Akira the Don: Music and Meaning

[0] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 4 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, Dr. Peterson's daughter and collaborator.

[2] 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 Lo -Fi.

[3] 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 lo -fi charts, Terrence McKenna and Alan Watts.

[4] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[5] Dad, why did you want to talk with Akira?

[6] Well, I've been following the work that Akira has been doing for about a year.

[7] I think you introduced him to me, actually.

[8] I found out about him somehow on YouTube, and he was this interesting and idiosyncratic person who was producing music of a genre.

[9] that I wasn't familiar with that mixed spoken word with, well, with background music.

[10] And it was, it's like a version of hip hop, although a very calm version, I would say.

[11] 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, from my lectures and music.

[12] And he seemed to be.

[13] serious about what he was doing and he seemed to be doing a good job.

[14] And so I've been following for about a year and he seems to becoming more popular by all appearances.

[15] So I thought it was a good time to talk to him to find out what he's up to.

[16] He just released something called 42 rules for life.

[17] He'd asked me for an audio, an audio recording of all the 42 rules that I had written originally for Koroff, from which my book, 12 Rules from Life and the next book as well, have been derived.

[18] And so that was another reason why it was a good time to talk to him, because he just released that this week.

[19] And I thought it had gone pretty well.

[20] You know, and he's a peculiar and interesting person.

[21] And so it's always entertaining to talk to someone who's creative and original in a way that you wouldn't expect.

[22] Peculiar how he's super open?

[23] yeah he's that's right and and you know he's he's trying to make a living doing something that no one else is making a living at and um he's getting enough downloads on spotify and other what other venues for distribution of music to 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 Gijek, April 19th at 7 .30 p .m. E .S .T. in Toronto.

[24] The debate is Marxism versus capitalism and should be very interesting.

[25] Gijek is basically the world's most prominent Marxist, and Dad thinks Marxism is pretty much the most dangerous ideology out there.

[26] Should be spicy.

[27] Tickets are completely sold out.

[28] They sold out incredibly fast.

[29] So we set up a live stream for the first time.

[30] We figured people who weren't in Toronto would want a chance to see the debate, plus a lot of Zijek's fans are European.

[31] Tickets are being sold at Dad's website, jordanb peterson .com slash events, and at peterson versus jijack .com.

[32] It should be extremely interesting.

[33] Akira the Dawn is a British musician, DJ, and producer.

[34] 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.

[35] For reasons that have been quite surprising to me, Akira has been making Lofi tracks, also known as Meaning Wave, a combination of metered spoken word and music chosen for its emotional and conceptual appropriateness from some of my sayings and my talks.

[36] They have been reasonably well listened to, garnering maybe a million views over the 10 or 15 or so that he has posted on YouTube.

[37] The two main albums, 12 Rules for Life and J .B .P. Wave Genesis, have a lot of solicited more than a million streams each on Spotify, and that doesn't include iTunes and other content providers of the same type.

[38] The third album, oriented around my words, will be entitled J .B .P. Wave Paradise.

[39] It will be released a week today.

[40] Earlier this week, Akira also released a long single, 42 Rules for Life, based on the totality of the rules I had written for Quora several years ago.

[41] I think I'll feature that on today's podcast.

[42] Akira has also produced similar works featuring Ellen Watts, Jocco Willink, who is currently number one in the Meaning Wave charts, Terrence McKenna, David Foster Wallace, and Elon Musk, among others.

[43] Overall, Spotify downloads of top 4 million, and he's experiencing an approximate exposure at the moment of about a million a month.

[44] so welcome akira it's nice to talk to you we've met a little bit before not not a lot as i became aware of what you were doing this is the first time really that we'll have a chance to talk in any great detail yes we've emailed so what are you up to bluntly i'm i'm you know i'm engaged in an experiment in uh ridiculous hyperproductivity and uh zone in habitation uh my idea being.

[45] Well, basically, you know, I'm working on this music.

[46] But aside from working on the music, I'm working on remaining in the zone of making music.

[47] So the music flows and becomes better and better and better.

[48] And my whole process becomes more efficient and powerful with each thing.

[49] So it's this combined thing of making this new form of music or nothing's new, is it?

[50] Making this form of music and doing it.

[51] in a hyperproductive and powerful fashion.

[52] Okay, so let's start with hyperproductive.

[53] So, because you said you had twin ambitions, and so what's the hyperproductive element?

[54] Well, I've released, is it five albums this year so far?

[55] Four or five albums this year so far?

[56] We're in March.

[57] It's March 2019.

[58] So you mean since the beginning of 2019?

[59] Indeed.

[60] Oh, yeah.

[61] Okay.

[62] Well, that seems to qualify as hyperproductive.

[63] especially if this also happens to be a difficult endeavor.

[64] It is.

[65] It is.

[66] But here's the thing I noticed.

[67] I used to be a music journalist, and there's this phenomenon wherein band's first albums are amazing, and then their second albums are often not amazing.

[68] And 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.

[69] years, writing songs together and so on and so forth.

[70] And their first album will be the sum of that.

[71] They'll have essentially been in a kind of flow, and the first album will be the fruits of that flow.

[72] 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.

[73] And when they go back into the studio, they've sort of fallen out of that zone.

[74] So I wondered to myself, what would happen if one got in the zone and then refused to leave?

[75] if one just got in the state of just constantly creating with a very specific sort of mission and purpose and 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.

[76] and okay the results being beyond what you could have hoped for along what dimensions what's what's changed for you over the last couple of years like what's this what was your career like before you did this and what's changed as a consequence for you in your career and well let's also say personally a lot i mean uh previously i mean i've been doing this uh you know it was sort of my job uh since 2004 full -time around two thousand four i got my first record deal with uh which was within to scope records in america after a bizarre sequence of events um 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 uh the old model of the music industry which i was I was sort of trapped in, which was completely my own fault, because I'd yet to imagine another way fully.

[77] You know, you spend years making an album, is the idea, and then you spend years promoting it, or a long time promoting it, and it's all about getting press and all these sorts of things.

[78] And I would get sort of discouraged and sad if I would spend, I'd spend a lot of time making a thing, and then I would go through.

[79] to sort of put it out and I wouldn't have all the resources that I felt that I wanted or needed to get it to all the people that it should get to, which is kind of the old model, whereas now what I'm doing, what I'm doing, part of what's going on now is I'm just kind of releasing a vast amount of stuff at a very, very high level, and it's sort of compounds.

[80] And, you know, the time is different in the internet.

[81] A week is a long time in the internet.

[82] A week is a very, very long time.

[83] So these days I make sure some new music comes out every week.

[84] and yes well the internet radically accelerates the production schedule of everything I mean we're gonna make this video and hypothetically I could release it this afternoon yeah crazy thing to do with a well with a with a with a what's essentially a semi -documentary I mean unheard of you know I know look at your camera quality hmm you know we're all walking around with with devices in our pockets that are better than the things they made 2001 a space odyssey with yeah yeah well and it's a very and the consequence of that speed acceleration is very um psychologically dramatic as well because it also becomes something that you have to feed on a very regular basis like the plant in little shop of horrors yes exactly the algorithms are hungry yeah 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.

[85] Indeed.

[86] Yeah.

[87] So, what was that thing?

[88] Alan Moore had that thing, you've 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.

[89] And then the amount of time it takes to create the same amount of stuff.

[90] You get to the point where between 1960 and 1970 human information doubles.

[91] Yes, everything's doubling at an incredibly rapid rate.

[92] Exactly.

[93] 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 to so much stuff being generated at any one moment that you go from fluid to steam.

[94] Was that Kurtzweil's analogy?

[95] Was that Kurtzweil's analogy?

[96] Who mentioned that?

[97] I heard Alan Moore talk about that.

[98] You heard Alan Moore?

[99] Okay, because Kurtzwall is of course famous for the idea that the singularity is coming as a consequence of all of this doubling.

[100] Yeah, I guess it's a similar thing.

[101] The idea is that once you're in Steam territory, anything could happen at any given second.

[102] There's things being birthed.

[103] like right now someone could be about to put something in the app store that fundamentally changes the way we interact and do stuff well yes yes well that seems to be happening on a very regular basis i think it's happening so rapidly that we don't even notice it you know i think um what's that dating app that you swipe tinder tinder tinder is a good example of that because tinder was a revolutionary technology, but it was buried by so many other revolutionary technologies that nobody even noticed that it was a revolutionary technology.

[104] Yes.

[105] So, and I think this is happening, it's happening so quickly that it's impossible to even keep track of.

[106] 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.

[107] And, you know, the library of tools out there is, well, if it's not infinite, it's at least unsearchable.

[108] 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.

[109] This has happened with everything.

[110] It's happened with music.

[111] There's so many music.

