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Akira the Dawn is a British musician DJ and producer He’s worked in genres as diverse as pop hip-hop indie dance and more recently perhaps Something that has come to be known as lo-fi For reasons that have been quite surprising to me Akira has been making lo-fi tracks Also known as meaning wave a combination of metered spoken word and music chosen for its emotional and conceptual appropriateness From some of my sayings and my talks They have been reasonably well listened to garnering Maybe a million views over the 10 or 15 or so that he has posted on YouTube the two main albums 12 rules for life and jbp wave genesis have elicited more than a million streams each on Spotify And that doesn’t include iTunes and other content providers of the same type The third album orient around my words will be entitled JBP wave paradise It will be released a week today Earlier this week Akira also released a long single 42 rules for life Based on the totality of the rules I had written for Quora several years ago. I think I’ll feature that on today’s podcast Akira has also produced similar works Featuring Ellen Watts Jocko willing who is currently number one in the meaning wave charts Terrence McKenna David Foster Wallace and Elon Musk among others overall Spotify downloads of top 4 million and he’s Experiencing an approximate exposure at the moment of about a million a month So welcome Akira. It’s nice to talk to you We’ve met a little bit before not not a lot as I became aware of what you were doing This is the first time really that we’ll have a chance to talk in any great detail Yes, we’ve emailed. So what are you up to? Lately, I’m you know, I’m engaged in an experiment in ridiculous hyper productivity and zone inhabitation My idea being well, basically, you know, I’m working on this music aside from working on the music I’m working on remaining in the zone of making music so the music Flows and becomes better and better and better and my whole process becomes more efficient and powerful with each thing so it’s this combined thing of making this this new form of music or this nothing’s new is it making this form of music and Doing it in a hyper productive and powerful fashion, okay, so let’s start with hyper productive So because you said you had twin Ambitions and so what’s the hyper productive element? Well, I’ve released Is it five albums this year so far four or five albums this year so far. We’re in March. It’s much You mean since the beginning of 2019 indeed, oh, yeah, okay Well that that seems to qualify as hyper productive, especially if this also happens to be a difficult endeavor It is it is but Here’s the thing. I noticed I used to be a music journalist and there’s this phenomenon wherein bands first albums are amazing and Then their second albums are often not amazing A bunch of reasons for this but I figured the main thing is a band will be locked in a garage Playing together every day for years and years and years Writing songs together and so on and so forth and their first album will be the sum of that they’ll have essentially been in a kind of flow and the first album will be the fruits of that flow and then the record company usually sends them on tour for a couple of years at which point they fall out of that flow of writing songs all the time and When they go back into the studio They’ve sort of fallen out of that zone So I wondered to myself what would happen if one got in the zone and then refused to leave Hmm, if one just got in the state of just constantly creating with a very specific sort of mission and purpose and and found a foundational sort of meaning behind it so one doesn’t get discouraged or whatever and Just kept doing that what would happen and I’ve been doing that since the last February and the results have been Beyond what I could have hoped for Hmm and okay the results being beyond what you could have hoped for along what dimensions what’s What’s changed for you over the last couple of years? Like what’s this what what was your career like before you did this and what’s changed as a consequence for you? In your career and while let’s also say personally Hmm a lot. I mean Previously, I mean I’ve been doing this, you know, it was sort of my job since 2004 full-time Around 2000 2004. I got my first record deal with which was within to scope records in America after a bizarre sequence of events And yeah, I’ve been making music full-time ever since and DJ however, previously if you kind of look at my catalog, you know, there would be many many years between releases and The old model of the music industry which I was I was sort of trapped in Which was completely my own folks I’d yet to to imagine Oh Another way fully You know you spend years making an album is the idea and then you spend years promoting it or a long time promoting it And it’s all about getting press and all these sorts of things and I Would get sort of discouraged and sad if I would spend I’d spend a lot of time making a thing And then I would go to sort of put it out and I wouldn’t have all the resources that I Felt that I wanted or needed to get it to all the people that it should get to Which is kind of the old model Whereas now what I’m doing what I’m doing part of what’s going on now is I’m just kind of releasing a vast amount of stuff at a very very high level and It sort of compounds You know the time is different in the internet. Yes, I’m in the internet week is a very very long time so these days I make sure some new music comes out every week and Yes, well the internet Radically accelerates the production schedule of everything. I mean we’re gonna make this video and Hypothetically, I could release it this afternoon. Yeah crazy thing to do with a well with a with a What’s essentially a semi documentary? Unheard of you know, I know look at your camera quality Hmm You know, we’re all walking around with with devices in our pockets that are better than the things they made 2001 a space Odyssey with yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s a very and the consequence of that speed acceleration is very Psychologically dramatic as well because it also becomes something that you have to feed on a very regular basis Like the plant in little shop of horrors. Yes, exactly. The algorithms are hungry Yeah, and they will punish you if they’re not fed but uh Yeah, they punish you by having the fruits of your previous work start to decline indeed Yeah, so Yeah, so What was that thing Alan Moore had that thing you talked about steam theory Which was the idea that the amount of time between the first human in say the the invention of the the stone axe and Then the baths of Rome and then the amount of time it takes to create the same amount of stuff You get to the point where between 1960 and 1970 human information doubles Yes, everything’s doubling at an incredibly rapid rate, yeah So his his idea I think this was in sort of the early 2000s He was talking about how by around 2013 we would go from a fluid culture Of this sort of like river of information and creation to so much stuff being generated at any one moment That you go from fluid to steam Was and it was that Kurt’s what was that Kurt’s wild some? Analogy who’s who mentioned that I heard Alan Moore talk about that you heard Alan Moore, okay, cuz cuz Kurt’s wallet Kurt’s wall is of course famous for the Idea that the singularity is coming as a consequence of all of this doubling. Yeah, it’s a guess It’s a similar thing. The idea is that you know, once you’re in steam territory Anything could happen at any given second this things being birthed like right now someone could be about to put something in the app store that Fundamentally changes the way we interact and do stuff. Well, yes. Yes Well that seems to be happening on a very regular basis. I think it’s happening so rapidly that we don’t even notice it You know, I think What’s that dating app that you swipe Tinda Tinder tinder is a good example of that because tinder was a revolutionary technology But it was buried by so many other revolutionary technologies that nobody even noticed that it was a revolutionary technology Yeah So and I think this is happening. It’s happening so quickly that it’s impossible to even keep track of I mean I work with a young team of programmers and you know, they’re always looking on the net for new tools to help accelerate What they’re capable of doing and you know the the library of tools out there is well if it’s not infinite It’s at least unsearchable and that also means that each programmer Or each expert can have a whole domain of tools that he or she is the only person who knows anything about Which is also very peculiar This has happened with everything has happened with music There’s some music it used to be that if you wanted to make a record you would have to go to a studio And only a few people really got to go to studios because they’re very expensive and there weren’t even that many of them So it was only a few people got to make music at a higher level Just a few decades a few decades ago decade and a half ago. Yeah, whereas now The thing I’m talking to you on is the same thing that creates most of the music you’ll hear on the radio And then within that there’s this infinity of tools and ways of of creating and manipulating sound That each person who does it has a unique unique stack of things that they use this unique to them, right? well the strange thing about what’s happened with you I would say or One of the things strange things I’ve noticed. I’m sure there’s many strange things that have happened with you over the last while but you know as the technology for putting music online increases in ease and accessibility the sheer volume of music online also increases to the same degree and then most people end up in the it seems to produce a hyper steep Pareto distributions where virtually everyone who puts content on the line online gets Pretty much zero attention that would be a set especially true with music and then a tiny fragment of people at the very pinnacle get volumes of attention that are essentially unimaginable and You occupy kind of a strange mid territory which rather well, which must be rather rare, you know I mean by your numbers, I think they have to be Regarded as successful and certainly in terms of volume What does it mean to you in terms of monetization? and I asked this he actually as a technical question because I know that monetizing creative production is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do and So I’m wondering if you’ve had any success at that and how you’re managing to keep body and soul together Are you pursue this? What would you call it? strange Pathway, that’s that’s probably accurate. I suppose it is a strange pathway, but it’s the only one that ever Seemed viable to me and for many years it was it was very difficult I’ve you know, I’ve been doing this a long time and I kind of I Pioneered a lot of the way things work now when I first got my first record deal I had a website and I was releasing mixtapes online. So I was releasing these kind of long-form projects that involved songs and also cutting up bits of spoken audio and sort of sample collages and things and I was releasing them online and literally no one else was doing that at that point and when I first worked with Interscope records their media department rang me up and asked me how the hell I was doing everything because they wanted to start rolling that out to all their other artists, so that was like 2004 and After I parted ways with the record label I had to essentially kind of create my own industry So I was releasing mixtapes and things and t-shirts and all that sort of stuff streaming didn’t exist at that point We’re now at the point where streaming Can make money Well, that’s interesting to know you have to stream a lot So it works out as at about four thousand dollars per million streams For example, he’s just looking at streaming so you need to be listening to a lot of your stuff But has a rough that’s a rough percentage man but you think about all that, you know how many people that are in the world and and You know this insatiable hunger that people have for music Yeah, never gonna not want to listen to music and if you keep giving them good music