I've got an email from a lot of you

lately saying, "Can we do a show just

off the news? Can one show not be in the

grim march of events?" So, here it is.

How do you intro Brian Eno

[Music]

has a claim as much as anyone does to

have invented the genre of ambient

music.

>> So there's no narrative quality to the

music. It just sort of starts, stays

pretty much in one place and then ends.

>> He certainly coined the term, built out

the philosophy. sort of has eaten a lot

of the music we now listen to, but also

he's just done so many other things.

He's produced seminal albums by you too.

>> The talking heads

>> glory Anderson

Coldplay.

[Music]

Hell, Eno composed the sound that plays

when you boot up Windows 95.

Do you remember that one? A lot of sound

we just take for granted. A lot of the

way sound is now made. Eno helped bring

that into existence. A lot of his work

on creating generative systems that make

music can be seen as a forerunner to

much of today's AI systems.

Anino is more than just a sonic

technician or tinkerer. He's this

wonderful thinker and philosopher of art

and just being a human being.

>> At least I personally am not interested

in the idea of art being a sort of

existential challenge to you.

>> And he's got this really delightful new

book out, what art does, an unfinished

theory, as well as a new album with Bey

Wolf called Liinal.

I wanted to talk to him about all of it

or at least as much of it as I could. As

always, my email escline shown

times.com.

[Music]

Brianino, welcome to the show.

>> Hello, Ezra. Nice to meet you.

>> So, your new book is called What Art

Does. And I guess tell me, what does art

do?

Well, perhaps I should tell you first

why I thought that question needed

answering. Because um in education in

England, and in fact, I think probably

in most parts of the world, the budgets

that always get cut are the arts budgets

because there are apparently more

important things that we should be

teaching people. Science, engineering,

financial, technology, that kind of

thing.

>> Yeah. You should be making short trades.

>> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

>> Are you really alive if you can't short

a stock?

>> But I've always thought that art is

actually one of the most important

things that humans do with their time.

You know, in my book, there's a long

list of things that I consider could

come under the headline of art. And it

includes, of course, obvious things like

symphonies and photographs and

paintings, but it includes cardigans and

jewelry and makeup and tattoos and all

the things that humans do that they

don't have to do. None of those things

have survival benefits in the obvious

sense. They're things we do to do

something in our mind, to change our

mind in some way. So, what does art do?

Why do we like it? I have this phrase in

the book that um children learn through

play and adults play through art. And I

think that's really what it does. But

when we look at children and we watch

them playing,

we don't think, "Oh, they're just

wasting their time. They should do

something more serious." We realize that

when children play, they're learning.

their understanding about materials,

about social relationships, about their

own bodies, their own minds, about where

they live, all of those things that are

very important to understand.

And they do that infallibly and with a

huge appetite. That's what children like

doing. And we understand, all of us

understand that that's the way they

learn things.

And then round about the age of 11, we

suddenly forget that idea and we think

people have got to start working to

learn. Um, but I think people carry on

playing. But what they do is they call

what they then do, they call it art. Art

is grown up play. It's a way of

imagining things and imagining what they

would feel like and imagining how they

connect to other things that we know

about. and then feeding that knowledge

back into our lives and into our uh

relationships.

>> I want to zoom in on a word you use

there which is feel. One of the central

arguments of the book is that art is a

way we explore or attune to our

feelings.

>> Mhm.

>> And I guess that raises another

question. Uh you you say and I agree

with this that feelings have a bad

reputation.

So to you what do feelings do and why do

they matter?

Yes. So, they have a bad reputation

because they're very hard to quantify

and measure. And of course, science

wants things that are easily comparable

and easily describable in in some kind

of language of quantity and measure. Um,

feelings because they're subjective are

very difficult to do that with. However,

the first response we have to most

things is a feeling response.

Particularly if they're unfamiliar

things, what's the first thing that

happens when you meet somebody? You kind

of form an impression of them quite

quickly. You think, "He looks like a

decent person. He looks quite friendly.

He doesn't look hostile. I think I could

get on with him." Or, "She looks pretty

interesting and I think I'm in love with

her." The feelings form very quickly

actually um and they form without really

much valition on our part and they are

in fact our first antenna, our first

judgment of a situation, our first sense

of whether it's dangerous or friendly or

useful or useless is made on the basis

of feelings. And then after that we

backfill with other information we find

and we sometimes find that our feelings

the quick response were were incorrect.

But surprisingly often we find that they

were actually exactly on the money. I

knew that as soon as I saw her. One

thing that I was thinking about while

you were talking is

a a way I think to say

what our modern relationship is here is

that we think feelings lie and we think

facts don't. And I've come to believe

that's a a very

>> uh simplistic way to think about both

feelings and and facts.

>> But what I am doing to to make form into

content here while you talk,

>> I have this whole list of questions and

in a rational, coherent, factual way, I

know what the next question should be.

>> What I'm actually doing is watching a

feeling that is moving around in my

chest while you speak.

>> Mhm. And there's a moment when I know

that you said something that's the next

place we should go and it's not the

thing on my sheet of paper,

>> right?

>> It's this whole thing I'm doing right

now in a way. And maybe it's wrong.

>> Yes.

>> But no great interviews

are logical. Like they just aren't like

we're working in a medium that does not

work that way. Conversation does not

work logically.

>> Mhm.

>> And I do think we've degraded

our relationship, our attunement to what

we feel. Yes.

>> And that's actually a mistake. So I

understood one argument you're making

about art which which feels true to me

is that it's a way of practicing our

attunement to our feelings.

>> Mhm.

>> I I think that opens something

interesting here. One thing in the book

that connected for me was you quote a

musician friend of yours John Hassel who

you says asks the question what is it

that I really like and says being able

to answer that is the most important

question. Why?

>> So, we're being told probably about 10

or 12,000 times a day what we ought to

like, what other people like, what some

people would prefer that we liked. Um,

in we're told that in the form of

advertising, in the form of political

messages, in the form of all of the

things that try to persuade us to think

or believe one thing rather than

another. Um, it's the biggest industry

in the western world actually.

persuasion. Um, and it's very easy in

that sea of that flood actually of that

tsunami of um, suggestions about what we

ought to like to forget what we actually

do like. So I think what he's doing

there, he's suggesting that the deepest

feelings we have are actually the most

reliable things that we know about. One

of the things that happens when you're

looking at art or listening to art,

something connects to you and you think,

"That's what I really like. That's what

really moves me." And I think when that

happens, you should pay attention to

that. You should you should think, why

do I really like that? What does that

mean that I like that thing? What what

does that connect me to that's so

important to me? Um, and we frequently

don't do that because the distraction

rate is so high. There are so many

things to think about all the time.