[112] It used to be that if you wanted to make a record, you would have to go to a studio.

[113] And only a few people really got to go to studios because they were very expensive and there weren't even that many of them.

[114] So there was only a few people got to make music at a higher level.

[115] Just a decade, a decade ago, a decade and a half ago.

[116] 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.

[117] And then within that, there's this infinity of tools and ways of creating and manipulating sound.

[118] that each person who does it has a unique stack of things that they use that's unique to them.

[119] Right.

[120] Well, the strange thing about what's happened with you, I would say, or one of the strange things I've noticed.

[121] I'm sure there's many strange things that have happened with you over the last while.

[122] But, you know, as the technology for putting music online increases in ease and accessibility, the sheer volume of music online also increases to the same degree.

[123] And then most people end up in the, it seems to produce hyper -steep perido distributions where virtually everyone who puts content online gets pretty much zero attention.

[124] That would be especially true with music.

[125] And then a tiny fragment of people at the very pinnacle get volumes of attention that are essentially unimaginable and you occupy kind of a strange mid -territory which rather well which must be rather rare you know I mean by your numbers I think they have to be regarded as successful that's certainly in terms of volume what does it mean to you in terms of monetization and I asked this actually as a technical question because I know that monetize creative production is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do.

[126] And so I'm wondering if you've had any success at that and how you're managing to keep body and soul together while you pursue this, what would you call it?

[127] Strange pathway, that's probably accurate.

[128] 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.

[129] I've, you know, I've been doing this a long time, and I kind of pioneered a lot of the way things work now.

[130] When I first got my first record deal, I had a website, and I was releasing mixtapes online.

[131] 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.

[132] And I was releasing them online.

[133] And literally no one else was doing that at that point.

[134] And when I first worked with Interscope Records, their media department rang me up and asked me how the hell I was doing everything because they wanted to start rolling that out to all their other artists.

[135] So that was like 2004.

[136] And after I parted Waves with the record label, I had to essentially kind of create my own industry.

[137] So I was releasing mixtapes and things and T -shirts and all that sort of stuff.

[138] Streaming didn't exist at that point.

[139] We're now at the point where streaming can make money.

[140] Oh, well, that's interesting to know.

[141] But you have to stream a lot.

[142] So it works out as at about $4 ,000 per million streams.

[143] For example, you're just looking at streaming.

[144] So you need to be listening to a lot of your stuff.

[145] That's a rough percentage, man. But you think about how many people that are in the world and, you know, this insatiable hunger that people have for music.

[146] Yeah.

[147] They're never going to not want to listen to music, and if you keep giving them good music that, you know, that they love and connect to it, they will always listen to it.

[148] And there's increasing, you know, there's so many more places.

[149] People hear music now than they're used to.

[150] 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.

[151] And as we strive boldly into the future, I envisage people essentially having personalized soundtracks everywhere they go in every kind of instance.

[152] Right, so you see a continually expanding market.

[153] Yes, yes, definitely.

[154] And yeah, and there's, you know, and aside from like streaming, there's various, you know, how it is ways that you can make a bit of money on YouTube, you can sell a few t -shirts you can get a few subscription service people there's all all the things together if you work hard and you're consistent and you're good and uh you know you don't stop consistency is obviously the fundamental then uh you can do it and uh you can thrive and i'm starting to thrive and it feels good oh well congratulations that's i'm very impressed to hear that because it seems like one of the world's more unlikely ways to thrive.

[155] I mean, well, in two ways.

[156] I mean, the first is that it's very difficult to make a career in music.

[157] So just as a baseline, that's very difficult.

[158] 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.

[159] it's this combination of metered spoken word so there's a bit of a poetic element to it and then you're carefully selecting music to go with it and matching the cadence of the of the spoken word to the music and people and people seem to be responding to that what what kind of reaction are you garnering from your audience I mean you must get a fair bit of correspondence what and I mean I've read some of the YouTube comments and so so it seems to me, and the overwhelming majority of those seem to be positive, which is a good thing on YouTube, because that's not necessarily the case.

[160] What kind of response are you getting from people and what do you think you're doing for them or to them?

[161] Yeah, the YouTube, the YouTube comments is kind of almost unheard of.

[162] It's like 99 .876 % ridiculously positive.

[163] 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.

[164] I imagine it's similar to what I've heard you talking about getting.

[165] 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 help them to find the strength to get out of the trouble they were in and things of that nature.

[166] Yeah, that's a big deal, and it's very significant and specific, eh, 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.

[167] Yeah.

[168] You mean, 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.

[169] both through their addiction and and the terrible meaning that they're trying to escape from as a consequence of their suicidal urges.

[170] Yeah.

[171] So, yeah, well, that's a big deal.

[172] And it seems to me to be psychologically very significant.

[173] I mean, God only knows what psychological role of music plays in our lives.

[174] I mean, I was going to ask you about this.

[175] Is there been much research done?

[176] because from where I'm a DJ, I'm out two to five nights a week playing music to people and seeing firsthand the effect it has on them.

[177] And I've been experimenting with this for years, trying different combinations of things in order to create certain reactions.

[178] 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.

[179] But I've experimented with combining things to create dramas, to create violence, to create lust, to create all sorts of things.

[180] And it's repeatable.

[181] It's, you know, it's repeatable in a scientific experiment capacity.

[182] So, yeah, I was going to ask you, is if you're aware of any research?

[183] No, not really.

[184] It's quite important.

[185] 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 have not come across it in the research that I've done on creativity.

[186] Yeah.

[187] But the study of meaning as a phenomenon is a relatively new one.

[188] 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.

[189] And of course, that's not the same thing.

[190] And it isn't obvious that people know how to do the experiments properly or to take the measurements properly.

[191] So, and I think, 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.

[192] and I don't believe that 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 in well let's say in church in sacred celebrations yep and and in any activities where people to gather together in in groups for anything of any significance and you know it 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.

[193] Yeah, I think the difference between it and most religious ceremonies is that it actually works.

[194] It does.

[195] I mean, I've seen people burst into tears at certain transitions, which is when you move.

[196] one song into another.

[197] And when you're DJing, or when I'm DJing anyway, I'm making sure that those things have a purpose other than just playing another song.

[198] 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.

[199] And the whole experience will have some sort of transformative purpose, and it will move people in a way and certain combinations of records the way you'll bring in one into another you work the way you'll sort of blend them i've seen that make people burst into tears right you can see that once just spontaneously you can see that sometimes with particularly good chord transitions too exactly you know there's something so deeply satisfying about the transformation of one pattern into another it's it i don't know what it well this is why i've always been so fascinated by music because I think there's something unutterably deep about music.

[200] I really believe that it's the most representative form of art because I think that the world is made out of patterns.

[201] That's the best way to think of the world.

[202] And those patterns vary in duration, you know, and we're always in search for the longer duration patterns because they're more reliable.

[203] And some of those patterns we can exploit let's say as tools and some we avoid as obstacles but and the rest we try to intermingle harmoniously with our actions and our thoughts so that the whole process turns into something that's symphonic you know and then you go to 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 in 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.

[204] And that's not optional, especially if you're in a chaotic state.

[205] It's the truth of, I think it's the truth of everything.

[206] And that community, it's, what is it, Stevie Wonder said?

[207] Music is the language.

[208] We all speak.

[209] It's something we all understand.

[210] And no, that.

[211] That's true across the world, and I've seen that.

[212] 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.

[213] Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating, that there's as many variations as there are languages, but we can understand all of them.

[214] I mean, you know, our language has a musical element, right?

[215] If you listen to someone who's an interesting speaker, there's a lot of melody in their speech patterns.

[216] This is why I first made a sample due, because I heard the melody and something you were saying, and I could instantly hear what the song was around it.

[217] There was a rhythm in it, there was a melody in it, the whole thing.

[218] And every individual has that.

[219] And it's often quite radically different, even within the same language.

[220] There's interesting different languages have different melodies, and therefore if you listen to French music, the actual melodies and music are similar to the shape of the voice the vocal sounds of the actual language.

[221] This is the same with Mexican, same with English, so on and so forth.

[222] So like melodies within music of cultures are informed very much by the language that people speak.

[223] I wonder what makes English particularly appropriate by all appearances for rock and roll.

[224] Yes.

[225] It's a fairly consonant heavy language.

[226] So maybe that has something to do with it.

[227] there's a like it isn't it hasn't got that same vowel like sing song that asian languages often have so it's got a bit more of a beat like harshness but like rock doesn't seem to work very well in french germans manage to pull it off now and then but not that often it's really remarkably an english experience altogether and that's a very uh thing i think this is why hip -hop has taken over the world.

[228] Hip -hop is now the dominant genre everywhere.

[229] Pretty much everywhere.