that you know that they love and connect to if they will always listen to it and There’s increasing, you know, there’s so many more places people hear music now than they used to musics in everything every video every film every experience every Avenue every Instagram story every Aspect of our culture as a soundtrack and increasingly and as we strive boldly into the future I envisage people essentially having personalized soundtracks everywhere they go In every kind of instance so right so you see a continually expanding market. Yes. Yes, definitely and Yeah, and there’s what you know and aside from like streaming this this various, you know How it is ways that you listen you can make a bit of money on YouTube You can sell a few t-shirts you can get a few subscription service people there’s all all the things together if you work hard and you’re consistent and you’re good and And you know you don’t stop consistency is obviously Fundamental then you can do it and you can thrive and I’m starting to thrive and it feels good. Oh, well Congratulations, that’s I’m very impressed to hear that because it seems like it seems like one of the world’s more unlikely ways to thrive I mean I mean Well in two ways, I mean the first is that it’s very difficult to make a career in music So just as a baseline that that’s very difficult and the second is well, you’ve pioneered this new genre, which is also Well, as I said in the introduction, I don’t really know what to make of it It’s this combination of metered spoken word. So there’s a bit of a poetic element to it and then you’re carefully Selecting music to go with it and matching that cadence of the of the spoken word to the music and Well, and people seem to be responding to that. What what kind of reaction are you? Garnering from your audience. I mean you must get a fair bit of correspondence What and I mean I’ve read some of the YouTube comments and so forth So it seems to me and the overwhelming majority of those seem to be positive Which is a good thing on YouTube because that’s not necessarily the case what kind of Response are you getting from people and what do you think you’re doing for them or to them? Yeah, the YouTube the YouTube comments is kind of almost unheard of it’s it’s like 99.876 percent ridiculously positive and I receive literally hundreds of communications on a daily basis from people who tell me that this is Helping them incredibly in their lives It’s I mean, I imagine it’s similar to what I’ve heard you talking about getting the amount of people who write to me saying that they got off drugs or They were they were gonna commit suicide and things of that nature and then the music helped them Find a reason and help them to find the strength to get out of the trouble they were in and things of that nature Yeah, that’s a big deal and it’s it’s very significant and specific a to to imagine that The music that you’re putting together and the meaning that it conveys Has that effect both on addiction and on suicide? Yeah, I mean, it’s obviously it’s a substitute well That’s probably putting it wrong it’s It’s something that’s providing the meaning that they’re searching for both through their addiction and and The terrible meaning that they’re trying to escape from as a consequence of their suicidal urges Yeah, so yeah, well that’s a that’s a big deal and it’s it seems to me to be psychologically very significant I mean God only knows what psychological role music plays in our lives. I mean, I Don’t think I was gonna ask you about this is that is there been much research done because from where I’m you know, I’m a DJ I’m out Two to five nights a week playing music to people and seeing Firsthand the effect it has on them and I’ve been experimenting with this for years trying different combinations of things in order to create certain reactions My main thing I’m trying to do is give people an incredible transcendent experience right Harry with them Not just for the rest of the week, but for the rest of their lives But I’ve I’ve experimented with combining things to create drama to create violence to create lust to create all sorts of things And you could it’s it’s repeatable. It’s it’s you know, it’s repeatable in a scientific experiment capacity So yeah, I was gonna ask you is the fewer were any no, not not really Well, yeah, I think that I mean it’s conceivable that I’m ignorant of the literature But I don’t think I am because I can’t see how I would not come across it in the research that I’ve done on creativity Yeah, but The study of meaning as a phenomenon is a relatively new one I mean it emerged to the degree that has emerged sort of out of that I mean in psychology out of the literature on happiness and well-being and of course, that’s not the same thing and It isn’t obvious that people know how to Do the experiments properly or to take the measurements properly? So and I think there’s also a proclivity among psychologists To devalue The psychological importance of cultural products, you know lots of evolutionary psychologists, for example believe that our ability to Produce art and to produce music Let’s say visual art and music is like a secondary consequence of something more fundamental And I don’t believe that like I think people would literally die without Music and drama and literature. I I can’t see that we could live. I don’t think we could organize our minds Without drama and literature and I don’t think I think that music is so crucial That it actually keeps people it’s one of the many things it’s one of the few things sorry That actually keep people sane Which is why features so prominently in well, let’s say in church in sacred celebrations Yep, and and in and in any activities where people to gather together in in groups for anything of any significance and you know, it’s obviously it’s the case that if you go to a concert and It’s well handled. There’s something going on there. That’s very much akin to a religious experience Yeah, I don’t see any difference when it’s done properly when all the people involved are working together To make it what it could be It can be more more transcendental experience than anything. Yeah, I think I think the difference between it most religious Ceremonies that is that it actually works It does I mean I’ve seen people burst into tears when you could at certain transitions, right which is when you move one song into another and When you’re DJing or when I’m DJing anyway, I’m I’m making sure that those things Have a purpose other than just playing another song So the idea is that you’re taking people on some sort of a journey that you’re telling a story From the beginning to the end of your set and you’re set all the songs you’re playing will have a beginning in a middle And an end and the whole experience will have some sort of transformative purpose and it will move people in a way and Certain combinations of records the way you’ll bring in one into another you work the way you’ll sort of blend them I’ve seen that make people burst into tears, right? No, you can see that once just spontaneously you can see that sometimes with particularly good chord transitions, too Exactly, you know, there’s something so deeply satisfying about the transformation of one pattern into another It’s it. I don’t know what it well. This is why I’ve always been so fascinated by music because I think there’s something Unutterably deep about music. I really read I really believe that it’s the most representative form of art because I think that the world is made out of patterns that’s the best way to think of the world and Those patterns vary in Duration, you know and we’re always in search for the longer duration patterns because they’re more reliable and some of those patterns we can Exploit let’s say as tools and some we avoid as obstacles but and The rest we try to intermingle harmoniously With our actions and our thoughts so that the whole Process turns into something that’s Symphonic, you know and then you go you go to a music festival you hear Well arranged music in particular because I think that’s an edited music Well, it all matters the melodic composition and the words all of that matters, but to hear it Well written and well edited and well arranged Speaks to you about how the entire structure of The entire structure of being could be arranged and also is Fortunately arranged those rare times where everything comes together for you And so people need that experience man it it reminds them of the potential harmony that That things can attain and that’s that’s not optional. Especially if you’re in a chaotic state It’s the truth of it’s I think it’s the truth of everything and That community it’s what is it Stevie Wonder said music is the language we all speak Something we all understand and no that’s that’s true across the world and I’ve seen that it’s interesting I’m music will will change from place to place but the fundamental aspects of it are the same and the fundamental Need for it is the same. Yeah, it’s absolutely fabulous Is the same yeah, it’s absolutely fascinating that there’s so much there’s as many variations as there are languages But we can understand all of them I mean, you know our language has a musical element, right if you listen to someone who’s an interesting speaker There’s a lot of melody in their speech patterns This is why I first made a sample due so I heard the melody and something you were saying Like instantly hear what the song was around it there was a rhythm in it There was a melody in it the whole thing and every individual Has that and it’s often quite radically different even within the same language. It’s interesting different languages have different Melodies and therefore if you listen to uh, french music the actual melodies in music Are similar to the shape of the the voice the vocal sounds of the actual language Uh, this is the same with mexican same with english So on and so forth so like melodies within music of cultures are informed very much by the language that people speak Mm-hmm. I wonder what makes english particularly Appropriate by all appearances for rock and roll Yes, is it is it it’s a fairly Consonant heavy language. So maybe that has something to do with it. There’s a Like it isn’t it hasn’t got that same vowel like sing song that Asian languages often have so it’s got a bit more of a beat like harshness But like rock doesn’t seem to work very well in french Germans managed to pull it off now and then but not that often. It’s really remarkably an english Experience altogether and that’s why I think I think this is why hip-hop has taken over the world Hip-hop is now the dominant genre Everywhere Pretty much everywhere and uh I spend a fair bit of my time researching music on a weekly basis as a part of my job and uh Listening to music in different countries and hip-hop is essentially taken over the whole world and hip-hop exists uh In every language i’ve looked into And it works in every language And there’s multiple reasons for that but just the thing we’re talking about is interesting like the sort of the shape Like french sounds fantastic on rap Far more so than uh on say rock. I don’t know that’s subjective You know the in the english accent we do a lot of uh small sounds than elongated sounds which um What’s it called the scottish snap? Yeah The sky which is uh a thing that’s in a lot of rap these days It’s like this type thing is a did it did it did it did it did it kind of goes in and out the sound you hear in a lot in old sort of folk music rock and roll is interesting because it’s almost a perfect combination of uh Of european folk and african Jazz and and traditional music right right together Yeah coming out there’s been some recent little skirmishes of people accusing say ariana grande of cultural appropriation For using a rap rhythm in the cadence of our singing but that rhythm is actually traced back to scotland Right. Well, one of the things that we should agree on right Off the bat is that we don’t have to pay any attention to anyone who ever dares to say anything about cultural appropriation And given the absolute necessity of trading these modes of communication across the world and the unbelievable utility that that’s had and and even the idea that it’s a form of theft in terms of its motivation is so