#262: The CIA, The Police, and Other Adventures from Stewart Copeland

Stewart Copeland (@copelandmusic https://twitter.com/copelandmusic) is a Grammy Award-winning musician, considered by Rolling Stone Magazine to be one of the top ten drummers of all time. He's a founding member of The Police, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Police and an inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In this conversation, we delve into lessons for surviving the music industry, why entrepreneurs (and self-directed artists) never get a day off, how The Police developed their unique sound, the decision that changed everything, and much more. This episode comes from my new television show Fear(less) https://tim.blog/fearless, where I interview world-class performers about how they've overcome doubt, conquered fear, and made their toughest decisions. You can watch the entire first episode with illusionist David Blaine for free at att.net/fearless http://att.net/fearless. (To watch all episodes, please visit DIRECTV NOW http://directvnow.com/). We recorded three hours of material and only one hour was used for the TV show. This podcast episode is almost entirely new content that didn't appear on TV. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Mizzen + Main http://tim.blog/shirts. These are the only "dress" shirts I now travel with -- fancy enough for important dinners but made from athletic, sweat-wicking material http://tim.blog/shirts. No more ironing, no more steaming, no more hassle. They are a personal favorite of NFL phenom J. J. Watt, alongside many professional athletes. Click here for the exact shirts I wear most often http://tim.blog/shirts. Don't forget to use the code "TIM" at checkout http://tim.blog/shirts for free shipping! This podcast is also brought to you by Kettle & Fire https://kettleandfire.com/tim, the first shelf-stable (never frozen) bone broth that uses 100 percent grass-fed, organically grazed animals. Recommended by past guests like Dom D'Agostino and Amelia Boone, Kettle & Fire is slow-simmered for 20+ hours so the bone broth is packed with collagen -- 19 times more than its closest competitor -- and other key proteins and amino acids. Need that slow carb diet boost? Take a look at kettleandfire.com/tim for 20 percent off your entire order https://kettleandfire.com/tim!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  It is very late at night. I am packing for an island getaway. Why does that matter? Because it reminds me of one of the sponsors for today's podcast, Mizzen in Maine. Why? Because the only dress shirt that I'm taking, I normally hate dress shirts, is from Mizzen in Maine. Specifically, the Beckett Blue Gingham. The reason, or the reasons I should say, is because I can throw it in my bag, in a duffel, not worry about ironing, not worry about any kind of wrinkling, and then throw it on where it may be four or five nights out of seven without washing it, and it won't smell. It's antimicrobial. It is made of stretch fabric, sweat-wicking, athletic. I could wear it for a hike in between dinners if I wanted to. I probably wouldn't do that.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  But Mizzen in Maine has really delivered on the all-around, all-purpose dress shirt. They're fancy enough, you can fool people into thinking that you had them custom tailored, but they're also rough enough and resilient enough that you can toss them into the bottom of a duffel bag or backpack, pull it off, and put it on in a bathroom at a restaurant, let's say. Hundreds of pro athletes love this brand, people who don't fit well into dress shirts otherwise, like NFL All-Pro J.J. Watt. And the last time these guys were featured on the show, Mizzen in Maine sold out of every item that they featured. So if you're interested in checking them out, I'd recommend taking a look.

• 1:49Tim Ferriss?

  Just go to tim.blog/shirts, and you can see that one shirt that I'm packing, that I always pack, the Beckett Blue Gingham, in addition to a couple of my other favorites. And you can enter TIM, that's capital T-I-M, at checkout for free shipping. If you use this code before September 15th, that's 2019. To buy a dress shirt, Mizzen in Maine will donate a brand new dress shirt to the relief efforts in Southern Texas. That's in addition to the 1,000 shirts that are already being donated through J.J. Watts, incredible efforts to put, or I should say rather, help Houston and the surrounding communities get back on their feet. So there you have it. Check it out. Take a look, even if it's just to take a peek at this one shirt,

• 2:33Tim Ferriss?

  the Beckett. tim.blog/shirts. Again, that's tim.blog/shirts.

• 2:42Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Kettle and Fire, which makes some of the best bone broth, and certainly the most convenient that I've ever found. And I have a big stack of them on my kitchen counter right now. I have one container every morning. And this first came highly recommended to me by past podcast guests, such as Amelia Boone, who's a four-time world champion in World's Toughest Mudder, Spartan Race, etc., and Dr. Dominic Agostino, the incredible Hulk of scientific research. You should check him out, too. But there are a few things that make Kettle and Fire special. Number one, they are the first shelf-stable, in other words, never-frozen bone broth that uses bones from 100% grass-fed,

• 3:22Tim Ferriss?

  organically-raised animals. So you are what you eat ate, if that makes sense. So it's very important that you understand, if you're consuming animal protein, what they consumed. They also use longer cook times, 20-plus hours, which means more collagen and other nutrients. For instance, they contain 19 times more collagen than one of their close competitors, and an independent lab confirmed this. I'll leave the competitor's name out of it, because I don't want to get sued, but that's the case. And it is not frozen. So thanks to many millions of dollars of packaging equipment, their bone broth doesn't require freezing or shipping with dry ice. So like I said, it's just sitting on my kitchen counter in these boxes, and then I can heat them up. They're basically ready to drink. Heat

• 4:07Tim Ferriss?

  them up on the stove top or in a microwave, and you are ready to rock and roll. And you also get a nice payload of glucosamine, glycine, along with the gelatin and everything else that I mentioned. So check it out. I have been hugely pleased with this, and like I said, I've been consuming it every morning. It gives you about, I want to say, 20 grams of protein, which is a nice little slow carb diet boost, if that's what you're looking for. And I'll typically sip this out of a very large camping coffee mug as I do some writing or journaling. So there you have it. Check it out. It's delicious. I favor the chicken, but each to his

• 4:47Tim Ferriss?

  own or her own. So check it out kettle and fire.com forward slash Tim and you can receive 20% off of your entire order. Take a look kettle and fire.com forward slash Tim.

• 5:02Tim Ferriss?

  Boom. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. I have music on the mind. It's a Friday as I record this. I've had way too much tea and that gives me a little bit of personality. So let's jump into it. This episode of the podcast features Stuart Copeland on Twitter at Copeland Music, who is considered one of the top 10 drummers of all times. Certainly one of the greatest drummers in rock and roll history. He was one of the founding members of the Police, has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and is a Grammy Award winning musician. Stuart is amazing. I've spent time with him. He reminds me a bit of Doc

• 5:41Tim Ferriss?

  in Back to the Future. It's your kids, Marty. It's your kids. But I digress. He is a fantastic storyteller and a very, very well spoken, smart guy. In this conversation, which is very wide ranging, we delve into early lessons in surviving and how to survive the music industry, why entrepreneurs never get a day off and certainly any self-directed musicians or creatives are entrepreneurs in the sense of emprender to make something from nothing. How the Police developed their unique sound and the decision that changed everything for them and much more. This interview comes from my television show Fearless, Fear Less, less in quotation marks,

• 6:25Tim Ferriss?

  since your goal is not to be fearless, but to learn to fear less. And in this show, I interview world-class performers on stage about how they've overcome doubt, conquered fear and made their toughest decisions. We recorded about three hours of material and only one was used for the TV show. So this podcast is almost entirely new content that did not appear on TV. But I highly recommend a few things. Number one, you can watch the entire First episode of Fearless with illusionist and endurance artist David Blaine. And he does a bunch on stage. You can watch it all for free at att.net/fearless. All spelled out, no parentheses. So att.net/fearless. So definitely check that out.

• 7:07Tim Ferriss?

  And to see all episodes of this new TV show, you can use DirecTV or you can use the app at directv.com. And that's DirecTV now. So you can check that out. D I R E C T V dot com. And that is it for now. So let's move on. Please enjoy this conversation with the one and only Stewart Copeland.

• 7:34Tim Ferriss?