[230] 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.

[231] And hip -hop is essentially taken over the whole world.

[232] And hip -hop exists in every language I've looked into.

[233] And it works in every language.

[234] And there's multiple reasons for that, but just the thing we're talking about is interesting, like the sort of the shape, like French sounds fantastic on rap, far more so than, uh, on say rock.

[235] I don't know, that's subjective.

[236] Mm -hmm.

[237] You know, in the English accent, we do a lot of, uh, small sounds, then elongated sounds, which, um, what's that called the, uh, Scottish snap, the Scott, which is, uh, a thing that's in a lot of rap these days.

[238] It's like this type thing is a da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da kind of goes in and out.

[239] It's also the sound you hear in old sort of folk music.

[240] Rock and roll is interesting because it's almost a perfect combination of European folk and African jazz and traditional music.

[241] Right, right.

[242] 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 a singing, but that rhythm is actually traced back to Scotland.

[243] Right.

[244] 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.

[245] And even the idea that it's a form of theft in terms of its motivation is so entirely specious because most of the time it's rooted in what I would regard as tremendous admiration.

[246] It's not like the Rolling Stones were massive fans of the black blues artists from the US.

[247] You know, I mean, they were doing everything they could to imitate them.

[248] Yes, 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.

[249] And that's the reason there hasn't been a new musical genre, a new sort of specific like tent pole musical genre since hip -hop.

[250] Yeah.

[251] Yeah.

[252] Yeah.

[253] Right, right.

[254] And that's actually getting to be quite a while ago now.

[255] Yeah, it wasn't about it.

[256] There was the 70s.

[257] And so what happened was you had, and it's really amazing how hip -hop was born.

[258] 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.

[259] And one of them worked out a way of playing the same record on two turntables at a slightly different part of the record on each side, so he could create a loop over which from the record over which somebody could wrap, tell the story, hype up the crowd.

[260] Therein it was born.

[261] Take from another piece of existing music or another piece of existing idea.

[262] And they were sampling European dance.

[263] They were sampling craftwork and they were sampling like weird folk stuff and they were sampling James Brown.

[264] They were sampling from everywhere.

[265] Hip -hop was taken from every bit of the existing musical call multiverse and then people could talk about anything they could talk about their real experiences they could talk about their fantasies they could talk about their fears uh i remember chuck d once saying that the the core story in hip -hop was could be boiled down to as simple as uh i am like i exist like the protest of it or the the call of the story is just like i i exist i'm here and then the music is as culturally appropriative as possible.

[266] They took from everywhere.

[267] And if they hadn't done that, it wouldn't exist.

[268] And if you suddenly start telling people, no, you can't do that anymore, then you're going to end up with a sort of very dull...

[269] Well, the other thing...

[270] If you look at it, again, from a psychological perspective, is that for me to understand you, I have to imitate you.

[271] That's the ground of understanding.

[272] It's not.

[273] like I listen to what you say and then think about it and then react, although I do that to some degree.

[274] It's that I watch you.

[275] I look at what you're looking at.

[276] I listen to the cadence of your voice.

[277] You know, I adjust my body so that it's in accordance with yours.

[278] If we're having a real conversation, I have to.

[279] 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.

[280] 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.

[281] And to say that cultural appropriation is a mistake is to deny people the ability to deeply imagine each other.

[282] 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.

[283] 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 truly, not just empathy, it's way deeper than empathy to try to live out their experience to the best of their imaginative ability in a deep way and maybe one that can be communicated with other people you know like maybe a white guy who writes about black experience and he's careful about it 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.

[284] 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.

[285] 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.

[286] And I found it profoundly affecting.

[287] Like, it was the first time in my life that I had really understood that you're the same when you're old.

[288] You know, like very much of you is like you were when you were 30 or 40.

[289] 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, are there just as powerfully.

[290] And I don't think I would have understood that until I was much, much older had, I know it had the good fortune of encountering that book.

[291] So, I think that the people who are discussing cultural appropriation, I truly believe that they hate art, because that is art, man. That's take from the best of everything and see if you can go one step farther.

[292] Yeah, they just haven't thought it through because the end result of that is that you can only write, basically you only have autobiography.

[293] You couldn't have a comic book unless it was written by a team of 30 people if it contained 30 characters.

[294] It means putting everyone back into their little boxes and not allowed to integrate with the world.

[295] It means that no one...

[296] Right, exactly that.

[297] And it means that art dies.

[298] 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.

[299] I mean, even if you wrote out a biography, you wouldn't be able to write about anyone else.

[300] Yes, exactly.

[301] There's a lot of people complain about modern art and, you know, the assaults on beauty, this war on beauty, this kind of rejection of skill and, obviously transcendent greatness in lieu of kind of like ugly things that remind us of that.

[302] ask you about the people that you've chosen to feature in your mean is it best referred to as meaning wave or as lo -fi 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 meaning of the meaningful speech with wave music wave music wave music is a lofi, it's trap, it's vapor trap, it's cloud, cloud wrap, it's a bunch of different things.

[303] But they share a common aesthetic vapor wave, things of that nature, which is amusingly a postmodern art form.

[304] Lofi just means low fidelity.

[305] So I've always made lofi because when I first started making hip -hop, it sounded quite bad because I didn't know what I was doing.

[306] So it was Just means, you know, maybe there's some record crackle, maybe you've, uh, it's not the most polished sounding thing.

[307] It's not top 40 radio.

[308] It's not.

[309] I've been considering, uh, doing another project called hi -fi, which goes in the exact opposite direction and just goes pristine, clean, what have you.

[310] But anyway, so lo -fi is that.

[311] Meaning wave is where I took those musical forms and combined them with, with speech.

[312] And then did you see some advantages in the low -fire approach?

[313] apart from its initial technical simplicity.

[314] I've always loved that sound.

[315] I've always loved warm, analog, crackly sounds.

[316] I've always loved hip -hop.

[317] All lo -fi hip -hop is really, is just hip -up instrumentals without an emphasis on high -tech production, I would say.

[318] So you think it's more comforting and welcoming to people?

[319] I mean, I've often been in buildings, you know, like modern buildings that are so perfect that the only thing that shouldn't be there is you indeed yeah it's 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 wornness well we heard this 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 as good coming out of a telephone as it does a club system and the drum kits they were using before that just don't pop out of a phone in the same way you can't really hear them so until phones can more accurately accurately reproduce a low end that drum kit will remain very popular but what happened with music anyway we saw as the 80 technology came in, computers came in, synthesizers came in, and it started getting really, really clean sounding, really, really clean.

[320] And then as people started working within computers and the music, oftentimes the music would never leave the computer.

[321] It'd be made on a Mac, it'd go through some fiber optic cables into someone else's Mac or into another phone.

[322] And it was that became that kind of cleanliness you were talking about, that kind of sterilized thing.

[323] And LoFi reintroduces real -world analog elements.

[324] to the thing, which brings a humanity and a nostalgia and a sort of tactile feeling that music had started to lose, which I think is why people love.

[325] Yeah, well, there's something about analog instruments that have a singing quality that the electronic instruments, even at the highest end, lack.

[326] 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.

[327] 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.

[328] 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.

[329] And that seems to be a very hard thing to duplicate on electronic instruments.

[330] Yeah.

[331] I think, you know, the limitless potential that technology has bought us is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

[332] But at the same time, we don't want to be throwing out the proverbial baby through proverbial bathwater and losing that foundational quality.

[333] So I think kind of a situation where you can have aspects of both working together harmoniously is optimal.

[334] That's what I've been trying to do.

[335] So you get some of the messy complexity of analog with the perfection and like endless possibility of electronic.

[336] Yeah, there's stuff you can do with electronic that you cannot do with analog and physical.

[337] 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.

[338] I could go in there and get the notes separated and move one of them around just to slightly change the court.

[339] 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 has 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 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 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 in a matter of seconds get and I mean the thing about all this new technology is that barring catastrophe Bar, good time for everything to blur, I would say.

[340] Barring catastrophe, it's all brand new.

[341] And it's going to be so much better in 20 years that we can't even imagine it.

[342] You know, because you kind of think, well, this is a new technology.

[343] And you think, well, it's new.

[344] It's like, and it's like finished in some sense.

[345] 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 and these little these little kids creating these galaxies creating these huge worlds create like down from the smallest details of building little houses and putting beds in them and looking in the drawers down to zooming out and creating like whole environments and things and working together and like you know Quincy is very good at this kind of thinking and this kind of stuff and Hercules is very good at a different kind of thing and they just harmoniously come together to create this stuff within these these supercomputers the size of a paperback right so they're in all worlds yeah and a generation who've grown up with that just being default just expecting to be able to imagine a thing and make it so.

[346] You know, when I was a little kid, I would draw comics and things of that nature.

