The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Akira the Don: Music and Meaning

Episode Date: April 14, 2019

On this episode, we’re presenting a conversation with Akira The Don, a British musician who has used parts of Dr. Peterson's lectures in his music. https://www.jordanbpeterson.com

Welcome to season 2, episode 4 of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Doctor Peterson's daughter and collaborator. Today, we're presenting a conversation between Dad and Akira the Dawn, a British artist, musician, and DJ, and originator of a new musical subgenre, Meaning Wave, also known as Lofi. Meaning Wave mixes music and spoken content derived from Dad, as well as other popular thinkers such as Jocco Willink, currently number one on the LoFi charts, Terrence McKenna, and Alan Watts. Welcome to the Jordan

B Peterson podcast. Dad, why did you want to talk with Akira? Well, I've been following the work that Akira has been doing for about a year. I think you introduced him to me, actually. I found out about him somehow on YouTube, and he was this interesting and idiosyncratic person who was producing music of a genre that I wasn't familiar with that mixed, spoken word with, well, with background music. And it was, it's like a version of hip hop, although a very calm version, I would say. And he sent it to me, or I stumbled across it, and I kind of kept an eye on it, because

I was interested to see if people would respond to that combination of spoken word, say, for my lectures and music. And he seemed to be serious about what he was doing, and he seemed to be doing a good job. And so I've been following for about a year, and he seems to be becoming more popular by all appearances. So I thought it was a good time to talk to him to find out what he's up to. He just released something called 42 rules for life. He'd asked me for an audio, an audio recording of all the 42 rules that I had written originally for Kuroff from which my book, 12 rules from life, and the next book as well have been derived. And so that was another reason why it was a good time

to talk to him, because he just really sat this week. And I thought it had gone pretty well. You know, and he's a peculiar and interesting person. And so it's always entertaining to talk to someone who's creative and original in a way that you wouldn't expect. A peculiar how? It's super open? Yeah, that's right.

And you know, he's trying to make a living doing something that no one else is making a living at. And he's getting enough downloads on Spotify and other, what other venues for distribution of music to continue with his work. When we return, Dad's conversation with DJ Akira the Dawn. Hey guys, an update on upcoming events. Dad is going to be debating Slavos Giyec April 19th at 7.30pm EST in Toronto. The debate is Marxism versus capitalism and

should be very interesting. Gieck is basically the world's most prominent Marxist and dad thinks Marxism is pretty much the most dangerous ideology out there. Should be spicy. Tickets are completely sold out. They sold out incredibly fast. So we set up a live stream for the first time. We figured people who weren't in Toronto would want a chance to see the debate, plus a lot of GJEC's fans are European. Tickets are being sold at Dad's website, jordanbe Peterson dot com slash events, and at PetersonverseGJEC.com. It should be extremely interesting.

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 Lofi. For reasons that have been quite surprising to me, Akira has been making Lofi tracks, also known as Meaning Wave, a combination of meetered, 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 is 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 in the same type. The third album, oriented around my words, will be entitled J.B.P. 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 Kora several years ago. I think I'll feature that on today's podcast. Akira has also produced similar works featuring Ellen Watts,

Jockel Willink, who is currently number one in the meaning wave charts, Terrence McCannna, David Foster Wallace, and Elon Musk, among others. Overall, Spotify downloads have topped four 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 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, lovely? I'm engaged in an experiment in ridiculous hypoproductivity and zone in habitation. My idea being, well basically, 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 new form of music, or this nothing is new, is it? Making this form of music and doing it in a hyperproductive 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 March 2019. Oh, so you mean since the beginning of 2019? Indeed. Oh yeah, okay. Well, that seems to qualify as hyperproductive, 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. There are 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 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? If one just got in the state of just constantly creating with a very specific sort of mission and purpose and found out 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 last February. And the results have been beyond what I could have hoped for. And okay, the results being beyond what you could have hoped for, along what dimensions, what's changed for you over the last couple of years?

Like, 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? Hello, I mean, previously, I mean, I've been doing this, you know, it was sort of my job since 2004, full time around 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 sort of trapped in, which was completely my own focus, I'd yet to imagine 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 pressed, all these sorts of things. And I would get sort of discouraged and sad, if I would 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, 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's sort of compounds. You know, the time is different in the internet. A week is fine in the internet. A 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 going to make this video when hypothetically I could release it this afternoon. Crazy thing to do with a, well, with a, with a, what's essentially a semi-documentary? I mean, unheard of, you know, I know. Looking at your camera quality. You know, we're all working around with devices in our pockets that are better than the things they made in 2001 to space, so to see what. Yeah, well, 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. They will punish you if they're not fed. But yeah, they punish you by having the fruits of your previous work start to decline. Indeed. Yeah. So, what was that thing? Alamo had that thing, and you talked about Steam Theory, which was the idea that the

amount of time between the first human, say the invention of 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. So his idea, and 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. There's so much stuff being generated at any one moment that you go from fluid to steam.