entirely specious because most of the time it’s Rooted in what I would regard as tremendous admiration It’s not like the rolling stones were massive fans of the of the black blues artists from the us You know, I mean they were doing everything they could to imitate them Yes, so this is another one of this is one of another another one of the reasons why hip hop Is taken over the world and could be considered the ultimate art form or maybe ultimate musical art form Uh because it takes from everything Within to itself to make something new and that’s the reason there hasn’t been a new musical genre a new sort of specific like tentpole musical genre Uh since hip hop. Yeah. Yeah Yeah Right, right and that’s actually getting to be quite a while ago now Yeah, it was about there was the 70s And so what happened was you had and it’s really amazing how hip hop was born hip hop was born because there was some rioting in new york And uh, some poor people managed to get their hands on some quite good sound equipment And start throwing parties with it and uh, one of them worked out a way of playing the same record On two turntables at a slightly different part of the record on each side so he could create a loop Over which from the record over which somebody could rap tell the story hype up the crowd therein it was born Uh take From another piece of existing music or another piece of existing idea and you know, they were sampling european Dance, they were sampling craft work and they were sampling like weird folk stuff and there was you know, they were sampling james brown They were sampling from everywhere Hip hop was taken from every bit of the existing music musical multiverse And then people could talk about anything they could talk about their real experiences. They could talk about their fantasies. They could talk about their fears Uh, I remember chuck d once saying that the the core story in hip hop was could be boiled down to as simple as uh I am like I exist Like the the protest of it or the the core of the story is just like I I exist i’m here And then the music is is as culturally appropriative as possible. They took from everywhere And we are if they hadn’t done that it wouldn’t exist And if you suddenly start telling people no you can’t do that anymore Then uh, you’re going to end up with a sort of very dull well the other thing that art form if if you look at it again from a psychological perspective is that For me to understand you I have to imitate you That’s the ground of understanding. It’s not like I listen to what you say and then think about it and then React although I do that to some degree. It’s that I watch you I look at what you’re looking at. I listen to the cadence of your voice You know, I adjust my body so that it’s in accordance with yours If we’re having a real conversation I have to we have to create a space between us. That’s a consequence of a mutual imitation even Changing the way that we speak because i’m going to adjust the way I speak to the way you speak and vice versa Or we’re not going to have a conversation We have to enter into the same space to use a terrible cliche, but all of that’s a consequence of deep deep and often unconscious and implicit imitation and to say that Cultural appropriation is a mistake is to deny people the ability to deeply imagine each other You know because there are conversations going on now that a man should never write a woman’s role or a white person should never write a black person’s role it’s like Well, all you’re doing is forbidding the creator to project him or herself into the landscape of that other person and try to and try to truly not it’s not just empathy it’s way deeper than empathy to try to Live out their experience to the best of their imaginative ability In a deep way and maybe one that can be communicated with other people, you know, like Maybe a white guy who writes about black experience And he’s careful about it um Can bridge a gap that no other person can bridge and even though it might not be 100% accurate and Not to say that biography itself or autobiography itself is ever 100% accurate it’s the best we can do with regards to climbing inside someone else’s skull and and attempting to truly Walk a mile in their shoes. Let’s say, you know, I read a great book by a woman named Margaret Lawrence who’s a very underrated Canadian author and she wrote a book called the stone angel which was about a About an 88 year old woman, I think an elderly elderly woman and And margaret laurence was not that age when she wrote the book and I certainly wasn’t an 88 year old woman when I wrote It and I found it profoundly affecting like it was the first time in my life That I had really understood that You’re the same when you’re old, you know like Very much of you is like you were when you were 30 or 40. It’s just that while you started to deteriorate physiologically and and sometimes but not always psychologically, but all of the emotions and all of the perceptions and the desires and longings and the doubts and all of that are are there just as powerfully and I don’t think I Would have understood that until I was much much older Had I know it had the The good fortune of encountering that book so I think that the people who are discussing cultural appropriation I truly believe that they hate art because that that is art man. That’s Take from the best of everything And and see if you can go one step farther Yeah, they just haven’t thought it through because the end result of that is that You can only write Basically, you only have a autobiography You couldn’t have a comic book unless it was written by a team of 30 people if it contained 30 characters It’s it’s it means putting everyone into back into their little boxes And not allowed to integrate with the world. It means that no one right exactly that And it means that art dies Well, I think that’s the point of the Complaint is that that there’s a true hatred for art That lurks underneath that and a desire for it to be replaced by a kind of propaganda I mean even if you wrote out a biography, you wouldn’t be able to write about anyone else Yes, exactly There’s a lot of people complaining about modern art and uh You know the assault on the assaults on beauty but there was this war on beauty this kind of rejection of of uh skill and uh transcendent Obviously transcendent greatness Uh in lieu of kind of like ugly things that remind us of that. Let me ask you about the people that you’ve chosen yes to to feature in your Meet is it best referred to as meaning wave or as lo-fi and what what are you what’s the difference? Well, yeah meaning wave is is what this genre of music i’m working on has come to be known as And it is the combination as you put of the uh, the meaning of the meaningful speech with uh wave music wave music Is uh lo-fi Uh, it’s trap. It’s vapor trap. It’s cloud cloud rap. It’s a bunch of different things Uh, but they share a common aesthetic vapor wave things of that nature, which is uh amusingly a post-modern art form Uh lo-fi just means low fidelity So i’ve always made lo-fi because when I first started making hip-hop, uh, it sounded quite bad because I didn’t know what I was doing So it was quite low low quality lo-fi it just means uh, you know, maybe there’s some record crack or maybe you’ve uh It’s not the most polished sounding thing. It’s not top. I see radio. It’s it’s not i’ve been considering, uh Doing another project called high five which goes in the exact opposite direction and just goes pristine clean What have you but anyway, so lo-fi is that meaning wave is where I took Those musical forms and combined them with with speech and then did you see some advantages in lo-fi approach apart from its initial? Technical simplicity i’ve always loved that sound i’ve always loved warm analog crackly sounds I’ve always loved hip-hop or lo-fi hip-hop is really it’s just hip-hop instrumentals with uh without an emphasis on high-tech production I see Um, so it means so you think it’s do you think it’s more Comforting and welcoming to people. I mean i’ve often been in buildings, you know Like modern buildings that are so perfect that the only thing that shouldn’t be there is you Indeed. Yeah It’s a creepy feeling the idea is it is a creepy feeling because like there’s some degree of Imperfection that seems to be need or age Warnedness Well, we heard this happen with music. So technology is what drives music Always the reason that music sounds like it does currently Uh a lot of it is to do with technology. There’s a drum kit that’s used on almost all music You’ll hear on the radio, which is the 808 kit And that’s been uh kind of dominated music for the past 10 to 20 years And the reason for that is because it sounds really as good coming out of a telephone as it does a club system And uh the drum kits they were using before that just don’t pop out of a phone in the same way. You can’t really hear them uh So until phones can more accurately accurately reproduce low end that drum kit will remain very popular But what happened with music anyway, we saw it as the 80 technology came in computers came in synthesizers came in And it started getting really really clean sounding Like really really clean and then as people started working within computers and the music Oftentimes the music would never leave the computer it’d be made on a mac It’d go through some fiber optic cables into someone else’s mac or into another phone and uh, it it was that Became that kind of cleanliness you were talking about that kind of sterilized thing And uh lo-fi reintroduces real world analog elements to the thing Which brings a humanity and a nostalgia? and a sort of tactile feeling that uh music Had started to lose which I think is why people yeah Well, there’s something about analog instruments that that have a singing quality That the electronic instruments even at the highest end lack like I notice when i’m playing the piano, which i’m not very good at but I can do at least to some degree if I play an electronic piano Every note is okay and all the chords are okay But I can’t get the whole instrument to sing and then like if the whole instrument is singing because of endless resonance then you can start to overlay the chords on the resonance and and It it makes the entire experience much richer and deeper and that seems to me a very to be a very hard thing to duplicate on electronic instruments yeah, uh, I think you know the The Limitless potential That technology has bought us is a wonderful wonderful thing But at the same time we don’t want to be throwing out the proverbial baby with through proverbial bathwater And losing that foundational quality. So I think kind of a situation where you can have aspects of both working together harmoniously is uh Optimal that’s what i’ve been that’s what i’ve been trying to do uh, so you get some of the messy complexity of analog with the perfection and and and Like endless possibility of electronic. Yeah, there’s stuff you can do with electronic that you cannot do with with analog and physical I can I can sample You playing the piano and then I could go in there and if I wanted I could go in and change a chord I could go in there and get the notes separated and move one of them around just to slightly change the chord There’s stuff we can do which blows my mind now there’s things coming out every week AI has started well machine learning they call it AI. Yeah. Yeah It started to come into music production and uh, there’s some incredibly exciting things happening in that area Uh, but the trick is as always is not to get carried away with these things and lose the foundational aspects uh When in you know when we embrace these things right? Yeah. Well, I noticed the other day that google had this little game on its search page where you could go and Type in a simple melody on a note on a staff that they had provided and then it would convert it to a Bach analog by analyzing 400 different Bach pieces and then Determining how it would be corded and how it would progress, you know and it was difficult to evaluate because it was very short and uh, the fidelity was relatively low, but But It’s pretty damn impressive that an AI system can go and evaluate 400 pieces of Bach’s music and then Rewrite something that has the same spirit based