love to do.
I've always liked to write on with biblical texts and I think it's fun because like that one's Isaiah 11.
It was about that and about my mom.
It was like for her, for her, for her birthday because a lot of the themes in there remind me of her.
And I like writing on scripture in for many reasons, but one is that it forces you to go down these interesting paths because the phrasing is not how you maybe would have written yourself and it forces you to like come up with some creative solutions musically.
And I'm not a great lyricist.
So I thought, well, I'm going to take this thing that I'm passionate about and let that kind of guide me.
I, I really like your lyrics.
It's surprising that you say that because I know I don't know if it, I mean, you're not obviously in look, I'm not, I, I, I don't, I've never read the Bible.
I'm not a very religious person.
I don't, I don't have anything against people obviously who are religious.
I think, I think anything, any life that you live as long as it's in a healthy way, right?
But so I don't know if in listening to those lyrics, if there's like direct references, direct quotes from the scripture, but it sounded, it sounds like your voice, you know what I mean?
Through the whole thing.
Oh, cool.
You definitely have a, have a style and your own voice, which is the whole, I think, you know, what you, as an artist, that's what you want, right?
Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, there are a lot of stuff pulled from there, but I'm glad it feels like, feels like me too, because it's sort of like, I guess it's sort of the things that I light up when I'm like reading through a section.
I'm like, oh, this is really wild, or this is really interesting to me, and this connects to whatever part of my life.
So I guess maybe that's how it turns into my voice.
So I'm glad that's how you feel.
I think it's being an ex-Catholic, I was raised Catholic.
I did 17 years of Catholic school.
I was an altar boy.
So a lot of, a lot of Jesus and a lot of religion, but I think it's important to not conflate scripture, spirituality, and organized religion, because I think they're all really separate pillars.
And I think it's really important that, you know, being sort of, I guess I would call myself an agnostic now, which, you know, a lot of people would say is hedging, but I think it's, you know, my, my, my position in the middle there is to say,
I don't know, and I don't know what I don't know.
And I think that, you know, to say that being atheist and say there is no God and to be, you know, fully organized religious and say there is a God and to say that as a human, you know these things.
That's the kind of issue I have where it's like, well, humans don't know everything.
And humans have a tendency to have a problem admitting that, to say I don't know, because it, that's scary to say.
And it's also, it requires humility to say two things that, you know, humans are not really sort of good at handling.
So I think it's important really to make the distinction between scripture, spirituality, organized religion, and they don't always have to overlap.
That's why I think it's important, as Ryan mentioned before, I mean, I'm kind of in the same boat, you know, love is love and whatever anybody wants to do to, to, you know, participate in their community or to be part of something bigger than themselves.
It's always fine as long as it's, you know, based in love and it's inclusive and things like that.
And that's where when you get into the world of organized religion, that's where you start seeing things that are in the good column and the bad column and things that are not allowed.
And that's sort of the issue I started to have with it as I got more educated and got older.
But I think it's really cool, you know, even going back to somebody like Amy Grant, who I always loved growing up and a lot of her music, which was, you know, you could listen to it through different ears, right?
You know, you could listen to, she would write love songs and, you know, maybe in her mind, they were spiritual and about Jesus and God and things like that.
And if you didn't know that, you know, she had a lot of tunes that were sort of ambiguous in that, in that, in that vein where you could sort of listen to it as a love song or you could listen to it and be spiritually uplifted or whatever.
But, and I also like, especially in that song, your lyrics, you know, you talk a lot about nature and about animals and things like that.
And that's something that I think is very prevalent in scripture that is not really highlighted a lot.
You know, it's nowadays, there are people who maybe think that, you know, nature and Mother Earth is more of a sort of, you know, godlike deity or whatever, than other folks who have been chronicled throughout time.
But it's really, if you look at both the Old and New Testament, you know, nature and animals are a huge part of many, many stories and many lessons, right?
Yeah, my dad and I used to have this project called Nature's Lamp that we did when I was maybe in my 20s.
And we were trying to, his slogan was always, have you read God's other book, Nature or something like that.
And he, and so we had this project where we were like cataloging and pulling out every, every nature related word in scriptures.
So we just sort of went through this whole thing and we're finding the connected themes. And it was, you're right, it was, it was like that.
Wow, you're shocked at how many times they go up on top of a mountain to find, you know, to have some sort of peace or solitude.
And of course, all the animals and all the animal imagery. So yeah, it's all over the place.
That's really cool. I just as on a personal note, I went to a high school that was run by Franciscan brothers.
And so, you know, in Catholicism, St. Francis was the patron saint of animals.
And apparently, he, you know, the stories where that he could talk with him through animals and things like that.
So that was always a really cool, you know, when I was feeling down about like, you know, going to church all the time or having this stuff drilled into my head,
I would often drift to things like that where it's like, well, like, that's just a cool story.
Like forget about all the pageantry and the pope and all that kind of stuff.
And just think about there's this, you know, guy who was the son of a wealthy merchant, gave up everything he had, went out into the forest and like kind of built a little chapel and talk to animals.
I mean, that's a, that's a cool story.
Yeah.
But, you know, and we're talking a lot about religion.
But I think that, you know, looking at here on the sunlight moonlight podcast, we talked with folks about, you know, what working people do to be creative and what creative people do for work.