Was that Kirchwiles? And LG, who mentioned that? I heard Alan Moore talk about that. You heard Alan Moore, okay, because Kirchwiles, of course famous for the idea that the singularity is coming as a consequence of all of this doubling. Yeah, it's a similar thing. The idea is that once you're in steam territory,

anything could happen at any given second. This thing's being birthed right now, someone could be about to put something in the app store that fundamentally changes the way we interact and do stuff. 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. I think what's that dating app that you swipe? Tinder. Tinder's 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. Yes. 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

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. It's 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 there's only a few people got to make music at a higher level. Just a few decades, a decade, a decade, a 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 creating and manipulating sound. That each person who does it has a unique stack of things that they use, that's unique to them. Right. Well, the strange thing about what's happened with you, I would say, or one of the strange things I've noticed, I'm sure there's many strange things that have happened with you over the last while, but 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 hyper, steep, perito distributions, where virtually everyone who puts content on the line online gets pretty much zero attention. That would be 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 must be rather rare. By your numbers, I think they have to be regarded as successful, certainly in terms of volume. What does it mean to you in terms of monetization? I asked this, 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, or you pursue this, what would you call it? Strange pathway.

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 very difficult. I've been doing this a long time and I kind of 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 on the line. 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 InScope 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 mix tapes 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. Oh, well that's interesting to know. But you have to stream a lot. So it works out as at about $4,000 per million streams, for example. It's just looking at streaming. So you need to be listening to a lot of your stuff. But that's a rough percentage, man. But you think about all the, you know, how many people that are in the world and, you know, this insatiable hunger that people have for music.

Yeah. You're never going to not want to listen to music. And if never gonna not wanna listen to music, and if you keep giving them good music, that they love and connect with, they will always listen to it. And there's increasing, there's so many more places people hear music now, than they used to, music's 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 you see a continually expanding market? Yes, yes, definitely. And there's a side from streaming,

this is various, how it is, ways of you. 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 the things together. If you work hard and you're consistent and you're good, and you don't stop consistency is obviously the 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 very impressed to hear that, because it seems like one of the world's more unlikely ways to thrive. I mean, I mean, in two ways, like one of the world's more unlikely ways to thrive. I mean, I mean, 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'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 medired spoken words, so there's a bit of a poetic element to it, and then you're carefully selecting music to go with it and matching the cadence of the

spoken word to the music. People seem to be responding to that. What kind of reaction are you garnering from your audience? I mean, you must get a fair bit of correspondence. And I've read some of the YouTube comments and so forth. So it seems to me, 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 comments is kind of almost unheard of. 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. 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 going to commit suicide and things of that nature. And then the music helped them find a reason and helped 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 very significant and specific 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.

Obviously, it's a substitute. Well, that's probably putting it wrong. It's something that's providing the meaning that they're searching for both through their addiction 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 big deal, and 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 there been much research done? Because from where I'm at DJ, I'm out, suit the 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. And marry with them, not just for the rest of the week, but for the rest of their lives. But I've experimented with combining things to create drama, to create violence, to create lusts, to create all sorts of things.

And it's repeatable. It's repeatable in a scientific experiment, capacity. So yeah, I was gonna ask you, is there a fewer, where are any? No, not really. I have a point. 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. But the study of meaning as a phenomenon is a relatively new one. I mean, it emerged to the degree that it has emerged sort of out of the, 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 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 and, well, let's say in church, in sacred celebrations. And in any activities where people gather together in groups for anything of any significance. And 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 transcendental experience than anything. Yeah, 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 get at certain transitions, which is when you move one song into another. And when you're DJing or when I'm DJing anyway,

I'm making sure that those things have a purpose of it and 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, But those things have a purpose of it and 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 your 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, the way you'll sort of blend them,

I've seen that make people burst into tears. Right. 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, 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, 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 the rest, we try to intermingle harmoniously with our actions and our thoughts so that the whole process turns into something that's symphonic. And then 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 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 reminds them of the potential harmony that things can attain. And that's not optional, especially if you're in a chaotic state. Is the truth, I think it's the truth of everything. And what is it, Stevie Wonder said? Music is the language we all speak. It's something we all understand.