[347] And I would imagine things and I would draw them and they would look a bit like I imagined.

[348] You know, and I practiced drawing and I got pretty good at it.

[349] I could never get out exactly what I was thinking, but you'd get an idea.

[350] You know, these kids can really imagine vast, vast things and look at them and see if they work.

[351] And they go, oh, this doesn't work.

[352] And I will destroy that and do another thing.

[353] on and so forth.

[354] So when these kids, 20, what the hell are they going to do?

[355] This is a generation whose expectation, whose expectation have been able to create what they imagine has no limits on it.

[356] A generation who, from as long as they could remember, all had a supercomputer that was the most powerful movie studio in existence, the most powerful recording studio, a magazine, you know, they can publish they can talk to anyone in the world they can publish to anyone in the world they don't have limits on their creation no no everybody's a media powerhouse but also a problem solving powerhouse in a way and when they work together that's what's really interesting 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 uh yeah what I'm just really excited about what they're going to do.

[357] And do you look and watch what he creates?

[358] Yes.

[359] And it's beautiful.

[360] It's beautiful.

[361] It's like, you know, Sistine chaffles.

[362] 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.

[363] Or he's made a statue of his friend.

[364] He's built a roller coaster or whatever it is.

[365] And then he'll set it all on fire or something.

[366] He'll become an angry god and he'll throw lava.

[367] at the thing.

[368] But, yeah, the, you know, because so many barriers that previous generations had are evaporating.

[369] And you have that, you have the, you know, the barriers of education or the barriers, like I was talking about earlier, you only used to be able to have 12 rock stars at once because there were only 12 covers of Rolling Stone.

[370] Right.

[371] You know, so that's why Michael Jackson tries to get prints.

[372] destroyed.

[373] Or was it, yeah, it was.

[374] Because, you know, it was like, well, there's only, oh, no, this, yeah, first there was that, and then they kind of, like, joined forces against Terrence Trent Darby.

[375] According to Terrence Trent Darby, because Terrence Trent Darby was a threat because he was like a third black guy, and you're only allowed, and at that point, there was statistically only room for two black guys because of the amount of covers of Rolling Stone.

[376] Right, right.

[377] There's some limiting factor.

[378] Yeah, but that doesn't exist anymore.

[379] That doesn't exist anymore.

[380] There's, uh, nowadays you can be a cult person, like say young lean, who's a Swedish rapper that mainstream people wouldn't know of, but everything he releases gets millions of streams and views and he can tour the world and live comfortably comfortably forever.

[381] Uh, you know, the barriers for, uh, education.

[382] You can learn everything, you can learn online.

[383] Right.

[384] So now you have, now you have niche celebrities.

[385] Yeah.

[386] Yeah.

[387] It's a very strange things.

[388] Yes.

[389] Because you, you wouldn't expect that to be a possibility but with the massive I mean I think there's two and a half billion people on YouTube and God only knows what the total reach of the podcast networks are and so you can have a pretty sizable following on any of those platforms and be invisible to the majority of the people who are on them yes it's it's yeah it's an incredible thing you know this is why they they hate PewDie Pie God bless him It's amazing that you have a situation where the biggest person on the biggest online broadcasting platform is somehow underground an anti -establishment.

[390] Yeah.

[391] Well, I think it's evidence that this new media world is underground and anti -establishment in the most profound possible way.

[392] I can't see how broadcast television can possibly survive YouTube.

[393] No, it's dead.

[394] And this is another reason I'm very excited about this generation, because not only this generation got this Minecraft limitless potential actualization, incredible computer skills, coding skills.

[395] He's learning to code young Hercules, six years old, just so that he can create portals in Minecraft, and open a portal to another dimension.

[396] The fact that he's interested in opening portals to other.

[397] dimensions and has that as a thing in his vocabulary is incredible.

[398] But they combine that with this complete disdain for, you know, mainstream media or those sorts of systems.

[399] It's like what is going to happen?

[400] What are they going to do?

[401] I guess one question that that raises for me is what is it that's going to hold us together?

[402] you know i mean one of the things and this might just be the what would you call it nostalgia of someone who's old enough to have a certain amount of nostalgia i mean with the limited broadcast means that we had when i grew up you know i had three television channels when i grew up at least to begin with and one of them was in french so it didn't really count had a limited number of radio stations and so forth and newspapers.

[403] There was a continually emergent consensus about what constituted the real, you know, in the social and political realm at least, and even in the physical world to some degree.

[404] And part of that, I think, was that many of those venues of communication were actually very carefully vetted and edited.

[405] You know, and I would say Time magazine would have fallen into that category because it was quite a magazine in its heyday, you know, quarter of an inch thick and almost almost nothing but solid text, very carefully written.

[406] 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.

[407] And of course, there's danger in over -supervision and hyper -regulation.

[408] But what seems to happen now is that it's almost possible.

[409] And maybe this is what the post -modernists were imagining, you know, in some sense, or intuiting that we were entering a world where there would be so many different interpretations of what was real that virtually everyone could extract out from the endless stream of communication, that construction of the world that seemed to suit them best for better or worse.

[410] And there's a fragmentation that goes along with that that seems to me to be, well, maybe dangerous, is it dangerous enough to be driving some of the nihilism that seems evident and some of the ideological rigidity?

[411] Yeah, nihilism was an unavoidable byproduct of the line of questioning that humans were going down.

[412] But I think they're starting to come out of that.

[413] And that's another thing in this new generation I'm seeing is a swing back against nihilism.

[414] Yeah, you think, and so yeah, well, that would account for the popularity of the meaning wave.

[415] And so what makes you confident in that?

[416] I mean, I'm hoping very much that you're correct in your assumption, but what makes you confident in that?

[417] Well, I think it's historically visible.

[418] that you always see this.

[419] People always react against their parents and so on and so forth.

[420] There's always that pendulum swing backward and forward.

[421] As you said, it's all with these patterns.

[422] 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 it has done my whole life.

[423] and uh so that's sort of like a swing between complexity and simplicity or or i think about it this complexity and rawness yeah well i mean it's a it's a cultural phenomenon but everything a great deal of what occurs is downstream from culture uh 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 uh things were all combining together rap and dance and all these things.

[424] People were taking MDMA and acids and stuff of that nature.

[425] Rafe culture was a big thing.

[426] Then it swung back into punky nihilisticness.

[427] And this happens in the colors, people wear, what people dress.

[428] It suddenly went into Nirvana, talking about killing misery, and it went into Brit Pop in the UK.

[429] Things became more conservative in their sonics and the clothes stars with people wearing.

[430] And then it went psychedelic again.

[431] 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.

[432] Then it swung back again, music went into emo, then it went back again.

[433] The more recent one, 2013 was the peak of the more recent psychedelic -y thing.

[434] We had odd futures, the biggest rap group, people wearing tie -dye.

[435] drugs -wise, it was Molly, which is MDMA again.

[436] Then it swung back into nihilism.

[437] And it's kind of like the, you know, there's pirate ship rights.

[438] It's like a pirate boat.

[439] And you pull up and you see it and then you go, pshum, down.

[440] And it did that in 2013.

[441] And then suddenly the drug had switched to Xanax.

[442] It was all downers.

[443] Punk and goth stuff became the kind of cultural signpost.

[444] 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 stuff up until 2013 was suddenly not anymore.

[445] And now it's starting to swing back in the other direction again.

[446] But this time, because we're all networked so much at this point, the whole psychedelic thing is going to be a lot more psychedelic and a lot more powerful and have a lot more of a lasting impact, I believe.

[447] So now you've picked Ellen Watts and Jockel 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?

[448] Well, it's looking at the puzzle from a different angle, which is valid, which is useful.

[449] So it's like I used to make music wherein I would rap and sing.

[450] So I was rapping and singing.

[451] 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.

[452] My first album was about, it was called When We Were Young and it was about being a kid.

[453] And my second album was about the life equation was about kind of being not a kid and interfacing with the world.

[454] The third album, what that needed to be about, I didn't know enough yet.

[455] And then I started listening to lots of people and listening to their position, their perspectives on things and, you know, say between you and Alan Watts, you're in a way doing what Alan Watts did for Eastern culture, for Western culture.

[456] 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.

[457] It was sort of stolen from them.

[458] And you've come along and you're reintroducing that to people in a foundational fashion.

[459] and Alan Watts did a similar thing but with Eastern ideas.

[460] Terence McKenna talks about a lot of the same stuff you talk about but from a specific angle, a different angle to the way you're looking at it.

[461] And it's also, I think of it in archetypes in a way, and you say someone like Jocco Wellink is the warrior, perhaps, and his is a very, very necessary perspective at this point.

[462] It's similar in ways to yours.