And it's always like you've got a pretty heavy Venn diagram there as far as being a sound designer.
I mean, it's highly technical, but it's also highly subjective and requires a bunch of talent, probably a couple of bachelor's degrees and music and audio and things like that.
Can you talk to us a little bit and I don't want it to be a job interview, but talk to us a little bit about the evolution of your career.
As far as like, you know, what you did during the day, you know, to make money and how that may be overlapped with some of your creative endeavors.
I do want it to be a job. This is a job interview.
That's what I differ.
Okay, cool.
We don't have a job for him, Ryan.
Well, just in case.
Oh yeah, you need to have a, okay, never mind.
I grew up always really interested in music and sound. I grew up playing piano. I grew up playing this for the video.
I grew up playing this very piano that's behind me in Wisconsin.
And but I also really loved puttering in the basement and recording weird sounds.
I would like put a microphone in the washing machine and bang on it and gather whatever kind of sounds I could and put it into my copy of cool edit, cool edit 3.0.
Yeah, cool edit, man.
Cool edit. Oh my God.
And thank you.
Thank you for knowing what that is.
We're all dating ourselves, but yes, that was a thing.
Let's just talk about cool edit.
What was fun about cool edit is that you could, at the level I had, there was no multi tracking.
So it was only, it was one track, but they had paste combined.
So you would record your sound.
You'd be like, I think later on I'm going to want this on top of this.
So you just keep adding layers and layers onto this giant wave file.
You had to start really quiet because it was going to get big.
But anyway, cool edit, cool edit show.
Welcome to cool edit show.
And anyway, so I wrote a lot of music.
I loved, I loved kind of making up my own things, like making up my own songs and making up my own.
Like I liked weird Al.
I liked making up.
Oh man, dare to be stupid.
When dare to be stupid came out, it like changed my life.
We used to bring a boombox on the bus in the morning and we would listen to that tape like back and forth.
And I'd tell you how many songs I knew first as weird Al songs.
I had no idea this was a real song.
Oh right. Like Rocky Road. I love Rocky Road.
And Yoda, I remember. I had never heard Lola before.
Yeah, it was 10 years later before I heard the real one.
Yoda, that's so good.
Yeah.
I forgot where we're going with this.
What was the question?
It's sort of like the evolution of your career and how the creativity sort of overlapped with, you know, maybe technology and earning a living.
Oh, right. Yes.
So I was always interested in doing my own thing.
I went to school for composition and theater.
And I always kind of wanted to create my own thing and I was eager to get out and work and do something.
I was eager to figure out what that what it was like to be in the real world and for the stuff to count.
Like I had trouble do I like doing assignments.
If I could be like, well, maybe I could use this later in whatever thing I'm going to dream up.
But it was hard for me to do assignments just for doing them.
It was always like, what am I going to do after?
And I used to always want to know you're in school.
It's like a it's like such a mystery.
You always want to know when people come visit professionals.
I just wanted to know like, well, how much how much does it cost for you to live in that apartment?
I just want to know just give me a ballpark because I think is it like $100 or like 10,000 because I really don't know.
So I wanted to know this like life information and make my own way right after school.
I made this show on the Apostle Paul that had it was like a performance art piece.
I got RV and I went in the RV and I would drive around the West and go to a town and do shows of this like one man video art and music soundscape kind of collage about his life about what I thought was wild about his writings.
And I did that in part because I was like making my own making my own way.
And I did that for a couple years.
Always thought that it was a real that was a big learning curve for me on what it would take to make your own way and the music and the arts.
I kind of thought coming out of school I was like, okay, I'm going to roll up into this town.
I'm this neat guy.
I got my show.
Let's work and I put this on and kind of ask around the town and thought I would just sort of be there and kind of like like.
Who's the music man guy?
Robert Preston.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, or Harold Hill.
Yeah, like character just rolling.
Robert Preston.
I guess he was a grifter also.
But so that's a half of a good example.
Yeah.
So you're a grifter.
I guess so.
I do love those grifting shows on Netflix.
I can't get enough of them.
So maybe maybe something about that seems appealing, but I think we're really getting somewhere with this.
Jonathan, I had I had therapy before this right before this on sitting here on zoom.
So sorry, we should have told you in the in the FAQs for the show, you should always schedule your therapist therapist appointment after the show.
Oh, well, oh well.
Most people need it after.
Yeah.
Yeah, anyway, so I don't know where I was.
We're still on the this is going to take the whole show.
Well, I mean, do you want to do you want to fast forward to like maybe like video games and Spotify?
Oh, yeah, yeah, sure.
I did.
Yeah, I did that.
I moved to New York City, played in a crazy band in the that played at the living room all the time and the band leader started.
He became the sound director at a slot machine company and hired the whole band and we became the sound department.
And suddenly we went from just like slobbing around New York City to being in like this high rise making slot machine music all day.
That's pretty incredible.
It was super fun.
And slot machine music is everything you could think of.
It's like got some fun themes, but it's got all the the dingy and everything and all these different styles.
We were all together just throwing throwing new ideas around.
That was a really it's like was a really fun creative environment.
That's like that's like my dream.
Ryan and I talked about it all the time.
That's like our dream to sort of be on staff in some capacity to say your job is to come in to the studio every day and just come up with new music and we'll pay you for it.