>> I think this question of what is it that

I really like and trying to pay

attention to your response to different

pieces of art is interesting because it

it gets it a mystery to me about being

human, which is why

things that are

legendarily beautiful works leave me

completely cold

>> even as they have inspired thousands of

books. and uh and comiums from others

and then I'll hear something or I'll see

something and my soul will leap into my

throat. I I've been obsessed this year

with an album by an artist named Drum.

And the album is called Undertangled

Silence. And this one song, Wax Cap, I

just keep listening to and listening to

when I give my headphones to somebody

else,

they quite rarely have the experience I

am having with that song.

>> Right? it in a way that makes me feel

lonier

but also a little bit more unique.

>> So you're an artist but you're also an

artist who both yourself creates and

helps others create things for mass

consumption.

And so how do you think about that

difference of attunement in different

people? How some people can hear

something and it is their favorite thing

ever.

>> Yes.

>> And others will put that same thing on.

>> Yes. and they hear nothing but noise.

>> I I think the answer to that is that of

course when we look at any piece of art,

we're not looking just at that piece of

art. We're looking at this piece of art

in terms of our own personal history.

So, it's like you're hearing the latest

sentence in a conversation you've been

having for your whole life. I I wrote

this little story once about somebody

finding,

you know, in some post-apocalyptic time

finding an art museum and the whole

place is wrecked, but there's lots of

pictures still around. And they find one

picture that obviously hasn't been

finished, which is just a white canvas,

which of course in fact is Malovich's

white on white. So it's it has no

meaning to that person who doesn't share

its history.

Part of the value of any piece of work

and the power of it is how it sits in

the cultural conversation in general and

in your cultural conversation in

particular. So, you know, a little

difference that is very significant to

you may be meaningless to somebody else.

For instance, I've always had a rather

blind spot for Shakespeare.

No English person is ever supposed to

admit that, but Shakespeare's never

thrilled me. Um, and I find I find it

hard to read and quite unrewarding. Um,

so when a critic, a writer picks out a

Shakespeare sentence and talks about its

significance, they do that because they

know the rest of the Shakespeare cannon

and they know where it sits in there and

what value it therefore has. It doesn't

mean anything to me because I don't know

any of those things and I don't care

about them in that case either. Well,

let me offer a cliched

uh concern, which is that this is a way

that art fails. I think when people

think of art now, they don't first think

of music or food on a plate or the way a

building looks. They think of something

you see in a museum.

>> Mhm. And I go to a fair number of of

shows or try to and am often left cold

in part because it feels like there is

so much cultural conversation going on.

>> Yeah.

>> And I'll read the little placard on the

wall next to a piece by an artist

working at the peak of their powers who

is being venerated as one of the great

artists of our age. And

>> this little placard is telling me that,

you know, what a meditation this is on

identity and borders. And I'm looking

I'm like, is it though?

And one of the um one of the ways art if

you'll locks people out is by by

demanding so much literacy in a cultural

conversation.

Well, one of the problems that fine art

faces is the problem of its own

irrelevance to most people's lives. You

know, nobody buys a 2 million pound or a

20 million pound painting just cuz they

like it. they they buy it because

there's a good chance they'll be able to

sell it again at a profit or it secures

them a sort of social status that is um

not easily obtainable otherwise. So you

have to make it seem very important. You

have to pretend that it isn't just an

object of commerce. It's an attempt to

build something up by by repackaging it

in this kind of crust of usually

incomprehensible

language. I think some of the worst

writing in the world is writing about

art, about fine art. And it ought to be

much simpler. As you said, the one of

the reasons you like it is because it

doesn't translate into words. It doesn't

turn into sentences. it hits you in some

other place, some other part of your

mind.

>> You did an album in the last couple

years with uh Fred again, who I think is

you've been a mentor to and who's

another artist who I really love. And

there's a song on that album that became

big. And I remember the first time I

heard it. Uh the song is called Come On.

>> Mhm.

>> And I've probably listened to it. It was

one of my top listened songs that whole

year. I want to play a little piece of

it. I want to ask you about it.

Please make me.

[Music]

>> So, we've been talking about feelings

>> and the thing that happened to me when I

listened to that song and every single

time I've listened to it since,

including in that moment, is something

about the way you've distorted that

sample. Mhm.

>> is incredibly physical for me.

>> There's something I think it's because I

don't really know why that works, but I

think it's something to do with the

sense of a of near incoherence of the

voice. It's like somebody trying to say

something and it come

it's it's broken, you know, it doesn't

come out clearly and straightforwardly.

So there's a sort of either a reticence

or a feeling of

the machine doesn't work any longer. The

machine that is me speaking isn't quite

working. It's defective in some way.

>> But the way you describe it there is

almost frightening where to me it's

extraordinarily comforting. It's a

feeling

>> I almost never have. I I mean it's

there's very little I can put on that

gives me the exact feeling of that song

and nor would I be able to describe the

feeling. Yes.

>> But it it is much more like a it's not

jarring for me. It's like a caress.

>> If you had to name the emotion that that

song has, what would you call it? I

mean, for me, it's there's something

melancholy and like a nostalgia for

a different future or something. A

nostalgia for a future that didn't

happen. It's which isn't sad, but it's

it's a to me it's a it's a very moving

song actually. Um I find it enormous I

love hearing you say that because I have

such a different experience. I find it

enormously comforting

>> that song.

>> That's that's lovely.

>> And that there's something

Yeah. very physical. It's like having a

blanket pulled over you.

>> Mhm.

And I even find that I mean I I find

this interaction so interesting. I had

Jeff Tweety on this um show years ago uh

from Wilco and we were talking about the

song his impossible Germany and I was

asking about the lyrics of it because

I've always found it to be such a

beautiful song about the dislocations of

travel.

>> Mhm.

Impossible Germany

[Music]

Japan

wherever you go wherever you land.

>> And that is not what he was doing with

that song at all. It was like a

misremembered line from a murder novel

as I remember his description. And just

the idea that you can create something

that it's not just that it's evoking

such feelings in in me or others, but

that the feelings are so different than

even the ones it gives you.

>> Yes. When you're making something, it

starts to come alive when you start to

have feelings that you didn't expect

from it. You know, do you start out with

something? You think, well, I'm going to

make this that, the other, and as it

starts to form, it starts to change. it

starts to become something that you

hadn't imagined. And you can either say,

"Okay, I don't want that." Which is what

a lot of people do. They shut that down

and try to get back to what they're

supposed to be doing. But I don't do

that. And I think a lot of artists don't

do that. They we say, "Oh, I wonder

where it's going. I wonder where it's

taking me." And you just carry on then

and think

there's a certain point you reach.

Either way, you can't make it any

better.

you notice that what you're adding is

starting to subtract rather than to add

or you've hit the deadline, you had to

stop.

