A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno

Brian Eno’s music opens up worlds I love to step into during trying times. And this conversation with Eno did the same thing. Eno is a trailblazing musician and producer who’s worked on seminal records by U2, David Bowie, the Talking Heads and Coldplay, among others. But Eno isn’t just a great collaborator with other artists; he’s also a great collaborator with machines. He’s been experimenting with music technology for decades. Long before we started worrying about ChatGPT replacing human creativity, Eno was tinkering with generative systems to pioneer ambient music – a genre that has deeply influenced how we listen to music today. Eno’s use (and playful misuse) of technology has expanded the possibilities of what music and sound can be. Many of you emailed in asking for a break from the news. Here it is. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: What Art Does by Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse East West Street by Philippe Sands Silence by John Cage Book Recommendations: Printing and the Mind of Man edited by John Carter and Percy H. Muir A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis Music Recommendations: The Rural Blues “The Velvet Underground” by the Velvet Underground The Consolers Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker, Kate Sinclair and Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Alyssa Jane Moxley, Sophie Abramowitz, Geeta Dayal, Jack Hamilton and Victor Szabo.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:30Ezra Klein?

  I've got an email from a lot of you lately saying, "Can we do a show just off the news? Can one show not be in the grim march of events?" So here it is. "How do you intro Brian Eno? Eno has a claim, as much as anyone does, to have invented the genre of ambient music."

• 0:52Brian Eno?

  So there's no narrative quality to the music. It just sort of starts, stays pretty much in one place, and then ends.

• 1:00Ezra Klein?

  He certainly coined the term, built out the philosophy, sort of has eaten a lot of the music we now listen to. But also, he's just done so many other things. He's produced seminal albums by U2,

• 1:20Ezra Klein?

  David Bowie,

• 1:26Ezra Klein?

  The Talking Heads,

• 1:36Ezra Klein?

  Laurie Anderson,

• 1:46Ezra Klein?

  Coldplay.

• 2:02Ezra Klein?

  Hell, Eno composed the sound that plays when you boot up Windows 95.

• 2:13Ezra Klein?

  Do you remember that one? A lot of sound we just take for granted. A lot of the way sound is now made. Eno helped bring that into existence. A lot of his work on creating generative systems that make music can be seen as a forerunner to much of today's AI systems. And Eno is more than just a sonic technician or tinkerer. He's this wonderful thinker and philosopher of art and just being a human being. And he's got this really delightful new book out, What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, as well as a new album with B.D. Wolf called Limitless.

• 2:59Ezra Klein?

  I wanted to talk to him about all of it, or at least as much of it as I could. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 3:24Ezra Klein?

  Brian Eno, welcome to the show.

• 3:25Brian Eno?

  Hello, Ezra. Nice to meet you.

• 3:28Ezra Klein?

  So your new book is called What Art Does? And I guess, tell me, what does art do?

• 3:33Brian Eno?

  Well, perhaps I should tell you first why I thought that question needed answering. Because in education in England, and in fact, I think probably in most parts of the world, the budgets that always get cut are the arts budgets, because there are apparently more important things that we should be teaching people: science, engineering, financial technology, that kind of thing.

• 3:58Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, you should be making short trades.

• 4:01Brian Eno?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 4:03Ezra Klein?

  Are you really alive if you can't short a stock?

• 4:06Brian Eno?

  So I've always thought that art is actually one of the most important things that humans do with their time. In my book, there's a long list of things that I consider could come under the headline of art, and it includes, of course, obvious things like symphonies and photographs and paintings, but it includes cardigans and jewelry and makeup and tattoos and all the things that humans do that they don't have to do. None of those things have survival benefits in the obvious sense. They're things we do to do something in our mind, to change our mind in some way. So what does art do? Why do we like it?

• 4:49Brian Eno?

  I have this phrase in the book that children learn through play and adults play through art. And I think that's really what it does. When we look at children and we watch them playing, we don't think, oh, they're just wasting their time, they should do something more serious. We realize that when children play, they're learning. They're understanding about materials, about social relationships, about their own bodies, their own minds, about where they live, all of those things that are very important to understand. And they do that infallibly and with a huge appetite. That's what children like doing. And we understand, all of us understand, that that's the way they learn things.

• 5:33Brian Eno?

  Art is grown-up play. It's a way of imagining things and imagining what they would feel like and imagining how they connect to other things that we know about. And then feeding that knowledge back into our lives and into our relationships.

• 5:50Ezra Klein?

  I want to zoom in on a word you use there, which is feel. One of the central arguments of the book is that art is a way we explore or attune to our feelings. And I guess that raises another question. You say, and I agree with this, that feelings have a bad reputation. So to you, what do feelings do and why do they matter?

• 6:13Brian Eno?

  Yes, so they have a bad reputation because they're very hard to quantify and measure. And of course, science wants things that are easily comparable and easily describable in some kind of language of quantity and measure. Feelings, because they're subjective, are very difficult to do that with. However, the first response we have to most things is a feeling response, particularly if they're unfamiliar things. What's the first thing that happens when you meet somebody? You kind of form an impression of them quite quickly. You think, he looks like a decent person, he looks quite friendly, he doesn't look hostile.

• 6:54Brian Eno?

  I think I could get on with him. Or, she looks pretty interesting and I think I'm in love with her. Feelings form very quickly, actually, and they form without really much volition on our part. And they are, in fact, our first antennae, our first judgment of a situation, our first sense of whether it's dangerous, or friendly, or useful, or useless, is made on the basis of feelings. And then after that, we backfill with other information we find. And we sometimes find that our feelings, the quick response, were incorrect. But surprisingly often, we find that they were actually exactly on the money. I knew that as soon as I saw her.

• 7:39Ezra Klein?

  One thing that I was thinking about while you were talking is a way, I think, to say what our modern relationship is here is that we think feelings lie and we think facts don't.

• 7:50Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 7:51Ezra Klein?

  And I've come to believe that's a very simplistic way to think about both feelings and facts.

• 7:57Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 7:58Ezra Klein?

  But what I am doing to make form into content here, while you talk, I have this whole list of questions. And in a rational, coherent, factual way, I know what the next question should be. What I'm actually doing is watching a feeling that is moving around in my chest while you speak. And there's a moment when I know that you said something that's the next place we should go, and it's not the thing on my sheet of paper.

• 8:26Brian Eno?

  Right.

• 8:26Ezra Klein?

  It's this whole thing I'm doing right now, in a way. And maybe it's wrong.

• 8:30Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 8:30Ezra Klein?

  But no great interviews.

• 8:33Ezra Klein?

  Are logical, like they just aren't like we're working in a medium that does not work that way. Conversation does not work logically. And I do think we've degraded our relationship, our attunement to what we feel.

• 8:48Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 8:49Ezra Klein?

  And that's actually a mistake. So I understood one argument you're making about art, which which feels true to me is that it's a way of practicing our attunement to our feelings. I think that opens something interesting here. You, you, one thing in the book that connected for me was you quote a musician friend of yours, John Hassel, who you says, asks the question, what is it that I really like? And says, being able to answer that is the most important question. Why?

• 9:18Brian Eno?

  So we're being told probably about 10 or 12,000 times a day, what we ought to like, what other people like, what some people would prefer that we liked. We're told that in the form of advertising, in the form of political messages, in the form of all of the things that try to persuade us to think or believe one thing rather than another. It's the biggest industry in the Western world, actually, persuasion. And it's very easy in that flood, actually, of that tsunami of suggestions about what we ought to like, to forget what we actually do like. So I think what he's doing there, he's suggesting that the deepest

• 10:01Brian Eno?

  feelings we have are actually the most reliable things that we know about. One of the things that happens when you're looking at art or listening to art, something connects to you. And you think, that's what I really like. That's what really moves me. And I think when that happens, you should pay attention to that. You should think, why do I really like that? What does that mean that I like that thing? What does that connect me to that's so important to me? And we frequently don't do that because the distraction rate is so high. There are so many things to think about all the time.

• 10:36Ezra Klein?

  I think this question of what is it that I really like? And trying to pay attention to your response to different pieces of art is interesting because it gets at a mystery to me about being human, which is why things that are

• 10:54Ezra Klein?