[463] It has aspects of sort of discipline and stuff of that nature, but in a, you know, in a much, he's looking at a very specific site, at which he is expert.

[464] I just thought it would be this incredible, powerful thing.

[465] If you could take people, somebody who's thought about a specific thing for 30 years and make that into pop music that people could listen to in the gym or in the shower or wherever they were, and they could really, really bring it into their lives.

[466] You're not necessarily going to listen to a podcast more than once, even a really, really good one.

[467] But if I take what I think are the most interesting or best bits, of a podcast and turn them into a pop song, you could listen to that 100 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 that are useful to you.

[468] Yeah, I mean, that's how people learned historically, right?

[469] They set poetry to music and listen to it over and over, and that made it stick.

[470] This is so the pre, the oral tradition, indeed.

[471] 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, I guess, the first meaning wave that I had.

[472] Right, right.

[473] But yeah, this is what we've been doing for thousands of years.

[474] Yeah, well, it's a lot easier to remember something if it's presented in a multimodal way, right?

[475] So you have the words, you have the rhythm, you have the rhyming, and you have the music.

[476] 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.

[477] And I'm not even sure you can do it without going through those first stages.

[478] Which stages?

[479] Well, the stages of rhythm 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.

[480] This is it.

[481] You know, people used to remember whole books, right?

[482] Yeah.

[483] People would be walking around with volumes and volumes of poetry and books in their heads.

[484] And they'd be able to like, you know, just whip it out.

[485] I mean, it's just that people used to, I mean, even in my lifetime, people had castellogs of jokes and stories.

[486] Right.

[487] They would have ready to throw out there in a pub conversation or whatever it was.

[488] And that seems to be declining somewhat.

[489] It's one of the unfortunate results of this wonderful technology.

[490] Yes, yes.

[491] Well, we seem to externalize everything, you know.

[492] Yeah, because we can put everything in the cloud now, so we don't need to save it on our hard drive.

[493] Right, right.

[494] And it makes you wonder what there is that's in you.

[495] 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?

[496] Yeah.

[497] And there's a big difference between having a fact at your disposal because you can find it in a library and actually having that fact in your cognitive toolbox so that you can use it actively in your life and you know it's it's certainly being unbelievably useful for me to create and remember a bank of stories and it makes you an much more 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 that was such a waste of time that, but it was already written down in a book, what good did it do for me to be able to recite it?

[498] And, you know, then I met a guy years ago, years later, who was an undergraduate and a remarkable person, genius and rather unstable, unfortunately, so I don't think he ever amounted to much, but one of the things he could do was declaim large sections of Shakespeare at a moment's notice apropos and it was unbelievably impressive like you know when he would start it everybody in the room would fall silent and like and he was very good at it you know he he wasn't embarrassing himself by bursting into this into this old english prose it was a real accomplishment and that was the first time that i saw how empty modern people were in some sense because they don't have that interiorized verbal culture.

[499] You know, now it's not sure, it's not clear that in more archaic societies, everybody had that either.

[500] From what I've understood, it was the shamanic types that were the vast repository of the entire oral tradition.

[501] But people had their stories and, well, you need to have your story.

[502] So I don't know what it is exactly that we're going to substitute for that.

[503] Yeah, well, you know, we're in a, as you said, this has just begun.

[504] We're still, you know, in sort of zooming out terms, we're still, we're still in utero.

[505] Yeah.

[506] We've yet to be born.

[507] And I think we're, I think we're coming close to being born, which is why everything is the way it is, and it's such a heightened.

[508] It's just an incredible period of history.

[509] exist in at this point.

[510] You know, you could have been born at any time, and for most of human history, you'd have been suffering away unless you were some kind of lord, and even then you'd have had wooden teeth if you were really lucky.

[511] Right, and they didn't fit very well.

[512] No, he's like, Jesus Christ, imagine.

[513] There's a thing that Hercules said, the good thing about having kids, as I'm sure you know, is they, obviously, you know, is they just say really, really smart things that make you think.

[514] And Hercules, there's a thing in Minecraft where you have a survival mode and creative mode.

[515] 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.

[516] And there are limitations on you.

[517] And in creative mode, there aren't these limitations and you can fly and you can build and play.

[518] And Hercules just turns around to me not seemingly inspired by anything that just happened.

[519] I said, Dad, I wish it could be creative mode in real life just for one day because really we're in survival.

[520] mode.

[521] And we have to eat and we have to work and die.

[522] He goes, I would just love it to be creative mode and just fly into the sky and play just for one day.

[523] And I thought, what a beautiful thing?

[524] And then I thought, but hang on, this is actually what we're doing.

[525] About a week later, I thought that.

[526] And I was like, this is actually what we're doing as a species for the first time a vast proportion of us aren't spending all of our time just trying to stay alive.

[527] We're in creative mode.

[528] Yes, at least some of the time.

[529] And that's something to be very very grateful for because it's really well it's unbelievably new it's crazily new I mean people God who knows hey 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.

[530] 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.

[531] You're never lost anymore.

[532] And it's enabled technologies like Uber, which, and I think Uber is a wonderful technology.

[533] 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.

[534] I mean, I might be wrong about this, but it seems like that kind of poverty, you know, barring inability to drive and other catastrophes, that kind of poverty where you're backed in a corner, you're just screwed.

[535] There's nothing you can do about it.

[536] That's Uber seems to have made a lot of that disappear.

[537] It's like, hey, man, you can't make a fortune, but you can make enough to get yourself out of a tight spot.

[538] And it's actually a pretty pleasant experience.

[539] Like, I like taking Uber's.

[540] There's no financial transaction.

[541] People are almost always polite.

[542] You know exactly where the car is going to be?

[543] Like, I don't know.

[544] I think it's been a really good thing.

[545] So, and it's, of course, only one of God.

[546] One of an infinity of miracles that are unfolding before us, like firecrackers every given second.

[547] Yes.

[548] There's on that thing, you know, if you, there are so many ways to make money now.

[549] If you're completely skillless, you can go on LetGo or Facebook, Gary V talks about this sort of stuff.

[550] lot.

[551] You know, you can, people are giving away chairs.

[552] I don't want this chair anymore.

[553] You go take care, then you sell it for $10.

[554] You do that all day.

[555] You can make hundreds of dollars in a day.

[556] You don't have to have any skills whatsoever.

[557] They can, if you do have skills, there's a million ways for you to make money.

[558] And if you don't have skills, there's a million ways for you to get those skills.

[559] There are 12 year olds on YouTube who will show you how to do everything.

[560] Yeah.

[561] And I, and I love those 12 year olds and I use them all the time.

[562] Right.

[563] Right.

[564] Yeah.

[565] That's 12 -year -olds.

[566] Right.

[567] Well, absolutely.

[568] Well, and you get these old guys down in like the southern U .S. who are like old plumbers or, you know, they've got some specialty that they're good at, and they'll grab their iPhone roughly and just gruffly film themselves fixing something.

[569] Say, ah, it's how you fix that.

[570] You know, and it's so, it's such an interesting manifestation of altruism, you know, and in the indication, I mean, people obviously like the attention that their videos garner.

[571] And I think that's perfectly reasonable because it's a form of indication that what you're doing is valuable.

[572] I mean, there's an ego element to it.

[573] But the ego element is, in fact, the fact that what you're doing is valuable.

[574] And it's so cool that people will take the extra effort.

[575] Like I was installing a stereo in this old car of mine a while back.

[576] and you know it it was a pretty old car like 11 or 12 years and somebody had put up a video about how to install the stereo in the car and i would have never figured that that specific car yeah i would have never figured it out because there was hidden screws and all sorts of weird things that needed to be known and the guy didn't have to do it you know it was just good of them to do it and it certainly saved me a lot of time and energy so that was quite, that was quite wonderful.

[577] Yeah, 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.

[578] You know, and it is, it's conceivable that that's one of the consequences.

[579] 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, know, you know, the Chinese graduate more engineers every year than the Americans have engineers?

[580] What's this other thing that's coming down in the pipeline is this Babelfish thing?

[581] You know, this translation technology, which is already bloody good.

[582] But in a few years, it's going to be seamless.

[583] Yeah.

[584] I will be able to talk to you and you will be speaking a different language, shall we say.

[585] And instantly, that will be translated to.

[586] me. And I'll be able to have a conversation with you in my language and we'll understand each other.

[587] So it means that Twitter opens up to China and, well, I mean, government's allowing, but you know what I mean?

[588] These sorts of current online community experiences we have open up to the world.

[589] And it also means that trade opens up to the world.

[590] And it also means all that information you're talking about opens up to the world.

[591] Because now you don't just watch the video of the guy in Ohio.

[592] You watch the video of the guy in Tokyo or wherever that.

[593] Right.