This is often a lot of the best things

I've made have been because I hit the

deadline and I couldn't spend any longer

[ __ ] them up. Sorry,

>> you're you're you're fine. There's a um

I think this gets at another interesting

distinction. So, I think we've been

talking about the exposure to pieces of

art here, if I'm going to try to define

it more tightly,

>> and the way that they create a space to

be attentive to feelings arising in you

that you might not have expected.

>> Yeah.

>> Then once you have discovered that it

gives you that feeling,

it can become a tool to reevoke it.

>> Mhm.

>> I put on that song, Come on. to feel a

certain way.

>> Yes.

>> Uh I put on, you know, your your series

of ambient albums uh because I actually

know how they will make me feel and I'm

trying to shift my emotional landscape

in that direction at a certain moment.

Mhm.

>> And I I always think this is really

interesting, this difference between art

as something you pay attention to or

music is maybe something you pay

attention to and then music as something

you use to change the way you pay

attention to everything else.

>> That's a very nice distinction. I wish

I'd thought of that myself.

>> Well, it's very built on things you've

written. So, but I'd be curious to hear

how you think about that.

I think when you're when you're working

as an artist, you're always world

building, you're creating a world. It

might be a huge world like uh you know

George Orwell's 1984. That's a whole

world completely thought out. And when

you go when you read that book, you

decide to live in that world for a time

and you decide to experience the

feelings of living in a world like that.

Because the wonderful thing about art is

that it isn't dangerous. You can live in

that terrible totalitarian world and

then you can shut the book and go and

put on uh a Fred again song or whatever

else you want to do. Um I'm always sort

of trying to find something that

that suddenly makes me think, oh,

there's a different kind of world. I've

never been in a world like that before.

If if we go back to the idea of adults

playing, I think that's what we're

doing. Pretending, imagining situations

and then sort of figuring out the

mechanics of them by imagining them is

the clue to everything that makes humans

such a powerful and probably dangerous

species. So even if you thought art was

not valuable for anything else at all,

you would have to say that this process

of giving our minds a way of imagining

futures and im in and virtually living

in them. Actually living in them in our

imagination must be a very important

thing for human beings. I hear this so

often from from artists and and in books

I've read about art.

this cultivation

of humanity, right? This cultivation of

different futures. I know you're doing a

lot of work on on on Gaza and I've been

doing a lot of podcasts on on this topic

and and as part of that work, I was

reading a book by Philipe Sans who will

by the time this comes out have been on

the show and this is a book about the

Holocaust and the development of the

idea of genocide. And one of the central

characters this book tracks is a man

named Hans Franc.

>> Yes.

>> Who is under Hitler, the uh governor of

Poland. And the worst things in history

happen under Hans Franc.

>> And a point Sans makes about him that is

very very very present in his biography

is how cultured a man he was.

>> Yes. Yes.

>> A beautiful classical pianist. Somebody

who much more so than most people does

really did care. Mhm.

>> about art, about literature, about

music, about paintings that he got it

>> and at the same time was so much more

capable of inhumity

and callousness. And so some part of me

rebelss on this. I often hear novelists

and others as if it is an equation with

a single output. If you expose yourself

to more of these worlds, more Beethoven,

more Bach, you will become a more

civilized person.

>> And yet, so much of the most univilized

civilizations

uh or parts of our civilizations have

been driven by people who were

enormously cultured. In fact, that was

part of what they believed made them so

superior to everybody else.

>> Yes. No, you're absolutely right. And in

saying that, it helps us use our minds

in that way. I'm not saying necessarily

for good things. It just makes our minds

better at imagining, but they can just

as easily be imagining terrible things.

You know, one of the great art

collectors of the 20th century was um

Himmler

had a huge collection which he'd stolen

mostly from Dutch and low countries

Jews, French Jews. um and he was

apparently very uh very learned in that

area. But to to your point, the ability

of something to make a mind work better

isn't the same as the ability of

something to make a mind work to good

ends. That's a different problem. That's

a that's a problem of morality,

spirituality, something like that.

Um, I'm not going to stay on this topic

for very long because I want this to be

a somewhat lighter conversation than

this, but after reading uh Sans's book,

um, I started reading a biography of

Martin Buber, the great Jewish

theologian and and one of the great

humanists of the 20th century.

>> Yes.

>> And it it was again so strange. Hansf

Franc loved Bach and Booer loved Bach

and says that much of who he is as an

adult is formed in sitting in

concerts listening to the contradictions

inside box music.

>> Mhm.

>> And that two people, two souls can I

mean far from our like is is come on

melancholic or comforting, right? that

that it can that these works of art can

take people in such different

directions. I'm not blaming Bach for um

anything that Hans Frank did, but it it

just speaks to something very very

complex in like the feeling

>> faculties and what we bring to them,

right?

>> We we sort of we've been told somehow

that art is this very important thing

that is good for you.

>> Uh and I think it is, but I don't think

it's good for you in that way. I don't

think it necessarily improves you in any

moral dimension whatsoever. I think it's

quite possible that um as some people

now insist, Picasso was a bit of a [ __ ]

>> He was more than a bit of a [ __ ]

>> Well, I'm I'm going light on him.

>> I mean, a remarkable artist, but uh a

complicated person to say the least.

>> Yeah. But it's funny that we

expect that it would be otherwise really

because it's because we've we've sort of

imputed a moral dimension to art. And

all I'm saying is that no, I think it's

much more biologically functional than

than we think it is. I don't think it's

such a spiritual moral business being an

artist.

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>> I've always found this very interesting.

You you read the um Roberto Blano book,

The Savage Detectives.

>> No.

>> Uh it's a beautiful fiction book. Um and

one of the reasons I love it is it's

because it's about a personality that I

have always been fascinated by and do

not myself have, which is the

personality that would give everything

anything to create art. In this case,

young poets.

>> There are people I mean you you know

them. I've known some of them who for

them art is everything.

>> They put their whole souls, their whole

lives into projects that most people

would walk by if they were hung on a

wall or playing in a store and not give

a second thought to. And then I know

other people

>> who see no role or understand no role

for for art in their life. What to you

differentiates those people? the people

for whom art becomes everything the most

important thing uh even in society

cannot give a damn about what they are

creating

>> and the people whom see feel no

resonance to it

>> yeah have you ever heard of place in

Switzerland loan called the muse dear

brut

>> it's it's the museum it's the I think

the greatest museum of outsider art in

the world so these are people who none

of whom were called artists in their

lifetime. A lot of them were in mental

institutions and they had nothing much

else to do and they painted for their

whole lives. Some of them did it

completely in secret. Nobody even knew

until they died that they had been

working as artists for their whole life.

And my

kind of feeling about that is that if

you if you can invent a world that you

prefer to live in, which is sort of what

those artists were doing, then why not

stay in it? You know, if if the rest of

the world is awkward and you don't fit

into it, it's got lots of sharp corners

and you can make this world where

suddenly

you you're sort of in control of it.

you've you've decided the terms of that

world. And I think I think a lot of

what's happening when artists are

working is that they're trying to make

the world they would prefer to be in.

