Ziggy Marley, Tony Hale, The Happiness Lab’s Dr. Laurie Santos, and Raffi have a playdate.
I think for other problems we have in the world, the solution still lies in our children and how what tools we give them an how we teach them to communicate with the world. This is Ziggy Marley. I really love the guy because the man has heart. We approaching with respect and approach and with the knowledge that if we instill something in them and it's solidifies in them, then that is what they're going to put out there. So to treat the children them as a part of the process of making this world a better place. You know, Ziggy believes that treating kids with respect is the backbone of making the world a better place. Honestly, that reminds me of Raffie. It's something Ziggy inherited from his father, Bob Marley. My father had a lot of kids around. We had just children, even not his children. I mean, we can't learn a lot. That's why observing children recently in the middle of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, Ziggy turned to his own kids for inspiration. I'm feeling emotions about what's going on in the society, um racial injustice, and you know, the cool of it and the planet and those things inspire me. To speak out and speak out in music. But then my five years so you know him, comes around with his Google Gaga thing and he's like Google Gaga, Google Gaga, and I'm like, yeah, okay, I'm writing a song called Google Gaga. Now that's awesome. Ziggy emerged with a new kids album called More Family Time and yes there's a song called Google Gaga. He's one of the few singers I know who can successfully cross from adult music in the kids songs and back again. Yes, someone said that to me, like, oh, yore, you just pivot. You just go from wanted that so seen this um, you know, unless you want to be just with blindness. And none of us really are set in one way. So the duality of my of I can sing songs like your pienis mind, but I also have a child like part of me that wants to express itself too, and so I free that part of me without worrying about ego are what you might think. It gives me so much space to imagine. Yeah, I mean things would be pretty miserable without that childlike inspiration it to be. Yeah, Oh yeah, I need that chi, I need that childlike vibes. You know, it makes me laugh. It makes me have funny, it makes me be free. Yeah, I can feel it when I'm playing with my daughter Sonny. I make goofy faces to make her laugh and it's totally okay. Raffi has always preached that we should make space for playing our lives. But somewhere along the way, even ralf he forgot to have fun. He abandoned his playful side that urged to be silly. Doesn't die because we get older, We just get good at ignoring it. So why do we value playfulness and children and beat it out of ourselves when we become adults. I'm Chris Garcia and this is Finding Raffie, a ten part series for My Heart Radio and Fatherly in partnership with Rococo Punch, about the life, philosophy, and the work of Raffie, the man behind the music. Today on our show, Rafie gets his Groove Back In Raffie decided he wanted to stage a comeback. He hadn't played to a young audience in four years, and he was coming off a pretty rough period in his life. You'll remember that he and his wife deb had split up and Evergreen ever Blew his ecology album aimed at teens and adults. Was pretty much a bust. So Ralfie goes back on tour and after a few months he decides to go big. Thank you very much and hello everyone. I've waited a long time him for this to be here with you on Broadway. Now, playing on Broadway is huge. Raf He sold out six performances, but you could feel his serious side battling it out with his playful side. Sure, Raffie sang some old favorites like Baby Beluga, but he followed it up with descriptions of whales dying from toxic pollution. Then to lighten the mood, he did impersonations of Bob Dylan and Elvis. You're just a little white wing on the good Yeah, Blue, the Baby Babylon. This was a new Raffi. He ditched the Hawaiian shirt and moccasin's for a dresser and a tie, and in between songs he incorporated a series of stage gangs. And that's when Raffie hit on something really big. You know now what picture this Raffie gets a delivery on stage. It's a shopping bag. Oh, it says here, organically grown bananas. Mhm. Raffie reaches inside and pulls out a banana. Hello, it's a banana phone, a phone with a peel. Here's a family that looks like you could use a bananular phone. There's so many reasons that I love this. As a comedian, I appreciate the misdirect. It's an all time classic bit. There's got your nose, pull my finger and using a random object as a phone. It's this corny stage choke that plants the seeds for one of Ralphie's greatest hits, one he hasn't even written yet. So how many people does this happen to you? You got a phone called nine in the morning and