  Legendarily beautiful works leave me completely cold, even as they have inspired thousands of books and encomiums from others. And then I'll hear something or I'll see something and my soul will leap into my throat. I've been obsessed this year with an album by an artist named Drum, and the album is called "Under Entangled Silence", and this one song, "Waxcap", I just keep listening to and listening to.

• 11:34Ezra Klein?

  When I give my headphones to somebody else, they quite rarely have the experience I am having with that song.

• 11:41Brian Eno?

  Right.

• 11:42Ezra Klein?

  It, in a way, that makes me feel lonelier, but also a little bit more unique.

• 11:50Ezra Klein?

  So you're an artist, but you're also an artist who both yourself creates and helps others create things for mass consumption. And so how do you think about that difference of attunement in different people? How some people can hear something and it is their favorite thing ever?

• 12:07Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 12:08Ezra Klein?

  And others will put that same thing on.

• 12:10Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 12:11Ezra Klein?

  And they hear nothing but noise.

• 12:13Brian Eno?

  I think the answer to that is that, of course, when we look at any piece of art, we're not looking just at that piece of art. We're looking at this piece of art in terms of our own personal history. So it's like you're hearing the latest sentence in a conversation you've been having for your whole life. I wrote this little story once about somebody finding, in some post-apocalyptic time, finding an art museum. And the whole place is wrecked, but there's lots of pictures still around. And they find one picture that obviously hasn't been finished, which is just a white canvas, which of course, in fact, is Malevich's White on White. So it's, it has no meaning to that person who doesn't share its history.

• 12:58Brian Eno?

  Part of the value of any piece of work and the power of it is how it sits in the cultural conversation in general and in your cultural conversation in particular. So a little difference that is very significant to you may be meaningless to somebody else. For instance, I've always had a rather blind spot for Shakespeare. No English person is ever supposed to admit that, but Shakespeare's never thrilled me. I find it hard to read and quite unrewarding. So when a critic, a writer picks out a Shakespeare sentence and talks about its significance, they do that because they know the rest of the Shakespeare canon and they know where it sits in there and what value it therefore has.

• 13:42Brian Eno?

  It doesn't mean anything to me because I don't know any of those things and I don't care about them in that case either.

• 13:48Ezra Klein?

  Well, let me offer a cliched concern, which is that this is a way that art fails. I think when people think of art now, they don't first think of music or food on a plate or the way a building looks, they think of something you see in a museum. And I go to a fair number of shows or try to and am often left cold in part because it feels like there is so much cultural conversation going on. And I'll read the little placard on the wall next to a piece by an artist working at the peak of their powers, who is being venerated as one of the great artists of our age. And this little placard is telling me that, you know, what a meditation this is on identity

• 14:32Ezra Klein?

  and borders and looking at like, is it though? And one of the ways art, it feels locks people out is by, by demanding so much literacy in a cultural conversation. And it's one reason music is so interesting.

• 14:49Brian Eno?

  Well, one of the problems that fine art faces is the problem of its own irrelevance to most people's lives. You know, nobody buys a two million pound or a twenty million pound painting just because they like it. They buy it because there's a good chance they'll be able to sell it again at a profit, or it secures them a sort of social status that is not easily obtainable otherwise. So you have to make it seem very important. You have to pretend that it isn't just an object of commerce. It's an attempt to build something up by repackaging it in this kind of crust of usually incomprehensible language.

• 15:32Brian Eno?

  I think some of the worst writing in the world is writing about art, about fine art. And it ought to be much simpler. One of the reasons you like it is because it doesn't translate into words. It doesn't turn into sentences. It hits you in some other place, some other part of your mind.

• 15:52Ezra Klein?

  You did an album in the last couple of years with Fred Again, who I think is you've been a mentor to and who's another artist who I really love. And there was a song on that album that became big. And I remember the first time I heard it, the song is called Come On. And I've probably listened to it. It was one of my top listened songs that whole year. I want to play a little piece of it. I want to ask you about it.

• 16:33Ezra Klein?

  So we've been talking about feelings. And the thing that happened to me when I listened to that song and every single time I've listened to it since, including in that moment, is something about the way you've distorted that sample.

• 16:47Ezra Klein?

  Is incredibly physical for me.

• 16:49Brian Eno?

  I don't really know why that works, but I think it's something to do with the sense of a of near incoherence of the voice. It's like somebody trying to say something and it come out, it's it's broken, you know, it doesn't come out clearly and straightforwardly. So there's a sort of either a reticence or a feeling of the machine doesn't work any longer. The machine that is me speaking isn't quite working. It's defective in some way.

• 17:20Ezra Klein?

  But the way you describe it there is almost frightening, where to me it's extraordinarily comforting. It's a feeling I almost never have. I mean, it's there's very little I can put on that gives me the exact feeling of that song, and nor would I be able to describe the feeling.

• 17:35Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 17:36Ezra Klein?

  But it's not jarring for me. It's like a caress.

• 17:40Brian Eno?

  If you had to name the emotion that that song has, what would you call it? I mean, for me, it's there's something melancholy and like a nostalgia for a different future or something, a nostalgia for a future that didn't happen, which isn't sad, but it's it's a to me, it's a very moving song, actually.

• 18:02Ezra Klein?

  I love hearing you say that because I have such a different experience. I find it enormously comforting.

• 18:09Brian Eno?

  Oh, good.

• 18:09Ezra Klein?

  That song.

• 18:10Brian Eno?

  That's lovely.

• 18:11Ezra Klein?

  And that there's something, yeah, very physical. It's like having a blanket pulled over you.

• 18:17Brian Eno?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:19Ezra Klein?

  And I even find this interaction so interesting. I had Jeff Tweedy on this show years ago from Wilco, and we were talking about the song, "His Impossible Germany", and I was asking about the lyrics of it because I've always found it to be such a beautiful song about the dislocations of travel.

• 18:48Ezra Klein?

  And that is not what he was doing with that song at all. It was like a misremembered line from a murder novel, as I remember his description. And just the idea that you can create something that it's not just that it's evoking such feelings in me or others, but that the feelings are so different than even the ones it gives you.

• 19:08Brian Eno?

  Yes. When you're making something, it starts to come alive when you start to have feelings that you didn't expect from it. You think, well, I'm going to make this, that, the other. And as it starts to form, it starts to change. It starts to become something that you hadn't imagined. And you can either say, okay, I don't want that, which is what a lot of people do. They shut that down and try to get back to what they're supposed to be doing. But I don't do that. And I think a lot of artists don't do that. We say, oh, I wonder where it's going. I wonder where it's taking me. And you just carry on then and think, there's a certain point you reach. Either way, you can't make

• 19:50Brian Eno?

  it any better. You notice that what you're adding is starting to subtract rather than to add. Or you've hit the deadline. A lot of the best things I've made have been because I hit the deadline and I couldn't spend any longer fucking them up.

• 20:08Ezra Klein?

  I think this gets another interesting distinction. So I think we've been talking about the exposure to pieces of art here, if I'm going to try to define it more tightly. And the way that they create a space to be attentive to feelings arising in you that you might not have expected.

• 20:27Brian Eno?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Ezra Klein?

  Then, once you have discovered that it gives you that feeling.

• 20:33Ezra Klein?

  It can become a tool to re evoke it. I put on that song, Come On, to feel a certain way. I put on, you know, your, your series of ambient albums. Because I actually know how they will make me feel and I'm trying to shift my emotional landscape in that direction at a certain moment. And I always think this is really interesting, this difference between art is something you pay attention to, or music is maybe something you pay attention to, and then music as something you use to change the way you pay attention to everything else.

• 21:11Brian Eno?

  That's a very nice distinction. I wish I'd thought of that myself.

• 21:15Ezra Klein?

  Well, it's very built on things you've written, so. But I'd be curious to hear how you think about that.

• 21:21Brian Eno?

  I think when you're working as an artist, you're always world building. You're creating a world. It might be a huge world like, you know, George Orwell's 1984. That's a whole world, completely thought out. And when you read that book, you decide to live in that world for a time. And you decide to experience the feelings of living in a world like that. Because the wonderful thing about art is that it isn't dangerous. You can live in that terrible totalitarian world and then you can shut the book and go and put on a Fred again song, or whatever else you want to do.

• 22:02Brian Eno?