Now that sometimes gets dismissed as

escapism, but I I don't think it is. And

anyway, I don't think there's anything

wrong with escapism. It's sometimes a

really good idea to escape and to get

out of things and think about them from

a distance rather than from being in the

center of them. Um but this is another

of the misconceptions about art that a

that it ought to be

difficult to do and I think there are

many people who I would call artists who

never experience any difficulty with

what they're doing. It's just what they

do. People who make beautiful cakes for

example um or who love doing one of my

daughters loves doing um masipan

decorations on cakes and they're

beautiful the things she makes. Um, but

I'm sure she wouldn't call that being an

artist, but I can't see what the

difference is. You know, why why is that

not being an artist? Um, so that's one

of the other art world things that in

order to make it valuable to justify the

high prices, we've got to think of some

way of kind of making it seem abnormal,

making it seem like something that only

abnormal humans can do. What are you

doing with art? Uh when I think of your

uh library,

it's not all creating a world that you

would like to live in. What is you've

sort of given all these legible

motivations for other people. Is your

motivation as legible to yourself?

At best, what I'm doing is

thinking

um as I often do, I often start

something by thinking I I wish there was

a piece of music like this. whatever

this means in my mind. For instance, one

of my best known records is Music for

Airports. And that came from a very

direct experience like that of sitting

in a a newly built airport in Germany

near Cologne. And everything about the

airport was dazzlingly beautiful. It was

lovely structure and they had terrible

German disco music

playing really loud through the whole PA

system in the airport.

And I just thought nobody's thought

about this issue of what kind of music

would belong in this place. You know, we

use music in public all the time, but

does anybody actually sit down and think

seriously what would be the best kind of

music to have in this important place

where people are arriving, leaving,

going on to important new phases in

their lives or going back to loved ones

or whatever. It ought to be something a

bit more.

So anyway, a bit more. I I started think

what what should it be more of?

So I started thinking and trying to make

a kind of music that I thought would

make the airport experience feel

important and special.

[Music]

>> And there were quite a lot of technical

considerations

like obviously it mustn't interfere with

communication. Um people must be able to

talk over it. um it mustn't keep

stopping and starting. Um it must not

matter if it gets interrupted. So it

should be a sort of continuum that you

won't feel like you've missed something

if there's an interruption. So on and so

on. So that was a that was a very

conscious

act of making a making a work of art.

But most of what I do isn't really

motivated by such high high sounding

ideas. Most of the time I'm fiddling

around and something starts to happen.

Something

intrigues me or some feeling starts to

happen. I think I like that feeling. How

can I make how can I bring that forward?

How how can I make more of it? And I

often don't know why I'm doing that or

how it will end up. Um, I have an

archive of about 11,000 unfinished

pieces of music. Um, and what I do

occasionally is pull one of those out

and suddenly I haven't seen it for 15

years maybe.

>> 11,000 unfinished pieces of music.

That's

>> Yeah, some of them some of them are very

short.

>> Let let me hold you on Music for Airarts

for a minute. um one of

>> my favorite albums and the second song

on that album 21 uh the tracks are not

so the tracks are not so evocatively

named given how evocative they are

>> is like a very important piece of music

to me so I want to play a couple seconds

of Yeah.

[Music]

What does it sound like to you when you

were saying that you wanted music that

matched what you felt that experience

should be? It should be more something

to one on there. What is it more of to

you?

>> I think it's more contemplative. So I

think it makes you

relax into the situation that you're in,

whatever that happens to be, presumably

in an airport in this case. Um,

rather than tries to pretend that you're

not in that place. So my nightmarish for

form of music is getting on an airplane

and hearing a piece of music coming like

this because they haven't got the

machine to work properly. And and the

you have two thoughts then. You have a

thought they're playing music because

they want to stop us thinking about the

possibility we might crash. And

secondly, they can't even get the bloody

player to work properly. So, we're going

to crash. Um,

you know, you can use music as a mask,

which is what is normally done in public

situations, as a way of

covering up the noise, or you can use

music that invites the noise to be to

sound like it's part of it. So, with

with all of that kind of music, what I

call ambient music,

I don't want there to be an edge to the

music. I want it to so that you don't

know whether some of the things you're

hearing are in the world around you or

are part of the music. So I want it not

to have a sharp boundary. I want it to

sort of fade out into the rest of the

world's noises around you. I always

think about that as being on an album

called Music for Airports.

>> Mhm.

because that both is very discordant and

then as I thought about it more exactly

correct that is to me one of the holiest

pieces of music I have ever heard. That

piece of music just feels holy.

>> Mhm.

>> And in a way I guess it's something true

about airports

which is that this is a place where

human beings go to fly.

>> Mhm.

>> Where they are forced into I mean I feel

this when I get on planes a

confrontation with their own mortality.

>> Yep. There's never a time when a plane

when I am in a plane that is having

turbulence during takeoff or I don't

think to myself in a way I usually do

not think in my day I could die.

>> Yes,

>> there are all these people. They're

going to places that are in many cases

incredibly important to them. And the

the airport is this like extraordinary

combination of a place that is so benol

lines and you're taking off your shoes

and you know you're waiting in line for

food that is mediocre at best and you

know you're late and your plane is late

and you're annoyed. And then also the

absolute most remarkable place that a

human being can possibly find

themselves. something that for most of

human history was completely

unimaginable.

>> Yes.

>> And that 21 to me on an album called

Music for Airports is such a perfect

song because it's more true about the

airport than my experience of the

airport is.

>> That's a nice way of putting it. Yeah.

So, I wanted to make flying feel like a

more spiritual experience is what if I

had to put it into a sentence with a

controversial word in it. Um, and by

that I mean I I was used to be very

frightened of flying and of course I had

to do it at that time in my career. I

don't do it much anymore, but um and I

thought, well, what about if you could

make a kind of music that made you less

worried about the idea of dying? What

about if you could make a piece of music

that made your life seem less the center

of your attention? if you could see

yourself as just being one atom in a

universe of complicated molecules, um

would that make things feel better? So,

so in a way it was a it was intended to

take the

stress off yourself. Um not by

pretending you weren't flying. So, let's

make it just sound like a disco or a or

a you know a nightclub or something like

that, which is what most of the music

tries to do. Let's not do that. Let's

say we're having an unusual experience

and let's experience it as a beautiful

experience.

>> One of the things in in that album,

Music Parts, your liner notes are very

famous and I know you've been asked

about it a million times, so I don't

want to stay here too long, but you do

talk about wanting that music to

cultivate different modes of attention.

>> Mhm.

>> And that's been very influential. this

idea that music is a cultivator of

different forms of attention, not all of

them an attention that is spent on the

music.

