Episode 29: Permission To Create With Nate Jones
Do you ever seek permission to express yourself creatively? If we all tapped into our limitless creativity, don’t you think our individual lives and the world as a whole would look a lot different? Host Anand J. Sukhadia welcomes you to this episode of Limitless One Podcast, where he sits down with Grammy-ballot recording artist, singer, songwriter, and creative wellness coach Nate Jones. Here, Nate takes us to his own creative and inspiring journey as a musician. With his new book, Permission to Create, he shows us the amazing possibilities out there when we live in a world that doesn’t hold us back and instead pushes us to embrace our art and unleash our true potential. Join Nate in this conversation as he helps us expand our minds, hearts, and spirit, all the while entertaining us with great music.
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Permission To Create With Nate Jones
Do you ever seek permission to express yourself creatively? I know I have to ask my girlfriend for permission when I want to sing my heart out in the car. If we all tapped into our limitless creativity, our individual lives and the world as a whole would look a lot different. We're going to be expanding our minds, hearts, and spirit with his multi-talented soul. Nate Jones is a Grammy-ballot recording artist, singer, songwriter, and creative wellness coach from Warwick, Rhode Island. His main interests are music, mindfulness, creativity, animals, and healing plant medicines, including ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms.
Nate is passionate about inspiring people to pursue their dreams while living healthy, creative, and connected lives full of meaning and purpose. Fun fact, Nate used to be an American Ninja Warrior coach before making the transition to full-time musician. When he's not on stage, Nate enjoys traveling the world, exploring other cultures, playing rock and roll in his basement, and living a vegan lifestyle in order to reduce harm towards animals, underprivileged communities, and the planet. He could talk for hours about music, visionary art, traveling, psychedelics, and personal growth. We're going to get into a lot of that stuff. Nate, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
I am great. Thank you for having me.
It’s such a pleasure. Nate and I met through mutual friends Carolina and Shane, who I had on the podcast in separate episodes on the show and we were at a cacao circle. It was a five-hour-long cacao circle. We were sitting next to each other and he played the most beautiful music during it. Even at the end, we had a shot of cocoa leaf rum, which was divine.
I completely forgot about that.
Those were good times and we had an amazing meal all together. It was a pleasure meeting Nate. I'm excited to get into the journey of how you got to the place you are. You're such an ambitious guy and you have so much diverse talents. I want to start out by you playing us one of your favorite songs to set the mood.
I certainly can do that, so I'm going to have to choose this particular song because of the synchronicity involved in its writing. I hope that this gives you an idea of what I view the point of music and life to be. The song is called Write This Down. “We don’t need to write this down. It lives inside of us. We don’t need to write this down. It lives inside of us and all of us. Cause I’m a teacher. I’m a preacher just singing my songs hoping everybody would sing along. I will meet you, I will greet you somewhere between reality and my sacred dream but you’ve got to be strong, you’ve got to be wise. You’ve got to be willing to compromise. You’ve to be bold. You’ve got to be kind. You’ve got to be the one thing you can’t find.”
Permission to Create: Embrace your Art and Unleash your True Potential
“We’ve got to have faith. We’ve got to stand tall. We’ve got to believe that we can move that wall inside of us. Just get on the bus. We don’t need to write this down. It lives inside of us. I said we don’t need to write this down. It lives inside of us and all of us. Get on the bus. Cause we’re all teachers. We’re all preachers singing my songs hoping everybody would sing along. We will meet you. We will greet you somewhere in between reality and our sacred dreams but we’ve got to be strong. We’ve got to be wise. We’ve got to be willing to compromise. We’ve got to be bold. We’ve got be kind. We’ve got to be the one thing we can’t find. We’ve got to have faith. We’ve got to stand tall. We’ve got to believe that we move that wall inside of us. Get on the bus because you don’t need to write this down. It lives inside of us. I don’t need to write this down. It lives inside of me.”
That is incredible. It's all inside of us, this life. That song gave me goosebumps. Thank you.
Thank you for saying so. I live for the delight and joy on other people's faces and in their aura in general when they hear good music. I love creating it for myself and for people. It's fun.
It's incredible. Instantaneously, by hearing an amazing melody or hearing somebody's voice, especially the stuff that's empowering, it changes your energy immediately. I can listen to one of my favorite songs and this is going on one of My Favorite Songs playlist. I hope you're on Spotify. It's incredible how music can transform my spirit at any moment.
It's terrific to know that. I have that playlist. On my Spotify, I have a profile as Nate Jones that I use Spotify with and I have an artist page, Nate Jones on Spotify but then I have a playlist on my profile that's my own music. It’s got any song that I'm on scattered versus any song I've released. For me, it's a big honor for someone else if they put them on My Favorite Songs playlist, so I appreciate that. It's not just listening to it though. What we're discussing here is creativity.
How could we get to a world where you didn't have to ask your girlfriend for permission to sing in the car because everybody's singing in the car all the time together? Is a 45-minute car ride not the perfect opportunity to sing and harmonize with other people? I love doing that. In our population, we've gotten way too far away from basic creativity. They teach us basic creativity in elementary school and preschool. We learn how to use different colors, markers, and paint. We learned that our hand makes a handprint. We think that's cool and we don't continue on the trend.
Most of us don't stay artists and I know myself, I didn't. I got into sports. I got focused on my physicality. I wanted to be athletic, fast, strong, and be all these things that I didn't see myself as a little kid. I completely overlooked the ability of art and music to do that for me to satisfy that urge to prove something within myself. There's a certain difference in your mindset when you're in a sports match or competing. You get this heightened adrenaline and everything. That cocktail of chemicals in your body conditions you to want to feel that certain way. When a lot of people stopped doing athletics, they look for other ways to take that aggression or competitiveness out, and usually, it comes from accidentally being a jerk because they're otherwise a great person.