  I'm always sort of trying to find something that suddenly makes me think, oh, there's a different kind of world. I've never been in a world like that before. If we go back to the idea of adults playing, I think that's what we're doing. Pretending, imagining situations and then sort of figuring out the mechanics of them by imagining them is the clue to everything that makes humans such a powerful and probably dangerous species. So even if you thought art was not valuable for anything else at all, you would have to say that this process of giving our minds a way of imagining futures and virtually

• 22:44Brian Eno?

  living in them, actually, living in them in our imagination must be a very important thing for human beings.

• 22:52Ezra Klein?

  I hear this so often from artists and in books I've read about art.

• 22:57Ezra Klein?

  This cultivation of humanity, this cultivation of different futures. I know you're doing a lot of work on Gaza and I've been doing a lot of podcasts on this topic. And as part of that work, I was reading a book by Philippe Sands, who will, by the time this comes out, have been on the show. And this is a book about the Holocaust and the development of the idea of genocide. And one of the central characters this book tracks is a man named Hans Frank.

• 23:26Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 23:26Ezra Klein?

  Who is under Hitler, the governor of Poland. The worst things in history happen under Hans Frank. And a point Sands makes about him that is very, very, very present in his biography is how cultured a man he was.

• 23:42Brian Eno?

  Yes, yes.

• 23:43Ezra Klein?

  A beautiful classical pianist, somebody who, much more so than most people does, really did care about art, about literature, about music, about paintings, that he got it. And at the same time, was so much more capable of inhumanity and callousness. And so some part of me rebels on this. I often hear novelists and others as if it is an equation with a single output. If you expose yourself to more of these worlds, more Beethoven, more Bach, you will become a more civilized person.

• 24:20Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 24:20Ezra Klein?

  And yet, so much of the most uncivilized civilizations, or parts of our civilizations, have been driven by people who were enormously cultured. In fact, that was part of what they believed made them so superior to everybody else.

• 24:36Brian Eno?

  Yes. Now, you're absolutely right. And in saying that it helps us use our minds in that way, I'm not saying necessarily for good things. It just makes our minds better at imagining, but they can just as easily be imagining terrible things. You know, one of the great art collectors of the 20th century was Himmler. Had a huge collection, which he'd stolen mostly from Dutch and Low Countries Jews, French Jews, and he was apparently very learned in that area. But to your point, the ability of something to make a mind work better isn't the same as the ability of something to make a mind work to good ends.

• 25:20Brian Eno?

  That's a different problem. That's a, that's a problem of morality, spirituality, something like that.

• 25:27Ezra Klein?

  I'm not going to stay on this topic for very long, so I want this to be a somewhat lighter conversation than this, but after reading Sam's book, I started reading a biography of Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian and one of the great humanists of the 20th century.

• 25:42Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 25:43Ezra Klein?

  And it was again so strange, Hans Frank loved Bach and Buber loved Bach and says that much of who he is as an adult is formed in sitting in concerts, listening to the contradictions inside Bach's music.

• 26:02Brian Eno?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:03Ezra Klein?

  And that two people, two souls can, I mean, far from our like, is, is come on melancholic or comforting, that these works of art can take people in such different directions. I'm not blaming Bach for anything that Hans Frank did, but it just speaks to something very, very complex and like the feeling faculties and what we bring to them.

• 26:25Brian Eno?

  That's a very good way of putting it, I think. We've been told somehow that art is this very important thing that is good for you. And I think it is, but I don't think it's good for you in that way. I don't think it necessarily improves you in any moral dimension whatsoever. I think it's quite possible that, as some people now insist, Picasso was a bit of a shit.

• 26:49Ezra Klein?

  He was more than a bit of a shit. I mean, remarkable artist.

• 26:53Brian Eno?

  I'm going light on him.

• 26:55Ezra Klein?

  Complicated person, to say the least.

• 26:57Brian Eno?

  Yeah, but it's funny that we expect that it would be otherwise. It's because we've, we've sort of imputed a moral dimension to art. And all I'm saying is that, no, I think it's much more biologically functional than we think it is. I don't think it's such a spiritual, moral business being an artist.

• 27:39Ezra Klein?

  I've always found this very interesting. You read the Roberto Bollano book, The Savage Detectives?

• 27:45Brian Eno?

  No.

• 27:46Ezra Klein?

  It's a beautiful fiction book. And one of the reasons I love it is it's because it's about a personality that I have always been fascinated by and do not myself have, which is the personality that would give everything, anything, to create art, in this case, young poets. There are people, I mean, you know them, I've known some of them, who, for them, art is everything. They put their whole souls or whole lives into projects that most people would walk by if they were hung on a wall or playing in a store and not give a second thought to. And then I know other people who see no role or understand no role for art in their life. What to you differentiates those people, the people for whom art becomes everything,

• 28:30Ezra Klein?

  the most important thing, even when society could not give a damn about what they are creating? And the people feel no resonance to it?

• 28:41Brian Eno?

  Have you ever heard of a place in Switzerland, Lausanne, called the Musée de l'Art Brut?

• 28:46Ezra Klein?

  No.

• 28:47Brian Eno?

  It's the, I think, the greatest museum of outsider art in the world. So these are people who, none of whom were called artists in their lifetime. A lot of them were in mental institutions and they had nothing much else to do and they painted for their whole lives. Some of them did it completely in secret. Nobody even knew until they died that they had been working as artists for their whole life. And my kind of feeling about that is that if you, if you can invent a world that you prefer to live in, which is sort of what those artists were doing, then why not stay in it? You know, if the rest of the world is awkward and you don't fit into it, it's

• 29:30Brian Eno?

  got lots of sharp corners and you can make this world where suddenly... You're sort of in control of it. You've decided the terms of that world. And I think a lot of what's happening when artists are working is that they're trying to make the world they would prefer to be in. Now, that sometimes gets dismissed as escapism, but I don't think it is. And anyway, I don't think there's anything wrong with escapism. It's sometimes a really good idea to escape and to get out of things and think about them from a distance rather than from being in the centre of them. But this is another of the misconceptions about art, that it ought to be difficult to do.

• 30:12Brian Eno?

  And I think there are many people who I would call artists who never experience any difficulty with what they're doing. It's just what they do. People who make beautiful cakes, for example. One of my daughters loves doing mousy pan decorations on cakes. And they're beautiful, the things she makes. But I'm sure she wouldn't call that being an artist, but I can't see what the difference is. You know, why is that not being an artist? So that's one of the other art world things that in order to make it valuable, to justify the high prices, we've got to think of some way of kind of making it seem abnormal, making it seem like something that only abnormal humans can do.

• 30:56Ezra Klein?

  What are you doing with art? When I think of your library, it's not all creating a world that you would like to live in. What is... You've sort of given all these legible motivations for other people. Is your motivation is legible to yourself?

• 31:11Brian Eno?

  At best, what I'm doing is thinking... I often start something by thinking, I wish there was a piece of music like this, whatever this means in my mind. For instance, one of my best-known records is music for airports. And that came from a very direct experience like that, of sitting in a newly-built airport in Germany. Near Cologne. And everything about the airport was dazzlingly beautiful. It was lovely structure. And they had terrible German disco music playing really loud through the whole P A system in the airport.

• 31:58Brian Eno?

  And I just thought, nobody's thought about this issue of what kind of music would belong in this place. You know, we use music in public all the time, but does anybody actually sit down and think seriously, what would be the best kind of music to have in this important place where people are arriving, leaving, going on to important new phases in their lives, or going back to loved ones or whatever? It ought to be something a bit more. I started thinking, what should it be more of? And so I started thinking and trying to make a kind of music that I thought would make the airport experience feel important and special.

• 32:41Brian Eno?

  And there were quite a lot of technical considerations, like obviously it mustn't interfere with communication.

• 32:51Brian Eno?

  It mustn't keep stopping and starting.

• 32:56Brian Eno?

  It must not matter if it gets interrupted.

• 33:02Brian Eno?

  So on and so on. So that was a, that was a very conscious act of making a, making a work of art. But most of what I do isn't really motivated by such high, high sounding ideas. Most of the time I'm fiddling around and something starts to happen, something.

• 33:25Brian Eno?