on a separate melody in a matter of seconds And I mean the thing about all this new technology is that barring catastrophe Bar Good time for everything to blur. I would say Barring catastrophe. It’s all brand new and it’s going to be so much better in 20 years that we can’t even imagine it You know because you kind of think well, this is a new technology and you think well, it’s new It’s like and and it’s like finished in some sense and We’re we’re so much at the infancy of this electronic revolution that it’s almost impossible to even imagine I’m very very excited about where we will be in 20 years just based off of watching my six-year-old son hercules Play minecraft with his best friend quincy who lives in canada and uh These little these little kids Creating these galaxies creating these huge worlds creating like down from the smallest details of Building little houses and putting beds in them and looking in the drawers Down to zooming out and creating like whole environments and things and uh and working together And like you know quincy is very good at this kind of thinking and this kind of stuff and hercules is very good at a different Kind of thing and they just harmoniously come together to create this stuff Within these these super computers the size of a paperback, right? Worlds, yeah and a generation who’ve grown up with that just being default just expecting to be able to imagine a thing And make it so you know when we were when I was uh A little kid I would sort of I would draw comics and things of that nature And I would imagine things and I would draw them and they would look a bit like I imagined You know and I practiced drawing and I got pretty good at it. I can never Get out exactly what I was thinking you’d get an idea um you know these kids can Really imagine vast vast things and and look at them and see if they work and they go This doesn’t work and I will destroy that and do another thing and so on and so forth. So when these kids 20 What are the what the hell are they going to do? this is a generation, uh Whose imagination whose expectation have been able to create what they imagine Has no limits on it a generation who from as long as they could remember had all had a supercomputer That was the most powerful movie studio In existence the most powerful recording studio a magazine You know, they can publish they can talk to anyone in the world they can Publish to anyone in the world. They don’t have limits on their creation. No, no everybody’s a media powerhouse But also a problem-solving powerhouse in a way and when they work together, that’s what’s really interesting because kids playing minecraft together They don’t need to say okay. You’re good at this you do that they just work it out and then do it and they go at a problem and they fix it and uh, Yeah, what i’m just Really excited about what they’re gonna do. Hmm. Hmm. Do you and do you look and watch what he creates? Yes, and it’s It’s beautiful It’s beautiful It’s like, you know cistine chafals like you zoom out and it’s fractals and you zoom in and it’s like he’s made a little House for his buddy or he’s made a statue of his friend. He’s built a roller coaster or whatever it is And then he’ll set it all on fire or something. He’ll become the angry god and he’ll he’ll throw lava at the thing But uh Yeah, the you know, because so many barriers the Previous generations had are evaporating And you have that you have the you know, the barriers of education or the barriers like I was talking about earlier You only used to be able to have 12 rock stars at once because there were only 12 covers of rolling stone right You know, so uh, that’s why uh, michael jackson Tried to get prince destroyed Or was it? Yeah, it was because you know, it’s like well, there’s only oh no this yeah First there was that and then they kind of like joined forces against uh, terrence trent derby according to trent’s trent derby because trent’s trent derby, uh Was a threat because he was like a third black guy and you’re only allowed at that point There was statistically only room for two black guys because of the amount of covers of rolling stone Right, right. There’s some limiting factor. Yeah, but that doesn’t exist anymore That doesn’t exist anymore. There’s uh Nowadays you can be a cult person like say young lean who’s a swedish rapper that mainstream people wouldn’t know of but everything He releases gets millions of streams and views and he can tour the world and live comfortably comfortably forever Uh, you know the barriers for uh education you can learn everything you can learn online Right. So now you have now you have niche celebrities Yeah, which is very strange things. Yes, because you you wouldn’t expect that to be a possibility but with the massive I mean, I think there’s two and a half billion people on youtube and God only knows what the total reach of the podcast networks are and so You can have a pretty sizable following on any of those platforms and be invisible to the majority of the people who are on them Yes It’s it’s yeah, it’s an incredible thing. You know, this is why they they they hate pewdiepie god bless him, uh pewdiepie it’s amazing that you have a situation where The biggest person on the biggest online, uh Broadcasting platform is somehow underground and anti-establishment Yeah, well I think it’s I think I think it’s evidence that this new media world is underground and anti-establishment in in the most profound possible way Like I can’t I can’t see how Broadcast television can possibly survive youtube No, it’s dead and this is another reason i’m very excited about this generation because not only is this generation Got this, uh minecraft limitless potential Actualization incredible computer skills coding skills. He’s learning to code young hercules six years old just so that he can create portals in minecraft and open a portal to another dimension the fact that he’s Interested in opening portals to other dimensions and has that as a thing in his vocabulary is incredible Right buying that with uh this complete disdain for uh, you know mainstream media or or uh Or those sorts of those sorts of systems uh It’s like what is going to happen? What are they going to do? I guess one question that that raises for me is What is it that’s going to hold us together? you know, I mean one of the things and this might just be the What would you call it? nostalgia Of someone who’s old enough to have a certain amount of nostalgia I mean with the limited broadcast means that we had When I grew up, you know I had three television channels when I grew up at least to begin with and one of them was in french So it didn’t really count Had a limited number of radio stations and so forth and newspapers there was a there was a continually emergent Census about what constituted the real? You know in the social and political realm at least and even in the physical world to some degree and part of that I think was that many of those venues Of communication were actually very carefully vetted and edited You know, and I would say time magazine would have fallen into that category because it was quite a magazine in its heyday You know quarter of an inch thick and almost almost nothing but solid text very carefully written and you could quibble about the Bias is an accuracy of the reporters, but they seem to be Professionals and they seem to be well supervised and well regulated and of course there’s danger in oversupervision and hyper regulation, but What seems to happen now is that it’s almost possible and maybe this is what the post-modernists were Imagining, you know in some sense or intuiting that we were entering a world where There would be so many different interpretations of what was real that virtually everyone could extract out from the endless stream of communication That construction of the world that seemed to suit them best for better or worse and There’s a fragmentation that goes along with that. That seems to me to be Well, maybe dangerous is it dangerous enough to be driving some of the nihilism that seems evident and some of the ideological rigidity Your nihilism was a Unavoidable byproduct of the line of questioning that humans were going down but I think they’re starting to come out of that and that’s another thing in this this new generation I’m seeing is a Swing back against nihilism Yeah, you think and so yeah Well that would account for the popularity of the meaning wave and so what what why do you? What makes you confident in that? I mean, I’m hoping very much that you’re Correct in your assumption, but what makes you confident in that? I think it’s historically visible That we all we you always see this people always react against their parents and so on and so forth There’s always that pendulum swing backward and forward It’s like as you said it’s all with these patterns an observable pattern which I’ve been aware of since since I was a kid Is the seven-year cycle from punk to psychedelia? Which swings backwards and forwards like a ticking clock? and it has done my whole life and So that’s sort of like a swing between complexity and simplicity or I think about it this place of the enormous Yeah, well, I mean it’s a cult. It’s a cultural phenomenon, but everything a great deal of what occurs is downstream from culture So if you think the sort of late 90s, sorry the the late 80s we had a summer of love of sorts We had a hippie periods acid house music was going people were dressing in bright colors Things were all combining together rap and dance and all these things and people were taking MDMA and Acids and stuff of that nature rave culture was a big thing then it swung back into Punkie nihilistic nurse and this happens in the colors people wear what people dress it suddenly went into Nirvana talking about killing like misery and it went into Brit pop in the UK Things became more conservative in this and it’s Sonics and they’re in the clothes stars with people wearing and then it went psychedelic again To the point I really I was thinking about this earlier. I was like, oh my god They actually legalized mushrooms in London at the year I calculated to be the peak of that particular seven-year psychedelic cycle, then it swung back again music went into emo Then it went back again the more recent one 2013 was the peak of the more recent psychedelic II thing We had odd futures the biggest rap group people wearing tie-dye Everyone drugs wise it was Molly which is MDMA again Then it swung back into nihilism and it’s like it’s kind of like the you know, there’s pirate ship rights It’s like a pirate boat and you pull up and you see it and then you go Shooom down and it did that in 2013 and then suddenly the drug had switched to Xanax. It was all downers Punk and goth stuff became the kind of cultural signpost colors went into black fonts went into gothic The conspiracy culture went from talking about aliens to complaining about Feminism and all those people that were interested in Psychedelic out there start up until 2013 was suddenly not anymore. And now it’s starting to swing back in the other direction Again and but this time because we’re all networked so much at this point The whole psychedelic thing is going to be a lot more psychedelic and a lot more powerful and have a lot more of a lasting impact I believe Now you’ve picked Ellen watts and jockel willing can Terrence McKenna and David Foster Wallace and Elon Musk and like How do you select the people from whom you derive your meaning wave albums and tracks? Well, it’s looking at the puzzle from a different angle, which is valid which is useful So it’s like I used to make music wherein I would rap and sing so I was rapping and singing and then I got to a Point where I realized that I didn’t yet know enough to Make an album about what I wanted to make an album about My first album was about was called when we were young and it was about being a kid and my second album was about The life equation was about kind of Being not a kid and interface interfacing with the world the third album What that needed to be about? I didn’t know enough yet and then I started listening to lots of people and listening to their position their perspectives on things and You know say between you and Alan Watts You’re you’re in a way doing what Alan Watts did for Eastern