rapp He says, okay, listen, I got this thing. I picked up my guitar and I went prett ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring ring. Banana phone. Musician Michael Creeper toured with Raffi during this period, and he says, you know, what do you think? And I don't even know it's worth anything or whatever. And I go, I'm coming right over cold that thought, you know, because it was brilliant. So I drove across town in my volks like and bus and uh we sat there for a full day in roping at the phone and basically in a day on his kitchen table, Dong ding, dong ding. I never thought Banana Phone would becomes a most popular rashy song. It's the best beats the rest cellular, modular, interactive, bodge ring ring. Sure, a lot of the kids are gonna listen to Banana Phone, and they won't hear all the puns we put in there. Those are for adults, but it doesn't really matter. The whole the song is fun no matter who listens to it. I mean, that's all we did. We just created puns the whole song. Dog up phone, Grandpa phone and a brama phone too. Oh yeah, my cell you learn bana, you learn fool. That playableness was good for us because we had fun writing it and performing it. It's a phone would appeal, and we do feel that those messages are eternal. You can have your phone and need it too. Kids need to know that it's okay. They need permission to play, you know, in their world, and adults too. We need that. Todd. Banana Phone is the moment that Raphie puts kids back in the center of it all. Using a banana as an imaginary phone is a wonderful former pretend play and then making a song about it. Then the play becomes musical, becomes a playful musical experience for the young child. You can feel the same energy from his first album single Bowl Songs, when he was just having fun and not caring about what people thought. Ralphie said he felt light and playful again. These were some of his favorite concerts ever. His parents Arto and Lucy noticed the change in Raffi two. There was something in his voice that moved them both. In his autobiography, Rafi wrote that his ailing father listened to the album every day, doing his exercises to the music, and Lucy danced to it with a family dog. Rafe's returned to playfulness was the key to his big comeback. The puns and basic silliness of Bananaphone allowed him to embrace the kidlike side of himself that he'd forgotten. But how do the rest of us do that? Can we change something so ingrained in our society? Do we even know how? I think so many of us have a hard time going back to these like playful, happy attitudes. We're working and we're worried about our kids. When can get dinner on the table, and rent is do and so on, And I think there's just this idea that that's silly stuff, you know, that's the stuff you give up, you know, once you get a real adult job. You know. I think when we, you know, forego playfulness, we do it at our own cost. Dr Lori Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale University and the host of the Happiness Lab podcast. She teaches one of Yale's most popular courses. It's known as the Happiness Class. The scientios we'd be more productive at work if we engaged in more playful practices. We'd end up being like more interesting to friends. We'd have hobbies and things to talk about with people. So it concrease our social connection, which also can increase our well being. Every available study of happy people suggest that happy people are more social right, they prioritize time with their friends and family members, and they really try to connect with the people around them. It's funny. The first song on Rafe's first album single, Songs for the Very Young, is the more we get together, the happier will be. It's like straight out of the positive psychology, you know. It could be a title of a like journal paper and then feel the positive psychology. The more we get together together together, the more we get together happy be because your friends are my friends and my friends are your friends. The more we get together happy, you will be. Lorie isn't just a professor at yet. She also lives on campus. She's ahead of college, which means she's kind of like a dorm mom. Laurie eats her meals with students, and she's there to experience the ups and downs of college life. When I took on that new role, I was expecting college to be, you know, fun and parties. What I wasn't expecting to see was the mental health crisis up close and personal, with so many students reporting that they feel depressed and anxious, and even ones that weren't you know, having like diagnosed mental health condition were still just stressed and kind of fast forwarding life, you know, and ask students like how's it going to be, Like, oh, I can just fast forward to mid terms or if I can just get like to the weekend, And it's like, you only get four years, you know, for our five years of