  Intrigues me or some feeling starts to happen. I think I like that feeling. How can I bring that forward? How can I make more of it? And I often don't know why I'm doing that or how it will end up. I have an archive of about 11,000 unfinished pieces of music. And what I do occasionally is pull one of those out. And suddenly, I haven't seen it for 15 years, maybe.

• 33:53Ezra Klein?

  11,000 unfinished pieces of music?

• 33:55Brian Eno?

  Yeah, some of them are very short.

• 33:58Ezra Klein?

  Let me hold you on Music for Airports for a minute. One of my favorite albums and the second song on that album, 21. The tracks are not so, the tracks are not so evocatively named, given how evocative they are, is like a very portent piece of music to me. So I want to play a couple of seconds of it.

• 34:37Ezra Klein?

  When you were saying that you wanted music that matched what you felt that experience should be. It should be more something. 21 on there, what is it more of to you?

• 34:50Brian Eno?

  I think it's more contemplative. I think it makes you relax into the situation that you're in, whatever that happens to be, presumably in an airport in this case, rather than tries to pretend that you're not in that place. So my nightmarish form of music is getting on an airplane and hearing a piece of music coming like this because they haven't got the machine to work properly. And you have two thoughts then. You have a thought, they're playing music because they want to stop us thinking about the possibility we might crash. And secondly, they can't even get the bloody player to work properly. So we're going to crash.

• 35:33Brian Eno?

  You know, you can use music as a mask, which is what is normally done in public situations, as a way of covering up the noise. Or you can use music that invites the noise to sound like it's part of it. So with all of that kind of music, what I call ambient music. I don't want there to be an edge to the music. I want it so that you don't know whether some of the things you're hearing are in the world around you or are part of the music. So I want it not to have a sharp boundary. I want it to sort of fade out into the rest of the world's noises around you.

• 36:11Ezra Klein?

  I always think about that as being on an album called Music for Airports.

• 36:16Brian Eno?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:17Ezra Klein?

  Because both is very discordant and then, as I thought about it, more exactly correct. That is, to me, one of the holiest pieces of music I have ever heard. That piece of music just feels holy.

• 36:29Brian Eno?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:30Ezra Klein?

  And in a way, it gets something true about airports, which is that this is a place where human beings go to fly, where they're forced into, I mean, I feel this when I get on planes, a confrontation with their own mortality.

• 36:45Brian Eno?

  Yep.

• 36:45Ezra Klein?

  There's never a time when a plane, when I'm in a plane that is having turbulence during takeoff, or I don't think to myself, in a way I usually do not think in my day, I could die.

• 36:56Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 36:57Ezra Klein?

  There are all these people, they're going to places that are in many cases incredibly important to them. And the airport is this extraordinary combination of a place that is so banal, lines and you're taking off your shoes and, you know, you're waiting in line for food that is mediocre at best and, you know, you're late and your plane is late and you're annoyed. And then also the absolute most remarkable place that a human being can possibly find themselves, something that for most of human history was completely unimaginable.

• 37:30Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 37:30Ezra Klein?

  And two, one to me, on an album called Music for Airports is such a perfect song because it's more true about the airport than my experience of the airport is.

• 37:40Brian Eno?

  Ha, that's a nice way of putting it, yeah. So I wanted to make flying feel like a more spiritual experience is what, if I had to put it into a sentence with a controversial word in it. And by that, I mean, I, I used to be very frightened of flying and of course I had to do it at that time in my career. And I thought, well, What about if you could make a kind of music that made you less worried about the idea of dying? What about if you could make a piece of music that made your life seem less the center of your attention?

• 38:19Brian Eno?

  If you could see yourself as just being one atom in a universe of complicated molecules, would that make things feel better? So, so in a way, it was intended to take the stress off yourself, not by pretending you weren't flying. So let's make it just sound like a disco or a nightclub or something like that, which is what most of the music tries to do. Let's not do that. Let's say we're having an unusual experience and let's experience it as a beautiful experience.

• 38:54Ezra Klein?

  One of the things in that album, Music, Your Line, I know it's a very famous, and I know you've been asked about it a million times, I don't want to stay here too long, but you do talk about wanting that music to cultivate different modes of attention. And that's been very influential, this idea that music is a cultivator of different forms of attention, not all of them, an attention that is spent on the music.

• 39:17Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 39:18Ezra Klein?

  I guess in the years since then, the decades since then, how do you think the relationship between music and attention has changed? Do you see it as a success of what you're trying to do? Do you see it as a nightmarish world that you accidentally summoned into existence? What is your, what is your relationship to it?

• 39:40Brian Eno?

  Well, I think what's happened is that it's changed in both directions. So I think people are ready to accord music, a level of attention that they never have done in the past. For instance, when you go to these extremely long concerts, sometimes 10 hours long, where you're basically listening to three sign tones for a very long time. That's a level of attention that really people never thought of giving until at least the middle of the 20th century and later. So there's that. And then, on the other hand, you have TikTok or very short pieces of music like that, which are, of course, right at the other end of the scale.

• 40:21Brian Eno?

  But I think in culture, this is a general rule that every single standard

• 40:28Brian Eno?

  Every single metric has increased in both directions. We now have extremely long pieces of music and extremely short ones. We have extremely loud bands and very, very, very quiet ones. It's as if we've taken every dimension in which music can exist and tried to expand it and say, what would happen at the edges now? Let's make a new edge.

• 40:51Ezra Klein?

  But I also was thinking about that in terms of the movement towards music that what it is doing is saying, we're going to cultivate this form of attention or feeling for you. So the rise of the Spotify that they're on every streaming network now, the playlists that are, well, here's your Happy Beats playlist. Here's your Beast Mode at the Gym playlist for when you really need to be pumped up. But here's your melancholy rainy day playlist. Here's studying at a coffee shop, which is different, of course, than studying at the library playlist. Here's your ambient playlist, your ambient essentials, but here's your... And now we're seeing this move into these places being, in some ways, generated, right? I don't know how much of it is happening now, but clearly we're moving towards AI generating

• 41:32Ezra Klein?

  a bunch of these songs at functionally no cost, mass-produced mood-altering music. Music is Xanax, music is Adderall, music is mood alteration.

• 41:44Brian Eno?

  Yeah.

• 41:45Ezra Klein?

  And done not as a relationship between the artist and the listener, but like you hire the music to perform a service and to do so quite unobtrusively. Some of that music is good, some of it is bad, obviously. But how do you feel about that?

• 42:05Brian Eno?

  Well, you're right. In your previous question, you asked, did I feel any responsibility for that? And I do, actually. I mean, I was very excited about the idea of generative music. I invented the phrase, I believe.

• 42:21Brian Eno?

  And I was very excited by the idea of making a music like a seed. You know, a seed is something that has a genetic message in it. And every manifestation of it will be a little bit different, depending on where you plant it and what time of year it grew and so on and so on. So I thought, wouldn't it be nice if you had music like that? So, I mean, there's a very simple example of that. Wind chimes. A wind chime is a simple enough machine. Let's say you've got five. Chimes, each one is a particular pitch, it's not going to change, it's only that pitch. But how and when they strike depends on the wind, so it's sort of semi-random.

• 43:05Brian Eno?

  So you can't really say that you composed that particular performance, though you can say that I built the system from which that performance emanated. You know, a wind chime is basically a simple piece of generative music.

• 43:20Ezra Klein?

  And so it shifts, and I know you've talked a bit about almost wishing you could sell people not the album, but the system behind it. It shifts the artistic act into the creation of the conditions

• 43:32Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 43:33Ezra Klein?

  that will create the artistic product.

• 43:36Brian Eno?

  Yes, that's right. So, so two things becoming important. What, what is the structure of rules, if you like? What are the possibilities that the system has? What are the limitations that it has? And what are the materials you put into it? So if you make a wind chime out of glass, for instance, or out of bamboo rods, or out of metal, they're all going to be slightly different results. But each one is a kind of package of possibilities. You're not specifically saying which possibilities you want to happen, but you're conditioning which group of possibilities can happen. And I, I thought that was a sort of a nice area for music to be in, because if you think

• 44:19Brian Eno?

  about it, up until the turn of the 20th century, you could never have the same musical experience twice. There was no way that you could precisely repeat a musical experience. As soon as records came along, you could do that. You could hear exactly the same performance of exactly the same song over and over and over and over. And that became how most of us listen to music, unless we happen to be born into a musical family or a church group or something like that. Most of the music we heard was repetition. So what I thought was, I wonder if you could use the technology of repetition to make music that constantly changes. And

• 45:04Brian Eno?