culture for Western culture And it’s in a funny way because it’s like you have a generation or two That don’t have knowledge of these fundamental aspects of sort of Western culture It was sort of stolen from them and you’ve come along and you’re Reintroducing that to people in a foundational fashion and Alan Watts did a similar thing but with Eastern ideas Terrence McKenna talks about a lot of the same stuff you talk about but from a specific angle And it’s also I think of it in archetypes In a way and you say someone like Jocko well ink is the warrior perhaps and that’s his his is a very very Necessary perspective at this point. It’s similar in ways to yours It has aspects of sort of discipline and stuff of that nature But in a you know in a much he he’s looking at a very specific side At which he is expert I just thought it would be this incredible powerful thing if you could take people somebody thought about a specific thing for 30 years and Make that into pop music that people could listen to in the gym or in the shower or wherever they were and they could really really Bring it into their lives. You’re not necessarily gonna listen to a podcast more than once even a really good one but if I take the the what I Think of the most interesting or best bits of a podcast and turn them into a pop song you could listen to that hundred times And it could write get in and you could really think about it and you could really integrate it into your life or integrate the bits of it that they’re useful to you Yeah, I mean that that’s how people learned historically right they set poetry to music and Listen to it over and over and that made it stick This is so the pre the oral tradition indeed Because the first thing I did was when I left school when I was 16, but my last exams The revision I did for them involved me just reading my revision notes over ambient music In a cassette recorder and then playing it when I went to sleep Which is which was a guess the first meaning wave Mm-hmm right right, but yeah, this is what we’ve been doing for thousands of years Yeah, well, it’s a lot easier to remember something if it’s presented in a multimodal way, right? So you have the words you have the rhythm you have the rhyming and you have the music. I mean so basically, you’re remembering it along five dimensions at the same time instead of just trying to extract out the Abstract Semantic meaning and and store that which is that’s very effortful, you know And I’m not even sure you can do it without going through those first stages Which stages well the stages of rhythm and oh, yeah, and memorization and you know, I don’t know how well you have to know something from the perspective of memorization let’s say before you can start to really think about it deeply and Transform it your own way This this is it, you know people used to remember whole books, right? Yeah, we’ll be walking around with volumes and volumes of Poetry and books in their heads and they’d be able to like, you know, just whip it out I mean, it’s just that people used to I mean even in my lifetime people had catalogs of jokes and stories right ready to throw out there in a pub conversation or whatever it was and That seems to be declining somewhat it’s one of the the unfortunate results of this wonderful technology that yes Yes, well, we seem to externalize everything, you know, yeah because we can put in the cloud now So we don’t need to save it on our hard drive, right? Right and it makes you it makes you wonder What there is that’s in you? I saw this funny New Yorker cartoon a while back where a Man came out with a fact of some sort and his wife says well Do you know that or do you just Google know it? Yeah, and and there’s a big difference between Having a fact at your disposal because you can find it in library and actually Having that fact in your cognitive toolbox so that you can use it actively in your life and you know, it’s it’s certainly been unbelievably useful for me to Create and remember a bank of stories and it makes you in much more much much more effective Communicator and a much better thinker like when I was a kid In grade 8 or grade 9, you know, and we were asked to memorize poetry always felt that was such a waste of time that But it was already written down in a book. What good did it do for me to be able to? Recite it and you know that I met a guy years ago years later who was an undergraduate and a remarkable person genius and rather unstable unfortunately, so I don’t think he ever amounted to much but One of the things he could do was declaim large sections of Shakespeare at a moment’s notice apropos And it was unbelievably impressive Like you know when he would start it everybody in the room would fall silent and like and he was very good at it You know, he he wasn’t embarrassing himself by bursting into this Into this old English prose. It was a real accomplishment And that was the first time that I saw how empty Modern people were in some sense because they don’t have that interiorized Don’t have that interiorized Verbal culture, you know now it’s not sure it’s not clear that in more archaic societies Everybody had that either From what I’ve understood it was the shamanic types that were the vast repository of the entire oral tradition but people had their stories and Well, you need to have your story so I don’t know what it is exactly that we’re Going to substitute for that Yeah, well, you know we’re in a wisdom as she said this is just begun we’re still you know in in sort of Zooming out terms. We’re still we’re still in in utero Yes, we’ve yet to be born and I think we’re I think we’re coming close to being born which is why Everything is the way it is and it’s such as such a heightened It’s just an incredible period of history to exist it at this point You know, you could have you could have been born at any time and for most of human history You’d have been suffering away unless you were some kind of Lord and even then you’d have had wooden teeth if you were really lucky Right and they didn’t fit very well. No, it’s like Jesus Christ imagine There’s a thing that Hercules said the good thing about having kids as I’m sure you know is they obviously, you know Is they just say really really smart things? That make you think and Hercules there’s a thing in Minecraft where you have survival mode in creative mode and survival mode it night time comes and the monsters come out to get you and you have to go hide in your house and hope that the monsters don’t get you and There are limitations on you and in creative mode there are there aren’t these limitations and you can fly and you can build and play And Hercules just it just turns around to me not seemingly inspired by anything that just happened I said dad I wish it could be creative mode in real life just for one day Because really we’re in survival mode and we have to eat and we have to work and die It goes I would just love it to be creative mode and just fly into the sky and play just for one day Hmm, I thought what a beautiful thing and then I thought that hang on. This is actually what we’re doing Great about a week later I thought that and I was like this is actually what we’re doing as a species for the first time a Vast proportion of us aren’t spending all of our time just trying to stay alive We’re in creative mode Yes, at least some of the time and that’s something to be very very grateful for because I think it’s really well It’s unbelievably new. It’s it’s crazily new. I mean people at least God who knows say hopefully it leads to everybody playing together nicely so that we can build a better world You know and I would say There’s a reasonable amount of evidence that that’s occurring I mean for all of its Catastrophic problems the internet works pretty well. I Mean it it’s given us a tremendous plethora of gifts even something, you know I’m not saying trivial because it’s not but taken for granted as Google Maps has had a profound effect on the way People live you’re never lost anymore And it’s enabled technologies like uber which and I think uber is a wonderful technology I think the fact that now anybody who’s unemployed But has a functional vehicle can almost immediately Find a way to make five hundred or a thousand dollars in a week or a week and a half is an absolute bloody miracle I mean I might be wrong about this, but it seems like That kind of poverty, you know barring inability to drive and other Catastrophes that kind of poverty where you’re backed in a corner. You’re just screwed. There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s Uber seems to have made a lot of that disappear. It’s like hey, man, you can’t make a fortune But you can make enough to get yourself out of a tight spot and it’s actually a pretty pleasant Experience like I like taking ubers. There’s no financial transaction people are almost always polite You know exactly where the car is going to be like, I don’t know. I think I think it’s been a really good thing so and it’s of course only one of God one of an infinity of miracles that are unfolding before us like like firecrackers every given second Is yes There’s on that thing, you know, if you if you there are so many ways to make money now If you’re completely skillless, you can go on Letgo or Facebook Gary Vee talks about this sort of stuff a lot You know, you can people are giving away chairs. I don’t want this chair anymore. You go. Yeah Yeah, then you sell it for $10 you do that all day. You can you can make hundreds of dollars in a day You don’t have to have any skills whatsoever They can if you do have skills there’s a million ways for you to make money And if you don’t have skills, there’s a million ways for you to get those skills There are 12 year olds on YouTube who will show you how to do everything. Yeah And I and I love those 12 year olds and I use them all the time right right? Yeah, I thought it was 12 year olds, right? No, well, absolutely well And you get these old guys down in like the southern u.s Who are like old plumbers or you know, they’ve got some specialty that they’re good at and they’ll grab their iPhone Roughly and just Roughly film themselves fixing something say ah, that’s how you fix that You know, and it’s it’s so it’s such an interesting Manifestation of altruism, you know and in the indication I mean people obviously like the attention that their videos Garner and I think that’s perfectly reasonable because it’s a form of Indication that what you’re doing is valuable. No, I mean there’s an ego element to it But the ego element is in fact the fact that what you’re doing is valuable And it’s so cool that people will take the extra effort like I was installing a stereo in this old car of mine a while back and you know, it it was a pretty old car like 11 or 12 years and somebody had put up a video about how to install the stereo in the car and I would have never figured it out that Specific car. Yeah, I would have never figured it out because there was hidden screws and all sorts of weird things that needed to be known and The guy didn’t have to do it You know, it was just good to do it and it certainly saved me a lot of time and energy So that was quite that was quite wonderful it would be really something if part of what the coming technological revolution enabled us to do would be to play and To play more effectively in a way that would translate into real-world results, you know And it is it’s conceivable that that’s one of the consequences I mean all these people that are learning to code and learning to use computers in a sophisticated way I mean god they’re just you know, you know the Chinese graduate more engineers every year than the Americans have engineers What’s this other thing that’s coming down the pipeline is this Babel fish thing You know this translation technology Which is already bloody good, but in a few years, it’s gonna be seamless Yeah, I will be able to talk to you and you will be speaking a different language should we say and Instantly that will be translated to me and I’ll be able to have a conversation with you in my language And we’ll understand each other so that means that Twitter opens up So that means that Twitter opens up to China and well, I mean governments allowing but said but you’re only like these sorts of current online