I've had this complete 180 in my life where I've been able to experience the liberation that comes from playing music instead of continually focused on these finite games like sports or other things that people compete in. It's an under-talked-about topic in our society on how essential creativity is for brain health. I know that's what you focus on with your business. Not only brain health but health for the overall body. It's a no-brainer for me that people should be giving themselves permission to create music and art and do what speaks to their soul. Rather than thinking they have to package and sell something or bring it to a marketplace in order for it to be viable.
It’s an interesting point you brought up. You go to athletic events and if it's a neutral crowd, half the crowd is going to be upset if your team loses. The other team is pissed off. There's only one winner and one loser. With music, everybody's a winner and everybody goes against the experience that you all are connected as one. Everybody's singing to the same beat and when everybody's focused on that, the Maharishi effect is, when you focus many people's attention on one thing, that thing gets created in the world. If you're singing about love like you do in creativity, you're having a ripple effect on this planet even if it's not consciously done on your part but subconsciously and it is having that huge effect.
You brought up a great point about not only the player or the performer. We play all these roles and we wear all these hats in life. Sometimes you're the boss. Sometimes you're the parent. Sometimes you're the employee, or whatever it is. When you're in a sporting match, you're the player. When you're in a play, you're no longer called a player for some reason. You're called an actor. I've never understood that because I'm a guitar player. We have these different labels that we assign, so it's not about the actor, player, or performer and how your role is changing your view of yourself in that finite game.
If you're playing Monopoly and you start winning and you own Broadway and Park Place, you start to embody the mindset of some financial shark kicking people out of their apartments. You would never do that in real life. It's interesting how games like that versus activities based on collaboration instead of competition affect not the people involved in those activities but the population, audience, people, and crowd. For example, let's say we’re at the cacao circle that day and you and I decided that we were going to play some instruments together. People would be watching us and they would be hoping that it sounded good.
Permission To Create: The more people compete with each other, the more it forces other people to pick sides in their minds. The more people collaborate together, the more it encourages other people to work towards the same goals.
Let's say instead of that, we were having an arm-wrestling match. Now the crowd is divided. Half of the people are like, “Come on, Nate. Beat him. You can do it.” Half of those people are like, “Come on, Anand. Kick his puny ass.” People start embodying this like, “Who do I want to win,” mentality versus at a musical event, it's like, “We all want this to sound good and be fun for all of us.” There's this collective. We are literally all on the same team. “We're all fans of Eminem or The Beatles, so we're here enjoying this together.” That's a huge underlooked aspect of it, too. The more people compete with each other, the more it forces other people to pick sides in their minds. The more people collaborate together, the more it encourages other people to work towards the same goals and the same ends if that makes sense.
We need more collaboration on every level of society. This party is starting with politics, government, and all this stuff that's going on in the world like racial tension and all of that. We focus our attention on collaboration. Let me ask you, why do you think that creativity muscle is an exercise or isn't encouraged to be exercised by society at large? We’re talking generalities, but why is it as prevalent as sports?
This is a tough question and there’s one of two ways I can answer it. The first way would probably be that there are shape-shifting entities in society that disguise themselves as the matrix and suppress us as human beings. That’s why and then all of the fallout from that central concept. I don’t believe that. I don’t have evidence that’s true. It’s because of convenience. People have such convenient lives nowadays that they’re not forced to be creative about a lot of the decisions that they make.
Driving down the road, there are twenty different options for you to grab food for yourself and you can do that or you could go to the supermarket, be creative, cook something, and challenge yourself. The reason why people don’t do that is one, their lives of ultra-convenience are a lot of times cheaper, always faster, and less work for them to be mindless about it and go to the drive-thru or something. I feel that maybe we need to put ourselves in more uncomfortable situations to force that creativity to come out.
Maybe if we start doing that more often, our innate creativity will display itself. In this room alone, I've probably got at least 100 different objects that serve some essential functional purpose in making music happen. That is wild because you could have a guitar and that's all you need or it can become eternally more complex. When we focus on the problems in front of us and say, “If we had this headphone amplifier, we could all plug our headphones in at the same time and listen to different volumes depending on what everyone's trying to hear.” Those immediate problems we've had to solve in our physical world of getting food, water, shelter, and the things we need have been removed in a big way. It's clear that we've lost the connection to our environment. That could be the short answer for why our creativity has been missing.
The path of least resistance goes hand in hand with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If everyone's focused on providing their food, shelter, and paying for an apartment in the city, it takes a lot of effort. To sit there completely stripped naked of everything of what we think we are and to be limitless and realize, “There's no end to this,” but it takes work to come up with some path in the way that you want to go to because it's not necessarily paved for us. We’ve got to create that own path. What is living a limitless life mean to you, Nate?
What it meant to the college version of me was that anytime someone dared me to do something, I felt compelled to do it because I always wanted to prove to myself and others, “I can't believe he did that.” I never would do anything dangerous, foolish, or anything malicious. I've climbed definitely 100 feet into trees before. Maybe that is dangerous and foolish, but for me, I know I'm capable. We were talking about how I was fortunate to spend time as an American Ninja Warrior coach.
I'm working at this gym and not just training people on obstacle courses but empowering kids. We would host birthday parties there. You could book a birthday party for your kid at the Ninja Warrior gym. I'm seeing these kids in their determination and it filled me with energy every day to remember how limitless I felt as a kid because when you're seven, you want to be ten. When you're ten, you want to be sixteen. Eventually, you're like, “I want to be ten again.”