  My first clue to that was when I first got hold of a tape recorder. I'd wanted a tape recorder my whole childhood. I just thought the idea of being able to catch a piece of sound and make it physical was the most magical thing I could think of, actually. And I had this obsession with, you could play it backwards and I just wanted to hear what things would be like if they were played backwards. Discovering that, first of all, you can capture sound and make it physical. That was something new for the 20th century. But then I thought, if you can make it physical, can't you also make it mutate in certain ways? Can't you make it so the physical medium, for instance, is not reliable?

• 45:49Brian Eno?

  It will play slightly differently each time. And so my first experiments in that direction were, I had a collection of broken tape recorders, which I just got from junk shops, you know, or thrift stores, as you might say. And I would try to break them a little bit more, but so that they would still play things. So a tape playing through it would change into something else, you know, it would have a lot of distortion or it would run unevenly like this, you know. I discovered that if I connected two tape recorders together, put one tape through one and coming out through the other, so that the playback head is separated by several

• 46:32Brian Eno?

  feet from the record head, you get a very late echo.

• 46:56Brian Eno?

  And then you can build up those, you can work on top of those. I mean, I discovered this in the 60s. So did Terry Riley and a few other people, I think. It just happened. I had two tape recorders for a while, so I could try this out. And then I could build up these huge sort of orchestras of music, live on my own. So I think that became an obsession, to try to make a recorded music that somehow changed every time. I finally achieved it in the 1990s.

• 47:30Brian Eno?

  And I'm still doing it now.

• 47:32Ezra Klein?

  You draw this distinction when working with generative systems, where you say, you don't want to be an architect, you want to be a gardener. What's the difference?

• 47:40Brian Eno?

  So the conception of an architect is somebody who thinks about an end result in great detail. You know, the archetype is Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed everything down to the teaspoons in his houses. And so the whole thing kind of pre-exists in the architect's mind and then is bought into being by builders. What a gardener does is put some seeds in the soil and then watches how they develop. Oh, these ones over here are doing better than those ones over there. So next year I'll plant them differently. But you know that if you're making a garden, you're only starting something. So one of Stuart Brand's books, it's called

• 48:20Brian Eno?

  How Buildings Learn. It's a great book. And in that, he says, you never finish a building, you only start it. And I think that's what I kind of mean by generative music. You start the piece, but it finishes itself. It carries on finishing itself for the rest of time.

• 48:38Ezra Klein?

  But so you you upgrade this idea of generative music. And now we have launched into this world of generative AI. The way you were using the term generative and the way what it is describing when we're saying now generative AI, which are things like ChatGPT and and all these large language models, is it the same word for you? Right? Are the two generatives equal?

• 49:09Brian Eno?

  I think they mean the same thing. Now, of course, as a set of techniques, mine is much, much, much cruder and simpler and much more analog than the techniques that are generally being used in LLMs. And of course, the other big difference is that mine are not owned by mad billionaires. And I think that's an important difference. In fact, with all the discussion about AI, to me, the single most important question is who should be in control of it. And we've seen in this century, what happens when billionaires control new technologies, social media I'm talking about, and we've seen that they

• 49:51Brian Eno?

  You get completely unpredicted and quite disastrous results sometimes. You know, the collapse of democracy in most of our countries, I think, is very traceable to social media and to the kind of misunderstanding that underwrote it, that, um, oh, let's make this amazing new medium where everyone can communicate with each other. Oh, but we've got to make a lot of money from doing it. You know, in a way, the big mistake was when the the algorithm became maximize engagement, which means maximize profits, of course. If maximize engagement is what you're going for, then you end up with what we have now, an internet that flourishes on anger and

• 50:38Brian Eno?

  nastiness in some ways.

• 50:41Brian Eno?

  I'm not saying, of course, that everything like that is like that on the internet, but what seems to have happened in the race for profits, we've managed to sidestep the friction that normally comes with things being born into the world. Friction is very important. Friction gives you a little time to see what's happening. It makes something ease into your life more slowly, so you can start to correct it as it's easing in. I always say it's like we've invented an amazing new type of car that can travel at seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, but we haven't put any brakes in it. You know, because brakes slow down the profits, basically.

• 51:23Ezra Klein?

  So there's this question of who controls it, and then also, as you get at there, this question of who profits from it. One of the things I find very morally complicated to think about with generative AI is that it is generative and the seed of it and more than the seed of it, the substance of it. Is the sum total of knowledge that human beings have made in a way that is legible to the crawling software developed by the AI companies.

• 51:54Brian Eno?

  Yeah.

• 51:54Ezra Klein?

  And you can see that it's really about that because in fact, these companies are mostly neck and neck with each other for how good their systems are. Uh, it's not like one of them came up with like the algorithm that no other human being could come up with. They're, they're sort of going back and forth because they have the same training data, which is us.

• 52:12Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 52:13Ezra Klein?

  And so on one level, that's like everything else is scientists are coming up with new scientific discoveries built on every scientific discovery before them. You have a lovely bit in your book about all the human genius over how many years it goes into getting you to work in the morning. There's nothing new about creations just being a marginal step forward built on the shoulders of us all. And yet I can never escape this feeling of the AI systems. There is something about the scale of the use here that should change who profits from it and how. The fact that they have absorbed everything I have ever written for the internet and fed it into the machine.

• 52:58Ezra Klein?

  I kind of think somebody should send me a royalty check. You know, it's not, it doesn't have to be a big one and it maybe shouldn't go to me. It should go to society.

• 53:05Brian Eno?

  Yes, yes.

• 53:06Ezra Klein?

  But something about it feels, I don't want to call it theft. It isn't theft, but nor is it just like a standing on the, like there's something here that feels like it needs new ways of thinking about it because, you know, just for a couple of these companies to profit off of the transformation of everything we've all ever done.

• 53:25Brian Eno?

  This is the question I'm asking myself. Should it be that we automatically have a system that says this is a social good, all this knowledge, it's a socially produced good, and therefore its usage should reward society? That's quite hard to meter, of course. It's hard to put a meter on it. I think it has to be written into the whole machinery itself so that nobody has to make a decision. For example, it wouldn't be a bad idea if everything that was generated in that way.

• 54:01Brian Eno?

  Fifty percent of all the profits from it immediately go back to society in some way. It would be saying, we're not claiming to be the geniuses here. We're claiming to be the people who know how to corral it all, how to put it together, how to make it available to you. But thank you for all the stuff you've written, Ezra and Brian and everybody else. And with your permission, we'll redistribute this to society. It's so obvious to me that that should be the way, but of course, that that is not the American way at all. That sounds like socialism of some kind.

• 54:35Ezra Klein?

  Or at least taxation. That seems true to me, too. I mean, at the moment, these companies are not making such big profits that even doing something like that would be that meaningful to the treasury. They're sucking in much more venture capital than they are producing revenue in general. But in the future, if it is what they think it will be, you know, if it is what they are promising their venture capitalists, it will be. I mean, I guess you just solve that through the tax system, but it seems like you need a way of thinking about it that's a little bit clearer than the ways we have. And it's funny, if you go into the writings of a lot of them, Sam Altman and and and others from a couple of years ago, they're talking about this, like this is a thing they imagine.

• 55:18Ezra Klein?

  I mean, Altman has, you know, ideas for what's functionally like a universal basic wealth grant coming out of taxing the AI companies. But I'm sort of with you on this. I I think it deserves a different conceptual category. That is not merely the category of taxation. That is more something of sharing, right? It is not confiscatory taxation. It is a reflection of the nature of these systems.

• 55:45Brian Eno?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Ezra Klein?

  And sort of my view of them is they actually should be able to crawl the sum total of human knowledge that is, you know, at least if people are willing to make accessible to them.

• 55:53Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 55:53Ezra Klein?

  But that part of that is that there's a contract between those companies and the rest of us that we both know what we're doing here. And we're in this together.

• 56:06Brian Eno?