  Welcome to Fearless. I'm your host, Tim Ferriss, and on this stage, we'll be deconstructing world-class performers of all different types to uncover the specific tactics they've used to overcome doubt, tackle some of their hardest decisions, and ultimately succeed on their own terms. So imagine yourself a founding member of one of the most successful rock bands of all time. What happens when you break up? For many, that might be the end of the story. But for my guest tonight, he was just getting started with no prior experience. He went on to score films for Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone, compose for ballet and opera, and even take pilgrimages to Africa where he played drums with hungry lions. I am not kidding. He's a founding member of the Police, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and for the last three decades, he's been one of Rolling Stone's

• 8:16Tim Ferriss?

  top 10 drummers of all time. Please welcome musician master and madman Stewart Copeland.

• 8:31Tim Ferriss?

  Good day, sir.

• 8:36Tim Ferriss?

  So just, we're going to get to the backstory, because I was kidding with some of the guys when we were doing all the research, that if I wrote a screenplay that covered the arc of your life, I think it would get... Rejected or heavily edited as being too unrealistic. We're gonna get to that, it's just a fascinating story. But, what was your mother's background?

• 8:57Stewart Copeland?

  Well, she's British. Her job was analyzing French and European train schedules. And so it was very, she was a spy, but it was in an office. It was a bureaucratic version of analyzing for sorting out bombing runs, getting supplies, and it was called the SOE. And the ladies of the SOE, it was almost all women, by the way. Unsung heroes, and people are now writing books about the SOE. These women who fought this kind of bureaucratic data war. And now data, we all understand data, but back then it was kind of number. And she met my father. They got married during the war. And, uh, that's my parents. She's, when we went to Lebanon, she was an archaeologist. And she wrote books, in fact, my mother.

• 9:42Stewart Copeland?

  Very bookish, and her books are the kind of books that you don't read in a bookstore. The kind of books that the people who write books that you read use as research. The first word in her book, you know, one of her books is "the." The second word is 14 syllables long.

• 10:01Tim Ferriss?

  Started off easy enough.

• 10:02Stewart Copeland?

  Yeah, yeah, started out great, but then it gets more and more impenetrable as you go into it.

• 10:06Tim Ferriss?

  What was it like growing up as the American in Cairo or in Beirut?

• 10:13Stewart Copeland?

  Well, there were other Americans too, mostly oil families. All the kids at the American Community School of Beirut. Rumored to, the American Community Schools, all the Aramco kids, all the families in Saudi Arabia, the American families around, they sent their kids to this school in Beirut. And in my generation, was the first generation where the Saudi Arabians and the Gulf Arabs with their new wealth began to send their kids for a Western education. And so I, in my age group, started to see Saudi princes in my class and got to know them. One such was Osama bin Laden.

• 10:50Tim Ferriss?

  In your class?

• 10:51Stewart Copeland?

  Not in my class, he would have been quite a few.

• 10:53Tim Ferriss?

  But in your school?

• 10:53Stewart Copeland?

  In that school, quite a few. If I'd known him, I would have kicked his ass.

• 10:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:04Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I have to ask, so you met and interacted with him?

• 11:07Stewart Copeland?

  No, no, no, he was years after, maybe a decade after.

• 11:09Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, years after, I got it, I got it.

• 11:11Stewart Copeland?

  By the way, I went back to Beirut years later, and it's all Arabic now. And they're all there, the Lebanese, they're one of the richest countries, the most developed countries in the Middle East, and they rule. In the Arab world, anybody who's running it is probably Lebanese. And they have no resources, they have huge civil strife, huge ethnic tension, but they've been through their civil war, and they've got it resolved. And just the Lebanese, they are all about education. So the American Community School, educating these kids to go and conquer America, which they do. You know, there's a Lebanese ghetto here in Los Angeles, it's called Beverly Hills.

• 11:57Tim Ferriss?

  What did you want to be when you were a kid?

• 12:00Stewart Copeland?

  I can't remember any time before I wasn't a musician. And I don't remember, you know, I was seven or something like that, I just never, ever... When I was actually in college, I thought, I don't actually want to play music, I want to organize it. So I, you know, I studied journalism and other aspects of the entertainment industry, but the drums just kept pulling me back.

• 12:29Tim Ferriss?

  When did you leave the Middle East?

• 12:32Stewart Copeland?

  I left the Middle East in the mid-sixties, I would have been fourteen or fifteen, something like that, and I was already playing in my high school band in Beirut by that time. And I got to boarding school in England, and a couple of things, nobody had ever heard of where I come from. "Where do you come from?" "Well, Lebanon." "Well, where's that?" You know, the other thing was that, I didn't realize it, but a lot of my vocabulary wasn't English. They speak in Beirut, they speak Arabic francese.

• 13:03Stewart Copeland?

  Which is Arabic, but the sophisticated Beirutis speak French. But English, you know, English American was invading. The university was American, the hospital built by American missionaries. The Americans in the Middle East, by the way, during my time, were mostly, apart from my father. The Americans built hospitals and universities and American money was going into the Middle East from Christian organizations, missionaries. And so Americans were known for no strings attached good stuff. You know, because it was the French and the British and the old imperial powers that had the bad rap. We soon earned a bad rap, but in those days, Americans were much loved.

• 13:46Stewart Copeland?

  What brought you to England? Why did you guys move? Well, I was evacuated because after the Philby thing, it got hot. And so my father just suddenly had to get the family out of Dodge. Lebanon at that time was always, you know, 1958, there was a civil war there at that time while I was there. And it was bombs in the night, we had to fill the bathtub with water and stock up with food and so on. And there were sandbags in the streets and, actually, in those days, it was put out by the United States 6th Fleet. Which is another reason I was real proud to be American. They showed up in 1958, I think Eisenhower was president, and that was it, civil war over.

• 14:28Stewart Copeland?

  They, just for show, they landed a whole platoon or whatever on the beach with the tanks and everything and did a display of these enormous tanks.

• 14:40Stewart Copeland?

  Okay, let's all go back to work now, shall we, you know? And there was no violence to act, it was just a display, it was like a 4th of July exhibition kind of thing. See, these are the kind of toys we got to play with folks, anybody, any questions? And because our, as I said before, because our status there was very positive, we were loved there. That we, you know, and they, there was an election coming up. And they were very, and I won't bore you with the complicated politics, but there was an election coming up and there was a lot of agitation and... So the Americans showed up, they had a peaceful election. They elected the not, the not American guy, actually, you know, they, my father was glad,

• 15:22Stewart Copeland?

  but they elected Shahab instead of the guy that the Americans wanted. But it was fine, he did a fine job and civil war over. But it was always there, there had three major religions there who had to share power. And the Christians ruled the country. Uh, then there was the Sunni and the Shia who were at each other's throats as much, they all, you know, it was a triangle. And um, that triangle with the influx of Palestinians just couldn't hold. And so civil war, and then there were, there were really awful civil wars, you know, the same as what's going on in Syria now. They eventually blew over and in Beirut, Lebanon is probably more able to withstand

• 16:05Stewart Copeland?

  the Syrian war next door because in Lebanon, no, no, no, no, no, we've been there, we're not, the Sunnis are fine, the Shia, fine, let's every, you know, everybody gets, go back to work. Instead of the US Six Fleet showing up, the civil, the civil war in Syria next door and their own history means they're not about to pick a fight anytime soon. Yeah. Now, before I was born in Syria, wherever the family was living before I was born, and my mother was pregnant with my brother Ian, uh, comes up in conversation a lot. Um, and they had a problem with their general who was, they, you know, their dictator was running the place, Faouzi Al Khadab, or whatever his name was.

• 16:46Stewart Copeland?

  And he was, you know, starting to get, starting to talk to the Ruski's and so on, and so, gotta get rid of this guy. And so they figured out, and this is my father's idea, that I tell you what, why don't we have a rent-a-mob go and attack an American diplomat's house? A rent-a-mob? Ours. Uh, and so, uh, and then, then the, uh, our, our new Colonel that we've been shining up, he can get the soldiers out to go and put down this riot, and while the soldiers are out, they can take over the radio station and the palace. And that's how they did it in those days. And he, the Colonel who took over the palace. Thought he was working against American interests.