Community experiences we have open up to the world and it also means that trade opens up to the world and it also means all That information you’re talking about opens up to the world because now you don’t just watch the video of the guy in Ohio You watch the video of the guy in Tokyo or wherever right? Yeah, you understand it and suddenly the sum of human knowledge and experience and usefulness is Shared with everybody, right? Right. Yes. It’s quite it’s quite well unfortunately at the same time the the sum of human foolishness and and Impulsivity as well, which is you know, I guess par for the course But something that we’re trying to desperately learn how to manage I’m hey just out of curiosity How long would it take you to queue up 42 rules for life? How do you mean? I was in stop playing it. Yeah Would this be a good connection? Yeah, why not? Why not DJ pizza? Let’s do it man. Let’s play some of it Tell the truth Or at least don’t lie Do not do things that you hate Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act Pursue what is meaningful not what is expedient if you have to choose Be the one who does things instead of the one Who is seen to do things? Hey attention Assume that the person you are listening to Might know something you need to know Listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationships Be careful who you share good news with Be careful Who you share bad news with? Remember That what you do not yet know Is more important than what you already know Be grateful In spite of your suffering In spite of your suffering What’s been the most exciting project that you’ve embarked on so far do you think what what’s been the most gratifying project Is that a reasonable question? That’s a reasonable question, but the answer is that each one is More exciting and gratifying than the last ah Which ties into this hyper productivity? Staying in the zone and refusing to leave experiment because it compounds Yeah, it just gets more and more intense and better and exciting There are synchronicities just in they just keep popping up and popping up and becoming myriads and ridiculous And I’ve taken I’ve taken synchronicities to be as signposts is what I’m treating those as Malcolm X said that when you spot synchronicities you’re walking with a law Grant Morrison always said it was the first step to becoming a Successful chaos magician was noticing those synchronicities and paying attention So I treat those things and they’re just every projects I do there’s more and more and more of that as I as I keep in this thing and sort of don’t stop The the last one I did which was clockwork elves, which was the Terrence McKenna project I just meant to do one song but finish the Alan Watts album I was like I’m gonna do this one Terrence McKenna song about his clockwork elves thing This is interesting and ties into something that Watts was talking about and I Sort of came out of a day’s Sort of three in the morning and I’ve made an album And it was almost like I didn’t do it It’s like and then I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot There’s a thing in Japanese anime you see a lot these these met these Mecha suits Which are like these giant robot suits and then humans sort of pilot them But they’re these amazing suits and a human can get in that and they can you can destroy a city or you know Whatever it is kind of feel that when you’re doing this stuff optimizing yourself in this fashion Becoming really really good at a thing becoming really proficient cutting out areas of wastefulness Becoming this finely tuned machine at that point you then sort of hand the keys to God as it were Stevie Wonder always said that he didn’t write his songs He kind of opened himself up and God wrote them through well You know you you developed such a body of expertise now in relationship to this So much of what you do has become Automatized, you know, and I don’t mean that in a bad way I mean that you’ve developed expert circuitry for all sorts of pieces of it and as you become better at something It’s necessary to stand back increasingly and let what you already know You let what you already know dominate you and take you over and and then you add a creative bend and twist here and there to Stop it from being merely rote You know like someone new that was great at playing a cello, you know, they have every technique down perfectly But they bend and twist each note Consciously to to add something new to it when you hit that zone It does mean that Well, everything that you’ve worked out to that point is starting to run automatically and there is an experience of Harmony I would say with Deeper parts of being when that occurs and it’s not surprising because if you’ve put that circuitry together honestly and diligently and courageously then it should be functioning properly and towards the good and so when you’re in the throes of that If you’re fortunate, then there should be almost nothing about that that isn’t good Now that’s that’s why that’s partly why character is so important You know what people don’t understand or or they’re not taught is that You genuinely become what you practice Not and not at some trivial level. I mean it’s built into you Biologically as well as spiritually Yes, it’s uh It’s terrifying You go through life and the reason that one of the reasons life feels like it’s speeding up is because you turn things into habits Right and then your brain kind of fast forwards past the habit. Yes, you’re going the same route to work every day Your brain will fast forward through that thing unless something different happens So a lot of times people feel life is speeding up because they’ve just turned so much stuff into habit So you have to be really careful about what you are Allow it to become habit and you have to keep checking on what your habits are Because at the same time you want to turn useful things into habits, right? You know, well that’s part of it that’s part of the tremendous difficulty of the balance between order and chaos you know, I mean because order does become invisible and unconscious and with the proclivity to become tyrannical and sterile, but it’s absolutely necessary because it makes you efficient and allows you to do Things that need to be done more than once with a high degree of accuracy and and and expertise but then there’s that add add mixture of the new that has to well, that’s what that’s what again, I think that’s what music signifies because there’s a fair bit of repetition in all music and That gives you a baseline expectation of what’s going to happen, you know, so you’re playing a game Along with the musician and you both basically know the rules, but what you’re hoping that the musician will do is break the rules at least to some degree in some way that Shocks you a bit keeps you interested in allows you to understand new possibilities That’s exactly what makes a great DJ set you want to have the right the right balance of Stuff that a person knows and makes them feel good and want to dance But then something that sort of shocks them and surprises them and takes them somewhere. They weren’t quite expecting It’s this thing I’ve been doing recently where I forced myself to play 50% stuff I haven’t played before or way, I haven’t played before because I at one point I’d found myself sort of Falling into it like I knew all so many things that worked It was really easy for me to unleash these combinations of things that work like in a fighting game We like press combine these various moves and you have like you unleash like a series of Fighting moves and you can knock the person out and I could do that very very easily but uh the really exciting things to do and the really useful to do things to do is to keep coming up with new ones and make Sure about half of what you’re doing is in that area of danger and the creation of something new which because that’s what leads to Those moments where the hairs stand up on right, right? Yeah Well, you have to have that element of I would say surprise but also of the potential for failure Exactly, right because I mean I noticed this with my lectures is that You know before I go out and do a lecture. I always have I spend about an hour Meditating although I hate to use that word. It is what I’m doing trying to Figure out what problem I’m trying to address and then trying to walk my way through the story that would enable me to explore that Problem, but then I always have about five minutes of sheer terror About the fact that it might not work like I might not get the problem formulated properly and I might not get through the story and come up with a The point because you know the talk should have a point There should be a conclusion or perhaps multiple conclusions, but at least one conclusion and because I Mix enough of what’s new in each lecture It isn’t obvious to me that that’s necessarily going to happen now. I’ve been fortunate so far and It’s happened each time I’ve lectured Publicly, which is how many times now? Oh, well for the 12 rules for life to earth’s 150 cities You know and so I’m becoming somewhat confident in my ability to manage it because I’ve done lectures when I was you know barely feeling able to drag myself onto the stage and Once I’m on there and warm up a bit you know it It it goes well, and yeah, I think part of that too And maybe you experience this as a DJ like I really feel that it’s a privilege to be up in front of the audience And it’s also a challenge to get them on board right because we’re all trying to be in the same place at the same time doing the same thing and You have to have a real sympathy for your audience In the deepest way you have to identify with your audience You know I think you have to feel yourself as part of your audience rather than the person who’s Say lecturing to the audience Before you can bring everyone along because it can’t be it can’t exactly be a top-down thing Participatory thing well, I always think of it in terms of this kind of like energy Triangle or something it’s like you give off this thing and then it comes back to you And then it goes back around again, and it’s this great. That’s going on even if it’s it’s I mean It’s obviously unspoken in a DJ capacity. You’re not having a conversation with words, but you’re giving them something They’re giving you energy in return in response to what you give them and then you build it and you build it and so on And so forth yeah, it’s a positive. It’s a positive feedback loop Hey, yes, and and you can I mean those can go out of control, but if you can keep them Modulated I had to stop drinking Because my reason for drinking well DJing that I’d given to myself as well I need to be on the same level as my crowd there or so I should be a little bit drunk But then then you get your thing distorted, and there’s all there’s well as we know there’s all sorts of Problems with drinking and the nightlife industry is oh, yes notorious functioning alcoholics. Oh definitely Well wonder I mean like a big part of not all of it, but a big part of what determines a probability of addiction is situation and the other thing too is that Someone like you or another musician say or a bartender nighttime people tend to drink more So it’s been it’s partly because they’re up at night But it’s also partly because they’re where they’re structured biochemically and then of course you’re always around people who are drinking And then what do you do after you’re done your? sets I mean the party’s on Exactly I’ve got this fix now, but yeah for my first year in Los Angeles Los Angeles everything shuts at 2 and then everyone goes up to a mansion in the hills and goes to another party there And that’s where all the business deals go down supposedly and things right kind of fell into that world for a little while Until I realized that it just wasn’t proving as effective and I had shit to do in the daytime god damn it Well, that’s the thing that’s that’s one of the best cures for an addictive process Is to have something better to do than to be hungover well, this goes back to your earlier question actually which is how I’ve changed in the past since meeting way and I Just don’t have any room in my life or any desire for Anything unnecessary which is you know any I don’t want to drink because I have this adventure I have