  Yes, especially if you're trying to inspire confidence in them. You you you want people to willingly participate in them rather than having it forced upon them. Do you know this word that I came up with years ago, which is senius? Yes. Yeah, okay, so that that was an attempt to try to understand that. I had been studying the early 20th century painting in Russia. There was a 20 year period when there were amazing amount of innovation going on. You know, suprematism, constructivism, reanism, all these different isms appearing. And I discovered that the scene was very complex.

• 56:47Brian Eno?

  It wasn't just that there were a few brilliant artists like Kandinsky and Rodchenko and Tatlin and so on. It turned out that some of the very important people were the collectors, who would specifically target certain artists and say, I want to keep this person alive. I'm going to support this person. Or they would go to Paris and buy pictures that they brought back to St Petersburg and Moscow to show to painters there and say, look, this is what's going on in Paris now. And then there were the people who ran the salons, who would invite artists to meet up with each other and talk to, and so on and so on. The cafe owner, the cafe that everybody used to hang out in, who was quite conscious that they had a part to play in the scene

• 57:31Brian Eno?

  and they would let people not pay for their meals and so on, and put it on the tab. And so I thought there was a whole scene here that was fertile, that was operational. There was a whole support system. And so I had got sick anyway of hearing this word genius being used all the time because it never seemed to me like it was just one person who was doing everything. So I came up with this word senius, which is seen with an I U S on the end. And that seemed to me to much better understand the ecology of systems like that. And I think that's what it is. It's an ecosystem and we still don't understand ecosystems. It's still not intuitive to most of us to under-

• 58:16Brian Eno?

  And how a thing like an ecosystem works, how there are lots and lots of nodes and they're connected in very complicated ways. And if you move one of the nodes to a different place, everything else in the system has to shift. Anyone who's become interested in the environment has started to become aware of how complex natural systems are. But human society is a natural system as well. And the and the society of knowledge that we all share is a natural system.

• 58:45Ezra Klein?

  This is a way in which, and I'm not an anti AI person. I use chat GPT a lot. I'm fascinated. I feel a sense of both. I do feel some fear, but I feel a tremendous amount of wonder around these technologies. I find watching it formulate a response that in some ways reads more human than the responses most humans give me to most things. It does. It generates a form of awe in me. One thing that frightens me as somebody who came up on the internet and understands, I think, fairly well, how knowledge production works on the internet is that they're breaking the fundamental social contract of the internet, which is even take something

• 59:27Ezra Klein?

  like Google. The value of Google is that there is so much that other people have created that is valuable and Google connects you to it. But it does connect you to it.

• 59:38Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 59:39Ezra Klein?

  And now chat GPT or Anthropic or whomever inhales the internet and it's all right there. And I never go to the underlying sites. And the creation of all this data, which was incentivized by ways people were able to monetize and not just monetize, but have their work discovered. That was for many of us on the internet, when I started a blog with no ever intent of a job or a profit from it. I was a college student. Just the idea that anybody would ever find their way to me and read something I did and care about it was such a tremendous incentive to create. But there is something very problematic about this. A huge amount of the internet and the intellectual commons we are now built on

• 1:00:24Ezra Klein?

  is traffic moving around the internet, people moving around the internet. And then the advertising that comes from that, the whatever that comes from that, keeping that whole ecosystem healthy. And these AI systems by nature, you go to the system. And then for most people, it stops there. Even Google search is trying to become more like that.

• 1:00:45Brian Eno?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Ezra Klein?

  The whole thing they're built on, they are going to destroy.

• 1:00:49Brian Eno?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Ezra Klein?

  Or at least substantially degrade.

• 1:00:51Brian Eno?

  Yes, that's right. When I was a kid and I liked watercolor painting a lot. And I used to notice that after a day of painting, the water that I was dipping my brush into, which was of course, a mixture of all the colors I had touched that day, was always the same color. Actually, I called it munge, M U N G E. Munge is sort of purply brownie, horrible color, basically. And whenever I've tried creating things on ChatGPT, I haven't done that much of it actually. But I work very hard to get my prompts right and to filter what I'm saying to, and trying to edge it into something interesting.

• 1:01:35Brian Eno?

  But the color of munge covers all of it. It's it's so over digested. And of course, it's quoting things, it's using things on the basis of how frequently they have appeared. I don't know whether you've ever tried making anything, let's say artistic, using ChatGPT or any of the other programs. It has a very interesting progression when you're doing it. The first thing you make, you think, bloody hell, that's pretty amazing.

• 1:02:08Brian Eno?

  And then after half an hour or so, you think, I'm so bored. And I remember that thing that Samuel Johnson said about something, I can't remember what it was about now, but he said, it's a little bit like watching an animal walk, a dog walk on its hind legs. You're not interested in how it walks, but just that it can. You know, you're sort of impressed by the fact that it can do something that is really quite like a human being. But then you find out that it's like a quite dull human being. And it kind of doesn't get more exciting unless you can trick it into some sort of aberration, which is what I've been trying to do.

• 1:02:51Ezra Klein?

  I've been amazed on the one hand at how good it is, but then I also have the exact experience. I love your description of it as munge.

• 1:03:01Ezra Klein?

  And I think it goes back to something we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, which is the information and possibility that is encoded in factual knowledge. And then the more amorphous forms of intelligence and intuition that are encoded in feelings. So I have experimented a lot with using different forms of AI as help in this show. And they are helpful for things that are very specific. But they are never helpful for the actual work of creating the conversation. And, and what's absent in the output is I think what we're talking about.

• 1:03:45Ezra Klein?

  I could not give you a description of how this conversation is structured. It is just structured by me having intuitive reactions to what is happening with it and then moving with those reactions.

• 1:03:57Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 1:03:58Ezra Klein?

  And ChatGPT is structured as a probabilistic output

• 1:04:02Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 1:04:03Ezra Klein?

  of what the entire internet would have done.

• 1:04:05Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 1:04:06Ezra Klein?

  And so it, it's not even that it always lacks surprise, but it always has a very visible internal logic.

• 1:04:12Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 1:04:13Ezra Klein?

  And then over time, that internal logic becomes overpoweringly annoying. Some people who work on these companies said, oh, I keep my diary in it and that's very interesting. You should try that. So without giving too much personal information, I did that.

• 1:04:28Ezra Klein?

  And the first couple of responses, I was amazed at how psychologically insightful they were, how supportive they were. I mean, it was better than what human beings in my life gave me. And then on response nine, 10, 11, 12, 15, 20, it was the same fucking feelings. It was the same glazing and sycophancy and the same kinds of insights. And I think it's one of these things that you couldn't look at the responses, say, there's anything wrong with it. But there is something human beings are attuned to.

• 1:05:05Brian Eno?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Ezra Klein?

  In the way we do not travel a perfectly logical or well structured path. We're not supposed to. It's not how our intelligence works. And it is funny. You do begin to feel the divergence there.

• 1:05:19Brian Eno?

  Yeah. It's not even what we like, actually. You know, as, as humans, we, we like a certain amount of predictability, but only a certain amount. We don't want exactly the same each time. So, you know, we rely on our interest being taken by a deviation we didn't expect. The sycophancy is the thing that really drives me mad when it says, good question, Brian. That's a really good question.

• 1:05:46Ezra Klein?

  That's not just an insight. That's a revelation.

• 1:05:49Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 1:05:49Ezra Klein?

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

• 1:05:53Brian Eno?

  Yeah. So you, first of all, if you're going to do work with AI at all, you have to, as my friend Danny Hillis says, you have to start off by saying, please don't flatter me.

• 1:06:26Ezra Klein?

  You've done so much of your work in collaboration, but also in collaboration with machines. I mean, it is something you are known for.

• 1:06:33Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 1:06:34Ezra Klein?

  So to you, what makes you good?

• 1:06:38Ezra Klein?

  At creating healthy collaborations between humans and technologies? And what for you typifies a healthy collaboration as opposed to an outsourcing, a unhealthy form of the diminishment of the human beings behind it?

• 1:06:53Brian Eno?

  Yes. So I have a few mental tricks that I use, which I think are just naturally part of me. One of them, when I'm faced with a piece of technology which can do something, I immediately don't want to know about what it can do. I want to know what it can do that the makers didn't imagine it would ever be used to do. With the type of technology that I work with, musical technology, that's a very rich, open territory. And it's rich and open because not that many people explore it. You know, they have something that says, this will make your mixers sound louder, and they use it to make mixers sound louder. Well, you know, don't blame them, that's what it says on the box.