• 17:25Stewart Copeland?

  But in fact, the other Colonel, hitherto undisclosed, was the actual guy. And so his system was getting other people to do the work, dirty work. But, okay, so this attack happens on the family home. The Copeland family home in Damascus, Syria. And they're late, and my father's on the phone to Beirut. And they show up, "Oh, great, great, oh, bang, oh, no, they got guns." That's not, you know, and then bang, bang. And the famous line that he had, which is, is our family thing is, uh, he says, "I'm gonna have to hang up now, they're shooting at me personally."

• 18:04Stewart Copeland?

  Now, I never even believed these stories. Uh, because it was my dad telling them, and he used to say, "Never let the facts ruin a good story." But, the history books are being written now about that period, and my father's in there. Oh, my God. And, according to the books, and I didn't realize this until I found in the family archives, uh, some, you know, uh, newspaper clippings about it. He chased them off with a gun, he had a gun. My father had a handgun. I never saw him with a gun, or he, you know, Alabama kid chases out bandits with a handgun. And, uh, there were, in one of the Persian rugs, there are bullet holes. And my sister's got that rug.

• 18:45Stewart Copeland?

  Uh, 'cause during those days, the diplomatic wives and all the wives would go to Iran, Persia as it was known, and buy all this incredible stuff. So I have, in my studio, these Persian rugs that are older than I am. They've been in the family longer than I am. And, in fact, another little digression. The patterns on those Persian rugs with these strangely geometric and yet curved lines, and everything like that. And now I was crawling around face-first on those rugs from the age of zero, all the way up. And I just looked at those rugs the other day, and I realized, that pattern is my music. That, my music is exactly that. The way it's a combination of symmetry and wild abandon.

• 19:30Stewart Copeland?

  The way the different colors interact with each other. I realized it was like printed when I was nose-first, face-first in these Persian rugs.

• 19:38Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm gonna dial us back a little bit to college. How did you choose where to go to college? How did you end up going where you did?

• 19:44Stewart Copeland?

  Uh, well, I was a draftable American. Uh, in spite of my pride in my, uh, country. We were fighting a war in, uh, Vietnam at the time, for which my brother had volunteered. My brother Ian, the heroic brother, actually, not only did he have a motorcycle in high school, but he went to Vietnam. He volunteered. He came back a decorated hero.

• 20:12Stewart Copeland?

  He, you know, I can't, you know, battalion citation, presidential citation, Purple Heart, Bronze Star. He found himself, you know, and he came back and became an agent, never saw a gun for the rest of his life. But he started, he was a wild kid who discovered that and he came back. And when he came back, he was spat on and reviled. And it was a tragedy of the Vietnam War, how the American people saw it, because we were afraid that we could be sent out. Well, the voluntary, those weren't volunteers over there, that could be me. Uh, and he did volunteer. And he was fine until the Gulf War, the first Gulf War, when he heard the crackle of the radios, the thump, thump, thump, thump of the helicopters. It came back and it, it almost, he had a psychosis for it.

• 20:57Stewart Copeland?

  And then when the soldiers came home as conquering heroes, he, you know, that was the, that's what, how he should have been treated. Every single one of the soldiers in his platoon ended up as heroin addicts. They didn't make it. None of them made it. He died of Agent Orange a few years ago. Taken by melanoma. Uh, that's how the Vietnam War generation was treated. Um, and I didn't want any part of that personally. And by the time I came along, I'm at the end of the baby boom. Um, and by the time I got to college, there were plenty, they'd built all these colleges and capacity for the baby boom. By the time I came along, it was kind of wittered out of it, so it was easy for me to get into college, you know, there's all this space. Uh, but...

• 21:41Stewart Copeland?

  How the hell did we get there?

• 21:43Tim Ferriss?

  How did you end up going to college?

• 21:45Stewart Copeland?

  How did I get to go to college? Okay, so we had a lottery system. Everybody, senators, kids, everybody was getting drafted. And so they had a lottery system. Whatever your birth date, you take your date out of a... They pull the dates out of a hat. Okay, September 27th, that's one. Okay, January 18th, that's two. Okay, April 9th, that's three. And you go down through all the 365 days of the year and you get a number. Mine was July 16th. And depending on what state you were in, they had a quota. Alabama had a quota. And if you're in Alabama and you registered to vote in Alabama and your number was 47, you're drafted. If your number was high, 200 or above, you're probably safe.

• 22:27Stewart Copeland?

  Well, the draft board for people who turned 18 outside of America was zero. They had a quota of zero. So as long as I didn't come to America, I was legally not drafted. I registered and everything. But then I got my number, 287. And then it was safe. So then I continued my university education in America.

• 22:52Tim Ferriss?

  Berkeley.

• 22:53Stewart Copeland?

  Berkeley.

• 22:53Tim Ferriss?

  Berkeley. Why did you choose Berkeley?

• 22:56Stewart Copeland?

  Because I'd outgrown the small school that I was at and I wanted to go to a big school with 40,000 students and learn from, you know, Nobel winners and so on. Just felt like a bigger, batter place.

• 23:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's a great school. It's right in my backyard. Tell me about, and tell us about the college event. Is that the tip sheet?

• 23:18Stewart Copeland?

  Now you're getting... Okay, now you have found a question for which I'm gonna have to make up material.

• 23:25Tim Ferriss?

  I've been trying, I've been trying.

• 23:27Stewart Copeland?

  I don't mean by making it up. I mean like, that's a question I've never answered before.

• 23:31Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 23:32Stewart Copeland?

  Mazel tov.

• 23:33Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you.

• 23:34Stewart Copeland?

  College event was an idea of my older brother, Miles, who was the businessman of the family. And basically, I called up all the colleges around the West and I said, "Tell me about what concerts you put on. How much did you spend? Frank Zappa, how much did he cost? Janis Joplin, how much did he pay?" How'd they go down? How did this ticket do? And they just send me back their report of the gig. And I printed it onto what was called a tip sheet. It's just information, just data. And I would send it to all the colleges in the West. So they could see, the, you know, UC Santa Barbara can see that UCLA paid Frank Zappa, you know, $10,000. They trashed the dressing rooms or whatever. And so the colleges could use this as a data sheet.

• 24:19Stewart Copeland?

  And I sold advertising to the record companies and so on and so forth. I have a little business venture. And then that drumming, it was just when I was into my like second or third edition. Then I'd call, calling up, selling the stuff and getting the letters. And the college people sent, all I had to do was print their letters about what agent ripped them off and didn't treat them. And that agent, the guy who deals with universities, they have a lot of money, these colleges. Oh, my God. And so suddenly I had power.

• 24:50Stewart Copeland?

  Power. But it was all going great until that drumming thing. And there was a band over in London needed a drummer. And it was summer, so I went over to London to play in the band and never came back.

• 25:03Tim Ferriss?

  What was the, what were the most important lessons that you took from putting together that tip sheet?

• 25:12Stewart Copeland?

  That you have to do it yourself was the main thing. And you have to think of everything. And there's, the entrepreneur, unlike a job holder, doesn't get a day off. And my, you know, roommate, you know, people in the, in the building, they had jobs. And they knew when they go to work. And they knew when they come home and they got their check. But they have to go to work. I didn't, as an entrepreneur, you don't have to go to work. You're always working. You can never not be at work. And so, you know, of my sins, I have seven children. And my sons, you know, for instance, just take two, for instance. One is an entrepreneur, filmmaker, has a band.

• 25:55Stewart Copeland?

  He's just, he's always picking up the phone. He's hustle bustle. And the other has a nine to five job. They are both happy as clams. The nine to fiver, he can't imagine what it's like. And six o'clock, he gets into his car. He is free. His life just as it belongs to him. He can watch TV, he can have friends, he can go out to dinner. He just lives a great life. Next morning, he gets up, goes to work, works like hell, enjoys his job. And then he's like, Jordan, he would not be able to thrive under those conditions. And what do you mean, I have to get up? You know?