And that's true across the world, and I've seen that. It's interesting how music 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 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 Sample Jew because I heard the melody and something you were saying and I could 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 French music, the actual melodies in music are similar to the shape of the voice, the vocal sounds of the actual language. 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, it's a fairly

consonant heavy language, so maybe that has something to do with it. 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 a very interesting thing. I think this is why hip- hop is taken over the world. Hip hop is now the dominant genre everywhere, pretty much everywhere. And I spend a fair bit of my time researching music on a weekly basis as a part of my job

and listening to music in different countries. And hip hop is essentially taken over the whole world and hip hop exists 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 on say rock. I don't know, that's subjective. You know, the English accent, we do a lot of small sounds than elongated sounds, which, what's that called? The Scottish snap, which is a thing that's in a lot of rap these days. It's like this type thing is a da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da folk and African jazz and traditional music. Right, right. 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 her 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. Given the absolute necessity of trading these modes of communication across the world and the unbelievable utility that that's had and even the idea that it's a form of theft in terms of its motivation is so entirely spacious 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 black blues artists from the US.

I mean they were doing everything they could to imitate them. 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. Because it takes from everything within to itself to make something new. And that's the reason it, there hasn't been a new musical genre, a new sort of specific like, 10 pole musical genre since hip hop.

Yeah, that's right. 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 a really amazing how hip hop was born. Hip hop was born because there was some rioting in New York and some poor people managed to get their hands on some quite good sound equipment and start throwing parties with it. And one of them

worked out a way of playing the same record on two turnt tables at a slightly different part of the record on each site, so we could create a loop from the record, over which somebody could rap to the story, hype up the crowd. Therein it was born. Take from another piece of existing music or another piece of existing idea, and you know, there was sampling European dance, there was sampling craft work and there was sampling like weird folk stuff and there was you know, they were sampling European dance, they were sampling craft work and they were sampling like weird folk stuff and they were sampling James Brown. They were sampling from everywhere. Hip-hop was taken from every bit of the existing 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 real experiences, they could talk about their fantasies, they could talk about their fears. I remember Chuck D. once saying that the core story in hip-hop could be bowled down to as simple as, I am, like I exist. Like the protest of it, or the core of the story is just like I exist, I'm here. And then the music is culturally

appropriative as possible. They took from everywhere. And 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 you can end up with a sort of very dull. Well, the other thing that art for them. 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 just 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, 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 block experience, and he's careful about it, 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 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 an 88-year-old woman, I think,

an elderly, elderly woman. And Margaret Lawrence 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 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 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 see if you can go one step farther. Yeah, they haven't thought it through because the end result of that is that you can only write basically you only have autobiography. You couldn't have a comic book, unless it was written by a team of 30 people

if it contained 30 characters. It means putting everyone 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 our dies. Well, I think that's the point of the complaint, is 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. You know, there's a lot of people complaining about modern art and the assault on beauty,, but this war on beauty is kind of rejection of skill and transcendent, obviously transcendent greatness in lieu of kind of ugly things that remind us of that. Let me ask you about the people that you've chosen to feature in your Meet is it best referred to as meaning wave or as low fire and what what do you what's the difference?

Well, yeah, meaning wave is as 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 meaningful speech with wave music, wave music is a lo-fi. It's trap, it's vapor trap, it's cloud trap. It's a bunch of different things, but they share a common aesthetic vapor wave, things of that nature,

which is a musingly opposed modern art form. Low fire just means low fidelity. So I've always made low fire because when I first started making hip hop, it sounded quite bad because I didn't know what I was doing. So it was quite low quality. Ah, low fire just means, you know,

maybe there's some record crack or maybe you've... It's not the most polished sounding thing. It's not top four radio. I've been considering doing another project called High Fire, which goes in the exact opposite direction, and just goes pristine, clean. What have you? But anyway, so Low Fire 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 lofai 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 lofai hip-hop is really just hip-hop instrumentals without an emphasis on high-tech production.

I see. So I mean, so you think it's more comforting and welcoming to people? I mean, I've often been in buildings, 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. Yeah, it is. It is a creepy feeling because like there's

some degree of imperfection that seems to be neat or age, warnness. Well, we have to happen with music. So technology is what drives music always. The reason that music sounds like it does currently, 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 kind of dominated music for the past 10 to 20 years. And the reason for that is because it sounds really good coming out of a telephone as it does a club system. And the drum kits that we're using before that just don't pop out of a phone in the same way.