• 1:07:37Brian Eno?

  But you will also find out that that can do something else that nobody had ever thought of doing with music before. So that was an example of using something that was meant to do a particular job, record something and play it back later on. So build something new in real time. So I think that's to do with technology, to do with people. So the first thing I think about when I look at a band, I think, okay, so there are, let's say, five people in that band. How many possible duets is that? How many possible trios? How many possible quartets? How many solos? Five, obviously. And how many everybody?

• 1:08:22Brian Eno?

  One. Now, it very often happens that that space has not been explored properly by the band. People haven't thought, what about if only three of us play in this? And then another slightly different configuration of three play. So it's a very simple thing, but it suddenly unlocks a... A set of possibilities that probably hadn't been explored before. You know, what happens if we only have vocalist, drums and bass? None of the other instruments that usually fill in the harmonic information in between. There are lots of tricks like that, but they're sort of ways of looking at the system as it stands and thinking,

• 1:09:06Brian Eno?

  what hasn't been done yet with this system? What might excite people? You see, I think that music grows out of excitement. And if you aren't feeling excitement, then you try to create it in some way. If the situation isn't turning you on, then you try to change it until it does turn you on. Because when you're excited, you are at your most alert, I think. And when you're at your most alert, you're most likely to spot the little thing that is going to turn into the big thing.

• 1:09:39Ezra Klein?

  One thing that makes me think about that feels relevant in both directions is I think it's often a very important question where the agency resides in something. So I think we always say we use social media, but no, social media uses us.

• 1:09:58Brian Eno?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:59Ezra Klein?

  And over time, if you watch anybody on it for long enough, you you watch them become the social media that's using them. Right? They begin to bow to its incentives, to its habits, to its form. What you were just saying, I thought was so interesting about the the set of possibilities in a band. Initially, it's a bunch of musicians playing in a band. Eventually, the band, through its habits, through what's expected of it, is playing the musicians.

• 1:10:19Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 1:10:20Ezra Klein?

  And I think this is very true with technologies. You know, when you talk about you discovering or Terry Riley discovering what you can do is two tape recorders, you are playing the tape recorders. And I think this is probably not always true, but when you think about a lot of the the digital possibilities people have had, you know, in the last couple of decades, like Ableton and and other things, it's still people playing the synthesizer, playing the music library. I think the fear that a lot of us have about generative AI is that we're not going to be playing it. It's going to be playing us, often because we prefer it to play us, right? When a kid, you know, you can use AI to help you write a better essay, but a lot of people just want the AI to write the essay, right?

• 1:11:05Brian Eno?

  The whole essay.

• 1:11:05Ezra Klein?

  The whole essay.

• 1:11:06Brian Eno?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Ezra Klein?

  And I think that that space between are you playing the technology or is the technology playing you? Is a very tricky one, and I think that's one of my more dystopic versions of our AI future, my kids' future in AI, is a world in which they've given up a lot of their own agency because it seems a little bit ridiculous to take it.

• 1:11:29Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 1:11:30Ezra Klein?

  And that could always have been true. I mean, there's a million technologies that I ha- like, I'm happy I have Google Maps. I have a bad sense of direction and I'm not trying to make it better. But there is some line where you are acting upon the world versus the world is just acting through you, that I think is gonna be very hard to please.

• 1:11:47Brian Eno?

  Yes, I think what bothers me, which is exactly part of what you're saying, is the possibility of not making a mistake at all, of making things that always come with this sort of professional finished gloss of what a real pop song looks like or what a real picture looks like. And I think that's lethal. I have a friend, an architect friend called Rem Koolhaas, he's a Dutch architect, and he uses this phrase, the premature sheen. So when, in his architectural practice, when they first got computers and computers were first good enough to do proper renderings of things, he said, everything looked amazing

• 1:12:29Brian Eno?

  at first. You know, you could construct a building in half an hour in the computer and you'd have this amazing looking thing. And he said, but it didn't help us make good buildings. It helped us make things that looked like they might be good buildings. But he said, in the end, we went back, and I went to visit him one day when they were working on a big new complex for someplace in Texas. And what they were using were matchboxes and pens and packets of tissues. It was completely analog. And there was no sense at all that this had any relationship to what the final product would be in terms

• 1:13:10Brian Eno?

  of how it looked. So it meant that what you were thinking about was, how does it work? What do we want it to be like to be in that place? You started asking the important questions again, not what kind of facing shall we have on the building, or what kind of color should the stone be? And when I see people fiddling around with

• 1:13:31Brian Eno?

  Synthesizers, this has always been a problem with synthesizers, that they always come with a bank of sounds ready-made for people who don't want to learn how to program them, which it turns out is most people. I remember talking to Yamaha once, who produced the most successful synthesizer of all time, which was the DX7. And I said, you know, you should really make these a little bit easier to program. And they said, well, we don't bother, because nobody tries to change them anyway. We often get them back for repair, and we can tell if somebody's tried to change the programming. And nobody's ever done it. They've just used the presets. And that seems to me a kind of mental laziness that I really

• 1:14:14Brian Eno?

  don't think fits well with making new things.

• 1:14:18Ezra Klein?

  I think that's strange, a little bit inspiring as a principle. You've worked, corresponded, known so many just fascinating people, people admire, that I want to see if you'd be up for me, just reading a few names, not a lightning round, you can answer at whatever length you would like, but you just tell me, you know, something, inspiration and insight, something that you took from that person, if you'd be up for it.

• 1:14:41Brian Eno?

  Sure, yes.

• 1:14:42Ezra Klein?

  Let me start, just the composer, John Cage.

• 1:14:46Brian Eno?

  I think the thing that really impressed me about Cage was not his music, which I didn't particularly care for after the 1940s, but his idea that being a composer was a kind of a practice in the sense of a religious, or a spiritual, or a philosophical practice. And I thought, that's the kind of artist I want to be. I want to have a practice. I want there to be resonances into other parts of my thinking. I don't want it to just be something that I do on the weekends and then forget about. So Cage, with his book Silence, was very important for me. That came along at just the right time for me.

• 1:15:28Ezra Klein?

  David Bowie.

• 1:15:31Brian Eno?

  One of the most... Committed artists I've ever worked with in the sense that he he really thought about what he was doing. Just to tell you a short story. I remember being in the studio with him doing, he was doing a vocal on one of the songs. I can't remember the song, but so he does the vocal and he comes back into the control room. Listening back to it, he says, it's a bit lumberjack, isn't it? And I knew exactly what he meant. And he said, I think the guy should sound a little bit more nervous, like he's working in an office and he hasn't been there very long and doesn't quite know how you're supposed to behave in the office. Then he goes back out and does this other vocal.

• 1:16:15Brian Eno?

  And suddenly you hear the transition from this confident, strong, hairy, macho guy to somebody who's a little bit timid and has, doesn't quite know whether he should be saying the things he's saying. And seeing him fine tune that was very impressive. Steve Reich. Well, Steve Reich was a very important part of my listening because he made a piece called It's Gonna Rain that opened a door for me.

• 1:16:52Brian Eno?

  And the door it opened was not just to do with the way in which he made it, which was itself very impressive. Using an absolute minimum of material, 0.8 seconds of material, I think it was. That piece works by making your brain behave in a certain way. You are not an inactive listener in that. All of his work, I think, depends on making your brain perform and watch itself performing in a certain way. So I suddenly thought then, oh. The composer isn't just Steve Reich. It's Steve Reich and my brain that's making this composition what it is.

• 1:17:33Brian Eno?

  And that thought never left me that you actually are engaging the the technology of the listener's brain to complete the piece. They're not passive.

• 1:17:43Ezra Klein?

  Listening to his music completely changed my relationship with music, I think.

• 1:17:47Brian Eno?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Ezra Klein?

  It's like power washing your own mind.

• 1:17:50Brian Eno?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:51Ezra Klein?

  Like to really sit through it. It's as psychedelic as any, as I think any drug out there really does. It it's so rhythmic and it forces your brain to adjust to it in a way that feels like when you come out the other end of it.

• 1:18:05Brian Eno?

  Yes.