Yeah, it just sounds like the dream.
Yeah.
And with people that are creative that you're that you can you can do it together.
It's it was really it was really special.
So we have a mutual acquaintance in that in that I've also not at the level that you did it, but I've made I've made some music for some slot machine games and you were always the the reference like you got to check out John stuff.
Oh really.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
That's cool.
It is fun.
It's fun to write at the time I don't know if they still use it but at the time I wrote one of the main ones they use for the big win like the jackpot.
Yeah.
And it was really fun to think you're going to write I'm going to write a piece of music that someone's going to experience when they're at like the highest point of I don't know but their life but at least like they're weak.
It's such a happy moment like I did it.
I won this big thing.
So it's probably going to be like burned into their brain.
Yeah, like because they'll they'll either black out because they won a million dollars or they'll like they'll just play that song over in their dreams.
Yeah.
Yeah, let's hope.
After that I did a bunch of kids that's around around there we had kids my wife Emily and I so then then I started thinking about I did a whole period where I was making kids music and kids podcasts always really kind of enjoyed that kids media but when you have your own kids it's just fun to do that with them.
And I started imagining I made that bunch of stuff under the name composer dad and I started imagining myself as like a superhero because when you're a little when you're like just like an exhausted dad of little little kids you just need to imagine yourself in that way.
Sometimes and it feels like these big feats like I didn't I didn't I didn't I was really chill when I had to like, you know, put nickels in a seatbelt over and over for an hour and just do this thing that was stressing me out.
Right.
I haven't yelled at my son in six hours.
Yeah, that's real superhero thing.
Right.
I'm a great dad.
Yeah.
But out of that out of my love for kids stuff I started I started listening to chompers a great the tooth hit toothbrushing podcasts for kids and that was made by gimlet and I just kind of became friends with them and then when they had an opening there.
I applied for an internship. I was a little I was just a little old and for internship but they said well, I mean they didn't tell me I was old but anyway they they said they thought it they thought it I was.
They said we old but we'll give you an internship. You know, there was a there was a guy who came in as my intern at serious XM. He was older than me at the time.
And now he is like a senior producer there he stuck it out. He said he wanted to stop doing what he was doing.
And he was like living with his parents or whatever. And then he stuck it out and became a salaried employee and then he worked his way all the way up to like a senior talk producer and he's still there today.
It's never too late.
There you go. Yeah, that's awesome.
That's really great.
Yeah, it's always good to be able to like, have it in your life and be like I'm open to starting in this new thing at this level.
With Gimlet and Spotify, they didn't that they said we actually know an audio engineer which you're more qualified for so that worked out and I started there at Spotify or it's Gimlet but the first day I went into work.
I saw on the news that their game was to be acquired by Spotify so I said I'm going to ask my boss about that on Monday and
Hey man, it's tough to avoid now.
It's like every day everybody's checking their badges to see if that's the company they still work for.
Yeah, but I was there for five years up until just the spring and did a lot in did kids stuff and then a lot in fiction podcasts.
That I want to pause there for a second because I listened to some of the real where you were doing quiet part loud and case 63 and like that stuff.
It's so it's so cool to me and first of all it sounded amazing that the quiet part loud clips with that the actor what was his name.
Tracy let's Tracy let's so he's he's totally insane in his own right. Absolutely.
He wrote all that. Oh, so each county right. He was on Seinfeld as like a character actor.
I mean the guy like I think he was married to Merrill Street maybe or I might be conflating folks but anyway the sound design is so incredible and it really brought me back to one of the reasons I wanted to get into broadcasting and specifically radio when I started was that when I was really young.
And my grandparents had bought me this set of these old cassettes. There were cassettes that were old radio shows.
So it was like the Bickersons and it was like George Burns and his wife and Charlie McCarthy and and it was in this plastic it looked like an old console radio like a stand, you know a wooden big walnut case and the cassettes were like sort of, you know, in there horizontally in a little set and I kept it as a set.
And it was really like OCD about that. And it really brings me back to that where really the beginning of the evolution of broadcasting and entertainment where you had these scripted serials or people like you know Orson Welles and RKO productions doing these events the pre cursor to television
where people would be you know the radio was about it was about it was about news and music but also these shows and Jack Benny and things like that where families would huddle around the radio at night on a weekly basis just to hear these specific shows and really listening to you know a little bit of quiet part loud and and K 63 I'm also huge Oscar Isaac fan.
So that was like so good right. He's got such a great voice and such great delivery. But hearing those again brought me it's amazing how things have come full circle, where like you have the beginning of broadcast entertainment, being these fictional podcast that's exactly what it was.
It was like these people in a room, telling these stories with sound effects to make you be able to close your eyes and envision yourself being there and envision what they're talking about.
They used to do it live to the sound effects, which is just amazing to me. But anyway, yeah, it's so cool. And that's a power of I love this medium so much. I really got smitten with it in that time.
It's still am and with the audio dramas and scripted fiction stories. It's the I think the best way to be immersed in a story and feel connected to the characters, because you're building it in your mind with the, you know, the world that's been created.
You're listening to and you take it with you and you're intimate with the characters. I think it is more powerful than movies. I'm going to say it. It's untethered from the tyranny of images. You can just make your own images.
You heard it here. Yeah, podcasts are better than movies.