>> Yes.

>> I guess in the years since then, the

decades since then, how do you think the

relationship between music and attention

has changed?

Like, do you see it as a success of what

you were trying to do? Do you see it as

a nightmarish world that you

accidentally summon into existence? What

is your what is your relationship to it?

Well, I think what's happened is that

it's changed in both directions. So, I

think people are ready to accord music a

level of attention that they never have

done in the past. Um, for instance, when

you go to these extremely long concerts,

sometimes 10 hours long, where you

basically listening to three sign tones

for a very long time, that's a level of

attention that really people never

thought of giving. until at least the

middle of the 20th century and later. So

there's that. And then on the other

hand, you have Tik Tok where or or very

short pieces of music like that. Um

which are of course right at the other

end of the scale. But I think in culture

this is a this is a general rule that

every single uh standard,

every single metric has increased in

both directions. We now have extremely

long pieces of music and extremely short

ones. We have extremely loud bands and

very very very quiet ones. Um so we've

it's as if we've taken every dimension

in which music can exist and tried to

expand it and say what would happen at

the edges now let's make a new edge. But

but I also was thinking about that in

terms of the movement towards music that

what it is doing is saying we're going

to cultivate this form of attention or

feeling for you. So the rise of the

Spotify, but they're on every um

streaming network now. The playlists

that are well here's your happy beats

playlist. Here's your beast mode at the

gym playlist for when you really need to

be pumped up. But here's your melancholy

rainy day playlist. you're studying at a

coffee shop, which is different, of

course, than studying at the library

playlist. Here's your ambient playlist,

your ambient essentials, but here's your

>> and and now we're we're seeing this move

into these playlists being in some ways

generated, right? I don't know how much

of it is happening now, but clearly

we're moving towards AI generating a

bunch of these

>> songs at functionally no cost,

mass-roduced mood altering music. Music

is Xanax, music is aderall, music as

>> um music as mood alteration.

>> Yeah.

>> And done not as a relationship between

the artist and the listener, but as a

like you hire the music to perform a

service

>> and to do so quite unobtrusively.

>> Mhm.

>> Some of that music is good, some of it

is bad obviously, but how do you feel

about that?

Well, you're right. In your previous

question, you asked, did I feel any

responsibility for that? And I do

actually. Um, I mean, I was very excited

about the idea of generative music. In

fact, a lot of I think I I invented the

phrase, I believe. Um, and I was very

excited by the idea of making a music

like a seed. You know, a seed is

something that has a genetic message in

it and every manifestation of it will be

a little bit different depending on

where you plant it and what time of year

it grew and so on and so on. So I

thought, wouldn't it be nice if you had

music like that? So I mean there's a

very simple example of that. Windchimes.

A windchime is a simple enough machine.

So you have, let's say you've got five

chimes. Um each one is a particular

pitch. It's not going to change. It's

only that pitch. But how and when they

strike depends on the wind. So it's sort

of semi- random. So you can't really say

that you composed that particular

performance. Though you can say that I

built the system from which that

performance emanated. You know, a

windchime is basically a simple piece of

generative music. And and so it shifts

and I know you've talked a bit about

almost wishing you could sell people not

the um the the album but the system

behind it. It it shifts the artistic act

into the creation of the conditions.

>> Yes.

>> That will create the artistic product.

>> Yes, that's right. So so two things

become po important. What what is the

structure of rules if you like? What are

what are the possibilities that the

system has? What are the limitations

that it has? and what are the materials

you put into it. So, if you make a

windchime out of glass, for instance, or

out of bamboo rods or out of uh metal,

they're all going to be slightly

different results, but each one is a is

a kind of package of possibilities.

You're not specifically saying which

possibilities you want to happen, but

you're conditioning which group of

possibilities can happen.

Um, and I I thought that was a sort of a

nice area for music to be in because if

you think about it,

up until the turn of the 20th century,

you could never have the same musical

experience twice. There was no way that

you could precisely repeat a musical

experience. As soon as records came

along, you could do that. You could hear

exactly the same performance of exactly

the same song over and over and over and

over. Um, and that became how most of us

listened to music. You know, most of the

music that unless we happen to be born

into a musical family or a church group

or something like that, most of the

music we heard was repetition. Um, so

what I thought was, well, I wonder if

you could use the technology of

repetition to make music that constantly

changes.

And

my first clue to that was when I first

got hold of a tape recorder. I had

wanted a tape recorder my whole

childhood. I just thought the idea of

being able to catch a piece of sound and

make it physical was most magical thing

I could think of actually. Um and and I

had this obsession with you could play

it backwards and I just wanted to hear

what things would be like if they were

played backwards.

discovering that first of all you can

capture sound and make it physical

that was something new for the 20th

century but then I thought if you can

make it physical can't you also make it

mutate in certain ways can't you make it

so the physical medium for instance is

not reliable it it will play slightly

differently each time and so my first

experiments in that direction were I had

a collection of broken tape tape

recorders,

uh, which I just got from junk shops,

you know, or thrift stores, as you might

say, and I would try to break them a

little bit more, but so that they would

still play things. So, a tape playing

through it would change into something

else, you know, it would have a lot of

distortion or it would run unevenly like

this, you know. Um,

yeah. So I think that became an

obsession to try to make to try to make

a recorded music that somehow changed

every time. Um I finally achieved it in

the 1990s

and I'm still doing it now.

>> You draw this distinction when working

with generative systems where you say

you don't want to be an architect, you

want to be a gardener. What's the

difference?

So the conception of an architect is

somebody who thinks about an end result

in great detail. You know the

archetypist Frank Lloyd Wright who

designed everything down to the

teaspoons in in his houses. And so the

whole thing kind of pre-exists in the

architect's mind and then is bought into

being by builders. Um, what a gardener

does is put some seeds in the soil and

then watches how they develop. Oh, these

ones over here are doing better than

those ones over there, so next year I'll

plant them differently. Um, but you know

that if you're making a garden, you're

making something that you're only

starting something. So, one of Stuart

Brown's books, it's called How Buildings

Learn. It's a great book. And in that,

he says, "You never finish a building,

you only start it." And and I think

that's what I kind of mean by generative

music. You start the piece, but it

finishes itself. It carries on finishing

itself for the rest of time. But so you

you upgrade this idea of generative

music and now we have launched into this

world of generative AI.

the way you were using the term

generative

and the way

what it is describing when we're saying

now generative AI which are things like

chat GPT and and and all these um large

language models

is it the same word for you right are

the two generatives equal

>> I think they're the same I think they

mean the same thing now of course as as

a set of techniques mine is much much

much crudder and simpler and much more

analog than than the techniques that are

generally being used in LLMs. Um, so

and of course the other big difference

is that mine are not owned by mad

billionaires. And I I think that's an

important difference. In fact, with all

the discussion about AI, this to me the

single most important question is who

should be in control of it? And we've

seen in this century

what happens when billionaires control

new technologies. Social media I'm

talking about and we've seen that they

you get completely unpredicted and quite

disastrous results sometimes. You know,

the the collapse of democracy in most of

our countries, I think, is very

traceable to social media and to the

kind of misunderstanding that that

underwrote it that um oh, let's make

this amazing new medium where everyone

can communicate with each other. Oh, but

let's make the underlying algorithm that

we've got to make a lot of money from

doing it. You know, in a way, the big

mistake was when the the algorithm

became maximize engagement, which means

maximize profits, of course. Um, if

maximize engagement is what you're going

for, then you end up with what we have

now, an internet that flourishes on

anger and

nastiness in some ways. Um, I'm not

saying, of course, that everything like

that is a is like that on the internet,

but what what seems to have happened in

the race for profits, we've managed to

sidestep the friction that normally

comes with things being born into the

world. Friction is very important.