You can't really hear them. So until phones can more accurately reproduce a 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. It really, really clean, and then as people started working within computers and the music, often signs 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 it was that became that kind of cleanliness you were talking about, that kind of sterilized thing. And a lo-fi reintroduces real world analog elements to the thing, which brings a humanity in an nostalgia and a sort of tactile feeling that music had started to lose, which I think is why people like that. Yeah, well, there's something about analog instruments that have a singing quality, that the electronic

instruments, even at the highest end lock. 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 it makes the entire experience much richer and deeper. And that seems to me to be a very hard thing

to duplicate on electronic instruments. Yeah. I think 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 the 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 optimal. That's what I've been trying to do. So you get some of the messy complexity of analog with the perfection and endless possibility of electronic.

Yeah, there's stuff you can do with electronic that you cannot do with analog and physical. 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 court. I could go in there and get the notes separated and move one of them around just to slightly change the court.

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. They started to come into music production. And there's some incredibly exciting things happening in that area. But the trick is, as always, is not to get carried away

with these things and lose the foundational aspects 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 that 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 the fidelity

was relatively low, but it's pretty damn impressive that an AI system can go and evaluate 400 pieces of box music and then rewrite something that has the same spirit based on a separate melody and a matter of seconds. I mean, the thing about all this new technology is that barring catastrophe. Barring. 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 it's like finished in some sense. And 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. These little kids creating these galaxies, 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, that's zooming out and creating like whole environments and things. 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 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 super computers that the size of a paperback. Right. 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. When I was a little kid, I would draw comics and things of that nature. I would imagine things and I would draw them and look a bit like I imagined. I practiced drawing and I got pretty good at it.

I could never get out exactly what I was thinking be it get an idea 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 It's on and so forth. So when these kids 20 What are what the hell are they gonna do? This is a generation what the hell are they gonna do? This is a generation whose expectation of being able to create what they imagine has no limits on it.

A generation who, as long as they could remember, had all had a super computer 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 careers. No, everybody's immediate powerhouse. But also a problem solving powerhouse in a way. And when they work together, that's what's really interesting. This 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 yeah, what I'm just really excited about what they're going to do. Do you and do you look and watch what he creates? Yes, and it's beautiful. It's beautiful. It's like, you know, sister in chaffles, 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 angry guards and he'll throw lava at the thing Yeah, the pizza, you know, because so many barriers the previous generations had are

evaporating. And you have that, you have 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 that's why Michael Jackson tries to get Prince destroyed. Or was it, yeah it was, because you know, it was like, well there's only, oh no, this was, yeah, the first there was that and then they kind of like joined forces against Terence

Trent Derby. According to Terence Trent Derby, because Terence Trent Derby 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. Nowadays, you can be a cult person, like say, young Lee, 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 they've come to comfortably forever.

You know, the barriers for education, you can learn everything you can learn online. Right, so now you have niche celebrities. Yeah, it's need very strange things. Yes. Because you wouldn't expect that to be a possibility, but with the massive, I mean, I think there's 2.5 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 incredible thing. You know, this is why they hate PewDiePie. God bless him. The biggest person on the biggest online broadcasting platform is somehow underground at anti-establishment. Yeah. Well, I think it's evidence that this new media world is underground and anti-establishment in the most profound possible way. 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 Minecraft limitless potential, actualization, incredible computer skills, coding skills. He's learning

to code. Young Her Hercules six years old, just so that he can create portals in Minecraft, an open of portals or another dimension. The fact that he's interested in opening portals to other dimensions and has that as a thing and his vocabulary is incredible. But buying that with this complete disstain for mainstream media or those sorts of systems, 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? 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 continually emergent consensus about what constituted the real, you know, in 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. 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 biases and 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 over supervision and hyper-regulation.

But what seems to happen now is that it's almost possible. And maybe this is what the postmodernists were imagining, in some sense, are 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. 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? Yeah, nihilism was an unavoidable byproduct of the line of questioning that humans were going down. But I think there's something to come out of that. And that's another thing in 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 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? Well, I think it's historically visible that we 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 always these patterns. An observable pattern, which I've been aware of since I was a kid, is the seven-year cycle from punk to psychedelia, which swings backwards and forwards like a ticking clock and has my whole life. So that's sort of like a swing clock and it has to my whole life.

So that's sort of like a swing between complexity and simplicity or I think about it as well. Plexity and wellness. Yeah, well, 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 late 80s, we had a summer of love of sorts. We had a hippie period, 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 acid and stuff of that nature, rave culture was a big thing.

