Hey, this is the moment. I'm Brian Koppelman. Thanks for listening.

All right, there's a big deal. Mike Mills from R. M.

R. Am is my guest today, and when I started this podcast, my goal was to talk to all four original members of RAM. It was a

stated goal because the podcast, the thing that started me wanting to have

this conversation with everybody I talked to is I've always wondered about moments when the earth shifts and one of the ways I would describe it when people say,

what are you after with these conversations was I've wanted since I'm 19 years old.

I wanted to ask the guys in REM what it felt like the first time that they

played together.

And like if they had any sense that this was a different thing, that these forces aligned in a way that would change the world.

So you're sitting here and I kind of, I just have to start by asking you I you know

whether you had a sense of it well certainly nothing on quite that scale but I do remember the first time we played together of

you know Bill and I had been an abandoned makin and we had left there to come to

college and through a woman that Bill was dating. We met Peter and Michael and I remember our first

rehearsal at the church and it was freezing cold and you know we had no idea what

was going to happen and Bill and I had some songs from our previous

incarnation in Mac and Georgia we showed them to those guys and I remember

listening to what they had done with our songs and going holy cow nobody

nobody else ever did that that sounds amazing because you know nobody played guitar like Peter it was all

arpeggiated instead of just thrashing away yes and and Michael had a beautiful

voice and a great gift from melody and he took our melodies and did cool things with them and I said wow this is

you know this is worth pursuing at least you know as a college side endeavor

whatever it was and and that's what got us started. Well that I was I was going going to ask you that question and we'll get to it about, um, about what it was about

...