You don't want to be ten again because you don't want to have everything removed from your control. You still want to have the mindset of a ten-year-old and maybe the flexibility and physical energy of a ten-year-old, but that's able to be cultivated through an intense mental focus on certain activities. For me, when I'm playing music, I feel completely limitless. My ego has left the building largely and all it left behind was the voice. I'm there with this instrument. The guitar, a drum set, and a piano. There are these instruments that I can travel with without physically going anywhere.
Everyone basically understands this concept but for people who don't play instruments, it's hard to explain the sense of disconnection from this reality that you experience, especially the deeper you go and the more intensely you focus and concentrate on it. It’s no different than the way Nikola Tesla invented all these amazing things that still impact our society by going into these deep states of focus on this one thing in front of you. For me, when I play my drum set for 2 to 3 hours sometimes, I get into this zone and there's nothing else that matters.
I've watched things spill, things that I could have stopped from spilling. I've been rained on. I have let many things happen to me that normally I would avoid because keeping the music going was more important. You were mentioning one of our mutual friends, Senor Freddie La Rosa, and how he and I played a show. My guitar strap fell off in the middle of the song and the guitar was hanging from my body. I was holding it with my arm and barely able to play it.
Eventually, someone from the audience came and strapped it back on for me, but I wasn't going to stop the song because that happened. It's this trance state where you go into the realm of possibility and you bring back reality. You create a song but you channel it into conscious awareness from the field of potentiality if we're getting into quantum physics. That's what it means. When people say, “I know my limits,” that's an egoic statement. Limits aren't things that exist. They're a human concept because we could have this infinite amount of everything. To me, feeling limitless means feeling not human, feeling superhuman, or feeling my energetic nature on a deeper level that what happens to Nate Jones is no longer of a big concern to the conscious awareness directing my mind.
It's coming to a conscious place where all possibilities exist. I've spent so much of my time in the left brain in my life and I am working hard on opening up that exploration and creativity. It takes a little bit of work. I would hope that everyone has this opportunity in life to at least experience that flow and consciousness state at some point. I know psychedelics are something that we'll talk about. That helps open the finite human form that we stay in and it opens up a lot of things about music and art and other ways of doing that. I want to start tapping into that. Nate, I want to ask you, tell us a little bit about your story. How did you get to this place in life as a successful musician and author? I know it's been a long journey, but start as early as you like.
It all started one day when I was a baby and my dad was holding me up above him laying down like Simba and Stairway To Heaven was playing in the background.
Do you remember that moment?
No, I don't, but we have it on video. I'm sure that the first documented physical evidence of, “This guy's going to be a sweat lord someday. He's destined for rock and roll greatness.” That was probably the beginning. Eventually, what took place over my life is I had something deeply ingrained within me, this belief that I was going to do something important. The world needed me in some way that I was going to be a hero of some kind essentially, but throughout my childhood, that wasn't easy for me to do because I got picked on basically every day of my life.
I assumed all these things about myself about what I could do and what I couldn't do. I was defining myself only by my intelligence on a purely intellectual basis and not realizing the emotional intelligence that I had. I was that kid in fourth grade where I had a psych eval done. I have these medical records and it says in the eval, “Concerned about the war in Iraq.” I'm nine years old in the fourth grade. I do remember that. I remember it weighing on me but to acknowledge what I was going through at that time was I saw many things that I thought could be done better than the way they were being done.
Permission To Create: A lot of things have diminishing returns, but you're going to keep becoming a better musician over time the more you put your energy into it.
I got in trouble a lot for breaking rules that I knew weren't good rules or they weren't serving any purpose to protect me in any way. That's where I began testing the limits of what I could get away with. Let's fast forward to my freshman year of college. I dated a girl, Rebecca, and she was learning to play the guitar. She would bring her guitar over to my dorm and it never occurred to me to pick it up or play it. Eventually, a couple of times I did and I was like, “That was fun,” but I forgot about it. I went home after my freshman year of college and there's an electric guitar in my basement from when I was a little kid.
I had played piano as a kid but never enjoyed practicing. It wasn't something that I found a ton of joy in. It was an escape a little bit but I never liked being forced to practice so I basically didn't do it. I would pick up songs by ear. Fast forward, I'm nineteen and I start playing the guitar. I enjoyed turning it on, plugging the amp, and hearing the power in the vibration. My father was a rock and roll drummer. He played for a band called What Now.
They open for some awesome bands like the Pixies, Hüsker Dü, and Sonic Youth. They played with the Meat Puppets, Soul Asylum, and the Violent Femmes, so they're doing good stuff. I never thought I would ever be able to jam with my dad but fast forward, here we are and we jammed together all the time. What happened between that moment and me picking up the guitar and this one in my life is I believed in myself. The guitar taught me that I was capable of completely redefining my creative abilities because I never did art or music in high school.
To be honest, I judged a lot of the band kids that I perceived as even nerdier than me or something. I didn't get that they were happy-go-lucky about jamming all the time. I thought they were weird. I believed in myself to be able to create something that I thought sounded good, and then play it until I got bored or created something new. Those skills kept piling up and building on each other. I bought an acoustic guitar and kept playing. That was completely self-taught, so I just learned by ear.
Over time, you do something enough and you become proficient at it. In 2016, I was working this job delivering beer and liquor out of the back of a truck and working with guys 2 or 3 times my size. I knew I was doing this because the pay was good but that day, a friend texted me. Thank you, Tiana, if you're reading. This was a pretty life-changing text. She said, “Saltwater Tavern is looking for a guitarist. You should call them or something,” so I did.
They wanted me to play guitar and sing some songs for three hours. I knew I didn't have that much material, but I worked towards it. I said yes and he said, “The pay is $100.” I was like, “I'm going to get paid $100 to do this? What?” I swear that moment alone of me standing on a pallet of liquor in the back of this giant truck looking at this text. I was making $100 for that whole days’ worth of busting my back so I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Let's do this.”