college, right, you know, if you're lev seven, you only get seven years of college. You know, it just felt so sad that they were kind of watching them fast forward through. And so my interest in the happiness stuff came out of wanting to teach my students some better strategies, right I did. I didn't like seeing them so depressed and anxious, and I really wanted to help. And I realized, you know, this is such a universal problem where we feel like we're not doing it well. And if you're a parent, you know, it becomes an even worse universal problem because you're thinking not just about your own happiness, but what you can do to ensure that your kids are happy too. How do we get this back as adults if we become unhappier as we age. Yeah, I think, you know, this is actually something that I think about a lot, and the fact that I've been working on a lot, because you know, I sometimes pontificate and give all this advice about happiness that I'm not necessarily following myself. And one thing I realized often causes me not to have fun is that I'm just too hard on myself. Right, It's hard for me to take a playful attitude because I'm just so scared I'm not going to be perfect or mess up or you know, sometimes fun things require being a beginner. Learning some new game or some new skill can be fun, but not if you're like I have to be perfect. Oh my gosh, I'm so embarrassed, like how am I not perfect? And so I think the first step to dealing with that is to not worry about other people, because they're not usually as bad as you are. Judging yourself anyway, it's to work on your own self compassion. You know, that really resonates with me as a stand up comedian because everything I do is based on people's reactions, but it's never as terrible as the reaction I have afterwards. Like after a I'll think I was like, oh my gosh, I bombed. People will go, hey, that was really great. They will sincerely say it was great, But inside I'm like, oh that was terrible. Um, well, why why am I doing this? Doctor? Why do I do this to myself? Why did I choose to risk public humiliation as a career. You know the theme of so many of these things in this happiness field is that our minds lie to us. We think you're being so hard on yourself because it's going to make you better, you know, if not harsh on yourself, if you give yourself the benefit of the doubt, you're just not going to be a good comedian. Right. We think we have to be this you mean, integral sergeant to ourselves to get anything done, to be good at anything. But again, this is a spot where if you look at the scientific literature, it shows that our intuition here is just wrong. Researchers in the field of self compassion actually looked at veterans from Afghanistan and taught them, you know, ways of being more self compassionate. And what they found is that these veterans who experienced self compassion are less likely to develop something like PTSD, you know, they're less likely to be anxious after ward. So interesting. My my parents have gone through a lot of trauma, and especially my mom, and they've been through so much together. You know, my dad was a political prisoner. He had some mental health issues the last ten years of his life. He had Alzheimer's disease until he finally passed away about four years ago. And my mom is so resilient she could still find humor in any situation. We're at the funeral home after my dad dies. We're sad, and my mom asked the person there if they offer a senior discount, and we just all start laughing, and she's always she is the Queen of gallows humor. What is it about finding humor or laughter in the darkest moments? Yeah, well, I think it's you know, it's just a way of kind of shifting your perspective. And this is something you know that so much of the research shows. It's also something that I think a lot of really very wise ancient traditions showed us too. You know. The Buddhists had this wonderful parable that they call the parable of the second Arrow. The way it goes is that Buddha asks his disciples, you know, if a guy's walking down the street and he gets shot with an arrow, is that bad? Disciple say, yeah, it sucks to get shot with an arrow, And Buddha asked, you know, is it worse to get shot with a second arrow? You imagine, like you know, arrow number two comes and strikes you again, is that worse? People say, yeah, that, you know sucks twice as much to give us, you know, struck with you arrows, And Buddhist as you know, the first arrow is life. That's your circumstances. That's what they call duca. That's suffering. You can't avoid that, right, that's the you get alzheimer, as you get deaths in life. You have bad circumstances. But the second arrow is your reaction to it. And Buddha says, you know, the second arrow is the most painful one because it's shot by ourselves. Like whenever we get hit with the second arrow, it's us reacting in a bad