• 1:18:06Ezra Klein?

  Some sort of reprogramming has happened.

• 1:18:08Brian Eno?

  Yes, yes, certainly. That definitely happened with me. I I can definitely say from the moment I heard It's Going to Rain, music was a different thing.

• 1:18:17Ezra Klein?

  Laurie Anderson.

• 1:18:19Brian Eno?

  Oh, such a sweet friend. Probably the hardest working artist I know. She absolutely never stops. And she is always working on half a dozen projects in 10 different parts of the world. And I think she's the only person I know who can fly all night, not sleep, come straight into a meeting and be absolutely there. She's remarkably low maintenance person. She's always there and always sharp.

• 1:18:58Ezra Klein?

  And Stuart Brand.

• 1:19:00Brian Eno?

  Well, these, all these people you're naming are people who had a huge impact on me. Stuart was in the army during, I guess it was the time of Korea or just afterwards. Yes, just after Korea, I guess. He was in the army and I don't think he was ever ashamed of being in the army. He, I think he enjoyed it. And he left the army and became a hippie, became one of the sort of foundational hippies around Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and that group of people. And he's always been a very big thinker and a very long term thinker. And one of his early thoughts was

• 1:19:42Brian Eno?

  If people on earth could see a picture of the earth from the moon, it would change our consciousness of the earth.

• 1:19:50Ezra Klein?

  A thought he had sitting on a roof all on acid, if I remember the story correctly.

• 1:19:54Brian Eno?

  That's absolutely true, yes. Acid does produce good results in some people. Not in me, unfortunately.

• 1:20:03Brian Eno?

  So Stuart sort of gave birth to this idea, I think, that if we could show the world from the outside, if we realized what this tiny, what an amazing, extraordinary, unique gift it was, this tiny little planet teeming with life, swimming around in a dead universe, as far as we know. We still don't know that there's any other life in the universe, which is phenomenal, if you think about it. We still don't know. We might be the only life in the universe. I think about that nearly every day. I think it's the most sobering thought. I think that should be shouted from the rooftops every day.

• 1:20:46Brian Eno?

  That's my version of seeing the whole earth from space is getting people to understand that we might be the only life. It might all be on this one place. And bloody hell, shouldn't we look after it a bit better then? Those things make me constantly think and constantly be sort of grateful for the fact that I'm alive. I remember reading this comment from a New York taxi driver who's driving the taxi.

• 1:21:16Brian Eno?

  And he says, he turns to the customer, he says, "Oh, life, I'm so glad I got in."

• 1:21:24Brian Eno?

  I just love that, the idea that it's like an amazing show at a theater and you managed to get a ticket to see it. I appreciate that kind of gratitude.

• 1:21:35Ezra Klein?

  That is lovely. And then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:21:40Brian Eno?

  Okay, so this was a very hard question. Three is not very many books, and I thought quite hard about them. So one of the books is called Printing and the Mind of Man. It was the catalogue, really, of an exhibition that was at the British Museum in 1963. And it was about the history of printing. But actually, the book is about the most important books in the Western canon. And the impact that they had when they were released. Starts with the Gutenberg Bible. But it's such a fascinating book because you really start to understand where the big fundamental ideas that made Western culture.

• 1:22:24Brian Eno?

  It doesn't have any Arabic books, or any Indian books, or any Chinese books. So it's really about the last 500 years in Western culture. And it's probably the most fascinating book about intellectual history that I've ever read. And it's a very beautiful book because it was put together by a great printer. Who used lots of beautiful types and so on. It's a wonderful book. So the second book, I think I'm going to suggest is a book by the architect Christopher Alexander called A Pattern Language. And it's really a book about habitat.

• 1:23:03Brian Eno?

  About what makes spaces welcoming and fruitful, or hostile and barren. And it's the most beautiful book. So it talks about things at the biggest scale possible, you know, countrywide, nationwide scale, down to the scale of the molding of a banister or something like that. And tries to understand why some of those things work and why they don't. And it's such a lovely book to read. Over the course of my life, I've bought, I would say 60 copies of that book now because I always give it to anyone who's about to renovate a house or about to build a house. So that's my second one.

• 1:23:47Brian Eno?

  It's a great read and you would love it. My third one is Naples 44 by Norman Lewis.

• 1:23:55Brian Eno?

  Norman Lewis was a British intelligence officer who was sent to Naples when the Germans had been beaten out of there. And he was sent there to find out whether there were nascent fascist groups still working in Naples. And he kept a diary. And this is the most fabulous diary you'll ever read. It's just both hilariously funny, deeply moving, and totally confusing. And you realise that Naples was like another planet. It's like reading sci-fi, some of it. The strangeness of that little world of Naples with its intertwining of deep religiosity,

• 1:24:39Brian Eno?

  deep criminality, deep love of the senses, incredible attention to food, weird, decaying aristocracies, all woven in with crooks and priests and so on. So there's three books, and I just want to suggest one other thing, which is a subscription to the London Review of Books. Probably the best intellectual reading in the English language, I think. It's amazing. Comes out every two weeks and it's, if you're interested in books, the London Review of Books, for me, beats the New York Review of Books, or the Times Literary Supplement, or any of those things.

• 1:25:20Ezra Klein?

  Well, let me, let me try to do this, because I've loved these recommendations so much, and I didn't offer this to you before, so maybe it's too hard, given all the little flood into your mind. But how about three albums? Three albums that have influenced you, that they sort of form part of your base layers?

• 1:25:39Brian Eno?

  Okay, I can respond to that. One that really made a huge impression on me was a folkways record called The Rural Folk Blues. And they were sort of semi-field recordings, some of them were actually records that had been made, but they all dated from the twenties, thirties, and forties, and they were black American music.

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  I'll make you happy in the morning, as any woman can be.

• 1:26:13Brian Eno?

  Now, I'd been listening to a lot of black American music because of where I grew up, in Suffolk, which had a lot of American airbases, but it was pop music, doo-wop and stuff like that. I loved it. When I heard those recordings, I thought, okay, this is the soil that that stuff grew out of, and I loved it. It was such, such rich soil. I think the second one that I have to name, because it still remains as one of the most moving records to me, is the Velvet Underground's third album, which had the song Pale Blue Eyes.

• 1:26:59Brian Eno?

  Beautiful, beautiful record. Beautifully controversial in many ways, because, in fact, I think it was probably without that record, I wouldn't have been a pop musician. I don't know what I would have done. I'd probably been an art teacher or something, but that record made me think, this is something I could do. And I think it made a lot of other people think that. I know so many musicians who say, that was the record that really made things happen for me. Now I've got to do number three. That means I've only got one choice left. This is very difficult. See, so much of the music that has really affected

• 1:27:38Brian Eno?

  me is religious music, which is funny, because I'm sort of an atheist. But the thing about religious music, I think, that is so special, is that it's made by people, and it's made by people for other reasons than, I want to pull a chick, I want to make a lot of money, or I want to dance. Now, all of those things are fine. I have no problem with them, but the majority of popular music comes out of those kinds of feelings, I think.

• 1:28:09Ezra Klein?

  I am very moved by the old conception of beauty, that when we recognize beauty, it is recognizing an earnest to God.

• 1:28:17Brian Eno?

  Yep. Well, I'd take that. Yeah, even an atheist like me would say. It depends how big the word god is for you. And if it's big enough, I can accommodate ideas like that. So I'm going to choose a gospel record. And it's a strange one. It's the Consolers. The Consolers were a couple, Sullivan and Iola Pugh. You know, I asked myself the question after going to this museum I mentioned in Lausanne, the Museum of Outsider Art. I thought, what's outsider music? I wondered. And then I thought, well, actually, the whole of pop music is really outsider music

• 1:29:00Brian Eno?

  in that it didn't come out of academies or institutions. It's just people doing stuff together. And I think as outsider artists, the Consolers, Sullivan and Iola, stand absolutely unmatched.

• 1:29:27Ezra Klein?

  Brian, you know, truly what a pleasure. Thank you.

• 1:29:29Brian Eno?

  Thank you so much. It's lovely to talk to you, Ezra.

• 1:29:44Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klontz is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Marie Cassillon, Jack McCordick, Marina King, Kristin Lynn, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota, Isaac Jones, and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Cemilouski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Spinning Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.