Yeah. Well, it's funny. It always reminds me of trying to watch a film with subtitles, because you're just not able to watch the movie. And so you really have to like, you know, you can glance up here and there, but like you're fixated on, you know, especially like some of these old French or Italian films where you're just trying to keep up with the dialogue.
And really, you know, you know what the characters look like. But I find myself, you know, when I'm watching those, those and I love all of those old movies and the feel of it and the ritual of it.
But really at the end of the day, when you leave and you see the end of the movie, you really didn't see the movie. You listen to the actors voices and you processed what you were reading and you synthesize both of them in your head.
And to be able to watch the movie at the same time is very difficult. It's like multitasking to the max. Whereas to your point, you know, I'm sure a lot of people multitask when they're listening to podcasts, whether they're topical or fictional.
But really, you have the opportunity to relax yourself and to close your eyes and to be immersed in those sounds and with the technology, the way it is today, you know, stereo surround and how things are mixed, which is part of your bag, right?
I mean, audio design and things like that is how the brain is receiving and processing these sounds as they're occurring and using, you know, different levels and beds and sound effects and all of those spatial ingredients to create an environment where people are immersed and entertained.
Yeah, exactly. It really, it's about taking them on this story and this journey and connecting with the characters. And as a person who was in the sound design, leading the post production kind of area, it's about bringing out this vision from these writers and the director and these actors and helping it, you know, they're just coming in and recording.
Kind of like animation, they're just, you know, we would record one at a time and all these puzzle pieces and put it together and try to like help this full vision come to life. I really enjoy that the process.
A lot of layers, just like you were saying.
Yeah, it's very crazy and what I like about the advent of podcasts, again, both topical and fictional, is that, you know, for a time there, radio was dead. You know, it was like you had all of these AM and FM stations across the US consolidating.
You had companies like, you know, I heart radio and things like that buying up all these stations and really controlling the narrative and not really having anything local.
Of course, Ryan and I as former employers, the series XM satellite radio really, you know, kind of broke the mold in the sense of, you know, you could drive cross country and listen to the same radio station for the first time, which is really, really cool.
But also, you know, in a sense of monopolizing that space where basically if you're not, you know, I mean, I guess there's still Westwood one, but they're mainly sports.
And so if you're not doing a sort of a talk show or a national show on series XM, there's not a whole lot of other places to do it except for podcasts.
And I think that, you know, in that period before when satellite radio happened, excuse me, and then, you know, right before podcasts sort of took off because they were they were around a while.
It was like basically Mark Marin and then like a couple of history shows and that was kind of it.
And then and kudos to him for being to me is like the Godfather. I know Joe Rogan is number one right now, but let's not forget Mr. Mark Marin, who, you know, turned his garage into a studio and started broadcasting basically on his own as an
independent. I think when you look at that, that arc and how things have really come full circle and now the market is so flush with podcasts, then they have companies like serious XM coming back to get those podcasts and to put them on their platforms, right?
Because now serious owns Pandora and, you know, then there's Spotify and they're gobbling stuff up, but they're also doing things that are more, you know, live or near live and sort of in the studio.
So I think it's really interesting to watch this happen. And I think that for myself, I mean, I've wanted to do a podcast for so long, but I was never really fully inspired by anything until Ryan and I started this.
And I think that once I sort of came up with an idea that I felt that was niche enough that it will, you know, the market wasn't flooded with stuff like this but also accessible enough to be able to have people of all different walks of life listen to,
you know, Ryan and I are very careful not to have a bunch of musicians on all the time because we know a lot of musicians.
So we pepper sort of different disciplines in on the show. And I think one of the reasons why you're a perfect guest here on the sunlight moonlight podcast is because you've got that, that technical experience that day job experience that is sort of still in this, you know, in this ecosystem.
But it's not exactly, you know, you're still doing music on the side, you've done a bunch of records on your own. You have a vision for your own music.
Let me ask you what discipline is or what facet of your career. Do you most identify with?
That's a great question. I think it depends on the time. Right now it's a little more I've done so much sound design and I love, I love, I find myself doing that a lot more lately and I definitely go through different seasons.
I love building up those worlds and it feels very musical to, to like, you know, think of a not think of an ambience of a room and then layer on these sound effects and figure out how it interacts with the, with the pacing of the voice and the dialogue and how the score weaves in feels all very like
counterpoint the way it was way traditional counterpoint as I studied from school. So that really like sound design lights up the musical part of my brain and the storytelling part at the same time, which I really get excited about.
So I think that's, that's where I am right now but gosh, it really does change over seasons.
It's hard, you know, it's funny how it's funny how I'm one of those people that once you get into something, once you're over us, when I was a, let's see, I was like a really a big show choir guy. Did you have show choirs wherever you grew up?
Yep. It's like, they're really bizarre. They're like, they're like college kids or high school dancing around singing these like these songs like celebration or they're all about just like the love of music and being together.
And I was so into this, I went to every camp and everything and performed in multiple and then it was like a switch turned off and I was like, I can't, I can't do this anymore.
And I've had a lot of periods of that in my life. And there's a lot of stuff like that that comes and goes and then some things come back. It's just funny how funny about life, how that works.
Do you have that too?