[594] Yeah.

[595] You understand it.

[596] And suddenly the sum of human knowledge and experience and usefulness is shared with everybody.

[597] Right, right.

[598] 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.

[599] Hey, just out of curiosity, how long would it take you to queue up 42 rules for life?

[600] How'd you mean?

[601] I was in Stop Playing it?

[602] Yeah.

[603] Would this be a good time?

[604] Across this connection?

[605] Yeah.

[606] Why not?

[607] Why not DJ Pizza?

[608] Let's do it, man. Let's play some of it.

[609] Tell the truth.

[610] Or at least, don't lie.

[611] Do not do things that you hate.

[612] 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 when you are listening to might know something you need to know listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you diligently that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know be grateful in spite of your suffering.

[613] What's been the most exciting project that you've embarked on so far, do you think?

[614] What's been the most gratifying project?

[615] Is that a reasonable question?

[616] That's a reasonable question, but the answer is that each one is more exciting and gratifying than the last.

[617] Ah.

[618] Which ties into this hyper -productivity staying in the zone and refusing to leave experiment because it compounds.

[619] Is that the right word?

[620] Yeah.

[621] It just gets more and more intense and better and exciting.

[622] There are synchronicities that just keep popping up and popping up and becoming myriad and ridiculous.

[623] And I've taken synchronicities to be as signposts is what I'm treating those as.

[624] Malcolm X said that when you spot synchronicities, you're walking with a la. Grant Morrison always said it was the first step to becoming a successful chaos magician was noticing those synchronicities and paying attention.

[625] So I treat those things, and they're just 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.

[626] The last one I did, which was Clark Ware Galves, which was the Terrence McKenna project, I just meant to do one song I'd finish the Allen Watts album I was like I'm going to do this one Terrence McKenna song about his clockwork elves thing which is interesting and ties into something that Watts was talking about and I sort of came out of a day's at sort of three in the morning and I'd made an album 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 mech these mecca suits which are like these giant robot suits and then humans sort of pilot them but they're these amazing suits and a human can get in that and they can you can destroy a city or you know whatever it is kind of feel that when you're doing this stuff optimizing yourself in this fashion um becoming really really good at a thing becoming really proficient cutting out areas of wastefulness uh becoming this finely tuned machine at that point you then and sort of hand the keys to God, as it were.

[627] Stevie Wonder always said that he didn't write his songs.

[628] He kind of opened himself up and God wrote them through him.

[629] Well, you know, you developed such a body of expertise now in relationship to this.

[630] So much of what you do has become automatized.

[631] You know, and I don't mean that in a bad way.

[632] I mean that you've developed expert circuitry for all sorts of pieces of it.

[633] And as you become better at something, it's necessary to, stand back increasingly and let what you already know you let what you already know dominate you and take you over and and then you add a creative bend and twist here and there to stop it from being merely wrote you know like someone who's 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 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 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 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.

[634] Yeah, it's terrifying.

[635] You go through life, and one of the reasons life feels like it's speeding up is because you turn things into habits, right?

[636] And then your brain kind of fast forwards past the habit.

[637] Yeah.

[638] If you go in the same route to work every day, your brain will fast forward through that thing unless something different happens.

[639] So a lot of times people feel life is speeding up because they've just turned so much stuff into habit.

[640] So you have to be really careful about what you are, allow to become habit and you have to keep checking on what your habits are because at the same time you want to turn useful things into habits right you well that's part of that that's part of the tremendous difficulty of the balance between order and chaos exactly you know i mean because order does become invisible and unconscious and with the proclivity to become tyrannical and sterile but it's absolutely necessary because it makes you efficient and allows you to do things that need to be done more than once with a high degree of accuracy and expertise.

[641] But then there's that admixture of the new that has to, well, that's what, again, I think that's what music signifies because there's a fair bit of repetition in all music.

[642] And that gives you a baseline expectation, of what's going to happen, you know, so you're playing a game along with the musician and you both basically know the rules.

[643] 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 and keeps you interested and allows you to understand new possibilities.

[644] That's exactly what makes a great DJ set.

[645] You want to have 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.

[646] There's this thing I've been doing recently where I forced myself to play 50 % stuff I haven't played before or way I haven't played before.

[647] Because at one point I'd found myself sort of falling into a, like I knew so many things that worked, it was really easy for me to unleash these combinations of things that work.

[648] like in a fighting game where you like press combine these various moves and you have like you unleash like a series of fighting moves and you can knock the person out and I could do that very very easily but uh the really exciting things to do and the really useful to do things to do is to keep coming up with new ones and make sure about half of what you're doing is in that area of danger and the creation of something new which because that's what leads to those moments where the hairs stand up on right right yeah well you have to have that element of I would say surprise but also of the potential for failure exactly right because I mean I noticed this with my lectures is that you know before I go out do a lecture I always have I spend about an hour meditating although I hate to use that word it is what I'm doing trying to figure out what problem I'm to address and then trying to walk my way through the story that would enable me to explore that problem.

[649] But then I always have about five minutes of sheer terror about the fact that it might not work.

[650] Like I might not get the problem formulated properly and I might not get through the story and come up with a point because, you know, the talk should have a point.

[651] There should be a conclusion or perhaps multiple conclusions, but at least one conclusion.

[652] And because I mix enough of what's new in each lecture, it isn't obvious to me that that's necessarily going to happen.

[653] Now, I've been fortunate so far, and it's happened each time I've lectured publicly.

[654] Which is how many times now?

[655] Oh, well, for the 12 Rules for Life Tour, it's 150 cities.

[656] 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.

[657] And once I'm on there and warm up a bit, you know, it goes well.

[658] And yeah, I think part of that too, and maybe you experience this as a DJ.

[659] Like, I really feel that it's a privilege to be up in front of the audience.

[660] And it's also a challenge to get them on board, right?

[661] because we're all trying to be in the same place at the same time doing the same thing.

[662] And you have to have a real sympathy for your audience in the deepest way.

[663] You have to identify with your audience.

[664] You know, I think you have to feel yourself as part of your audience rather than the person who's, say, lecturing to the audience before you can bring everyone along because it can't be it.

[665] can't exactly be a top -down thing.

[666] It has to be a participatory thing.

[667] I always think of it in terms of this kind of like energy triangle or something.

[668] It's like you give off this thing and then it comes back to you and then it goes back around again and it's this going on.

[669] Even if it's obviously unspoken in a DJ capacity, you're not having a conversation with words, but you're giving them something.

[670] They're giving you energy in return in response to what you give them and then you build it and you build it and so on and so forth.

[671] Yeah, that's it.

[672] It's a positive.

[673] It's a positive feedback loop.

[674] Yes, exactly.

[675] And you can, I mean, those can go out of control.

[676] But if you can keep them modulating, I had to stop drinking.

[677] Because my reason for drinking while DJing that I'd given to myself as well, I need to be on the same level as my crowd.

[678] They're all drunk.

[679] So I should be a little bit drunk.

[680] But then you get your thing distorted.

[681] And there's all, well, as we know, there's all sorts of problems with drinking.

[682] And the nightlife industry.

[683] industry is oh yeah it's notorious functioning alcoholics oh definitely well it's no wonder i mean like a big part of not all of it but a big part of what determines the probability of addiction is situation and the other thing too is that someone like you or another musician say or a bartender nighttime people tend to drink more so it's and it's partly because they're up at night but it's also partly because of the way 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 well yeah i've got this fixed now but yeah for my first year in los angeles los angeles everything shuts at two 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 I 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.

[684] God damn it.

[685] Well, that's the thing.

[686] That's one of the best cures for an addictive process is to have something better to do than to be hung over.

[687] Well, this goes back to your earlier question, actually, which is how I've changed in the past since, meaning away.

[688] 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.

[689] 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.

[690] And it's amazing in my life, and it's amazing in my family's life.

[691] You know, I got really annoyed, not really annoyed.

[692] I don't get really annoyed by social media.

[693] But I did see that there was yet another vice story about, Having kids is awful.

[694] Oh, man, that's so brutal.

[695] It's so anti -human.

[696] It's so cruel.

[697] Evil.

[698] It is.

[699] It's absolutely cruel to women, I think.

[700] I had some poor woman on my Q &A last week tell me that all her friends are down on her because she doesn't call herself a feminist because she wants children.

[701] They're just torturing her.

[702] Jesus, it's so awful because it's like Nietzsche said, if you want to punish someone you should punish them for their virtues yeah and that's 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 destroying the ecology.

[703] It's just, God, it's so, it's, I just can't believe how cruel that is.

[704] And it's, and it masquerades in the guise of virtue, which makes it worse, you know.

[705] It's like, Jesus, woman, have a child, have a husband, have a, have a career, have a life, for God's sake.