way, and it's worth remembering that we can always control our second arrow. You know, this kind of advice for me has been really powerful because there's so many times in our life when our misery is caused by us. Listening to Laurie, it explains so much about my mom, and it made me wonder about Raffie too. He's also always found his way back to a playful place, even if it was it nurtured in his childhood. No one had to encourage it. It was just there, as it is in all children, you know. I think maybe the more interesting question is who discouraged it. Let's put it this way. There were many adults in my life as a child who didn't quite appreciate how the needs for play was so strong within me as a as a child. But that's a long, long conversation. It's it's not easy to put it into a short answer. Um, I don't know what else to say at the moment, Hey, Tony, how's it going. It's going well. Gosh, you sound so good and I do not sound good. I don't know you should hear it from this vantage point, it sounds great, good. God. I need a lot of affirmation, constant affirmation, so do I actually, But thank you so much for talking to me this morning and taking the time. There are a few people who get paid to be playful and do it with such fun abandoned like Tony Hale. You probably know Tony as Buster Bluth from Arrested Development and Gary Walsh on Veep. In real life, he's a dad to his teenage daughter Lloyd. I wanted to talk to Tony because it's his job to be America's man child, so he's got to be the guy who knows how to keep that kid like feeling alive into adulthood. It's so funny because there's such a playful side in the characters that you've played. And um, I'm wondering if that's if that's just who you are. Are you like, where does that come from? Um? I think yeah. I mean I will say, like Buster and Gary, there's a I think there's an anxiety through line. When I was a kid, I was very anxious. I was an asthmatic kid, and I had a lot of anxiety around that. And I think I was when I was a kid, I just wanted everybody to like me and a lot of people pleasing stuff. And I had panic attacks when I was a kid. And so even though that sucked walking through that as a kid, it's been it is nice to kind of bring it into your work, like, I know what, I know what a panic attack feels like, I know I know what severe anxiety can how that can manifest. And so it's nice to kind of have that history. Even though it's not something that I struggle with as much as I used to, I really kind of relate to this anxiety, you know, and I am so cautious of it and I really don't want to like pass it down to my daughter, you know. And so even though when I'm with her, I do feel a great sense of calm uh and peace, then I I don't know I've ever felt like it's just such a warm and beautiful feeling. But some days I look at the front page to the newspaper, um and it seems like it's going to end today, you know, And so of course, of course, yeah, um, how do you, like, do you talk to your daughter about these big issues that are going on in the world, like climate change or the pandemic, or even anxiety. How do I navigate this? Yeah, and it's it is hard. You've obviously heard of helicopter parenting. That's a very common term. But there's a new one I've heard called snowplow parenting, where you you just you just try to remove all challenges in front of them because you don't want them to walk through anything, which, by the way, I completely get. I don't want my daughter to be in pain. I don't want her to have anxiety. I don't want I don't want to be challenged. I want to remove all challenges so that she has a very easy and smooth path. The fact is, like you and I are who we are because of what we've been through, and so I have to I want so bad to fix and be like, Okay, this is how you can get around that challenge. This is how you can take this, you know, shortcut, and it's like no, I mean I gotta sit and listen and understand and allow her to walk through it. And that is really hard. It's really hard. How do you harness fun in spite of all the crap that's out there? Like what, like, what has it done for you to find happiness or laughter even in these dark moments? Yeah? I mean, this has obviously been a very challenging two years for so many people. But at the same time, I think it has it has forced me to slow down and even though it's been very frustrating, Like my daughter and I have kind of watch movies. We try to watch movies outside I don't know, Like we watch YouTube videos together and just I cannot it makes me laugh so hard. There's these YouTube videos of like people going on these roller coaster rides and screaming and her and I just like, how there's this one YouTube of it's really gross, but these have you seen that YouTube about the parents and if they're in the bathroom and they asked their kid to get them toilet paper and the kid comes in, comes