Then it swung back into a punk nihilisticness and this happens in the colors people wear what people dress. It suddenly went into Nivana talking about killing the misery and it went into brick pop in the UK. Things became more conservative in this and in Sonics and the closed stars with people wearing. And then it went psychedelic again. To the point 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-y thing. We had odd futures, the biggest rap group, people wearing tie-dye, drugs-wise, it was Molly, which is MDMA again. Then it swung back into nihilism. It's kind of like the, you know, this pirate ship writes. It's like a pirate boat and you pull up and you see it and then you go, zoom 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, but this time, because we're all networks 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. So now, now you've picked Alan Wads and Jocke Willink and 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 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, it 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 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 perspectives on things. And you know, say between you and Alan Watts, 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 in your reintroducing that to people in a foundational fashion. And Alan Watt 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. The different angle to the way you look at it. And it's also, I'd think of it in archetypes, in a way, and you say someone like Jocco, Wellink, is the warrior, perhaps.

And here's 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 much, he's looking at a very specific site, 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 part music that people could listen to in the Gimmer in the shower or wherever they were and they could really really bring it into their lives. You're not necessarily going to listen to a podcast more than once, even a really good one. But if I take 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 you could get in and you could really think about it and you could listen to the hundred times. And you could get in. And you could really think about it. And you could really integrate it into your life or integrate the bits of it.

The, the are useful to you. Yeah, I mean, that, that's how people learned historically, right? They set poetry to music and listened to it over and over and that made it stick. This is so the, the 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. 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 multi-modal 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 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 of rhythm and 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 to transform it your own way This is it you know people used to remember whole books, right? Yeah. People would 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 cassilocks 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 unfortunate results of this wonderful technology. Yes. Yes. Well, we seem to externalize everything, you know?

Yeah, because we can put it in the cloud now so we don't need to save it on our hard drive. Right. Right, right. 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 there's a big difference between having a fact that you're 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 certainly being unbelievably useful for me to create and remember a bank of stories. And it makes you much, much, much, much more effective communicator and a much better thinker. Like, when I was a kid in grade eight or grade nine, 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 to recite it? And you know, then I met a guy years ago, years later, who was an undergraduate and a remarkable

person, a 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 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 verbal culture. Now, 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 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, as you said this is just begun. We're still you know in the, in sort of zooming out times we're still, we're still in in utero. Yes. We've yet to be born and I think we're, terms, we're still in utero. That's what it is. We've yet to be born. And I think we're coming close to being born, which is why everything is the way it is and it's such a heightened,

it's just an incredible period of history to exist at this point. 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 wouldn't see if you were really lucky.

Right, and they didn't sit very well. No, it's actually Christ-imagine. There's a thing Hercules said, the good thing about having kids, isn't 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 a survival mode and creative mode. And survival mode, 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 aren't these limitations and you can fly and you can build and play. And I hope you're 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. And I thought, what a beautiful thing. And then I thought, but hang on, this is actually what we're doing. Right. About a week later, I thought that. And it's like, this is actually what we're doing. There's 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 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 that's really, well it's unbelievably new. It's, it's crazily new. I mean, people that have leads. 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'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 $500 or $1,000 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 another catastrophe. Is that kind of poverty where you're backed in a corner and 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 it enough to get yourself out of a tight spot. And it's actually a pretty pleasant experience. I like

taking ubers. There's no financial transaction. People are almost always polite. You know exactly where the car is going to be. I don't know. I think it's been a really good thing. And it's of course only one of God. One of the infinity of miracles that are unfolding before us, like firecrackers, every given second. Yes. On that thing, you know, if you, there are so many ways to make money now, if, if you're completely skillless, you can go on, let go 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 to think, 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. And I love those 12-year-olds, and I use them all the

time. Right, right. Yeah. I love those 12-year-olds. Right, well, absolutely. Well, and you get these old guys down in the Southern US who are old plumbers, or 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, how you fix that. It's such an interesting manifestation of altruism. And in indication, I mean, people obviously like the attention that they're a video's garner. And I think that's perfectly reasonable because it's a form of indication that what you're doing is valuable.

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. 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 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's 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 And it certainly saved me a lot of time and energy. So that was quite wonderful. Now 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 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, the Chinese graduate more engineers every year than the Americans have engineers.

Ha, ha, ha, ha. What's this other thing that's coming down the pipeline is this babelfish thing. You know, this translation technology, which is already bloody good, but in a few years, it's going to be seamless. I will be able to talk to you and you will be speaking a different language. Sure, we say. And instantly, that will be translated to me, and I'll be able to talk to you and you will be speaking a different language. Sure, 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 to China. And well, I mean, government's allowing. But it's said, but you're only mean 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. And you understand it. And suddenly the sum of human knowledge and experience and usefulness is shared with everybody. Right. Right. Yes, it's quite well. Unfortunately, at the same time, the sum of human foolishness 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, I just out of curiosity.