[706] There's not that much to life.

[707] The meme, well, the meme that they're putting out there is like, you know, if you have children, like, uh, it 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.

[708] I am way more financially abundant or better off.

[709] I don't know if abundance is the right word yet in that direction since having a child.

[710] My life is so much better since having a child.

[711] My motivations are so much clearer.

[712] The reason for being this is so obvious.

[713] So much joy.

[714] Like unmeasurable level of joy have come from that one child.

[715] And the only thing I wish with regards to my life is that if I was going to go back and have a conversation with my earlier self, is just have lots of kids as soon as possible.

[716] Right.

[717] The earlier, the better.

[718] There is no optimal time.

[719] Like, Hercules wouldn't have happened if we planned it.

[720] We didn't, we didn't plan him.

[721] We always thought, well, there's no intelligent time to have a child.

[722] No, you're never ready.

[723] There's never enough money.

[724] There's never enough time.

[725] Da -da -da -da -da.

[726] But it's the single most wonderful motivating occurrence in this magical blessed existence.

[727] Yeah, well, that's how I've always felt about my kids.

[728] Yeah.

[729] You know, well, there's a variety of reasons, you know.

[730] 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.

[731] yeah and i don't believe that that can happen unless you have kids because it's actually not that easy to have someone be more important than you you know like if you fall in love with someone i would say there may be times when you would consider them more important than you but i would say the general equation is something like well we're equally important to one another you know And if it goes past that, sometimes it gets a little bit, well, questionable, you know, like, well, I would die for you or I would do anything for you.

[732] It's like, that's a bit much, you know.

[733] But with kids, it's not that at all.

[734] It's like they're number one, period, and you're not not.

[735] And that puts, it's a relief to some degree, I would say.

[736] but it also puts things in the proper context and it and it does provide you with additional impetus for proper action and ambition.

[737] Well, there's no room for error.

[738] They're looking at you.

[739] They're looking at to you for everything.

[740] You're completely responsive.

[741] Like, you know, if you're not the best version of yourself, then what are they going to be?

[742] Yes.

[743] And the mistakes you make are going to echo through.

[744] their lives as well.

[745] And then it's intergenerational.

[746] This is the thing I realized relatively recently, these intergenerational ills that just keep propagating down the line because they're not fixed.

[747] Yeah.

[748] Yeah, well, that's it.

[749] You know, is you get someone in some generation, they tear a hole in the fabric of reality and they pass it on to their children.

[750] And unless their children sew up that hole, then they pass it to their children.

[751] and the damage remains until someone decides enough.

[752] I'm going to repair it.

[753] And, you know, that's partly what you're trying to do as a parent is sew up the fabric of being.

[754] A child will inspire you to sew up the fabric of being like nothing else.

[755] Yes.

[756] And this is why I'm terrified of politicians without children, frankly, because they have no skin in the game.

[757] Or they certainly have less skin in the game than people who have.

[758] have a vested interest in the future, not being a horrible place to live.

[759] Yes, yes, yes.

[760] Well, yeah, well, to any women or men who are listening out there that are of the proper age, I would say, don't let the naysayers and the pessimists and the gloom purveyors.

[761] And those who dare to compare human beings to a cancer on the face of the planet dissuade you from having children.

[762] This is what the bad guys say in movies.

[763] That's what Agent Smith said in The Matrix.

[764] He was the villain.

[765] He was the villain.

[766] And this ideology is the ideology of villains.

[767] It's a very, very strange thing.

[768] And, you know, they believe themselves to be virtuous.

[769] And people who believe themselves to be virtuous are terrifying because they will do any kind of evil because they think they're goody -goodies.

[770] That's a terrifying thing.

[771] But as we were talking about earlier, I'm very excited about the future.

[772] because the new generation is going to react directly against that.

[773] 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.

[774] God, wouldn't it be something if that was the case?

[775] This is what's going to happen.

[776] I think this is what's blossoming.

[777] I think we're going to have a generation of radical, wholesome Mr. Rogers' is.

[778] well you're i think you're the most optimistic person that i've talked to for a long time i mean i talked to stephen pinker you know and he's he's optimistic in a much more detached way because he thinks that the data indicates that economically things at a very rapid rate but you're speaking of something more akin to a psychological transformation yes i am i am And this is just based on observations, but I believe this.

[779] And there's a lot that could go wrong.

[780] We're at the best time to be alive in recorded human history, obviously.

[781] We're also at the most dangerous time because it could all collapse.

[782] Right.

[783] Everything, this wonderful miracle that we inhabit, I get to walk outside and no one throws a brick at my head.

[784] Right, yes, which is, you know, you have to be sure that one of the hallmarks of wisdom is to understand that if you could walk outside and no one throws a brick at your head, that that's actually a miracle.

[785] Yeah, it is.

[786] I know this.

[787] So, you know, because I grew up somewhere where people used to throw bricks in my head.

[788] Oh, oh, what was that all about?

[789] I was, 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, of that nature, and everyone thought I was an insane weirdo.

[790] So I was in sight of my life.

[791] from them.

[792] People are very brutal in the UK, certainly compared to Los Angeles, to America, where people are very nice, compared to the brutality of that region of the world.

[793] And I think it's to do with the climate.

[794] You know, it's a cold, gray rock.

[795] And the other thing, actually, is in America, everyone operates under the foundational assumption that anyone could be president.

[796] So, you know, you have a service culture and waitresses are nice to you.

[797] 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.

[798] So everyone's a bit bitter and twisted because of that, I think, in the UK.

[799] But yeah, anyway, I had quite a sort of tough upbringing and people were very mean.

[800] And I'm very, very aware of the capacity for nastiness and species and horror.

[801] So when I say things like this about where I think we're going, this isn't out of any kind of of naivety of humans.

[802] I know full well what humans are capable of.

[803] 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.

[804] Yes, we have some very serious problems.

[805] How old were you, when you started dissociating with creative people and sort of found your own crowd.

[806] Well, this goes back to what we were talking about earlier.

[807] So when I was young, I had no, I thought I was the only person like me on earth.

[808] I thought, you know, I was just strange creature and I would be that life might be this awful forever, but I sort of, you know, granted it.

[809] I left, you know, I left school at 16.

[810] I left home at 16 and left little, sleepy little whales and went to a big city.

[811] And that's when I started finding people like me. Right, so you needed to get, you needed to get out to the city.

[812] Yeah, I had to leave home and move to a different country.

[813] Right.

[814] Yeah, 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.

[815] And if you live in a small place, there may not be any other people like you.

[816] And so you are going to be marked out as someone who's strong.

[817] because you are strange by the dint of your creative capacity.

[818] It's virtually the defining characteristic of creativity.

[819] The thing is now you can go online and find lots of people like you.

[820] Right.

[821] And you could make art with them and you could send files backwards and forwards and you could create things.

[822] And also, so it's, I'm interested to see what that does as well.

[823] Yeah, well, it certainly does mean that that people have 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 every one of these amazing solutions we find or these wonderful gifts there's a shadow side of course we have to deal with and that's the main thing right is that we just work at how to deal with it.

[824] Okay, so two more questions, I guess.

[825] One would be, what has been the shadow side of what you've been doing?

[826] Like, working with this meaning wave, you're much more well -known than you were.

[827] Has that had an effect on your life other than a positive one?

[828] And what's been the price that you've paid for this?

[829] You know, it doesn't mean so bad so far.

[830] You know, the usual, some people really, really don't like you, for example.

[831] And therefore, me doing stuff with you means that suddenly I've gone from a hero in their eyes to a complete villain.

[832] And there's a few people that's been the case with.

[833] But that's, you know, that's to be expected.

[834] I would say, you know, the whole thing has been a blessing.

[835] The whole thing has been a blessing.

[836] 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.

[837] There is that.

[838] Yeah.

[839] You know, I'm working, you know, I'm working very hard.

[840] 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, you know, we see this as a useful and helpful endeavor to be engaged in.

[841] And how much time are you spending working a day?

[842] Oh, God.

[843] 14.

[844] hours or so, 15, I don't know.

[845] Yeah, you know, it seems like that's about the minimum amount of time that you have to work if you really want to push yourself to new levels of accomplishment.

[846] Yeah, and that's every day.

[847] Yeah, every day.

[848] Yeah, it's very, very difficult to exceed expectations, let's say, if you're trying to work a normal eight -hour work day.

[849] My experience with people is that there either not busy enough or they're so busy they can barely keep up and that it's usually the ones that are so busy they can barely keep up that are pushing the envelope in whatever discipline they happen to be pursuing yeah and you know then you just have to um there's a concept i heard of recently which i like which i've been trying to do uh essentialism you know when you're so 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.

[850] There are more albums I would like to make than I physically have time to do in a lifetime.