• 26:30Stewart Copeland?

  It's more of a question, no, no, no, you can't go to bed.

• 26:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right. I remember being told once, they said, if you work diligently, eight hours a day, for perhaps 10 years, then you can get promoted to boss and work 12 hours a day.

• 26:43Stewart Copeland?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:47Stewart Copeland?

  When the punk bands in London in 1977 desired to play reggae, because it was, you know, for punk bands, the only form of chill was dub reggae, which is still hostile, still pissed off, but chill.

• 27:06Stewart Copeland?

  And so, there was no such thing as chill punk music. You just can't slow it down and, you know. And so, the punk rockers would chill to dub reggae, which meant that I could fall right into that. Topper Heaton, to his credit, he figured out, let's see, the backbeat doesn't go on two and four. So he's sitting there in his drums and he's figuring out, and then that, and he had to learn how to do it, and he could do it. I already could do it. And so, we developed that sound in The Police, which is kind of important. And we didn't actually play reggae strictly the way it comes out of Jamaica. We did our kind of own thing to it. But it was elemental. It wasn't learning it the way Topper had to. It just was that secret weapon that I got from my friends in Lebanon.

• 27:53Stewart Copeland?

  So I call Sting and I say, "So Andy wants to join the band." He's like, "Fanta, he's in, that's it, no-brainer, what are we waiting for?" And I say, "Dude, calm down, calm down, we can't afford him." He's a, you know, I had to explain to Andy, "There's no record company, I'm the record company." You know, illegal records, you know, I printed them myself. Sting and I put the records into the bags ourselves and with Letras, I did the artwork myself and I called up the stores, I'm the record company. Management, I'm the manager too. And agent, nah, I'm booking the gigs too. Roadie, that's you. And so, you know, I'm really flattered,

• 28:37Stewart Copeland?

  "But you're gonna leave after two weeks, you know, you're, you know, you got a life, you got expenses, you know." And he insisted, he said, "No, no, no, I'm canning all my sessions, I want to be in the band." He had played with Soft Machine, or Burden, The Animals, you know, he had a list of credits as long as your arm, but he didn't want to be a sideman anymore, to be in the band and to be, for the band to be his band. And of course, I'm gonna get rid of that other guitarist, you know that, right? And I say, "Sure, sure, sure, I didn't think about that." We actually did play a couple of shows with two guitarists. But, so, he insisted. And so, and by this time Sting going, "No, he's an actual musician, he's in the band." I'm going, "Calm down."

• 29:22Stewart Copeland?

  And finally, you know, it's either he's in or I'm out, you know. Okay, so Andy's in the band. And immediately, Andy has deep musical training. I didn't have to show him an E chord, or a D, or an A chord. He knows E flat and seventh carry the, you know, you know. He really, and as soon as him and Sting put their heads together...

• 29:46Stewart Copeland?

  Out of nowhere Sting writes a song. As a result of Andy joining the group. There was another surprise in store for us all. Which was that in our punk band, the singing was

• 29:58Stewart Copeland?

  and Sting could do that and that's all I ever heard him do because that's what we did and that kind of and that genre was all shouting. But we had one last Andy Summers gig to do. He said, "Look, I've got one last gig, this guy in Germany and I'm gonna go over and by the way, he needs a drummer, so you got a gig too." So Andy and I went over to Germany with Everhard Scherner. This high concept thing where he's got jazz saxophone, he's got lasarium, he's got a ballet dancer and a punk group. And for a punk group, you know, actually, you know, we got a buddy who plays bass. Why don't we bring him over to... Sure, so they brought... So the three of us are there as the punk group as a part of this multi, you know, mix and match kind of show. And the jazz singer, the obligatory American jazz singer, uh, jazz singer chick.

• 30:43Stewart Copeland?

  And she had the shoulder down.

• 30:48Stewart Copeland?

  She's out of tune and liked it that way. You know, the jazz out of tune, she's a punk band. One day, so, but, long story short, we, the first show, we were unprepared. We, you know, the, all kinds of bedlam and craziness and we got the first show, we don't even know how we're gonna finish the set. At one point, she slinks off, she does her

• 31:12Stewart Copeland?

  and slinks off like that and there's the mic stand. And there we are and we're not quite sure what, what to do next. Bass player walks up to the microphone. And the sound out of his mouth, a keening, wailing sound that was soaring high with the stars with a pain and a yearning and a growing feeling of the cosmos coming down to take us away in the heart of this wave. And Andy and I are going, "Fuck me."

• 31:58Stewart Copeland?

  And so The Police was born.

• 32:02Stewart Copeland?

  Well, with two things. I didn't know he could write songs, and I didn't know he could sing like that. And it was sort of Andy who made it all, the whole thing come together.

• 32:13Tim Ferriss?

  The cocktail come together. So with The Police, how did you decide on certain visual aspects of the band, or other stylistic decisions, like the bleached blonde hair, for instance?

• 32:23Stewart Copeland?

  Well, we would never be caught dead discussing such matters. The bleached blonde hair came from the fact that Sting's wife was an actress. She had an agent. She took one look at her client's husband and said, "That guy belongs in front of a camera." And she would send him for modeling jobs. And in advertising and so on, and he would get every gig. And one day, they wanted a punk band for a Wrigley's chewing gum commercial. And so they called, you know, he got the gig and said, "Well, I have a punk band. I am myself a punk."

• 33:04Stewart Copeland?

  So they got Andy and I out there as well, but they didn't think we looked snarly enough. "I know, let's peroxide their hair." And so the wardrobe people, just like the ladies you got back there, they made us look the part. And we looked at each other and said, "That's kind of cool." And so we got our blonde look from a Wrigley's chewing gum commercial.

• 33:28Stewart Copeland?

  Somewhere, the ad didn't run. I guess it didn't test well or something. And somewhere, in a vault somewhere, is that ad of the three blonde heads, blonde for the first time. I actually am blonde, okay? This is real. It's okay gray, but it...

• 33:47Tim Ferriss?

  I'm blonde too, but alas.

• 33:52Tim Ferriss?

  The locusts took my hair.

• 33:56Tim Ferriss?

  Common cause of male pattern baldness.

• 33:58Stewart Copeland?

  You know, Stingo and I, music fulfills a different purpose in our lives. Uh, for me, it's celebration. It's a party. And for Sting, perhaps it's more of a, um, an escape. You know, a peaceful, beautiful place that he can go to. And those two things, when we were codependent, we, the, the differences between us really filled gaps. And so it was very synergistic. Um, but as we, you know, the first two albums were recorded with that, you know, first album, it was just us in the studio and we got in there and we recorded an album in 20 minutes. And then the second album was after we'd start to get somewhere in America. And we'd been playing and we're getting great reviews and burning down the house night after night. And we're feeling really great.

• 34:43Stewart Copeland?

  And they say you have your whole life to write your first album and six months to write your second album. And so there we're back in the studio and, you know, we got half an album worth of material, but we gotta get a new album. And so that second album, we just came up with it. We were full of ourselves. We're, you know, we, we were validated by, you know, we, we know that we're the coolest, so we had confidence. And our second album just was all creativity. Had a bunch of hits on that record too. So the third album, we're going into the studio and now we are not just us anymore. This was the beginning of the Police becoming something that isn't our, just our little thing anymore. It's bigger than us.

• 35:26Stewart Copeland?

  And there's a momentum there. There's a record company that's counting on hits. And we were there in Holland, in fact, recording the third albums in Yata Mondata. And the record company are actually in the studio. Is that a hit? No, I think the other one's a hit. And it was like Commerce was in the room with us. And it really bummed us out, kinda like that. But we were still, had, had a buzz going and it was us against the world. The next two albums, which we recorded in Monserat in the Caribbean, far, far away. 12 hours from the nearest record company executive. And there was just the three of us. And by now, um... We were not so codependent. But when it comes to music,

• 36:09Stewart Copeland?