I never looked back. From that moment, I started calling places and telling them like, “I'll play guitar for you,” because I was like, “Other people are doing it and now I've done it, so why am I not going to continue doing this?” The amount of people I've been able to meet and impact through playing these shows has transformed the lives of my family coming out to see me, my friends, and my community. I've been able to be a part of cool things. I kept believing in myself even more because this gift of music is that you get better the more that you do it. A lot of things have diminishing returns, but you're going to keep becoming a better musician over time the more you put your energy into it. That's how I got from there to here. I believed in myself.
In your freshman year of college is when you started playing and then only five years that you've been going full-time into it.
Yeah. I've played something like 550 shows since then. That is fun.
That is full commitment.
That's even including the limited shows I've been able to play with COVID. It was addicting to me and I would get this rush for being on stage. All of a sudden, people were looking at me and girls were looking at me. Little kids would look at me and wonder and that's what did it for me. There are dozens of photos of me on stage somewhere and I'm doing something with a toddler. I love when the kids lock on to it because it's such a new stimulus for them to understand like, “This is a potential thing that people do that maybe I could do.”
I didn't start super young but I see these kids that a lot of times, the parents will be like, “He plays guitar.” I've got some music students that way, which has been fun to go out to people and deliver the medicine because that's what music is. I became disillusioned with it for a period of time because as I had my spiritual awakening, which took place a few months after I started doing these gigs, I quit drinking. That was the same time that I went vegan after visiting the Buddhist monastery, Thích Nhất Hạnh’s monastery, Blue Cliff in New York. That experience changed me.
When I went back to my life being at bars all the time, I was like, “I hardly want to be here. This no longer resonates with the frequency that I'm operating on.” I got disillusioned thinking that I was not drinking but I was participating in the economic food chain of alcohol like, “My being there is driving alcohol sales and all this stuff.” Somebody said something important to me at Blue Cliff about a year after that. I had this spiritual awakening and then this depressive slump after it because I was like, “The real world doesn't feel the way I feel inside. Something's not right.” That was because I was holding on to my anger and aggression and a lot of other things that I needed to do a lot of shadow work on.
The idea that me being there at the bar was the best possible thing that could be added to that situation. Maybe my medicine would be stronger than what they were getting over that counter. Maybe what they were looking for at the bar that night, they would find in themselves and they would find through my honesty, emotion, and genuine deliverance of what I feel is real medicine for people. That completely changed my outlook on it and that's when I started embracing the mindful side of creating music and the performance as well.
Take us through how you started to write your songs. I know for a little while, you were doing a lot of cover songs at the gigs that you were doing.
I had to play rock and roll, all the songs that I loved listening to. I’m finding a way to make that translate on an acoustic guitar, whether it was looking up the chords or discovering the riffs. I eventually started writing my songs when my physical skills on the guitar were good enough that I could do it on autopilot or that I could keep something going in an automatic enough way that I could come in with the other side of my brain and layer something down on top of it.
I had a student and he said, “Is it normal for me to have a bunch of songs written before I even know how to play the guitar?” I was like, “Not at all. That's a sign. That's your soul wanting to express itself in some way.” For me, it was the opposite. The words came after I had developed this physical relationship with the instrument where it was like the set and setting. I knew how I felt based on what the guitar was triggering within me. It would trigger this emotion for me and then I would write from that place.
You recorded your first song in 2019 and it was nominated for Grammy. Tell us that story.
The War of Art
There are a couple of things. I've got The Beatles Abbey Road poster. I put it behind me after receiving the call from my agent, Al Gomes, at the time. He was a classmate of my mom in elementary school and I had heard his name through my mom’s stories. In 2018, he came to see a band that I was in perform at a Providence Battle of the Bands, Neapolitan with my friend Sam and Brandon. He pulled me aside and he was like, “I like what you're doing with these guys.” I would sing a little bit, too, even though I was the drummer of that band.
He's like, “Do you have any stuff of your own because I work with solo artists.” It wasn't a thing for me at that point or I wasn't confident enough with it to say yes to that, even though I had ten songs. The following year, I was on tour with this band from Boston, The Big Lonesome. I tell this story in the book. I was in Whole Foods in South Carolina. I was at the salad bar. I got this phone call and it was Al and he said, “I'm going to send you some documents over email. If you want to be a part of my artist roster for this year, here's what we do.”
Their organization is a member of The Recording Academy, so they're able to submit a song. I forget how many. I don't know the rules, so I can't talk about this because I probably am not supposed to be talking about this too much. Out of 80,000 songs that were submitted for the 2020 Grammy Awards in September of 2019, my song, Safe as We Can, made it onto the ballot in two categories, Best Rock Song and then attached to it was a music video in which qualified it for Best Rock Performance as well. In best rock performance, one of the other artists I was competing against was Paul McCartney, who plays 42 instruments.
I play 16 or 17, so he's got me beat by almost three times. It was surreal to hear that news. I didn't believe that it was that big of a deal at first. It was shocking to me that I had to downplay. It was like, “Oh, yeah.” Meanwhile, it was all I could think about. Some of the artists I was competing against as well were The Black Keys and Blink-182. I was starstruck. I was out of my mind. I didn't know what to do with myself. I found out like, “Here's the language we're allowed to use.” I technically wasn't 1 of the top 5 that are referred to as the nominated.
I was in that pool where those were selected from, so it was right there on the cusp. It was a song, not an album. Being an unknown artist, there was no real way for people to gauge me as an artist. I wasn't expecting to win or anything like that. It completely reframed, one, how much I charged for what I do, and two, realizing that people would take me a lot more seriously because of it. I started going for things that I previously wasn't ready to go for. I started putting a level of intentionality into my songs where people would be like, “I can see why he's done this.” I want people to listen and feel like they're getting a high-quality experience with my music. It's a label but at the end of the day, it's reflective of the work that I put into making that song sound awesome.