Oh yeah. Yeah, it's, I have so many ideas going on at once that you just have to sort of commit to it and be like, okay, I'm going to finish this. I'm going to do this, you know, it's always easy to start something.
It's always harder to finish it. Sorry, there's a there's a fruit fly. There's no fruit in here. I don't know where the fruit fly came from.
I mean, right now where I'm trying to figure out because I'm at a what's next part in life. So I'm just sort of looking back at all these fun to talk to you all about this because I'm looking back at all these chapters like, oh, I really love that experience.
And I was doing that. Is that do I want to go back to that? Do I want to do something new? It's like, these are all the questions that I'm asking and that people ask in these transitional times.
What kind of so when you're working on, I'm sorry, keep swat swat this.
Why? Why? On some of the shows that you were working on Spotify, like what sort of I mean, there were multiple number one shows. What what type of hours were you putting in?
Like what what what work goes into a production like that? Are you just working around the clock or the very structured?
Those shows, they're really fun to make. They usually the life of them. Once the script is locked, you know, the writers are kind of working on this for however long they have, they want to develop their dream.
But once the script is locked, it sort of followed the pattern of like a couple months of pre production, getting things ready and casting and then maybe a month of recording all the actors for the show.
And then maybe five months or so of post production, layering all the sounds. We might have had a couple shows going at once that you're doing earlier work on one and then finishing up another one.
So they would overlap or different. We had a team of people. So different people will be working on them.
But at Spotify, that was, you know, that that was really fun. It was like that was a full time job full time hours. Working on this on the show for probably about yeah, about that length of time per show.
Yeah.
I also wanted to get into you'd mentioned that you had taken some AI training at Spotify. What did you learn? What sort of training did you do?
Well, that was wild because Spotify, Spotify does a lot of their pros at helping you discover new music, right? That's their thing.
And so they use for even before the AI boom or whatever we're in. I'm no expert. But even before that, they were really good at at leveraging this and figuring out how how to use AI to help you find what what you would like based on what other people were enjoying and listening to.
So just working there, I thought, oh, it's a great opportunity to learn how they do that a little bit more. So they had internal like other companies had internal classes on AI and large language models and sort of how to use it.
I was interested in it being a creative tool. I'm not really a programmer, but I was interested in how it can be used either to make personalized experiences for listener at some level.
Like what if you could tell a story that had some element in it that was resonated with you. I'm sure other people are working have worked on this too.
But so both like what could be personalized about your listening that was interesting to me and still is and then also how you can use it as a creative tool.
I, for example, I am not a like I said, I'm not a great writer with words in my opinion. But so it was fun. It's fun to have that as an assistant to be like, not necessarily write it for you but sort of get a little bit out of your head and and, you know,
tweak, you know, help you get rolling. Yeah. And and like, like writing from scripture, I take the text and I'll be like, oh, I like that part. I like that part. I like that part.
But then using using some sort of generative model to help you just think outside the box and then use that as a jumping off point. I think it's really fun creatively.
So yeah, I, yeah, I think that's that's sort of where I am.
There's obviously such an uproar over AI and it's, you know, it's moving so quickly now.
A lot of people in Dom, you know, I've talked about this, but many of my friends are very worried how it's going to affect the creative fields.
And, you know, I hear like, well, that's it. That's over for us. And I don't know. Maybe I'm just a more like a, like an optimist to a fault.
But like, I just don't think I, I see where you're coming from. I see it to be used as a tool.
I don't.
Many of my friends giving everybody way too much credit.
Dom has said it. Other people have said it. You're giving people way too much credit. I think that in a time where we're on social media, we're online all the time, people crave human connection.
I don't think it'll ever go out of style. Humans making music and humans performing.
I think I don't.
And I say humans because I think I think I have to distinguish it from artificial intelligence now. I think humans are always going to want to hear music from humans.
And they're going to want to hear it from AI too. But I don't think it's like humans aren't going to go away and being creative is not going to go away. Art is not going to go away because I think that we as human beings need that connection.
I mean, look, I agree with what you said. However, I think that you're overestimating people's ability to sort of differentiate between what they're hearing as being generated from an actual human versus what they're hearing being generated from an artificial intelligence.
I think you could probably figure it out. But if we do these blind tastings as it were, like these blind watchings or hearings, or be able to...
If you look at some of the artwork that's coming out generated by AI, I can't tell you what was made by a human or a computer.
Well, I think as a human being, you have to put it out there and you have to say, hey, I made this.
What if you're lying?
Nothing's stopping you from...
Nothing's stopping me from... If I go in and make a bunch of AI generated images, let's say like comic book characters, right?
And I print them out and I put them in really nice frames and I bring them to an art exhibition.
Yeah.
Like, why... I can sell those.
Yeah, but I mean, people have done that before. People have claimed they've written music and they get other people to write it and pay them and like, hey, look at what I did.
Yeah, I mean, Milly Vanilly was like the first AI, right?
Yeah, like I don't...
I don't give a great quote. Wow.
Milly Vanilly is the first guy.
They were ahead of their time, man. We should have leaned in.
Oh, my mind.
We should have leaned in.
But Jonathan, what are your thoughts on that in terms of creativity or in just jobs in general? What do you think, you know, especially on your areas of expertise that would be a threat?
What is it threatened?
Yeah, it is. I think it's interesting how if it's in your field, you can always... you can detect it so much better than out of your expertise.