[851] There are more speakers I would like to cover.

[852] There are more, you know, there's more songs I would love to play, more techniques I would love to learn.

[853] There is far more to do in this lifetime than I have life.

[854] So then essentialism, you boil down what are the essential things and what things cannot fit.

[855] And then you streamline your life and you do that ever more, ever more.

[856] remove things that are less essential, making room for the more essential, and then the more you know what the more essential is, the better idea you have of where you're going or what you're trying to do and how to do it.

[857] Yeah, well, that's the separation of the wheat from the chaff.

[858] That's a real skill if you can manage it, especially if the opportunities are flying at you fast and furiously.

[859] Well, how do you do?

[860] You presumably have more than you could possibly hope to achieve.

[861] Well, I do a certain amount of flailing about.

[862] 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 you sync synchronism that you described earlier is that fortunately as with each leap in notoriety or popularity I've had people show up who offered to take certain tasks off my plate you know in professional relationships and I've been fortunate that the majority of those people have been very competent and so and I do delegate like my hiring ethos is you want this job okay do it I'm not gonna micromanage you if you can do it man great right power to you hopefully you can do it better than me and if you can't do it well then i'll have to find someone else well or we'll have to find you a different place because 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 i mean that's the ideal thing in life is everything you're not the best at delegate that to someone who is the best at that right focus on the stuff that you're the best well right and then you can also continue to do more of things and you know I I would say my wife and I have been fairly ruthless well and my daughter as well probably my son as well in the communication we've had about the people we've hired over the last three or four years because the time pressure is so intense you know if you can do the job man we're thrilled to have you but if you have three or four chances and you can't do it then we just stop working with you immediately because we don't have any time for error it's and that the the costs of the errors are too great so but you can delegate so it's a difficult thing to learn to do I it took me a long time to be able to let go because I did everything myself for so long I taught myself how to do every aspect of this sort of business from graphic design to making the videos to recordings went to everything right letting go of that is was a hard to learn to do.

[863] Now I'm very happy to do that.

[864] And if I can find someone who can do something better than me, then wonderful.

[865] I would much rather than that.

[866] But it did take a while.

[867] It's part of the whole ego.

[868] 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.

[869] Yeah, this is true.

[870] So there is that work that you have to do yourself before you're capable of delegating and evaluating the consequences.

[871] Okay, so last question.

[872] I think.

[873] What's going to happen to you over the next year?

[874] Who knows?

[875] I'm going to work very hard.

[876] I'm going to get better.

[877] I'm going to stick to the plan I set and the hyper -productivity and results of this will compound.

[878] So where this leads, who knows?

[879] But I do know that I will make great music and it will be useful in a great many, people's lives.

[880] Right.

[881] So you've got a you've got a strategy.

[882] Yes.

[883] And what do you what do you what do you like about the hyper productivity?

[884] I mean one of the things you said was that well you don't have time to drink you don't have time to waste time and there is something really useful about hyper productivity in that regard is that it it does force you to dispense with everything that's damaging and non -essential because you just don't have the time.

[885] But is there anything else about about the hyper -predictivity that you've found, let's say, psychologically significant or useful?

[886] I'm a lot.

[887] I mean, the thing is, I started the hyper -productivity thing, exactly the same time I started the carnivore diet.

[888] So sometimes I'm not sure which is causing what.

[889] I used to about once a month go into a kind of deep depression for a few days, which my wife would call my funk.

[890] I'm a very optimistic, happy person normally, but then there would be a little bit where I was kind of the opposite.

[891] I haven't had that since.

[892] Wow, congratulations.

[893] How long has that been?

[894] That's 13 months.

[895] And what else is, I wasn't going to ask you about the diet, but now I'm going to.

[896] What's happened to you because of the carnivore diet?

[897] Well, I lost all my unnecessary body fat.

[898] How much was that?

[899] I think I went from like 160 to 146, and I'm sorry.

[900] stayed at 146 about since and that happened pretty quickly like the first part of it was in days like my face changed within a few days you have this bloat I guess inflammation likely eh yes all that sort of thing I used to have like sort of psoriasis and that went I used to have like my tongue was all messed up and yeah that sorted itself out I used to have bleeding gums and that's gone that's gone eh 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've 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 hyperproductivity makes life so much simpler because when you know that certain things have to be done without question then there's no question right you know it's like well I'm So I can't go and do that thing because I'm going to do this.

[901] I've committed.

[902] Right.

[903] Well, that's the advantage of having a very well delineated aim, may, and a purpose.

[904] You bet it helps you separate what's necessary from what isn't necessary.

[905] And that is a genuine relief, no doubt about it.

[906] It's joyful.

[907] There's so much, so much weight is cast off you.

[908] You know, someone asks you to do a thing.

[909] There's no debate.

[910] You either do it or you don't.

[911] on what this aim is, what you're doing.

[912] Same then applies to things like food.

[913] Like one of the really annoying things in my life prior to the carnival thing was like the daily, what are we having for dinner conversation?

[914] And the annoyance is related to that, which is completely gone.

[915] I know what I'm having for dinner.

[916] I'm having a steak.

[917] And I know what I'm having for breakfast and the same thing.

[918] You know, and I know what I'm drinking.

[919] I'm drinking water.

[920] And I know how I'm going to feel.

[921] You know, I know I'm not going to.

[922] suddenly be sleepy or bloated or weird after eating something you know i'm going to be the same high energy uh purpose that's a that's a major plus so congratulations on that that's a huge that's a huge beneficial transformation so let's end with this um what do you think you're doing with this what's your like i know that you have a name and an ambition you're making this music you're making yourself hyperproductive you're concentrating on this meaning wave but underneath all that there must be a what like an invisible or an implicit ambition something like that a deep ambition what what's your most profound hope for what you're engaged in personally i would like to become the best version of myself possible 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.

[923] I want to get to nuke level and be the best possible version of myself, possible, as effective on every level I can be.

[924] 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 seven years old and listening to music and wanting to make music and reach people and communicate with people on that.

[925] And specifically with regard to the meaning wave?

[926] Yeah, well, I think the meaning wave thing is like so much we've talked about, we haven't scratched the surface of what's possible with music.

[927] 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.

[928] 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.

[929] And I think that way with pop music.

[930] Pop music is so new.

[931] You know, it just happened, boom.

[932] It was just there.

[933] And, you know, we don't know, to quote you a bit, we don't know what the upper limits of this thing are.

[934] Right, right.

[935] I'm excited to explore this.

[936] So I think of myself a bit like Picard in Deep Space Nine going out adventuring into this world.

[937] Yeah, well, you've hit a vein that seems rich and you seem highly committed to getting better and better at mining it.

[938] And so that's a good adventure.

[939] 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.

[940] So it's nice to have an adventure where you can't necessarily see the destination, but it looks positive.

[941] Yeah.

[942] I mean, maybe it's not positive.

[943] You know, maybe the adventure has a horrible ending.

[944] It's an adventure, regardless.

[945] Yes, this is true.

[946] There's something to be said for that.

[947] Yeah.

[948] It's an exciting.

[949] 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.

[950] Like, grandmother's 96.

[951] She's the eldest of 13.

[952] She saw the birth of the radio.

[953] She was like, you know, she left school at 13 to the window.

[954] We saw TV and internet and all of this stuff appear.

[955] Like, what have we to witness?

[956] Things are, you know, things are speeding up so radically.

[957] It's just an incredibly exciting time to be here.

[958] 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.

[959] Well, look, it was really good to talk to you.

[960] 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 naively optimistic and well A, I hope we can meet at some point in the 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.

[961] Thank you.

[962] That was my...

[963] Yeah, I really didn't want to do disservice to those words because I respect them greatly.

[964] And I'm very grateful for them.

[965] And I'm very grateful that you're out there doing this work and putting your head over the battlements.

[966] at this crucial, crucial time in our development as a species as we boldly march into hyperspace and our destiny.

[967] So thank you.

[968] Very good to meet you.

[969] Hopefully we'll talk again in the not too distant future.

[970] I'm sure we will.

[971] And I hope you like the album.

[972] Thank you.

[973] I'm very much looking forward to it.

[974] Nice.

[975] Okay, man. All right, wicked.

[976] Really good to meet you.

[977] Yeah, you too.

[978] Bye, bye.

[979] Peace.

[980] 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.

[981] Both of these books dive much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[982] See Jordan B. Peterson .com for audio, e -book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[983] Next week, you'll hear my lecture from the Community Theater in Sacramento, California, recorded on June 27, 2018.

[984] 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.

[985] 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. Peterson.

[986] Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommend books can be found on my website, Jordan B. Peterson .com.

[987] 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 self -authoring .com.

[988] That's self -authoring .com from the Westwood One podcast network.