It's not like you had the intention when you started on this journey like, “I'm going to be nominated for Grammy.” You put your head to the stone, kept going, and worked your ass off because you love what you do. You put all your focus on that. A couple of years later, the results happened. In September 2019, you’re Grammy-nominated on the Ballot. 2020 is going to be the best year ever for touring, and then what happens?
My entire ability to put food on my table was taken away from me and it triggered a lot of thoughts for me. That November, I went to Peru to visit one of my best friends out, Sodus. He was living there working remotely at the time. He had fulfilled his dream of getting this opportunity to do this job working remotely and move to South America. We were both riding high. It was my last day in Peru the day we ended up finding out who was going to Los Angeles for the Grammy Awards and it wasn't me.
It was that experience in Peru that I met this guy, Daniel. He opened my eyes to certain things. He had come from Venezuela as a refugee and the situation was bad there that a lot of people were walking out of their houses with a backpack. I can't even imagine myself being in that situation. When I started realizing the impact that COVID was going to have and how devastating the entire process was going to be, it made me think of that experience. I was able to stay mindful, humble, and grateful for everything that I did have.
If anything, it was this creative catalyst for me of like, “There goes the next couple of thousand dollars of money I had lined up to make.” Who knows how far it was going to go? I had come back from a small tour and I was planning an even bigger tour. I was supposed to be playing at some prestigious restaurants and venues. It was all wiped away. I started doing live streaming but I didn't do a ton of it because I didn't want to over-saturate my fans with the same songs and music all the time or make it this regular thing.
I took the time to incubate and work on what it is I feel I can do best. The balance between music not being my income anymore, I had to find this way. I started selling my artwork. In this room alone, I know I've counted because I love counting things. I have about 45 pieces of paintings in this room. A lot of the paintings I make, I do sell and a lot of them are on my website at NateJones.world. I always have been resourceful, someone who hustles, and entrepreneurially minded to the degree that there was nothing that was going to stop me once I realized this was going to happen.
For a while, I hadn't applied for unemployment because I didn't know what was going to happen with that. Luckily, eventually, I did receive it. Some venues opened back up and I was able to do some things, but it was piecemeal, so I had to shift my focus to more private engagements and doing weddings. That's been my saving grace, I would say. It was right around the end of the summer that I got notified by a friend of mine. His name's Brendan Barbato and he might be a cool guest for you to have.
He was in the startup world for a while but he has diabetes. He was writing about his story and I was like, “This is cool. You're writing a book. How are you doing this?” He told me about this program happening at Georgetown and that is how my idea to put a book together. That was my first realization that the opportunity was there and this was something I could do. It's like, “You've been talking about this. Here it is.” It was one plus one equals two for me and I went for it.
A lot of people, especially when their main source of income is playing live venues and things like that, was there any point where fear was getting stronger? Did it paralyze you at all or you knew from the beginning, “Whatever happens, I'm going to find a way out of this situation that we're currently in.”
I'm going to ask you to ask me that question again because I would like to make sure I get every single part of it.
The situation that you were you were in having most of your income coming from live venues. Was there any point where fear overtook you or did you know from the beginning, “I'm not going to let this creep into my psyche. I'm going to find a way and thrive through this?”
Yes. There was never a doubt in my mind. There were a couple of days where I was like, “Come on.” There were moments where I did not agree with the way things were being handled. I saw a lot of things I disagreed with in terms of what activities were allowed to continue and who they benefited versus what was taken away and the logic behind it being taken away, without getting into that, aside from that, no. I knew I was going to thrive through this because it's the perfect storm for showing you what you're made of.
If you're someone who has a food truck business and then all of a sudden COVID hits, what are you going to do? Maybe you're going to set up a brick-and-mortar location. Maybe you're going to rent a delivery kitchen or something. If that's your business, you can't give up. I am fortunate enough to be in a position where although I was broke for a long time, I had saved up enough money from playing music to have a little bit of a cushion. I also refinanced my house, my mortgage, which allowed me to save quite a bit of money and that was a smart decision.
I was also able to take cash out of the equity from my house. It required a lot of creativity all across the board. I would say that my thriving mindset or that mentality of like, “Am I going to let this fear paralyze me right now?” It was a good way to reaffirm that my journey is far from over. When you think you're hitting the ground running and getting everything good going, life's like, “Try to hit this,” and throws a curveball at you. For me, it was this way to completely expand my identity of who I could be, how I could earn a living, what I could become, and how I could help others.
Throughout COVID, I was realizing that a lot of people are in a way worse situation than me. Not just in this state or in this country but in places where people are living in tent cities and refugee camps, and then COVID hits. My problems are real to me and they're legitimate but the fact that I'm able to sit and think about my problems versus struggling to survive, it's immediately apparent like, “Don't make excuses.” My dad would always say to me, “Don't fail because of things. Succeed in spite of them.” It’s a great life motto and it applies to COVID perfectly.
Permission To Create: The amateur believes that he or she must overcome their fear before they can do their work. Whereas the professional knows that they will never overcome their fear fully, but they can face it.
There was a book I read called The War of Art. It's like a play on the art of war. It's by Steven Pressfield. The guy is a genius in the way he paints the picture of a professional versus an amateur. What it is, is like are you doing something because you love it? That's the amateur. Are you doing something because it is your job, duty, or profession? You're professing to be behind this thing and you're promoting it for others so that they can gain value from it.
Once I flipped that switch, I was like, “It's not about me. It's about how much value can I provide other people.” When you focus on that, everything becomes easier. You feel better because you're working towards things that you know are going to help people. If it's what you love to do, then you know that you're in the right place. It's effective when what you're doing is something that you love and something that other people need. For me, music was that perfect crossroads of, I can help people expand their minds, open up their hearts, get into their emotions more, dance, and move around.