If I... you know, like if I... like I said, if I'm generating some writing, I'm like, well, that's pretty good. That's a story. Sure.
But if I hear AI generated music, I'm like, this is a disaster zone. Someone's got to clamp this down ruining the industry.
And so I think it... because I think it's... I think it's a little bit like that across fields. And people can... you can feel... you can feel like excited about an area that you aren't so good at.
You can be like, I can express myself in this area a little bit.
And then... but you're going to need people... somebody with taste is going to have to come in and say, don't share that. That's a creative tool for you. That's a creative tool for yourself.
Don't share that. It's actually garbage. Well, we just moved. That was exciting.
I tried to do it subtly.
This was a comment. It's supposed to happen naturally.
But anyway, you're always going to need people with taste to understand what is actually high quality.
I mean, Dom thinks I'm crazy. Another friend of mine, Johnny, thinks I'm cute.
No, no. I just think you're... it's cute. You're like... you give people...
Beautiful.
It gives people so much credit. It's like, oh, like Ryan still has faith in humanity. That's cute.
I do. I do.
I think it's adorable.
I do.
I do not.
It's such a backhanded...
No, but I admire your positivity. I will say that is genuine. I admire your positivity because I don't have it.
I am wired toward the negative. I am wired. I'm a consummate New Yorker. I've never lived anywhere else.
And when someone says good morning to me, my first thought is, what is your angle? What do you want from me?
Right.
And that's a horrible disposition. However, it's just how I am.
Sure.
And I do think... I mean, for example, we went... we stayed in an Airbnb a couple of weeks ago, the family,
and we were having these conversations back and forth with the owner through the app.
It's kind of like, you know, did you get in the house? Okay. And I'm like, you know, the code doesn't work and there's a leak in the ceiling, whatever.
And he was writing these responses back to me. And I was like something in the back of my... I was like, is this a fucking real person?
Or is this like a bot?
Yeah.
Because the English was technically correct, but there was something off.
So he could have been using Google Translate. Like maybe he speaks, you know, whatever, Russian or some other weird language that is not...
He doesn't want to do broken English, right?
So maybe he's putting all of his language into Google Translate. He's hitting English. He's copying, pasting and putting in there.
And that's kind of the feel of what you get where it's like, it's technically accurate what they're saying, but there's something that's not rhythmically correct about it.
Right.
And I was talking to my wife and I was like, I don't know if this is like a real person.
And it's unsettling, right?
Did we rent this Airbnb from like a machine?
Like, is there a server somewhere that's like, okay, send in the cleaners.
Okay, like, you know, like, I don't know. And so that's a really good example of like in every day where Jonathan, to your point, you're saying, hey, in your field, you're thinking that, you know, I feel like I can detect this a little more.
Whereas, you know, sure, somebody who works in your customer service can spot it really quickly, right? To be like, that's not that, you know, you're Jake from Illinois, like that's not Jake.
That's like, that's a server in a farm somewhere.
I hope I get a little, I hope it stays this weird because I like how weird the conversations come out.
I feel like we're in a, you know, remember how great early internet was, well, the sites are a little strange in the chat rooms.
It was like kind of the Wild West, but it's just sort of funny.
And I'm okay with where we are right now. I'm a little scared where I can't tell anything and how I'll feel emotionally about that, particularly if it's in my field.
If I get duped in my own thing.
I feel like to me, it's not, it's not a reason to not still try to make art and to even make a living from art.
No, I don't think we should all give up.
Yeah. Well, you said that the other day.
You said it's over.
No, no, I said it's over.
That was hyperbole.
That was hyperbole. I mean, look, we were discussing, we have, we know of people who are generating
AI generated short form podcasts.
Yeah, there's a whole companies, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
It's wild.
But here we are doing our own thing.
That's not discouraging me from like, you know, and it's crushing.
We are crushing it.
Crushing the competition as per usual.
I have a really sort of niche question because this started to bother me years ago when I started to see established television and movie actors go to Broadway and take start taking more major roles on Broadway.
Now, this is something that normally happened the other way around is that people would cut their teeth and make their bones in the theater scene off Broadway, Broadway, you know, summer stock, traveling shows, things like that.
But really, you know, people like Raoul Julia and, you know, Chaz Palmenteri and, you know, people who were theater kids before they were television and movie stars.
And I guess it was in the 80s and 90s you started to see the shift where it was like, well, they started giving these plum Broadway roles to established actors and actresses to sort of bump up the box office.
Same is true for sound design voiceover and podcasting where this used to be a realm before the advent of sort of Pixar movies and things like that.
This used to be a realm of voiceover artists.
These were voiceover actors, voice actors.
These are people whose faces you would rarely see or or they'd be extras or whatever, but they were sort of doing these voice roles, whether it's books on tape, whether it was cartoons, animated movies.
I mean, if you go back to the older Disney films, you know, like Hercules and the Emperor's New Clothes and things like that, there's nobody in those movies.
And then basically, once you had Robin Williams as the genie in Aladdin and that blew up, what you had now is like this, okay, now we need voices that people recognize in these in these compartments where it used to be a refuge for people who, you know,
maybe I'm going to be blunt here, like maybe they had a face for radio, as we used to say, and maybe they weren't terribly, you know, good at sort of physically acting or their voices were better than their sort of stage presence or their screen presence.