How long would it take you to queue up 42 rules for life? Haji main, I was in stop playing it. Yeah. Could this be a good term in connection? Yeah. Why not? Why not DJ pieces? 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. 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, pay 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. What's been the most exciting project that you've embarked on so far? Do you think 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, which ties into this hyper productivity, staying in the zone and refusing to leave experiment because it compounds. It just gets more and more intense and better and exciting.

There are synchronicities,, just keep popping up and popping up and becoming myriad and ridiculous. And 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 laugh. 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 every project I do, there's more and more and more of that as I keep in this thing and sort of don't stop. The last one I did, which was Clockwork Elves, which was the Terrence Mechanic project, I just meant to do one song, I'd finished the Alan Watts album.

I was like, I'm gonna do this one Terrence Mechana 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 days, at sort of three in the morning, and I'd made an album. Keith.

And it was almost like I didn't do it. It's like, and I've been thinking about this quite a lot. There's a thing in Japanese anime you see a lot, these mecha suits, which are like these giant robot suits and then humans sort of pilot them. But are these amazing suits and a human can get in that and make it. You can destroy a city or, in that and make it, 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 then you add a creative bend and twist here and there to stop it from being merely wrote, you know, like someone did that. It was great at playing a cello, you know, they have every technique down perfectly, but they bend and twist each note consciously to add something new to it. When you hit that zone, it does mean that well, everything that you've worked at 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 why that's partly why character is so important. You know, what people don't understand or they're not taught is that you genuinely become what you practice. And not at some trivial level. I mean, it's built into you biologically as well as spiritually. Yeah, it's terrifying.

You go through life, and 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. You go in 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 allow it to become habit And you have to create checking on what your habits are because at the same time you want to turn useful things into habits Right, you want that's part of it. That's part of the tremendous difficulty of the balance between order and chaos. Is that it? 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. 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 bit keeps you interested and 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 something that sort of shocks them and surprises them and takes them somewhere they weren't quite expecting. This is the 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 at one point, I'd found myself sort of falling into it. Like I knew all the so many things that worked, it was really easy for me to unleash these combinations of things that work. Like in a fighting game where you 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 the really exciting things to do and the really useful to do, the things to do is to keep coming up with new ones and make sure about half of what you're doing is in the 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, but 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 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 Mixed 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 goes well. And yeah, I think part of that too, and maybe you experienced 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 a top-down thing. It has to be a participatory thing. I was thinking of it in terms of this kind of like energy triangle or something,

is 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 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 and 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 feedback loop. Yes, exactly. And you can, I mean, those can go out of control, but if you can keep them modulating. But man, I had to stop drinking.

Because my reason for drinking, well, DJing that I've given to myself as well, I need to be on the same level as my crowd. They're all drinking. So I should be a little bit drunk. But then you get your thing distorted. Well, as we know, there's all sorts of problems with drinking. And the nightlife industry is... Oh, yeah, it's notorious functioning alcoholics.

Oh, it's definitely well. It's so wondered. I mean, like, they're 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 bartender nighttime people tend to drink more So 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, it's the party's on. Exactly. Yeah, I've got this fixed now, but yeah, for my first year in Los Angeles Los Angeles everything shut to 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 Got damn it. Well, that's the thing. That's one of the best cures for an addictive process

is to have something better to do than to be hung over. Well, this goes back to your earlier question, actually, which is how I've changed in the past since meeting away. And I just don't have any room in my life or any desire for anything unnecessary, which is, you know, 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, I got really, 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 absolutely, especially cruel to women, I think. And I had some poor women 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, because she wants children, and 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. And that's what's 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 and the ecology. It's 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 career, have a life for God's sake.

There's not that much to life. The meat, well, the meat 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 yet in that better since having a child. My motivations are so much clearer. The reason for being this is so obvious. So much joy, like unmeasurable levels of joy have come from that one child. And the only thing I wish to do guys in my life

is that if I was gonna go back and have a conversation with my earlier self, I was 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 plan him. We always thought, well, there's no intelligent time to have a child. No, you're never ready. There's never enough money. There's never enough time.