Also, teaching them to play the instruments and empower them with the single most beneficial skill for brain development, according to neuroscience research. There were moments that I had some doubts and some annoyance over the frustration that we all went through together and we're still going through together. I knew that if I trusted what was carrying me through the whole time, my belief in myself and my abilities to get through things, this was not something that I was going to let sideline me when many other people had overcome so much more.
The key to life is never to be a victim of circumstance. Every one of us has an individual story of hardship. We're the heroes of our story, so we have to figure out how do we get through those circumstances? It's funny, every single person I've had on this show has gone through hell during the pandemic and struggled in many ways but they never stopped looking for answers. Every single person that's come through here has figured out a way to thrive in these crazy, uncertain times.
One of the greatest things to do for anyone who is having a hard time with something is to first look at the resources that they have in life. In your case, it’s like, “Cashflow is tight. Let me look, what do I have? I have some equity in my house.” You look at the resources you have, figure out the resources you need, and then marry the two but there's never a point when the game is over until we say that it's over because we are these limitless beings and we all have that ability. Everybody plays with a different hand of cards but we all have an ace card up our sleeve, so we have to continue to fight and play this game of life until we move through the next obstacle. When we move through the next obstacle, we're stronger now, and then the next obstacle will come, we’ll be stronger then. It's a game of evolution. It's a video game that we're in.
You nailed it right there. I can't believe I didn't touch on that in some way. You've made me think of my favorite quote from stoic philosophy by Marcus Aurelius. He says, “Have no fear for the troubles of tomorrow for you will face them with the same weapons of intellect, which today arm you against the present moment.” That is key. People are like, “How am I going to be able to do this?” You got to this point. You learn to walk and talk and here you are.
Steven Pressfield makes another great point in his book where he talks about fear and resistance and how fear in and of itself is not a bad thing. In fact, it's something we should seek out if we seek to expand and grow. He says that the amateur believes that he or she must overcome their fear before they can do their work. Whereas the professional knows that they will never overcome their fear fully but they can face it. I don't know if this quote is from his book or where I heard it, but it was great, “Fear is the only thing that gets smaller as you run towards it.”
I live my life by that motto because whenever I look at a project, I’m like, “This book, I can't do this. It’s 40,000 words. A year of my life.” Yet, here I am. What I have created demonstrates the evolution that someone can go through from being someone who considers themselves like an average Joe, a regular old person with no crazy talents or skills or abilities to what I've been able to do in my life. Also, the people I've been able to impact positively. It does go to show you that we are limitless beings. I say that in the trailer for the book.
Let's get a little bit more detail into the book. Tell us a little bit about it. I know you've created an entirely new genre of books implementing your songs as well as QR codes involved inside that book. Tell us a little bit about that creation process.
I like that. Thank you for saying so. I'm going to start using that. I've created an entirely new genre of books. In one of the meetings I had with two of my editors and one of the guys who runs the publishing company, New Degree Press, we were talking about this. I said, “I don't think what I'm doing has been done before. I'm not modeling this after anything else. This is an idea that I've had floating around. It's first of its kind.” They were like, “Yeah, but let other people say that for you. Don't say that yourself.” I’m like, “I will let other people say that.”
I'll introduce you every time.
You're allowing me to claim the authority of what I have created. I am an author. When people read my book, they know that this has been vetted. I'm not self-publishing the book. That's a clear distinction. I'm working with a publisher, so everything has been vetted. This book is my best collection. I've been journaling every morning for the past couple of years as part of The Artist's Way program. It’s a fascinating book that’s a hybrid book. It's a book but it's a twelve-week program. There are all these quotes and activities you can do and it's all about the mindset of artistry.
For me, it's the mindset of artistry but I'm telling the story of all these particular events that have taken place in my life. One chapter opens with a story of me having a conversation with Nahko from Medicine for the People. I asked him if I could tell him something cool and he said, “Yeah.” I found out about the Grammys and I said, “I'm competing against Paul McCartney for two Grammy Awards.” He pulled his head back and looked at me and was like, “Who are you?” For Nahko to say that to me, it was like, “You're my musical hero. How is this happening?” It's happening because I'm embodying the limitless mindset.
In my book, every story is a story that I have been through in my life. There are some secondhand accounts where I talk about different scientific principles involved in mindfulness, psychedelics, and creativity. For the most part, it's like, “I'm living my life and here's what I'm noticing. Here's what's happening in my life.” I'm sharing an account of what I've gone through. My editor, Regina, helped me see that it's way more about telling the story than it is presenting the facts that you have derived for yourself from that story.
When you read a book, everyone's picturing the character a different way and everyone's pushing the scene a different way. You have to allow that subjectivity for people to learn what they can learn about themselves by hearing what you've learned about yourself. No one can tell you that what you've learned about yourself is wrong because they haven't learned it. It's not about, “Here is why psilocybin mushrooms should be legal,” and then a whole list of medical research. It's like, “Here's what happened to me when I did this. Are you not as absolutely mind blown about that as I am?” I love people and I want to share awesome things with people I love so I'm going to have to find some way to make that in where I'm presenting.
If you were like, “You got to watch this movie. It's the best movie ever,” I would listen to you and I would watch it because I trust that you want to be to have a good experience and you want someone to talk about it with. In my book, I've presented the things that have fundamentally impacted my life, including plant medicines like San Pedro, ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, and some others. I would say DMT was probably the most unbelievable experience of my life that felt like 10,000 years but lasted for five minutes.
Would you mind sharing a little bit about your DMT experience?