  I kinda like working with an orchestra. And by the way, I write music for a 60-piece orchestra. They don't talk back. I put every note and how they play it on the thing. That piccolo player's been playing piccolo his whole career, but he's gonna play exactly what I put on the page. And it's not da-da-da-da-da. It's da-da-da-da-da, with a little diminuendo at the end, with articulate, you know, staccato, the third note, and then the, you know, the slur over... And I put on the page in ink, in Italian, exactly, in 60 guys, and that's how it works. And guess what? Sting likes to do that, too. And he's real good at it, and he has kind of a track record of being successful at it. But what he wants to do is kind of different from what I wanna do.

• 36:53Stewart Copeland?

  The purpose of music for him has a different purpose for me. And we came together for the reunion tour, and it was so hard for us to make the pieces fit back together, 'cause guess what? 20 years had gone by, and we'd grown. And I had lost... I'd gotten out of the habit of the bass player turning around and telling me anything. You know? And he'd gotten out of the habit of this World War III going behind his left shoulder. And he comes over to... Oh, well, maybe not.

• 37:27Stewart Copeland?

  Okay, maybe not. And, you know, with the best of intentions. You know, I'm sure Sting looks at the mirror every morning and says, "Okay, today, I'm gonna let Stuart be Stuart." And I would look at the mirror in the morning. Anything he wants, I will be there for him. Any scintilla of new, I will listen, and I will do my best to remember what he told me and try, you know... And that gets us through the first hour of rehearsal.

• 37:56Stewart Copeland?

  This is the thing about Francis Coppola, is he can spot talent. And his, you know, very different from somebody like Oliver Stone, for whom I've scored as well. Who Stone himself owns every frame, every aspect of the film comes from his creativity, and that's what he does, you know. He doesn't want people with clever ideas, he wants people who are clever at carrying out his ideas. And fortunately, he's got really great ideas, so Francis has a different technique. He finds people that have the talent, and he just gives them a long lead and says, "You just go for it, you take it, take it, and I want to see what you come up with." And that was a good relationship.

• 38:33Tim Ferriss?

  What was different about the idea that you presented? Or the material you presented?

• 38:39Stewart Copeland?

  I'll give you a clue, which was the, his people, his producers kept saying, "When's the scoring date?" "Date? I've been in the studio for a month, what do you mean, 'date'?" You know, the way they used to do films was they'd have a date. And on the date, they show up with the orchestra and they record the music on that day. And that's the recording session. I don't do it like that, I'm in the studio by myself, and I play a little bit of drums, then I add some guitar, and then I fiddle around over here, and I'm working, I'm building it, like you make a record. And I was in the studio, that was just completely an alien exercise. I mean, the people come down and they say, "This is kind of interesting." And, but there was the moment when Francis did turn around, so this all sounds really fantastic.

• 39:24Stewart Copeland?

  And all of his old guys, his crew that he'd been working with forever, they're all thinking, "Wow, this is really different, I've never heard anything like that, but it kind of works." "That's crazy, but it kind of works," you know. And, but he did turn around and say, "I want strings." You know, "I need some strings," and I'm going, "Oh shit, he's gonna hire some string schlocky guy." "Francis, you're so right, you need strings." "I'm gonna fix up some nice strings," strings, you know, "nice strings, strings." And so I call up the contractor and say, "Send me some strings." And he says, "Well, okay, sure, fine, how many strings?" "I don't know, how many strings is strings?"

• 40:02Stewart Copeland?

  Send me some strings, you know. And so these, I think it was maybe fourteen, fifteen guys showed up, you know, strings. And they arrive and usually a recording session, your guitarist shows up and you book him for the afternoon. Then he comes in with his ten guitars and a couple amps and a bunch of pedals and he's like, "Okay, so the first thing is just kind of a..." And then when it comes to that shot, okay, there's a shot of, uh, his name, you know, Matt Dillon is called, you know, that kid with the bandana, okay. On the shot, I'm just kind of hitting a kind of thing there and then kind of pull back a little bit there and then, you know, and you're talking to him like that. And that's the way you work it. And the guy's like, "Oh, cool. How about this?" And you're like, "Maybe, how about that? Try that." Stratocaster, you know. You talk and it's an interaction in between the two of you. Collaborate, you get a...

• 40:45Stewart Copeland?

  So the strings arrive, a lot of them, and so I go out to do my thing. "Hey, guys, it's great to have you here. This movie's kind of an art movie and, you know, the first song is kind of thing and it goes, and then when you see the guy with the bandana, it just kind of goes a little like that." And I'm talking and I'm talking and they're looking kind of more and more uncomfortable.

• 41:06Stewart Copeland?

  And eventually one of them says, "Uh, maestro, um, do you want us to play what the music on the page here or whatever the fuck you're talking about?"

• 41:17Stewart Copeland?

  And I go, "Oh, uh, play the page, play the page." And so they do. And the page, by the way, in this case was footballs, what they call its whole notes.

• 41:32Stewart Copeland?

  You know, I didn't know how to write...

• 41:37Stewart Copeland?

  I didn't know how to write that music at that time. So it was just the chords that I was playing myself. Bling, bling.

• 41:47Stewart Copeland?

  Here, stop the tape. Okay, roll tape. Bling.

• 41:52Stewart Copeland?

  You know, and ear ball it and put that on a chart so that that's the top note and okay, we'll give that to violin and violin two and viola and you know, and I had an arranger, put it on the page, you know, and I had studied, you know, I was a, you know, music major in college, so I could read it, but I hadn't seen a sheet of music in 20 years. In rock and roll, there are no sheets of music. It just, this is not part of the vocabulary. But here with these string players, a section, and so they have these footballs. And they say, well, look, it's all footballs. Can we just, listen, run it down, everybody, one, two, three, four. And the pieces. Let's just run it.

• 42:30Stewart Copeland?

  Okay, cool. Okay, roll tape. And they play, and they were done in like, half an hour. They just played what was on the page. You know, I didn't need to talk to them at all. They just play, it was on the page and they played it. And they were done, you know, after the guitarist guy, he's there all afternoon, you're trying stuff. These guys, it's on the page, they play it exactly, and they're done. Wow. Wow. You mean, all I gotta do is figure it out and do the homework, put it on the stand, and they play. So 20 years later, I, you know, I'd done maybe 40, 50 films, TV commercials,

• 43:12Stewart Copeland?

  and all this stuff, and you use orchestra a lot, and pretty soon I got, I learned how to write, you know, and fancy stuff. And the best part of it is that it's about the homework. With a band, you think on your feet, and it's an interaction. Musicians of the ear, musicians are divided at birth into two categories, musicians of the ear and musicians of the eye. Musicians of the ear, where I come from, they're connected to music by the ear. They're staring off in space, and they just know when eight bars are up, and they know where to listen for the groove, and they're part of that groove, and they're connected with their ear. Musicians of the eye, read a chart, and they, their fingers follow what their eyes tell them to play. And even the rhythm comes from the conductor, a visual cue,

• 43:56Stewart Copeland?

  the conductor's baton. Their eyes connect them to the music. And the musicians of the ear, they just make that shit up. It's collaborative, it's improvisational. They know that it's E, A, and D, but how are you gonna hit that E? How are you gonna, which inversion of A? And so, there's, you know, it's a collaboration. You work it out together. Takes forever. But in orchestral music, you put it on the page and they will play it. And like I said before, it's not just da, da, da, da, da. It's da, da, da, da, da. You know, you put that shape, you have to put all that shape on the page. And if you do, sixty guys, and that guy over there on the double bass, and that guy way over there on second violin.

• 44:39Stewart Copeland?

  They're thirty, forty feet away from each other, but each of them has their own book with only their own part. And if they follow exactly what's on the page and execute it beautifully, then they all, all sixty of them, become the mighty Chicago Symphony. And that's where their ego lies. Not from, "I'm gonna express myself on this part here, goddammit, even though I'm the third chair, second violin." You know? No, their ego, their pride in their work comes from this corporate identity of the magnificent orchestra of which they are part. And by the way, they're playing Mendelssohn and Brahms and really, really good music. The best of the best of the best that has withstood the test of time.