But it's the single most wonderful motivating occurrence in this magical blessed existence. Well, that's how I've always felt about my kids. You know, 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. 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 it gets a little bit questionable, you know, and if it goes past that sometimes it 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 and it and it does Provide you with additional impetus for proper action and ambition Well, there's no room for error. They're looking at you. They're looking at you for everything. You're completely responsive. If you're not the best version of yourself, then what are they going to be? Yes, and the mistakes you make are going to echo through their lives as well. And then it's insigenerational. This is the thing I realized relatively recently,

these intergenerational illos that just keep propagating down the line because they're not fixed. That yeah. Yeah, well, that's it. You get someone in some generation, they tear a hole in the fabric of reality, and they pass it on to their children. And unless their children sew up that hole, then they pass on to their children. And unless their children sew up that hole,

then they pass it to their children. And the damage remains until someone decides enough. I'm going to repair it. And that's partly what you're trying to do as a parent is sew up the fabric of being. So, child will inspire you to sew up the fabric of being so child will inspire you to sow up the fabric of being like nothing else. Yes. That's 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 people who have invested interest

in the future, not being a horrible place to live. Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, yes. Well, yeah, well, I'm to attend the women or men who are listening out there that are of the proper age, I would say, don't let the naysayers and pessimists in them, gloom, pervayers, and those who dared 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 this ideology is the ideology of villains. It's a very, very strange thing. And they believe themselves to be virtuous and people who believe themselves to be virtuous,

they're 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 going to react directly against that. The most punk rock thing you can do in 2019 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 I think 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 is. Well, I think you're the most optimistic person that I've talked to for a long time. I mean, I talked to Stephen Pinker, you know, and he's optimistic in a much more detached way, because he thinks that the data indicates that economically things are at a very rapid

rate, but you're speaking of something more akin to a psychological transformation. Yes, and this is just based on observations, but I believe this. And there's a lot that could go wrong. We're the best time to be alive in the recorded human history. Obviously. We're also the most dangerous time because it could all collapse. Right. Everything, this wonderful miracle that we

in a habit, I guess, will walk outside and no one tries to break up my head. Right. Yes, which is, you know, you have to be sure that one of the hallmarks of wisdom is to understand that if you can walk outside and no one throws a brick at your head, that that's actually a miracle. Yeah, it is.

I know this. Yeah, because I grew up, some of the people I've used to throw bricks in my head. Oh, what was that all about. I grew up in North Wales and I was like the only person like me. I was the only person who liked music and stuff at that age and everyone thought I was an insane widow. I was in my life. People are very brutal in the UK. Certainly compared to the South-Sans 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, very rock. And the other thing actually is in America, everyone operates under 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's a bit bitter and twisted because of that, I think, to the UK. But yeah, anyway, I had quite a tough upbringing, people were very mean, and I'm very, very aware of the capacity for finastinus species and horror, which so when I say things like this about where I think we're going, this is an out of any kind of naivety. Right, right. Let's see if you can must 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 the seriousness

of the problem with sufficient gravity, because it's a serious problem. Yes, we have serious problems. How will you, when you started dissociating with creative people and sort of found your own crowd? Well this goes back to what we were talking about earlier. So 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 say 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 and

Left Little sleepy little whales 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 Right. Yeah, well move to a different country. Right. And then that's one of the things that I get.

Well, 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 lots of people like you. Right. And you could make, and you could make art with them and you could send files backwards and forwards

and you could create things and also serve it 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 the thing for everyone of these amazing

solutions we find, all these wonderful gifts. There's a shout-out site. 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. Okay, 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're much more well-known than you were. Has that had an effect on your life,

other than a positive one? And what's been the price that you've paid for this? You know, that's a bit so bad so far. You know, 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. There is that. 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.

There is that. Yeah, you know, I'm working, you know, I'm 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 see this as a useful and helpful endeavor to be engaged in. And how much time are you spending working a day? Oh God. 14 hours or so, 15, so 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. And that's every day. Yeah. It's very, very difficult to exceed expectations, let's say, if you're trying to work a normal eight hour work day. 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 then you just have to, this concept I had of recent which I like, which I've been trying to do, essentialism, you know, when. You know, when you get to the point where you're, which is a wonderful point to be at, 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 songs I would love to play, more techniques I would love to learn.

There is far more to do in this lifetime than I have life. So then essentialism, you boil down what are the essential things and what things cannot fit. And then you streamline your life and you do that, have them more, ever more, remove things that are less essential, making room for them more essential. And then the more you know what the more essential is, the better idea you have of where you're going or what you're trying to do and how to do it. Well, that's the separation of the wheat from the chaff.

That's a real skill if you can manage it, especially if the opportunities are flying at you fast and furiously. Well, what would you do? You presumably have more than you could possibly cope with. 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 I think this is an element of that synchrony that youchronism 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. In professional relationships,

and I've been fortunate that the majority of those people have been very competent. And so I do delegate 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.omanage you. If you can do it, man, great 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 or we'll have to find you a different place 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. And 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. Okay. On the stuff that you're the best at. Well, right.