No, I would not at all. I love talking about it because I love continuing to try to find a new language to map out these mental frontiers of straight-up undiscovered territory. That's what it is. We need to develop a new language to talk about new concepts. A lot of these concepts are things we've already experienced before in some way. Terence McKenna would say, “If there's no song, then we don't know what you mean.” We can hear what you're saying but we don't know what you mean unless there's some collective identifiable thing that we can all latch on to.
For anyone reading that is coming to this podcast from the Nate Jones side of the fence here and you don't know about my experience with DMT or what it is, DMT stands for dimethyltryptamine and it is a neurotransmitter that's in our brains. It's also found in certain quantities in our lungs and other places in the body stored in tissue. DMT is a powerful molecule. When it gets released endogenously in your own body, you are liable to have complete out-of-body experiences.
This is what certain Tibetan monks and certain yogis have experienced by triggering an internal release of this chemical DMT. However, like many things, you can also find DMT in the natural world. It's in the grass. If you know your chemistry, you can make some. What's interesting about that is if you eat grass, you're not going to have DMT washed through your body, but if you smoke the DMT or vaporize the DMT through your apparatus, you leave this reality. That's the only way I can describe it.
It's like when you're at a magic show, imagine if you could get up from your seat, walk to the side, and see from behind the stage what the magician is doing. Once you see that, you cannot go back to the audience and look at that magic trick. You can't re-believe in something that has already been shattered in your mind. Once I experienced the behind the curtain look at the universe where my senses were no longer portraying this external world of colors, solid objects, sounds, and things like that, I still had my conscious awareness but that conscious awareness was now perceiving this field of energy and electric possibility.
I saw that symbol from the back of the dollar bill, the pyramid with the all-seeing eye on top of it. I saw it in my mind's eye. It was like a dream. Fun fact, DMT is also released when you dream, so that's interesting. It's also interesting that DMT is released when you die and when you're born. The pineal gland forms in a fetus at 49 days, 7 weeks. It’s 7 times 7. There's a lot of numerology around it that historians and mathematicians have collaborated with scientists and said, “This is the special stuff.” This is the spirit molecule, as Rick Strassman calls it. I feel that experience alone blew the lid right off of anything I thought I ever knew with certainty about space, time, reality, or the ground beneath my feet. The fact that it could all go away that quickly in a matter of seconds and that I could be completely transported to this realm.
I didn't even describe how I felt there. I felt so much love and awareness and this truly limitless feeling where I had started to think about all the bad things in my life. It was so confounding at first that I was in ecstasy. Once I mentally came to this place, I had all these realizations and all these negative things that were happening in my life started building up. I was thinking about my uncle, who had been put in a nursing home at the time. I was afraid about him passing away and I realized, “It's okay because death is not the opposite of life. It's the opposite of birth.” That was the thought that entered my mind. I was like, “That means that death and birth are opposites, not death and life.”
Death isn't this completely static state afterlife where you're aware of your nothingness. It's the inverse of whatever we're experiencing now. That's a geometrical, mathematical, physical reality that whatever our experience that’s on, there's going to be an off and we're going to be tuned to a different frequency. I felt like I was in that place. I felt at home, love, and comfortable but there, I had no body. I knew that I was Nathan Jones. I saw this ascending stairway of rock and roll. It was like the yellow brick road and the stairway to heaven had a baby. There's my path to like rock and roll salvation not for myself. It felt like the most epic thing that had ever happened. I'm still waiting for a more epic thing to happen. I don't think it's going to.
What does God mean to you?
God used to mean certain things to me because I went to Catholic school from kindergarten to the end of high school. I learned a lot about empathy and how to treat others. God was like your grandfather that had eyes in the back of his head. You think you're going to get away with stealing that cookie, but God knows, so don't do it. I grew up in fear of God like, “God's going to punish me.” I would be afraid that I was going to be at heaven's gate and like St. Peter would be there. I'd be thinking about how great of a person I was and thinking I'm going to get in and then, “They're going to remember that time that I stole that candy bar. No.”
Permission To Create: Death isn't this completely static state afterlife where you're aware of your nothingness. It's the inverse of whatever we're experiencing now.
I was afraid that I was going to be rejected for my flaws, which is a huge psychological malady that our entire population faces. For me, God was a benevolent guy but he was about justice. He was definitely a guy for sure. It was almost like you got this sense that God was right for putting you in hell if you truly didn't deserve to be there because God is just. You can't put God in a box like that and that's what I've learned now. I thought God was this thing, when in reality, it lives inside of me, whatever it is, whatever God is.
There's this awareness of pure truth that we're able to touch. When I think about God now, I think about my experiences with ayahuasca, San Pedro, and different intelligent entities that I've encountered on different plant medicines and in different mental states from various activities. I no longer see God as a figurehead, but I see God as a flow of source energy that is able to permeate every single nerve ending, route, and atom of the universe and express itself in all these complex ways. That's how I see God now.
Why did you come here to planet earth as Nate Jones? What did you want to experience?
A good friend of mine, Cindy, told me, “You chose to come here and be Nate Jones and you have work to do.” In my state, I asked her, “What work?” Even though I know what it is. She's like, “I can't answer that for you. Only you can answer that.” I think that if I could sum it up, this would be my message. I came here to earth to be Nate Jones. To be someone that believed in themselves enough to convince other people to believe in themselves too. It isn't that hard now that I know that's my life's purpose. Every decision I make feels natural and easy because I know that if I'm operating from that mission statement then all of my company's values are completely aligned in this experience as Nate Jones if I'm empowering people to believe in themselves as much as I believe in myself.