Friction gives you a little time to see

what's happening. It makes something

ease into your life more slowly so you

can start to correct it as it's easing

in. I always say it's like we've

invented an amazing new type of car that

can travel at 750 mph, but we haven't

put any brakes in it, you know, because

brakes slow down the profits basically.

Well, so there's this question of who

controls it, then also as you get at

there, this question of who profits from

it. One of the things I find very

morally complicated to think about with

generative AI is that it is generative

and the seed of it and more than the

seed of it, the substance of it is the

sum total of knowledge

>> that human beings have made in a way

that is legible to the crawling software

developed by the AI companies.

>> Yeah. And you can see that it's really

about that because in fact these

companies are are mostly neck andneck

with each other for how good their

systems are.

>> Uh it's not like one of them came up

with like an algorithm that no other

human being could could come up with.

They're they're sort of going back and

forth

>> because they have the same training data

which is us.

>> Yes.

>> And so on one level that's like

everything else is scientists are coming

up with new scientific discoveries built

on every scientific discovery before

them. You have a lovely uh bit in your

book about all the human genius over how

many years that goes into getting you to

work in the morning.

>> Yes.

>> There's nothing new about creations just

being a marginal step forward built on

the on the shoulders of us all. And yet

I can never escape

this feeling with the AI systems that

there is something about the scale of

the use here

>> that should change who profits from it

and and how the fact that they have

absorbed everything I have ever written

for the internet and fed it into their

machine. I kind of think somebody should

send me a royalty check. You know, it's

not it doesn't have to be a big one and

it maybe shouldn't go to me. It should

go to society.

>> Yes. Yes. But something about it feels I

don't want to call it theft. It isn't

theft. But nor is it

>> just like a standing on the like there's

something here that feels like it needs

new ways of thinking about it because

you know just for a couple of these

companies to profit off of the

transformation of everything we've all

ever done. This this is the question I'm

asking myself. Should it be that um we

automatically have a system that says

this is a social good? all this

knowledge. It's it's a socially produced

good and therefore it should its usage

should reward society. Um that's quite

hard to meter. Of course it's hard to

put a meter on it. Um I think it has to

be written into the whole machinery

itself so that nobody has to make a

decision. for example, it wouldn't be a

bad idea if everything that was

generated

um in that way

50% of of all the profits from it

immediately go back to society in some

way. It would be saying we're not

claiming to be the geniuses here. We're

claiming to be the people who know how

to corral it all, how to put it

together, how to make it available to

you. And but thank you for all the stuff

you've written, Ezra and Brian and

everybody else. and uh with your

permission we'll redistribute this to

society. It it's so obvious to me that

that should be the way. But of course

that that is not the American way at

all. That sounds like socialism of some

kind or at least taxation. I that seems

true to me too. I mean at the moment

these companies are not making such big

profits that even doing something like

that would be that meaningful to the

treasury. Mhm.

>> Uh they're sucking in much more venture

capital than they are producing revenue.

>> Yes.

>> In general, but in the future, if it is

what they think it will be, you know, if

it is what they're promising their

venture capitalists it will be.

>> Mhm.

>> I mean, I guess you just solve that

through the tax system, but but it seems

like you need a way of thinking about it

that's a little bit clearer than the

ways we have. And it's funny, if you go

into the writings of a lot of them, Sam

Alman and and and and others from a

couple of years ago, they're talking

about this, like this is a thing they

imagine. I mean, Alman has, you know,

ideas for what's functionally like a

universal basic wealth grant coming out

of taxing the AI companies. But I'm sort

of with you on this. I I think it

deserves a different conceptual category

that is not merely the category of

taxation,

>> that is more something of sharing.

Right. It is not confiscatory taxation.

It is a reflection of the nature

>> of these systems.

>> Yeah.

>> And sort of my view of them is they

actually should be able to crawl the sum

total of human knowledge that is, you

know, at least that people are willing

to make accessible to them.

>> Yes.

>> But that part of that is that there's a

contract between those companies and the

rest of us that we both know what we're

doing here

>> and we're in this together.

Yes. Yes. In especially if you're trying

to inspire confidence in them, you you

you want people to willingly participate

in them rather than having it forced

upon them. Um I don't do you know this

word that I came up with years ago which

is senius.

>> Yes.

>> Okay. So that that was an attempt to try

to understand that I had been studying

the early 20th century painting in

Russia.

There was a 20

year period when there were amazing

amount of innovation going on you know

suprematism constructivism ranism all

these different isms appearing

and I discovered that the scene was very

complex it wasn't just that there were a

few brilliant artists like Kandinsky and

Rodchenko and Tatlin and so on

turned out that some of the very

important people were the collectors who

would specifically target certain

artists and say, "I want to keep this

person alive. I want I'm going to

support this person." Or they would go

to Paris and buy pictures that they

brought back to St. Petersburg and

Moscow to show to painters there and

say, "Look, this is what's going on in

Paris now." Um, and then there were the

people who ran the salons who would

invite artists to meet up with each

other and talk to and so on and so on.

And as you read about it, you find that

there were so many people. the cafe

owner, the cafe that everybody used to

hang out in, who was quite conscious

that they had a part to play in the

scene and they would let people not pay

for their meals and so on. Um, and put

put it on the tab. Um,

and so I thought there was a whole scene

here that was fertile, that was

operational. There was a whole support

system. And so I had got sick anyway of

hearing this word genius being used all

the time because it never seemed to me

like it was just one person who was

doing everything. Uh so I came up with

this word senior which is scene with an

IUS on the end. And that seemed to me to

much better understand the ecology of

systems like that. And I think that's

what it is. It's an ecosystem. And we

still don't understand ecosystems.