So I'm curious about what knowing this, this evolution where you're doing a fictional podcast with Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac.
I mean, these are two, these are marquee names. And they're taking better or worse, they're taking the jobs away from people whose job is just to be a voice actor who are not established in Hollywood.
Do you have like a thought or have you had thoughts about this in the past working with, I'm sure working with, you know, working video games, you're working with voice actors who are not in the movies, and then you're working with a smart key A-list talent, Oscar winning talent.
What, what, how do you feel about that?
Well, I think with those shows, it always felt like we were making movies for your ears. And so finding these movie legends to be in them felt appropriate, but they weren't always, they also had plenty of, you know, voice actors that would do other parts,
because there's a lot of parts in them. And we had our favorite roster of just New York, New York working actors that would be in multiple shows and do different characters. And they're definitely the voice skills really come in handy to be, you know, to be able to play, you know, three different characters in a show and not for people not to tell.
So I think, you know, that was on our, I know having a variety and diverse cast was definitely on our mind in making these shows there. But you're right, it is a real trend to have these, to have these big names in.
And I don't know, that's a good like sag question of how, you know, how many, you know, how, how has that shaped, how do those voice actors still get roles? You're right, it used to be such a wide variety of that.
You remember that guy who was like, there was like that guy, he's like, oh, there's, there hasn't been a building here in years. That guy, he was in like every Disney movie is like this sleepy dog and one at a one or the guy, the, the, or the Winnie the Pooh guy.
Oh, he's in Jim Cummings.
No, no, I just, I just looked him up. Yeah, Jim Cumming, I think, or Jim, something like that.
Or like Mel Blank. Mel Blank. Yeah. Right, right. Right. I'm just talking about Mel Blank. And they became, they were like all these, yeah, they became this, or the person who does Naruto, that woman who does the voice of Naruto is in all these anime shows my kids like, we're like, I think she does the one piece guy, Luffy.
Oh, right. And that look, that stuff is huge. Right. And I think also, I mean, even going back to, to books on tape, you used to have narrators for these books. And then finally, somebody was like, well, why don't we have the writers just read their own books?
Right.
And so like, when you listen to some of these expert excerpts, I mean, I don't, I'm not a big books on tape guy, but I saw something on the news about the governor out, Christine Noem, who had done her, she wrote a book about, you know, and in it, you know, she shot a dog or something.
Yes.
There's a big kerfluffle about it.
Right.
And so on the,
Kerflufferling.
Lots of kerfluffle.
And they had, they played an excerpt of her book, her audio book and her reading the book. And it was like, forget about the subject matter. I mean, it was just the most awful thing. It was like listening to just a middle aged woman read off a page, zero inflection, zero emotion.
And if Leonard Nimoy, you know, narrates his autobiography, yeah, I'll fucking, I want to listen to that. And Shatner, I mean, Shatner is amazing as a voice actor and a spoken word guy.
The record he did with Ben Folds is just like fantastic. I listen to that all day, but not everybody just because you wrote a book doesn't mean it's interesting to hear you read it.
Yeah. Don't you like the, I mean, it depends on the person, but I always think it's special when the, when the writer reads it.
If it's, if they're good at it.
That's true. If it's listenable.
You know, like Tony Morrison. Okay. Like, you know, Bill Clinton. Okay. Like he's a, he's an orator.
You know, but if it comes down to like somebody who's really smart, but doesn't know how to deliver it.
It's kind of like you lose me. That's when you got to ratchet it up and listen to it at like 1.75, 75 speed because that's a field.
That's a, that's a threat from those, the AI generated voices. That's a tough, that's a tough area that you can just plug in your whole book and have it read and say, well, it's pretty good.
Saved a bunch of money. So that's a real threat to the audiobook readers.
Yeah. I would assume.
I have a question here. So you wear many hats, right?
Your parents, and you also have a spouse who works in the arts. How do you, how do you juggle all that? How do you guys juggle all of it?
We, we had a lot of juggling, like you both know, in your own lives. Yes, my wife is a accomplished theater performer, theater maker.
And a PhD student in Shakespeare and emotion and a performer, aerialist, mover, and a great singer and guitar player.
So she does, is very inspiring around the house because she's always exploring new things and does a great job of running toward an interest.
And that impacts the kids a lot too. So they get excited about our youngest is really into gymnastics and tumbling.
He saw some tumbling videos on YouTube and then saw more and more and more.
And then my wife is able to do all this stuff with him. So that feeds his interest.
So we do the best of trying to share to just honestly share what we're doing with them and hope that they at least see what we're doing and see that we do it in a positive way that feels restorative to us and helps other people.
We sometimes they don't they're into the stuff we do they don't really, it was years we used to so Emily and I used to sing and perform together you heard her in that song.
But it was like, I don't know, seven years or so before they stopped just screaming when we would sing together in the house, just screaming like, like, like so loud we couldn't do it.
They were so just like mad about us doing that together really killed the band.
What a what a weird like Yoko Ono syndrome like influence, you know, it's like you don't you don't think of that.
I've had a similar thing when I when my kids were really young.
My oldest when he was a toddler, he did not like seeing me perform and he would come up to me while I was playing and like hit me.
He started hitting me.
Yeah, this thing is between you and me. Let's get let's shut it down. Yeah.