It doesn't mean that you can be the most positive, amazing individual ever. It means you can challenge yourself to dig deep into the less than attractive aspects of your own nature and find a way to transform those qualities about yourself that you know are not in alignment with your deepest values. For me, I know I would not be in alignment with my deepest values if I was still eating animals and that is because of a combination of factors. Not just our environment. I don't think that it has as much to do with whether or not we believe we're superior to animals in any way. I think it has a lot more to do with holding onto emotions in our own psyche and then eating in a way that creates a new chemical mix in our brain to distract us from that.
I was listening to the Rich Roll Podcast, if you know him. He's a great podcaster and he does a great job of explaining that it’s about that collective thing like, “I want you to know about this cool thing because I know that's what you're about too, and I'm about it, and I learned this new thing.” I'm going to call it like this day’s woke culture. Everyone wants to expand their level of awareness and increase their sphere of empathy so that they can start identifying with the troubles of others and not stay in their little bubbles and echo chambers.
To me, if you're really doing that, then that means you're going to challenge your own beliefs and practices. If you are someone who believes in science, rationality and doing the compassionate thing and you see all this evidence that animal agriculture and all these things are contributing to deleterious effects on our environment, they're creating health pandemics. Not from COVID-19, which was born of us eating animals, but also because of the health impacts and strain it puts on our medical system. It is completely unjust for someone who has a heart attack or cancer or some event that happened to them to not be able to get the medical treatment they need because our medical centers and hospitals are too concentrated with people who have completely preventable diseases if they had eaten better or been educated to eat better.
It's a complete public health crisis that we're facing. The reason I believe in the plant-based vegan lifestyle is because at least for me, I'm not saying it's going to work for Eskimos, as a consumer in society, I know with data and I know by the way I feel that this is the best thing I can do to help alleviate all of that. It's like hitting so many goals with one single action. I think that's part of what I came here to do was to speak up about that. One is that we can liberate animals from these ways that we treat them that are so unfair and two, to help people realize that it's all tied into you being better and you being limitless and you believing in yourself and achieving your dreams. You have to look at what you're doing and see what's happening in order to try to make those changes.
It's such a beautiful statement, on ahimsa, which is non-violence towards yourself, anybody else, and our love towards the planets. Secondly, self-responsibility is very big because the actions that we do will have results. We have to be responsible for everything that we put into our body and if we're not putting the right things into our body, it's going to affect us. If you look at individuals, yes, it affects us but as a culture, as a large, if it's taxing the system it's going to make things a lot harder for the people that really need the help, support, and stuff. Nate, I want to thank you so much for coming on. How can we learn more about you? Tell us the name of your book and where we can find you.
The name of my book is Permission to Create: Embrace your Art and Unleash your True Potential. You can find my book for pre-order on the Indiegogo.com website. You can also go to my Facebook page at Facebook.com/natejonesacoustic. That's my business page there. It's called Nate Jones music. I also have a personal profile page. You're welcome to add me as a friend. Let me know that you’ve learned of me from this show. If you'd love to collaborate or do something together, I'm always looking for people to collaborate with creatively and business-wise.
My website is NateJones.world. You can book me for any type of event, whether you want someone to come play acoustic guitar and sing at your house for a few hours, you need music and DJ services for your wedding. You can go there. You can also reach me at (401) 644-5848 if you feel so compelled to give me a call because you loved this episode and what Anand and I talked about, then I am throwing that option out there for you.
Those are the places where you can find me. The book will be out in August 2021. The last thing I'll say, I want to clarify this for people. What is categorizing my book in a new genre is that not only am I putting the lyrics to the songs in the book and telling the stories that relate to each particular song, but I've also embedded into the actual pages of the book various QR codes. Those little things you see you can scan with your phone. When you do that, you'll be taken to a page where you're able to listen to my music while you read the book.
I've found that a lot of cars don't even have CD players in them anymore. I was thinking of putting a CD with the book but it's not worth it. It's so much easier for people to do this. In that way, you are getting access to the music through the book and it's right there for you as one combined product while you interact with the stories themselves. That is what makes Permission to Create a little different than any book you've ever read before.
I'm going to order one myself. Nate, would you honor us with another song to play us out?
I'd love to. This is Jude and it is a fairly new addition to my collection of guitars. It was a few before my San Pedro ceremony was Shane and Carolina, the first one. I ended up breaking this out and playing a little bit. I'm going to play one of the first songs I ever wrote. This song is called Organic Song. “My life is always been an organic song. My life is always been an organic song, that I sing along with. People in your past may have done you wrong. Living life too fast, trying to be strong. Try and make it last right where you belong. Just sing along. It doesn't matter how. You will find a way. The universe is ours and it's here to stay. We’ve all got the power and we're here to play, so sing along. I’ve got to step back from myself and catch my breath. People all around this planet, we must not forget that we live in a society of changes. We’re all living for that wild feeling of ageless. My life is always been an organic song. My life is always been an organic song, and I sing along. I sing along. My life is always been an organic song.”
Beautiful.
Important Links:
Carolina Leal - Past episode on Apple Podcasts
Shane Rose - Past episode on Apple Podcasts
Nate Jones - Spotify
Brendan Barbato - LinkedIn
Permission to Create: Embrace your Art and Unleash your True Potential
About Nate Jones
Nate Jones is a Grammy Ballot Recording Artist, Singer/Songwriter, and Creative Wellness Coach from Warwick, Rhode Island. His main interests are music, mindfulness, creativity, animals, and healing plant medicines including Ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms.
Nate is passionate about inspiring people to pursue their dreams while living healthy, creative, connected lives full of meaning and purpose. Fun fact: Nate used to be an American Ninja Warrior coach before making the transition to a full-time musician!
When he’s not on stage, Nate enjoys traveling the world, exploring other cultures, playing rock and roll in the basement, and living a vegan lifestyle in order to reduce harm toward animals, underprivileged communities, and the planet. He could talk for hours about music, visionary art, traveling, psychedelics, and personal growth.