It's it's still not intuitive to most of

us to understand how a thing like an

ecosystem works. How there are lots and

lots of nodes and they're collected in

very complicated ways and if you move

one of the nodes to a different place

everything else in the system has to

shift. I mean we anyone who's become

interested in the environment has

started to become aware of how complex

natural systems are. But human society

is a natural system as well. And the and

the society of knowledge that we all

share is a natural system.

This is a way in which and I'm not an

anti- AI person. I use JBD a lot. I'm

fascinated. I feel a sense of both. I I

do feel some fear, but I feel a

tremendous amount of wonder around these

technologies. I I I find

>> watching it formulate a response that in

some ways reads more human than the

responses most humans give me to most

things.

It it it does it it it generates a a

form of awe in me. One thing that

frightens me as somebody who came up on

the internet and understands I think

fairly well how knowledge production

works on the internet is they are

breaking the fundamental social contract

of the internet

>> which is you even take something like

Google. The value of Google is that

there is so much that other people have

created that is valuable and Google

connects you to it. Yes,

>> but it does connect you to it. And now

GPT or anthropic or whomever inhales the

internet

and it's all right there and I never go

to the underlying sites.

>> And the creation of all this data which

was incentivized by ways people were

able to monetize and not just monetize

but have their work discovered. That was

for many of us on the internet. When I

started a blog with no ever intent of a

job or a profit from it, I was a college

student.

>> Just the idea that anybody would ever

find their way to me and read something

I did and care about it was such a

tremendous incentive to create.

>> But but there is something very

problematic about this. A huge amount of

the internet and the intellectual

commons we are now built on

>> is traffic moving around the internet,

people moving around the internet and

then the advertising that comes from

that the whatever that comes from that

keeping that whole ecosystem healthy.

>> Yeah.

>> And these these AI systems by nature you

go to the system

>> and then for most people it stops there.

Even Google search is trying to become

more like that.

>> Yeah. the whole thing they're built on,

they're going to destroy.

>> Yeah.

>> Or at least substantially degrade.

>> Yes, that's that's right. When when I

was a kid and I I liked watercolor

painting a lot, and I used to notice

that after a day of painting, the water

that I was dipping my brush into, which

was of course a mixture of all the

colors I touched that day, was always

the same color. Actually, I called it

munchge. M u n g e. Mong is sort of

purpley brownie

horrible color basically and when

whenever I've tried creating things on

chat GPT I haven't done that much of it

actually but

I work very hard to get my prompts right

and to filter what I'm saying to it and

to trying to urge sort of edge it into

something interesting but the color of

munchge covers all of it. It's it's so

overdigested

and of course it's it's quoting things

it's using things on the basis of how

frequently they have appeared. I don't

know whether you've ever tried making

anything let's say artistic using chat

GPT or any of the other programs. Um

it's it has a very interesting

progression when you're doing it. the

first thing you make, you think, "Bloody

hell, that's pretty amazing."

Um, and then after half an hour or so,

you think, "I'm so bored." Um, and I

remember that thing that Samuel Johnson

said about something. I can't remember

what it was about now, but he said,

"It's a little bit like watching an

animal walk on a dog walk on its hind

legs. You're not interested in how it

walks, but just that it can. You know,

you you're sort of impressed by the fact

that it can do something that is really

quite like a human being, but then you

find out that it's like a quite dull

human being.

>> Mhm.

>> And and it kind of doesn't get more

exciting unless you can trick it into

some sort of aberration.

Um which is what I've been trying to do.

I I've been amazed on the one hand at

how good it is, but then I also have the

exact experience. I love your uh

description of it as munge. Um, and I

think it goes back to something we were

talking about at the beginning of this

conversation, which is the information

and possibility that is encoded in

factual knowledge

and then the more amorphous forms of

intelligence and intuition that are

encoded in feelings.

So

I have uh experimented a lot with using

different forms of AI as help in this

show and they are helpful for things

that are very specific

but they are never helpful for the

actual work of creating the conversation

and and what's absent in the output

is I think what we're talking about. I

could not give you a description of how

this conversation is structured. It is

just structured

>> by me having

intuitive reactions to what is happening

with it and then moving with those

reactions.

>> Yes.

>> And chachi is structured as a

probabilistic output.

>> Yes.

>> Of what the entire internet would have

done.

>> Yes.

>> And so it it's not even that it always

lacks surprise, but it always has a very

visible internal logic.

>> Yes.

>> And then over time that internal logic

becomes overpoweringly annoying.

some people who work on at these

companies said, "Oh, I I keep my diary

in it and that's very interesting.

>> You should try that." So, without giving

too much personal information, I did

that.

>> And the first couple responses,

I was amazed at how psychologically

insightful they were, how supportive

they were. I mean, it was better than

what human beings in my life gave me.

And then on response 9 10 11 12 15 20 it

was the same [ __ ] feelings. It was

the same glazing and sick of fancy and

the same kinds of insights.

>> And I think it's one of these things

that you couldn't look at the response

and say there's anything wrong with it.

>> But there is something human beings are

attuned to.

>> Yeah. in the way we do not travel a

perfectly logical or well ststructured

path. We're not supposed to. It's not

how our intelligence works. And it is

funny. We you do begin to feel the

divergence there.

>> Yeah. It's it's not even what we like

actually. You know, as as humans, we we

like a certain amount of predictability,

but only a certain amount. We don't want

it exactly the same each time. So, you

know, we we rely on our interest being

taken by a deviation we didn't expect.

Um, the sick fancy is the thing that

really drives me mad when it says, "Good

question, Brian. That's a really good

question."

>> That's not just an insight, that's a

revelation.

>> Yes.

>> That's not an X, it's a Y formulation.

>> Yeah. Um, so you first of all, if you're

going to do work with AI at all, you

have to start, as my friend Danny Hillis

says, you have to start off by saying,

"Please don't flatter me."

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>> You've done so much of your work in in

collaboration, but also in collaboration

with machines. I mean it is something

you are known for.

>> Yes.

>> So to you what makes you good at

creating healthy collaborations between

humans and and technologies and and what

for you typifies a healthy collaboration

as opposed to an outsourcing a an an

unhealthy form of of the diminishment of

the human beings behind it.

>> Yes. So,

so I have a a few mental tricks that I

use which I think are just part

naturally part of me. One of them when

I'm faced with a piece of technology

which can do something, I immediately

don't want to know about what it can do.

I want to know what it can do that the

makers didn't imagine it would ever be

used to do. And with the type of

technology that I work with, musical

technology, that's that's a very rich

open territory. And it's rich and open

because not that many people explore it.

You know, they have something that says

this will make your mixers sound louder

and they use it to make mixers sound

louder. Well, you know, I don't blame

them. That's what it says on the box.

But but you can you will also find out

that that can do something else that

nobody had ever thought of doing with

music before.

>> So give me an example of when you did

this with a piece of technology.