this really really useful thing to do this proving really really useful in the lives of Hundreds of thousands of people and they tell me every day and it’s amazing in my life and it’s amazing in my family’s life You know the I got really annoyed not really annoyed. I think it really annoyed by social media but I did see that there was yet another vice story about Having kids is awful. Oh man that those sets so brutal. It’s so anti-human. It’s so cruel Evil it is it’s absolute especially cruel to women I think and had some poor woman on my Q&A last week Tell me that all her friends are down on her because you know She doesn’t call herself a feminist and because she wants children that they’re just torturing her and Jesus. It’s so awful because it’s like Nietzsche said if you want to Punish someone you should punish them for their virtues Yeah, and that’s was a brilliant and unbelievably cruel statement and then to find some perfectly normal healthy young woman who would like to have a family like every single one of her ancestors had for 3.5 billion years and to tell her that she’s responsible for you know Elevating the carbon footprint of the planet the ecology is just God, it’s so It’s I just can’t believe how cruel that is and it’s and it masquerades in the guise of Virtue which makes it worse, you know, it’s like Jesus woman have a child Have a husband have a have a career have a life for God’s sake There’s not that much to life the meat where the meme that they’re putting out There is like, you know If you have children like it costs loads of money and you won’t be able to do any of the things you enjoy And it will be life will be miserable when it’s the very opposite is true. I am way more Financially Abundant or better off I don’t know if abundance the right word Yeah in that direction since having a child my life is so much better since having a child My motivations are so much clearer. The reason for being is so obvious so much joy like Unmeasurable levels of joy have come from that one child And the only thing I wish would have asked my life is that if I was gonna go back and have a conversation with my earlier Self is just have lots of kids as soon as possible Right the earlier the better there is no optimal time like Hercules wouldn’t have happened if we planned it We didn’t we didn’t plan him. We always thought well, there’s no intelligent time to have a child. Oh, you’re never ready There’s never enough money. There’s never enough time that it added up But it’s the it’s the single most wonderful motivating occurrence in this magical blessed existence Well, that’s how I’ve always felt about my kids yeah, you know um well, there’s some there’s a Variety of reasons you know one of the things that has to happen to you as You mature if you mature is That at some point you have to realize that someone is more important than you Yeah And I don’t believe that that can happen unless you have kids because It’s actually not that easy to have someone be more important than you You know like if you fall in love with someone I would say There may be times when you would consider them more important than you, but I would say the general Equation is something like well. We’re equally important to one another You know and if it goes past that sometimes gets a little bit Well Questionable you know like well, I would die for you, or I would do anything for you. It’s like That’s a bit much you know But with kids It’s not that at all. It’s like they’re number one Period and you’re not and that puts It’s a relief to some degree I would say but it also puts things in the proper context in it and it does Provide you with additional input impetus for Proper action and ambition There’s no room for error. They’re looking at you. They’re looking at to you for everything You’re completely responsive like you know the if you’re not the best version of yourself Then what are they gonna be Yes, and then the mistakes you make are going to echo through their lives as well And then it’s intergenerational. This is the thing I realized relatively recently these Intergenerational else that just keep propagating down the line because they’re not fixed that yum Yeah, well, that’s it. You know is you get someone in some generation. They tear a hole in the fabric of reality and They pass through the fabric of reality And They pass it on to their children and unless their children sew up that hole then they pass it to their children and Damage remains until someone decides enough Yeah, I’m going to repair it and you know that’s partly what you’re trying to do as a parent is Sew up the fabric of being so a Child will inspire you to sew up the fabric of being like nothing else Yes, why I’m terrified of politicians without children frankly because they have no skin in the game Well, they certainly have less skin in the game than the and people who have a vested interest in in the future not being a horrible place to live Yes, yes, yes Well, yeah, well I’m to attendee Women or men who are listening out there that are of the proper age I would say don’t let the naysayers and the pessimists and them gloom purveyors and those who dare to compare human beings to a cancer on the face of the planet Dissuade you from having children. This is what the bad guys say in movies. That’s what agent Smith said in the matrix He was the villain He was the villain and the this ideology is the idea the idea the ideology of villains it’s a very very strange thing and you know, they believe themselves to be virtuous and People who believe themselves to be virtuous are terrifying because they will do any kind of evil because they think they’re goodie goodies That’s terrifying thing. But as we were talking about earlier, I’m very excited about the future because the new generation is gonna react directly Against that the most punk rock thing you can do in 2019 is is get married and have a child and Take your life seriously and be nice and be civil God wouldn’t it be something if that was the case? That’s what this is what’s gonna happen. I think this is what’s blossoming I think we’re gonna have a generation of radical wholesome mr. Rogers’s Well, you’re I think you’re the most optimistic person that I’ve talked to for a long time. I mean I talked to Steven Pinker, you know And he’s he’s optimistic in a much more detached way because he thinks that the data indicates that economically Things are you know a very rapid rate but you’re speaking of something more akin to a psychological transformation Yes, I am and I’ve been this is just based on on Observations I believe this and there’s a lot that could go wrong We’re at the best time to be alive in the in in recorded human history Obviously, we’re also at the most dangerous time because it could all collapse right everything this wonderful miracle that we inhabit I get to walk outside and no one tries to break at my head, right? Yes, which is which it’s you know, you you you have to be sure that One of the hallmarks of wisdom is to understand that if you could walk outside and no one throws a brick at your head That that’s actually a miracle Yeah, it is. I know this. Yeah, cuz I grew up somewhere people where people used to throw bricks in my head. Oh What was that all about? I am I was a I grew up in North Wales and I was like the only person like me I was any person who liked music and stuff of that nature and everyone thought I was an insane weirdo So I was a see my life and people are very brutal in in the UK Certainly compared to Los Angeles to America where people are very nice Compared to the brutality of that region of the world and I think it’s to do with the climate, you know It’s a cold gray rock and the other thing actually is in America Everyone operates under the the the foundational assumption that anyone could be president So, you know you have a service culture and waitresses and nice to you Whereas in the UK people operate under this assumption that there is a monarchy Which means there’s a level that you could never get to or beyond which means that there’s this Weird unspoken thing that you’re scum. So everyone everyone’s a bit bitter and twisted because of that. I think in the UK But yeah, anyway, it was I had quite a sort of tough upbringing people were very very mean I’m very very aware of the capacity for The nastiness and species And horror which so when I say things like this about where I think we’re going this isn’t out of any kind of Naivety right right. That’s too few months. I know full well what humans are capable of. Yeah. Well, that’s good because optimism without the underlying wise pessimism is useless because you’re not taking that the Pro seriousness of the problem with sufficient gravity because it’s a serious problem Yes, we have serious problems. How old were you when you started dissociating with? Creative people and sort of found your own crowd Well, this goes back to what we talked about earlier. So when I when I was young I had no I thought I was the only person like me on earth I Thought you know, I was just strange creature and I would that life might be this awful forever But I sort of you know granted I left, you know, I left school at 16. I left home at 16 Left Little sleepy little whales and went to a big city and that’s when I started finding people like me, right? So you needed to get you needed to get out to the city? Yeah, I had to leave home and move to a different country Great. Yeah That’s one of the issues of being high in creativity, you know is that it’s not that common and You have to find Your niche and if you live in a small place There may not be any other people like you and so you are going to be marked out as someone who’s strange because You are strange by the dint of your creative capacity. It’s virtually the defining characteristic of creativity The Thing is now you can go online and find loads of people like you right And you could make and you could make up with them and you could send files backwards and forwards and you could create things And also so it’s I’m interested to see what that does as well Yeah, well, it certainly does mean that that people of specific talents Rare talents can find themselves in ways that they never could before now. It also means that people of Spare and rare pathology can also find themselves and that seems to cause a certain amount of trouble But I don’t see how it would be possible to get one without the other Yes, this is whether this is the thing for every one of these amazing solutions. We find all these wonderful gifts There’s a shadow side, of course we have to deal with and that’s the main thing right is that we just work out how to deal with it And okay, so so two more questions. I guess one would be What has been the shadow side of what you’ve been doing like with working with this meaning wave You you you’re much more well known than you were has that had an effect on your life other than a positive one and and What’s been the price that you’ve paid for this? You know doesn’t it so bad so far, you know, yeah the usual some people Really really don’t like you for example And therefore me doing stuff with you means that suddenly I’ve gone from a hero in their eyes to a complete villain And there’s a few people That’s been the case with but that’s you know, that’s to be expected. I would say I would say, you know The whole thing has been a blessing The whole thing has been a blessing You know, there’s the amount I’m working means I don’t get to see my family as much as I would like to see my family The amount I’m working means I don’t get to see my family as much as I would like to there is that yeah You know, I’m I’m work, you know working very hard but the time we have together is that much more precious and we’re working together very much together and we’re supporting each other and and you know, we we see this as a Useful and an helpful endeavor to be engaged in and how much time are you spending working a day? Oh God 14 hours or so 15 Yeah, you know, it seems like that’s about the minimum amount of time that you have to work if you really want to push yourself To new levels of accomplishment and that’s every day. Yeah every day Yeah, it’s it’s very very difficult to exceed Expectations, let’s say if you’re trying to work a normal eight-hour workday I my my