And then you can also continue to do more things. And, you know, I would say my wife and I have been fairly ruthless. And my daughter as well, probably my son as well in the communication we've had about the people 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. Yeah. And the costs of the errors are too great. So, but you can delegate. So, it's a difficult thing to learn to do.

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 graphic design to making the videos, to recording, to everything. Right. Letting go of that was a hard thing to learn to do. Now I'm very happy to do that, and if I can find somebody to 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, that's the truth. 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. 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 compound. So where this leads, who knows? But I do 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 strategy. Yes. And 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 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 the hyperpredictivity that you found, let's say psychologically significant or useful? I mean, the thing is I started the hyperproductivity thing exactly the same time I started the kind of ordiya. So sometimes I'm not sure which is causing what? I used to do about once a month

go into a kind of deep depression for a few days, which my wife would call my funk. I've been 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. Well, congratulations. How long has that been?

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 bloats, I guess. This goes. Information likely, eh? Yes, all that sort of thing. I used to have like sort of psoriasis in that one. I used to have like, my tongue was all messed up

and thought it itself out. I used to have bleeding gums and that's gone. That's gone, that's interesting, because 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 high-proper 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.

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 the advantage, that's the advantage of having a very well delineated aim, a, yeah, and a high, and a purpose. You bet. It helps you separate what's necessary from what isn't necessary. And that is a genuine relief. No go to vote it. It's, it's joyful. There's so joyful. There's so much weight is cast off you. There's someone asks you to do a thing, there's no debate. You either do it or you don't, based on what this aim is, what you're doing. Same then applies to things like food.

One of the really annoying things in my life, the price of the kind of other thing was the daily, what are we having for dinner conversation? And 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 going to feel, you know, that I know I'm not going to suddenly be sleepy or bloated or weird after eating something. You know, I'm going to be the same high energy purpose. That's a major plus. So congratulations. So not that's a huge that's a huge beneficial

transformation. So let's end with this. 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 under D-thalb that there must be a, like an invisible or an implicit ambition, something like that, a deep ambition, 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 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 Nuke level and be the best possible version of myself possible as effective on every level I can be. And with relation to the path I've chosen, which is this music thing, which is what I always, since I was, you know, my earliest memories is being about 70 years old, and listening to music and wanting to make music, and reach people, and communicate with people on that. And specifically with regard to the meaning wave? Yeah, well, I think the meaning wave thing now 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 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 a very neanderthal rough approximate like beginning of where it can go and what

it can do I think. And I think that way we've caught music. Pop music is so new. You know, it just happened, it was just there 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. Yeah, yeah. In this world.

Yeah, well, you've hit a vein that seems rich. you've seen 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 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. It's an adventure, regardless. Yes, this is true.

That's why it's something to be said about. Yeah. It's an exciting. Yeah, we're at this stage, as we mentioned earlier, we're at this point of human development, where everything, our world, we can barely imagine the world in five years, that alone 10, 15, 20.

Like, grandmother's 96. She's the eldest of 13. She saw the birth of the radio. She left school at 13 to window. She saw TV and internet and all of this stuff appear. Like, what are we to witness? Things are speeding up so radically. things are speeding up so radically. It's 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 it certainly came as a shock to me when it first came out. And it's also refreshing to speak with someone

who's unabashedly and not dively 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 work and my words in such a careful manner. Thank you. That was my, yeah, I really didn't want to do the service 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 developments. That's why I was there. This crucial, crucial time in our development as a species, as we boldly march into hyperspace and at Destiner. Thank you. It's very good to meet you.

Hopefully we'll talk again in the not too distant future. I'm going to show you well. And I hope you like the album. Thank you. I'm very much looking forward to it. Nice. And I hope you like the album. Thank you. I'm very much looking forward to it. Nice. Okay, man.

All right, like it. Really good to meet you. Yeah, you'd say bye-bye. Peace. If you found this conversation engaging, you might want to pick up Dad's books, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, or his newer best-selling 12 Rules for Life and Antidote to Chaos. Both of these books dive much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

See JordanB. Peterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Next week, you'll hear my lecture from the Community Theatre in Sacramento, California, recorded on Gene 27 27, 2018. I discussed the modern tendency for every domain of human experience to become defined as political, part of the political correct universe of ideas. The idea that the universities may now do more harm than good. The consequences of the revolution and communication that is being produced by online video and

podcasts, and the necessity to voluntarily stress yourself, challenge yourself, to force what's best to manifest itself within you. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram at Jordan.b.p. Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, JordanBPederson.com. My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand

themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future can be found at selfauthoring.com. That's selfauthoring.com from the Westwood One Podcast Network. Cast Network.