Yeah, so that might be a right. I mean, it might be a you thing though, right. Because whenever anybody hears you play, it's like, all right, he's not the first person that it hit has hit me from the performance.
That's true.
It's not true. So we've we've covered so much here, Jonathan.
I really, really enjoyed this conversation here in the sunlight Moonlight podcast. I'm Dom Dorman.
I'm here with Ryan Havers and we're here with Jonathan Roberts, composer, audio engineer, sound designer.
Jonathan, covering everything we've covered.
And we've gone a little long here, but I'm okay with it because I think everything was like what a super cool conversation and so interesting for not only for us, but for our listeners and watchers.
Normally, toward the end of the show, we do a segment here in the sunlight Moonlight podcast called easy uneasy.
And this is where Ryan will ask you a question that should effectively be easy to answer.
And then I will follow up with a question that may make you uneasy.
So are you are you into this? Are you okay? Yeah, yeah, let's do it. Let's.
Easy question. Yeah. Easy question. What is your favorite meal of the day?
Breakfast. Breakfast.
I make the breakfast. I like them.
What's your go to breakfast? What do you like?
Well, pancakes are a real hit. Chocolate chip blueberry pancakes.
Blueberry flax. Martha's adapted Martha's Stewart recipe. Big hit in our house.
Make it a lot.
Dom, Dom beat Martha's Stewart in a chili cookoff recently.
Wow. Congratulations.
I did.
Yeah. So last year I won my town chili cookoff and you get a golden ladle as the as the prize.
You're reaching over to I saw your hand go over.
That's great. If you have it.
No, no, it's elsewhere.
But so this year I tried to repeat as the as the champion and there was a late entrant into the chili cookoff.
It was Martha Stewart.
Wow.
And she I did not come in first.
I lost to the town barbecue joint, which I'm happy to, you know, very well run business.
But she came in third and I came in second, which means I did not win, but I beat Martha Stewart at cooking.
Wow.
Yeah. Congratulations.
That's good chili. Thank you.
Amazing.
Thanks. And she admitted to me. Well, that's I won't say.
Wait a minute.
I would love to have her on as a guest. So I don't want to.
I don't want to.
I don't want to, you know, just one dirty laundry.
Say that again. You beat Martha Stewart at cooking.
I did.
Just say it.
I beat Martha Stewart at cooking.
Thanks, Ryan. That's that's for our audio, our audio designer guest.
See, we can do it too.
Yeah.
That's not really elevated the whole show.
It's what sound can do.
It was in stereo too.
You guys are doubters, but.
Okay. So now I'm going to ask you a question that may make you uneasy.
Okay. Great.
Have you ever stolen towels from a hotel?
Hmm. Have I ever stolen towels from a or robe?
No, I think I've taken the.
Flip the slippers before in a unclear if this was complimentary or not situation.
And so when it comes to the slippers,
you'd rather ask for forgiveness than permission.
Yeah. Yeah.
Someone will let me know.
I think they're complimentary.
I think so. Yeah.
I think that well, sometimes they wash them and put them back,
which is, I don't know.
I don't, I'm not a slipper guy.
I have house shoes.
Like I have shoes I only wear in the house.
I have nice slippers with cork bottom.
Contrary to popular belief,
the mini fridge is not complimentary.
I found that out the hard way.
Well, the mini, so okay, the mini fridge,
the whole fridge, like,
you take it out and you, and you know, you're checking out and they're like,
excuse me, sir.
It's not, that's not complimentary.
I'm like, oh, I thought everything was complimentary.
Turns out it's,
I want to say, I once stated a hotel that if you're aware or a wordsmith is,
I consider myself to be,
there are two versions of the pronounced word complimentary.
One has an E in the middle and one has an I in the middle.
So complimentary with an E means gratis.
It is yours.
Complimentary means it kind of goes with the room,
but you still pay for it.
So I actually stayed in a hotel that had a sign on it where it was spelled complimentary.
And if you drank it, you got charged for it.
Can you, how do you understand how dastardly that is?
How underhanded that is.
Yeah.
As in like, this is not free.
It just kind of goes with the room, doesn't it?
Wow.
That is, that's tricky.
I'm going to start a petition.
That's one for grammar girl.
We're here on the sunlight, moonlight podcast with Jonathan Roberts.
Jonathan, thank you so much for your time.
Ryan, any, any, any last words here for this episode?
I had so much fun.
Yeah, me too.
I have, I have more questions, but maybe we can have Jonathan on again in the future.
And I would also like to have Emily on because she does a lot of different interesting creative projects.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Yeah.
You mentioned, what did you say Shakespeare and emotions?
Shakespeare and emotion.
Yeah.
How they perform, how people are told and how people decide to perform emotion in Shakespeare these days versus how it was back then.
A lot of interesting opinions about that.
That's really, that's, I mean, that's a whole show in itself and the fact that she's an aerial artist as well is totally intriguing.
Yeah.
Well, that's great.
For Ryan Havers, I am Dom Dorman.
This is the sunlight, moonlight podcast.
We were here with Jonathan Roberts, composer, audio designer and audio engineer, sound designer.
And we thank Jonathan, you for your time and we hope to see you again very soon.
Thank you, fellas.
Thanks, Jonathan.
Have a good one.