experience with people is that they’re either not busy enough or they’re so busy they can barely keep up and that it’s usually the ones that are so busy they can barely keep up that are Pushing the envelope in whatever discipline they happen to be pursuing. Yeah, and you know, then you just have to Concepts I heard of recent which I like which I’ve been trying to do Essentialism, you know when you so when you get to the point where you’re which is a wonderful point to be out where there’s suddenly More to do than you have time to do with which I have fully there are more albums I would like to make than I physically have time to do in a lifetime. There are more Speakers I would like to cover there are more, you know, there’s more More songs. I would love to play more techniques. I would love to learn there is far More to do in this lifetime than than I have life. So then essentialism you boil down What are the essential things and what things cannot fit and then you? You know, then you streamline your life and you do that ever more ever more Remove things that are less essential making room for the more essential and then the more you know What the more essential is the better idea you have of where you’re going and what you’re trying to do and how to do it Yeah, well, that’s the separation separation of the wheat from the chaff. That’s a real That’s a real skill if you can manage it especially if the opportunities are flying at you fast and furiously You presumably have more than you could possibly hope to well I do a certain amount of flailing about I would say, you know luckily what’s happened is that as I’ve become better known and And I think this is an element of that synchrony that you sing synchronism that you described earlier is that fortunately as with each leap in notoriety or popularity I’ve had people show up who offered to Take certain tasks off my plate no in professional relationships and I’ve been fortunate that the majority of those people have been very competent and so and I do delegate like my hiring ethos is You want this job? Okay, do it. I’m not gonna micromanage you if you can do it man Great, right power to you. Hopefully you can do it better than me And if you can’t do it, well, then I’ll have to find someone else well, or we’ll have to find you a different place because Because there’s just no point in you doing it if you can’t do it better than me then Well, then that’s no good I mean, that’s the ideal thing in life is everything you’re not the best at Delegate that to someone who is the best at that right focus on the stuff that you’re the best Well, right and then you can also continue to do more things and yeah, you know I would say my wife and I have been fairly ruthless Well, my daughter as well My daughter as well probably my son as well in the communication we’ve had about the people we’ve hired over the last three or four years because the time pressure is so Intense, you know if you can do the job man We’re thrilled to have you but if you have three or four chances and you can’t do it then we just stop working with you immediately because We don’t have any time for error It’s and that the the costs of the errors are too great So but you can delegate So it’s a difficult thing to learn to do I it took me a long time to be able to let go because I did everything myself for so long I taught myself how to do every aspect of this sort of business From the graphic design to making the videos to recordings went to everything right letting go of that It was a hard thing to learn to do now Now I’m very happy to do that and if I can find somebody can do something better than me then wonderful I would much rather than that, but it did take a while. It’s part of the whole ego Well, you have to also master it to some degree before you’re capable of determining whether the person you’ve pulled in as a replacement Actually knows how to do it. Yeah, this is true So there is that work that you have to do yourself before you’re capable of Delegating and evaluating the consequences. Okay, so last question I think um What’s gonna happen to you over the next year Who knows I’m gonna work very hard, okay, I’m gonna get better. I’m gonna stick to the plan I set and The hyper productivity and results of this will will compound so where this leads Who knows but I write you know that I will make great music and it will be useful in a great many people’s lives Right, so you’ve got a you’ve got a strategy Yes, and what do you what do you what do you like about the hyper productivity? I mean one of the things you said was that well, you don’t have time to drink You don’t have time to waste time and there is something really useful about hyper productivity in that regard Is that it it does force you to dispense with everything that’s damaging and non-essential because you just don’t have the time But is there anything else about? For about the hyper productivity that you found Let’s say psychologically significant or useful I’m a lot. I mean it’s the thing is I started the hyper productivity thing exactly the same same time. I started the carnivore diet So sometimes I’m not sure which is causing what I Used to about once a month go into a kind of deep depression for a few days, which my wife would call my funk I’m a very optimistic happy person normally, but then there would be a little bit where I was kind of the opposite I haven’t had that Since Wow, congratulations. How long is that bean? That’s 13 months and what else is I wasn’t gonna ask you about the diet But now I’m going to what’s happened to you because of the carnivore diet Well, I lost all my unnecessary body fat. How much was that? I think I went from like 160 to 146 and I’ve stayed at 146 about since and that happened pretty quickly Like the first part of it was then days like my face changed within a few days. Yeah, this blows I guess Inflammation likely a yes all that sort of thing. I used to have like sort of psoriasis and that one I used to have like my tongue was all messed up and yeah, so it itself out You start bleeding gums and that’s gone. That’s gone. Hey, that’s interesting cuz that went for me, too Yeah, I used to have like little bumps on my skin. You wouldn’t really notice but like close up you would that’s all gone I have very smooth skin now I have very consistent high energy I used to sort of oscillate I guess It’s made a lot of so there’s all those sorts of things It’s made life so much simpler and hyper productivity makes life so much simpler because when you know That certain things have to be done without question Then there’s no question, right? You know, it’s like well, I can’t go and do that thing because I’m going to do this I’ve committed right. Well, that’s the that’s advantage That’s the advantage of having a very well delineated aim a Yeah, and a higher and a purpose you bet it helps you separate what’s necessary from what isn’t necessary And that is a genuine relief no doubt about it. It’s cool. It’s joyful. It’s so much as so much weight is cast off you There’s you know, someone asks you to do a thing There’s no debate you either do it or you don’t based on what what this aim is what you’re doing, right? Same then applies to things like food like that one of the really annoying things in my life Price of the carnival thing was like the daily. What are we having for dinner conversation? And the the annoyance is related to that which is completely gone. I know what I’m having for dinner. I’m having a steak And I know what I do having for breakfast and the same thing, you know, and I know what I’m drinking I’m drinking water and I know I’m gonna feel You know that I know I’m not gonna suddenly be sleepy or bloated or weird after eating something, you know I’m gonna be the same high-energy Purpose that’s a that’s a major plus. So congratulations or not. That’s a huge. That’s a huge beneficial transformation. So Let’s end with this. Um What do you think you’re doing with this What’s your like I know that you have a name and an ambition you’re making this music you’re making yourself hyper productive you’re concentrating on this meaning wave, but underneath all that there must be a What like an invisible or an implicit ambition something like that a deep ambition What what’s your most profound hope for what you’re engaged in? Personally I would like to become the best version of myself possible You know the for the Dragon Ball X sort of final form type thing The transformations that you go through and there’s these levels of you. I want to get to the nuke level I want to get get to nuke level and be the best possible version of myself possible as effective on every level I can be with relation to the path I’ve chosen which is this Which is what I always what always since I was you know, my earliest memories is being about seven years old and listening to music and wanting to make music and Reach people and communicate with people on that Specifically with regard to the meaning waves Yeah, well, I think the meaning wave thing is Like so much we’ve talked about We haven’t scratched the surface of what’s possible with music we haven’t scratched the surface of what It can do and we haven’t I haven’t scratched the surface of what I can do with it I’m like this is a very what we’re listening to at the moment and the level it’s at right now is it is a very Neanderthal rough Approximately Beginning of where it can go and what it can do I think and I think that way I think that way with pop music Pop music is so new you know just it just happened Jim it was just there and and You know, we don’t know To quote you a bit. We don’t know what the upper limits of this thing are, right? Right, I’m excited to explore this so I think of myself a bit like the card in deep space nine Into this world Yeah, well you’ve hit a vein that seems rich and you seem highly committed to getting better and better at mining it and So that’s a good adventure and it I mean from what I’ve observed with regards to your trajectory over the last while then That all seems to be expanding nicely so it’s nice to have an adventure Where you you can’t necessarily see the destination, but it looks positive Yeah, I Mean maybe it’s not positive, you know, maybe the adventure has a horrible ending this it’s an adventure regardless. Yes. This is true Something to be said for that Yeah, we’re at this stage as we mentioned earlier we’re at this point of human development where Everything our world we can we can barely imagine the world in five years that alone 10 15 20 Grandmother’s 96 She’s the eldest of 13 She saw the birth of the radio. She was like, you know, she was she left school at 13 to window We saw TV and internet and all of this stuff appear Like what what do what have we to witness things that you know, things are speeding up so radically It’s just just an incredibly exciting time to be here and To be actively taking part in an aspect of it and sort of like, you know marching boldly forward into unexplored territory is About the best adventure I could think of Well, look, it was really good to talk to you I mean I’ve been watching what you’ve been doing with a fair bit of curiosity for quite a long time because certainly came as a shock to me when it first came out and It’s it’s also refreshing to speak with someone who’s unabashedly and not naively optimistic and Well a I hope we can meet at some point in a relatively not too distant future and B I wish you every bit of success that you can have with your hyper productivity and your experimentation with music and I’d like to thank you as well for doing what you have to popularize my My work and my words in such a careful manner Thank you. That’s that was my Yeah, I really didn’t want to do disservice to those words because I respect them greatly and I’m very grateful for them and I’m very grateful that you’re out there doing this work and You know putting your head over the Battlements at this crucial crucial time in our development as a development as a species as we boldly march into Hyperspace and our destiny. Thank you. Very good to meet you Hopefully we’ll talk again in the not too distant future. I’m sure we will and I hope you like the album Thank you. I’m very much looking forward to it. Nice. Okay, man Like it really good to meet you. Yeah you too. Bye. Bye