• 45:24Stewart Copeland?

  So, there's two completely different musical universes. And I love jamming with guys who come over to my studio. We jam, and we just make it up as we go along. But I also love to do that homework and get it on the page and conceive of every aspect of it. Where the swell is, where the surge, the ebb and the flow. And that violin, like, go up to there and he gets up high like that and the trumpet takes it over and then goes, "Ba-boom" on the low brass. Oh, you know, that's just really a lot of fun to conceive of that stuff. And then, you go and you sit with the orchestra and they play it. And without debate, and the first time it's a little creaky, the second time it's like, "Wow." And then by showtime, it's really good fun to play that stuff.

• 46:09Tim Ferriss?

  I like this question. This is from James Staub's Facebook. He's one of the few rock drummers that plays traditional grip. How did he come to play that way? So maybe you could also explain to people what this means.

• 46:20Stewart Copeland?

  Well, in olden times, the snare drum was a military instrument for marching. And to march with it, and the snare drums are that deep, cylinder like this, that deep, and to march with it like this is kinda hard. So what they do is they turn it on its side so that the drum is like that, and you can still march, which means to hit the drum like this is kind of a problem. So, how about this hand, hold the stick like that, and you create, the drum is at this angle, and now your sticks can go like that, because that, whereas this would be a problem. That's where it came from. Okay, when they took the snare drum and put it on a drum set and created the trap set, probably down in New Orleans or somewhere,

• 47:02Stewart Copeland?

  wherever they, whoever had the idea of assembling a bunch of drums, and the trap set, the snare drum was, you know, the technique of playing it still was this, you know, both hands are not the same. This is called match grip, this is called orthodox, it's old school. And just the practitioners would set up this newly invented contraption and have the snare drum at that angle. Okay, years go by, and I learned from that, from, you know, Buddy Rich and the Gene Krupa style. My father, as soon as he spotted me as a musician, had me in lessons, which meant orthodox, paradiddles and slamadiddles and all rudiments and everything, with this technique. And then nowadays, a drummer can set up the drums at any how he darn well wants,

• 47:46Stewart Copeland?

  and he has it logically flat, and the tom-toms logically like that. And what's this for? So he plays like this nowadays. Nowadays, drummers all play matched grip, it makes perfect sense. Now, in my opinion, this is a bigger digit than this. There's bigger muscles here, so when I wanna get that backbeat, "Look out, baby, this hammer's coming down", with this thumb to bring it down, and it just seems like a more stronger thing, I don't know. It's not matched, and so you learn to make it so that the effect is the same, but different mechanics in each hand. Glad you asked.

• 48:34Tim Ferriss?

  The next one is from Masood Khan. We don't have to do 10, but he asked the 10, top 10 albums he would take to another planet. Let's just say, 3 albums. The old desert island question.

• 48:46Stewart Copeland?

  Uh, well, any Hendrix album, but probably the double one, because it's a double one.

• 48:51Stewart Copeland?

  Uh, which would be the third one, uh, Axis, no, not Axis. Um, who was the third one? Voodoo Child or Visited, double album, all the naked girls on bicycles.

• 49:01Tim Ferriss?

  I'll go, I'll go Google it later.

• 49:03Stewart Copeland?

  Uh, anyhow, Hendrix, that's one.

• 49:07Stewart Copeland?

  Uh, I'm not a huge Beatles fan, but I would probably take either the White Album or Sergeant Pepper, just because the variety. If we're gonna be stuck on that island for a long time, we need some variety.

• 49:19Stewart Copeland?

  And, uh... Probably some blues, just because it makes me feel good. But then again, I could play blues myself. No, I wouldn't take a blues record.

• 49:30Stewart Copeland?

  Uh, I don't know, some classical, some Stravinsky probably, Rites of Spring, or Petruska.

• 49:35Tim Ferriss?

  And, if you're out of the running, if you had to combine, let's say, 3 drummers, alive or dead, into your sort of perfect super drummer, who would they be? And why?

• 49:46Stewart Copeland?

  I would take the majesty of John Bonham. He achieved with very few drum strokes, very, size. (drumming) It just sounds like a mountain. And everybody, nobody has gotten there, figured out how to make a drum set sound so huge. And it's the economy, and it's the way he hits the drum, just some magic about the way he played, created size, just hugeness. Then, I would take, uh... God, I'm terrible with names, uh, James Brown's drummer, Stubblefield, Stubble... Anyone here, anyone?

• 50:29Stewart Copeland?

  Clive Stubblefield for funk, because we got to dance. You know, and he's not a star guy, but just give me some of that. And so we'll all be dancing and those pudenda will be, you know, doing what they do. And then I would take Mitch Mitchell for technique, or Buddy Rich.

• 50:47Tim Ferriss?

  What about the technique?

• 50:49Stewart Copeland?

  Just the effervescence, the lively spark of either. It'd be tough between, I mean Buddy Rich is the number, he is the absolute top guy. Whether you like his music or not, there's nobody who's been able to achieve just the manual dexterity, let alone the artistry and everything else. I mean, he really is in a class of his own. Mitch Mitchell is up there as well, but he was, his music was more fun and more effervescent and so on, so I'd probably take John Bonham, Clive Stubblefield, and Mitch Mitchell.

• 51:24Tim Ferriss?

  So we saw you tearing it up in the first video that we showed. This next question is from I am Keith Andrew on Twitter. What weaknesses in your playing or writing or composing bug you and are you fighting to overcome? How do you fight them?

• 51:38Stewart Copeland?

  Arthritis.

• 51:40Tim Ferriss?

  Arthritis, yeah.

• 51:42Stewart Copeland?

  And right now, I play with an orchestra. And my drums are designed to play to accompany amplified instruments, which can be any amount of volume. You know, so the dynamic range of the rock and roll drummer goes from seven to 12. Guitarists only go to 11. And drummers, and by the way, we don't do it by turning a little knob. We do it by hitting it. And in the orchestra, the orchestra feels very loud, but is in fact a quarter of the volume of a rock band. When you go to a concert and you see an orchestra play, it feels emotionally really big. But physics-wise, it's actually much more quiet.

• 52:23Stewart Copeland?

  And so you have the huge orchestra, and you put the drums there, crack, and the orchestra's gone. They're toast. You can't hear them, nothing, because the drums are so loud. So the biggest challenge has been to play quietly. And I now, after years of playing with orchestras and working on it, and I practice with the music barely audible, so I can't accompany it unless I get it down there. And a couple of things. First of all, less work. Second of all, the drums sound so much better. Third of all, all kinds of finesse of technique that I learned as a kid, but never could use in rock and roll. They just have... You never hear them. You know, a rough or a drag. You know, you can't hear them in rock and roll, but now you can.

• 53:05Stewart Copeland?

  So they sound great, cool technique, less work. And so, learning how to play that quietly, I can now play a full-on drum set, my drum set, designed for the aforementioned cacophony. And there's a violin solo that I wrote, a nice little violin solo, and she's 30 feet away, and I'm up there, and I can now play so quietly that I can hear her. And so can the audience, you know? And that's an achievement.

• 53:35Tim Ferriss?

  Is the... You mentioned arthritis. Is that a real issue that you're contending with?

• 53:39Stewart Copeland?

  Absolutely, yeah. There, there, there, and there. I wonder why, in my thumbs.

• 53:44Tim Ferriss?

  How do you deal with that?

• 53:45Stewart Copeland?

  Well, I find that if I... You know, I don't look at my drums until I've got a show coming up. And this year, I've had shows coming up all year, so I've been in shape. So I have to start up. It's like Rocky. You know, I start slow, and I work it up, and I have little things like that to get, you know... And I find that when I get fit to play, and I'm up to speed, the arthritis goes away. And it doesn't return until I walk away from the drums, and I don't even look at them, until next time I have to. And then the arthritis creeps back in, opening a door. Ow! If it's locked, a locked door, ah, man, that hurts. Ah! You know? And I think, darn, this is really inconvenient for what I do.