>> Well, um I discovered

that if I connected two tape recorders

together, put one tape through one and

coming out through the other so that the

playback head is separated by several

feet from the record head, you get a

very late echo.

[Music]

And then you can build up those, you can

work on top of those. I mean, I

discovered this in the 60s. So did Terry

Riley and a few other people. I think it

just happened. I had two tape recorders

for a while. So I could try this out and

then I could build up these huge

sort of orchestras of music um live on

my own. Um now there's a whole there are

many people who do that brilliantly with

little tiny looper pedals, little tiny

boxes. Um Reggie Watts is a brilliant

exponent of it for example. Um so so

that was an example of using something

that was meant to do a particular job.

record something and play it back later

on. So, build something uh new in real

time. Uh another example could be when I

first started playing with tape records,

as I said earlier, I used to try to

exploit the faults that they had cuz I

all the tape records I had were cheap.

They came out of junk shops and one of

them had a a bent spindle

and it would make everything go like

this because

and I thought, "Oh, that could be really

nice if you had a piano like that." So I

called that butterfly echo. And um that

was on the first Roxy Music album. We

had a butterfly echo piano. Um so I

think that's to do with technology to do

with people. The first thing I think

about when I look at a band I think okay

there so there are let's say five people

in that band

how many possible duets is that how many

possible trios how many possible

quartets

um how many solos five obviously and how

many everybody who won. Now it very

often happens that that space has not

been explored properly by the band.

People haven't thought what about if

only three of us play in this and uh

then another another slightly different

configuration of three play. So it's a

very simple thing but it suddenly

unlocks a a set of possibilities that

probably hadn't been explored before.

You know what happens if we only have

vocalist drums and bass,

none of the other instruments that

usually fill in the harmonic information

in between.

There are lots of tricks like that, but

they're sort of ways of looking at the

system as it stands and thinking what

hasn't been done yet with this system.

What what might excite people? You see,

I think that the main music grows out of

excitement.

And if you aren't feeling excitement,

then you try to create it in some way.

If if the situation isn't turning you

on, then you try to change it until it

does turn you on. Because when you're

excited, you are at your most alert. I

think this this is what and when you're

at your most alert, you're most likely

to spot

the little thing that is going to turn

into the big thing.

One thing that makes me think about that

feels relevant in both directions is

I think it's often a very important

question where the agency resides in

something. So I think we always say we

use social media,

>> but no, social media uses us.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

>> And over time, if you watch anybody on

it for long enough, you you watch them

become the social media that's using

them, right? They they they begin to bow

to its incentives, to its habits, to its

form.

>> What you were just saying, I thought was

so interesting about the set of

possibilities in a band, right?

Initially, it's a bunch of musicians

playing in a band. Eventually, the band

through its habits, through what's

expected of it, is playing the

musicians.

>> Yes. And I think this is very true with

technologies.

>> You know, when you talk about you

discovering or Terry Riley discovering

what you can do with two tape recorders,

you are playing the tape recorders.

>> Mhm.

>> And I think this is probably not always

true, but when you think about a lot of

the the digital possibilities people

have had, you know, in the last couple

decades like Ableton and and other

things, it's still people playing the

synthesizer, playing the music library.

I think the fear that a lot of us have

about generative AI is that we're not

going to be playing it. It's going to be

playing us often because we prefer it to

play us, right? When a kid, you know,

you can use AI to help you

>> write a better essay, but a lot of

people just want the AI to write the

essay, right?

>> The whole essay.

>> The whole essay.

>> Yeah.

>> And and I think that that space between

are you playing the technology or is the

technology playing you?

>> Is a very tricky one. And I think that's

one of my more dystopic versions of of

our AI future, my kids future in AI is a

world in which they've given up a lot of

their own agency because it seems a

little bit ridiculous to to take it. Um

>> yeah,

>> and that could always have been true. I

mean, there's a million technologies

that I hand like I don't I'm happy I

have Google Maps. I'm have a bad sense

of direction and I'm not trying to make

it better. Mhm.

>> But there is some line

where you know you are acting upon the

world versus the world is just acting

through you that I think is going to be

very hard to police.

>> Yes. I think what bothers me, which

which is exactly part of what you're

saying,

is the possibility of not making a

mistake at all, of making things that

always come with this sort of

professional finished gloss of what a

real what a real pop song looks like or

what a real picture looks like. And I

think that's lethal. I have a friend, an

architect friend called Rem Koulhas.

He's a Dutch architect and he uses this

phrase the the premature sheen. So when

in his architectural practice when they

first got computers and computers were

first good enough to do proper

renderings of things. He said everything

looked amazing at first. You know you

could construct a building in half an

hour in the computer and you'd have this

amazing looking thing. And he said but

it didn't help us make good buildings.

it help us make things that looked like

they might be good buildings. But he

said in the end we went back and I I

went to visit him one day when they were

working on a a big new complex for some

place in Texas and what they were using

were matchboxes and pens and

packets of tissues. um it was completely

analog and there was no sense at all

that this had any relationship to what

the final product would be in terms of

how it looked. So it meant that what you

were thinking about was how does it

work? What's it like to be what do we

want it to be like to be in that place?

You started asking the important

questions again, not not what kind of

facing should we have on the building or

what kind of color should the stone be.

And when I see people fiddling around

with um synthesizers, this has always

been a problem with synthesizers that

they always come with a bank of sounds

readyade for people who don't want to

learn how to program them, which it

turns out is most people. I I remember

talking to Yamaha once who had just who

produced the most successful synthesizer

of all time which was the DX7

and I

said um you know you should really make

these a little bit easier to program.

And they they said well we don't bother

because nobody tries to change them

anyway. We get we often get them back

for repair and nobody has ever tried.

You can we can tell if somebody's tried

to change the programming and nobody's

ever done it. They've just used the

presets and that seems to me a kind of

mental laziness that I I really don't

think fits well with making new things.

I

>> I think that's strange a little bit

inspiring as a as a as a principal.

You've worked corresponded. known so

many just fascinating people and people

admire that I want to see if you'd be up

for me just reading a few names not a

lightning round you can you can answer

at whatever length you would like but

you just tell me sort of you know

something inspiration an insight

something that that you took from that

person if you'd be up for it

>> sure yes

>> let me start just the composer John Cage

cage I think the thing that really

impressed me about Cage was not his

music which I didn't particularly care

for after of the 1940s. Um, but his idea

that being a composer was a kind of a

practice in the sense of a a religious

or a spiritual or a philosophical

practice. And I thought that's the kind

of artist I want to be. I I want to have

a practice. I want there to be

resonances into other parts of my

thinking. I don't want it to just be

something that I do on the weekends and

then forget about. So Cage Cage with his

book Silence was very important for me.

That came along at just the right time

for me.

>> David Bowie,

>> uh, one of the most

committed artists I've ever worked with