in with toilet paper and then they put in the tela on their arms, as they're walking away and then they're and then they're like, oh my gosh, oh no, and these kids, these kids are like and they just absolutely lose it. It is the funny thing. I'll take that over any sitcom and so like we just like try to find stuff like that and laugh. Did you play a lot of music for your daughter when she was growing up? Yeah, we did, and we we always love when she was little. I missed those times we would little. We would always go to those play spaces and with other parents and you'd sit around a circle and you'd sing the songs. And when I was youtubeing Raffie last night, just those kids and that kind of five to six range where they don't give any crap about what people think of them or if it's cool or anything like that, and they just fully engage and then he engages back. It's that age is a really really beautiful age. It's so cool. We just actually started taking my daughter to a music class on Monday mornings and as soon as um, you know, the teacher of the musician starts playing like she goes bonkers, and it's like so free. She she's not self conscious at all. She starts like wiggling and throwing your arms up, and it's such a beautiful and pure thing um to watch. Yeah, and it's it. Actually it actually switches now and my donors fifteen. So now I do all those actions and she's humiliated by it, just like I was never humiliated by my challenge. She was young, but now I'm like the freak and she's like, you really need to just settle down. I couldn't let Tony go without getting his take on Banana Phone. I just want to sit here and list and two Raffi song Banana Phone with you ring ring ring, ring, ring, ring ring, Banana Phone. I love that so much. Do you know what I love about what he's doing is he's giving permission to these kids. You know, everybody looks at a banana and wants to pick up the banana, go hey glow Like it's just kind of it's just a common thing. But it gives a child permission to be silly, a child permission to kind of think beyond kind of whatever their present narrative is. And it's like, man, that is such a gift, I think to so many people. We all need it. To call a friend of mine, don't need computer or TV to have a real good time. I'll call for pizza, I'll call my cat, I'll call the Whitre house, have a chat in my place, to call around the world cooperator, get me bei Jing Jing jing Jing. Over the past months, I've spoken to Raffie a lot, and more than just a few times. He showed me his playful side, cracking jokes and just playing around. You know, long before the iPhone, there was the b phone. Yeah, the banana phone pre dated the iPhone by many years and I'm still going strong and it hasn't been reinvented. It's uh a pocket cellular, if you will. At first, I thought it was his way of breaking the ice and dealing with the awkwardness of being interviewed. Then I wondered if it was his way of deflecting a question he didn't want to answer. But now I see it as his mission, like he chose to be playful as a way to survive. Maybe it's how he deals with his strict upbringing, his divorce, or as an escape from witnessing a dying planet. It's amazing the amount of play that has been in my songs. Overtly, I sometimes listen to my old stuff and I go, RAPI, you dog, look at what you did, man, I just kind of you know, I really went for it at every point, I just yeah, baby, So you know, it's just my way of enjoying every single day. Joy is not something to be postponed ever. I love a great comeback. Story plays a way of life. Really, it's an intelligence and a way of life. And I actually think, um that as we grow older, we're not meant to lose play. I think we're actually meant to deepen our faculties in it. Next time on Finding Raffie, you know, are you only just gonna remember me for my six little ducks and apples and bananas and baby Buluga? That you're gonna look at my second career, my child honoring work. What about my thirty years as a climate activist? Will you take a look at all this music and advocacy activism? Will you see the coherence in it? The Earth and child link. Finding Raffi is a production of My Heart Radio and Fatherly in partnership with Rococo Punch. It's produced by Catherine Finalosa, Meredith Hannig, and James Trout. Production assistance from Charlotte Livingston Alex French is our story consultant. Our senior producer is Andrea Swahee. Emily Foreman is our editor. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusade. M raph E's music is courtesy of Troubadour Music Special thanks to Kim Layton at Troubadour. Our executive producers are Jessica Albert and John Parotti at Rococo, punch Ty Trimble, Mike Rothman and Jeff Eisenman at Fatherly and Me. Chris Garcia, thank you for listening. Your name is probably the most fun friendly name you can have rap because it rhymes with daffy. That could be it