• 54:30Stewart Copeland?

  But in fact, when I start playing drums, when I get fit, you know, it's not a problem.

• 54:33Tim Ferriss?

  Do you do anything else for self-care of the hands?

• 54:36Stewart Copeland?

  Uh, yeah, there's the stretches. I have a thing that I got in China, which is like a little... Pointy, soft wooden thing that I just sort of massage the muscles and like I say, there's quite of a fetish. I'm pretty familiar with the structure of the hand. There's 10 bones there and like all this really complicated, but I'm pretty into making it work and playing at that volume, it just isn't the stress that it is at high volume.

• 55:06Tim Ferriss?

  So this might be related, but next question is from Tinker Coffee Co., at Tinker Coffee Co. What's the most technical but underappreciated skill for a drummer to possess?

• 55:15Stewart Copeland?

  I would say that quiet thing.

• 55:18Tim Ferriss?

  Quiet.

• 55:19Stewart Copeland?

  Because I have drummers who have that range, dynamic range of 7 to 12. And that's just really hard work. You know, my buddy Fishman in Phish, he's really quiet. He's been doing that all, and I saw that guy and you know, you see them from the front and it's blazing because there's a 50 zillion watt PA system to make it louder. He doesn't need to make it louder.

• 55:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Stewart Copeland?

  And so the side is that, watch him, and he's just comfy. He's hardly breaking a sweat. I'm gonna do that, you know, and playing quietly, that's the most unappreciated technique that I would say to answer that question.

• 55:57Tim Ferriss?

  All right, well, given that you're, so you're talking sort of categories are the do not discuss list for dinner conversation. If you were to give a TED Talk, let's say, or some high-profile talk, 20 minutes long, but you couldn't talk about music, couldn't talk about drumming, nothing that you're known for, but maybe some secret obsession or thing that you study on the weekends or in the evenings, or anything for that matter, what would you talk about?

• 56:23Stewart Copeland?

  Old Testament theology.

• 56:25Tim Ferriss?

  Old Testament theology?

• 56:26Stewart Copeland?

  Yeah.

• 56:27Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 56:28Stewart Copeland?

  Well, I grew up.

• 56:29Tim Ferriss?

  Tell us more.

• 56:30Stewart Copeland?

  I grew up in the Holy Land and they're still arguing about it now, to this day. Whose is it? And which religion prevails? And it turns out that the three religions fighting most vociferously over that piece of real estate are the same religion. They come from the same book and the Old Testament is that book. And the Old Testament is unique because I also love Egyptian history. You know, I think Moses was a jackass, you know, that Egyptian history was a beautiful, beautiful thing as described in the Old Testament. You know, the Egyptians were great people with great values and beautiful culture, but the people who wrote the Old Testament didn't think so.

• 57:13Stewart Copeland?

  So, the Egyptians describe their enemies in these pejorative terms, and in turn are described by the Israelites in these pejorative terms. It's fascinating. Because in the Egyptian history, there was no plagues. There was no Moses. There was no Exodus. And so, obviously, the Exodus and the events referred to in the Old Testament, there's something happened historically to create what became these stories. You know, there's gotta be an origin to these stories. Which Pharaoh was that? Which part of Egyptian history was that? You know, traditionally, it's Ramsay II, you know, the big one. Just because he's the biggest, but it wasn't. And you figure out there are these different chronologies. There's the archaeology.

• 57:58Stewart Copeland?

  Or, let's start with the Old Testament, which says that a thousand years ago Moses did this. So many thousand years ago Solomon did that, and there's a chronology. Then there's the Egyptian chronology, which has its list of kings. And it's not measured in 1927. It's like, this king, in the third year of King Senacrib II. And it's like, you have to know how many, and there's that chronology. Then there's the archaeology. The strata of Jericho, for instance, tells us that there was no burning down of Jericho when the Bible says that they came, you know, they came and burned down Jericho. Didn't happen, folks. Jericho's been burnt, but not when the Bible says it did. Couple, 3,000 years early.

• 58:43Stewart Copeland?

  Well, okay, well, let's pull that Bible chronology down, pull this one up, so that that matches now. Well, then we got a problem with the Egyptian chronology. So we stretch that then, you know, in the period of Solomon, there are no great architectural masterpieces or anything to denote a great kingdom during the time of Solomon. Doesn't mean he didn't exist. It means that the chronology of when the Bible said he exists might be a little inaccurate. So you, that's what I can find endlessly fascinating. The Indiana Jones of rock and roll.

• 59:21Stewart Copeland?

  Okay.

• 59:21Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 59:22Stewart Copeland?

  Okay. Okay, okay, I know, I know, I know, I know. I lost you, I totally lost you there for a minute. But I'm gonna bring you back. Okay? Over in the west side of Los Angeles, there's all these private schools where all us fancy folks send our kids. And there's only a few of them, so all us fancy folks send our kids. And they have these school gala fundraising events. Where they raise money, as if they need to raise money. And they have this gala event, and they have, you know, all the bands, you know? And, uh, you know, we got all, you know, the dads, there's gonna be some rock stars in there. And so they have, you know, I call what I call "The Grateful Dad." Which is the school band, um, of whatever dads are in that school. And, you know, one of the schools here, uh, Wildwood, the school "The Grateful Dad" was

• 1:00:05Stewart Copeland?

  Stephen Stills, Gene Simmons, me, uh, Barkley, um, I mean... Travis Barkley. Miles. Miles. In a wheelchair. Kind of a rap thing, anyhow, anyhow. And Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan was supposed to be there, but he bailed. So that's the band. Gene Simmons, Stephen Stills, and me. Okay, that's pretty disparate. Well, we figure out a show, we play for all the dads. Okay, turns out that Gene Simmons is a student of Old Testament theology. So, there at this event where we're playing all this stuff, like, there's the bass player

• 1:00:46Stewart Copeland?

  of Kiss, and the drummer of Police backstage arguing about which prophet knows, Zebadiah was not the son of Zeus.

• 1:01:01Tim Ferriss?

  So, you're clearly a very well-read guy. Are there any quotes, is there a quote or quotes that you either live your life by or think of often?

• 1:01:14Stewart Copeland?

  "Don't worry, be happy."

• 1:01:16Tim Ferriss?

  Alright.

• 1:01:20Stewart Copeland?

  And by the way, by the way, that's just the first thing that came into my mind. And thank you for that nice polite applause there. What the fuck does that mean? What use is that? Don't worry, be happy? As if. Is there a pill for that?

• 1:01:36Stewart Copeland?

  Some good advice, but...

• 1:01:37Tim Ferriss?

  It is good advice.

• 1:01:38Stewart Copeland?

  Kind of facile.

• 1:01:40Tim Ferriss?

  So we can also come back to that one. If anything, if any... If there's someone who is particularly quotable in your mind, in a way that has impacted you, maybe that's another way to tackle it. For me, it would be a Seneca, maybe an Emerson.

• 1:01:53Stewart Copeland?

  Wow, that's sophisticated.

• 1:01:55Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I mean, Seneca, no, well, I'll show you how unsophisticated I am. So from Long Island, I thought Seneca was... And there is another Seneca, in fairness. But a Native American elder, for the longest time, I was like, this guy's the best quote ever. And then I was like, oh, wait, he's a Roman, he's been dead for 2,000 years.

• 1:02:08Stewart Copeland?

  I thought that was a football team, or a city in...

• 1:02:12Tim Ferriss?

  It is a lot of things. Seneca has been used for a lot of labeling.

• 1:02:18Tim Ferriss?

  If you were, say, giving advice to a young musician, very capable musician, who's getting ready for their first, what they perceive to be, big gig. And they're just all nerves. They are... They feel like they're gonna vomit backstage.

• 1:02:34Stewart Copeland?

  Is this kid, by the way, a presenter of a television show?

• 1:02:37Tim Ferriss?

  It could have been me. What advice would you give that person?

• 1:02:40Stewart Copeland?

  Relax.

• 1:02:41Tim Ferriss?

  Relax.

• 1:02:42Stewart Copeland?

  Take that as your living room. It's...

• 1:02:46Stewart Copeland?

  Well, that particular thing, there's a bunch of specific to that challenge, which is that there are audiences on your side. You're... You walk out on stage as a total success, and it's yours to throw away. And it's really hard to throw away. You know, um... So relax. Assume that you're blowing everybody away.

• 1:03:10Stewart Copeland?

  And everything else will take care of itself. You know, when I was young, I used to think that I gotta get myself out to go on stage, and I gotta go out there, ah! But in fact, that's a dissipation of the energy. You know, there was that film Whiplash, where the kid is trying to get better, and he goes back to woodshed, and they show him in the woodshed. Arrgh! And that's the one thing they got wrong.

• 1:03:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Stewart Copeland?

  Uh, to get better, you don't go like that, you go...

• 1:03:37Stewart Copeland?

  Like that, you know, calmly. And the more relaxed you can be, the more energy, the more ferocity you can achieve by being relaxed. You know.

• 1:03:47Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 1:03:48Stewart Copeland?

  Mass murder is best delivered cold. Is that my message?

• 1:03:51Tim Ferriss?

  That's what it does. Well, I mean.

• 1:03:54Stewart Copeland?

  Ah, revenge, best served.

• 1:03:57Tim Ferriss?

  Cold, oh, yeah, yeah, there we go.

• 1:03:58Stewart Copeland?

  Any act of violence has more aggression and violence if it's done calmly.

• 1:04:04Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you also see this in athletics, right? I mean, certainly.

• 1:04:07Stewart Copeland?

  That's kind of a nervous evil laugh going around the room there.

• 1:04:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's a little like chorus of Dr. Evil laugh in the audience.

• 1:04:13Stewart Copeland?

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:04:15Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, you see the.

• 1:04:16Stewart Copeland?

  Wives, check your husbands.

• 1:04:19Tim Ferriss?

  You see the ability to turn off informing the ability to turn on, right? I mean, you see this in athletics all the time, meaning the, someone's capacity to turn off and relax being directly correlated to their ability to turn it on. If they're always on or somewhere in the middle, it just doesn't seem to manifest the same way. I remember hearing this story about a gent named Marcelo Garcia. So he's considered sort of the Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson, Wayne Gretzky combined of the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu world. He's something like a nine-time world champion. And I know a fellow who co-owns a school with him. And Marcelo is going to the world championships, biggest event of the year on the planet. And he's supposed to go into the finals and they call his name to go out to the mat

• 1:05:04Tim Ferriss?

  and he's asleep in the bleachers. And they had to go shake him to wake him up. And he's sort of groggy, rubbing his eyes, walks out. And then as soon as he steps on the mat, just different person.

• 1:05:15Stewart Copeland?

  I, I totally endorse that. You get yourself into a state of calmness and the ferocity will take care of itself. I had a similar thing the other day. I was playing in Seattle with the Seattle, you know, symphony there doing Ben Hurts, a 90-minute program with big orchestra, really complex show. My hotel room's just around the corner. So I go back after, you know, rehearsal and I'm, and I set my alarm for six o'clock and I got into a sneeze. I set it for 6:00 a.m., not P.M. Oh, so I wake up, oh, like that, and I got a bit of a sandwich, and I'm chewing on the sandwich, and I look at, oh shit! And, uh, so I run, you know, like, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, the eleva-

• 1:05:55Stewart Copeland?

  I'm on the 28th floor elevator, out of service, down the step, now I'm, you know, up the hill, get there like that, and

• 1:06:08Stewart Copeland?

  Okay, showtime. Best show ever.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  Ladies and gentlemen, Stewart Copeland.

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  Alright.

• 1:06:25Stewart Copeland?

  Thank you.

• 1:06:35Stewart Copeland?

  Thank you, folks.

• 1:06:37Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again, just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance.

• 1:07:19Tim Ferriss?

  And it's very short, it's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com, that's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Kettle and Fire, which makes some of the best bone broth and certainly the most convenient that I've ever found. And I have a big stack of them on my kitchen counter right now, I have one container every morning. And this first came highly recommended to me by past podcast guests such as Amelia Boone, who's a four-time world champion in World's Toughest Mudder, Spartan Race,

• 1:08:01Tim Ferriss?

  etc., and Dr. Dominic De Agostino, the incredible Hulk of scientific research. You should check him out, too. But there are a few things that make Kettle and Fire special. Number one, they are the first shelf-stable, in other words, never-frozen bone broth that uses bones from 100% grass-fed, organically-raised animals. So you are what you eat. Eight, if that makes sense. So it's very important that you understand, if you're consuming animal protein, what they consume. They also use longer cook times, 20-plus hours, which means more collagen and other nutrients. For instance, they contain 19 times more collagen than one of their close competitors, and an independent lab confirmed this. I'll leave the competitor's name out of it, because I don't want to get sued, but that's the

• 1:08:46Tim Ferriss?

  case. And it is not frozen. So thanks to many millions of dollars of packaging equipment, their bone broth doesn't require freezing or shipping with dry ice. So like I said, it's just sitting on my kitchen counter in these boxes, and then I can heat them up. They're basically ready to drink. Heat them up on the stove top or in a microwave, and you are ready to rock and roll. And you also get a nice payload of glucosamine, glycine, along with the gelatin and everything else that I mentioned. So, check it out. I've been hugely pleased with this, and like I said, I've been consuming it every morning. It gives you about, I want to say, 20 grams of protein, which is a nice little slow-carb diet boost, if that's what you're looking for. And I'll typically sip this out of

• 1:09:29Tim Ferriss?

  a very large camping coffee mug as I do some writing or journaling. So there you have it. Check it out. It's delicious. I favor the chicken, but each to his own, or her own. So check it out, kettleandfire.com/tim, and you can receive 20% off of your entire order. Take a look, kettleandfire.com/tim. It is very late at night. I am packing for an island getaway. Why does that matter? Because it reminds me of one of the sponsors for today's podcast, Mizzen & Mayen. Why? Because the only dress shirt that I'm taking, I normally hate dress shirts, is from Mizzen & Mayen, specifically the Beckett Blue Gingham.

• 1:10:14Tim Ferriss?

  The reason, or the reasons I should say, is because I can throw it in my bag in a duffel, not worry about ironing, not worry about any kind of wrinkling, and then throw it on, wear it maybe four or five nights out of seven without washing it, and it won't smell. It's antimicrobial, it is made of stretch fabric, sweat-wicking, athletic. I could wear it for a hike in between dinners if I wanted to, I probably wouldn't do that. But Mizzen & Mayen has really delivered on the all-around, all-purpose dress shirt. They're fancy enough, you can fool people into thinking that you had them custom tailored, but they're also rough enough and resilient enough that you can toss them into the bottom

• 1:10:56Tim Ferriss?

  of a duffel bag or backpack, pull it off, and put it on in a bathroom at a restaurant, let's say. Hundreds of pro athletes love this brand, people who don't fit well into dress shirts otherwise, like NFL All-Pro J.J. Watt. And the last time these guys were featured on the show, Mizzen & Mayen sold out of every item that they featured. So if you're interested in checking them out, I'd recommend taking a look. Just go to tim.blog/shirts, and you can see that one shirt that I'm packing, that I always pack, the Beckett Blue Gingham, in addition to a couple of my other favorites. And you can enter TIM, that's capital T-I-M, at checkout for free shipping. If you use this code before

• 1:11:39Tim Ferriss?

  September 15th, it's 2017, to buy a dress shirt, Mizzen & Mayen will donate a brand-new dress shirt to the relief efforts in Southern Texas. That's in addition to the 1,000 shirts that are already being donated through J.J. Watt's incredible efforts to put, or I should say rather, help Houston and the surrounding communities get back on their feet. So there you have it. Check it out, take a look, even if it's just to take a peek at this one shirt, the Beckett. tim.blog/shirts, again, that's tim.blog/shirts.