Ted Gioia on AI's Threat To Music

Hey everybody I'm Rick biato today I have the pleasure of welcoming back to the studio Ted Joya a renowned music historian critic and futurist known for his deep dives into the evolution of music and American culture I've been following Ted substack where he writes about everything from his predictions on the future of AI and music to his love of coffee just like our last conversation I find that Ted is not only Endlessly fascinating but also has an incredible sense of humor I think you'll really enjoy this here's my interview Ted welcome thank you for having

me or should I say welcome back actually well it's great to be back we had fun last time and I'm looking forward to doing it again so you and I went to dinner last night and we talked a bit about Ai and how record labels and Delivery Systems like Spotify will be using AI in the future can you talk about this a bit Well AI is everywhere right now and it's the hot Topic in music uh but the question is how much is it being used and the problem is is there's not a lot of

disclosure what we see about AI is almost a secret and this is probably the biggest warning sign for me is if AI is really so wonderful if it's so exciting if it's so tremendous why do they have to keep it a secret and I see this everywhere now I'm going to talk about music in a second but let me Just look at some of the other fields like I'm in writing yep and there are these AI articles everywhere but no disclosure a few months ago Sports Illustrated right before it collapsed had this great idea of

saving money by using AI to write articles and you know what they did is they actually assigned the names of people to the Articles well this article is by Bill Smith or Nancy Jones or whatever and then they would have bios and a web page for these Authors that did not exist cuz they were ashamed unbelievable of using the AI yeah and this is spread everywhere in books I had now ai books come out trying to steal my readers and they attribute the books to Mr joyya Frank Joya wrote this book on Jazz and then

and basically they're targeting the readers of my jazz book but deceptively at no point do they say is this book is written by AI so I actually went looked at all the new music books that were listed on Amazon And tried to figure out which ones are by real authors and which ones are by a and you can't figure it out there's no there's no honesty there so let's now look at music and in music my fear of the same thing is happening on Spotify one of the users a fellow named Adam FaZe was listening

to Spotify and he kept hearing the same song over and over again he said this is interesting he started paying attention every time the song came on it was a 41 second song Okay he saw it had a different name and a different artist now wait a second this song sounds almost identical to the one I heard so he compiled a playlist of 49 songs that were more or less identical but they had different names different artists and were attributed to different composers now west going on here that can't be true now it's obvious to

conclude and I can't prove it though is this is spotify's way of using AI they Have ai songs they attribute them to people that don't exist like Sports Illustrated and this allows them to take royalties that would go to musicians mhm and keep them for themselves if they can own the work themselves created by AI they're going to be able to maximize their revenues now I can't prove this is happening in Spotify but it's hard to think of some other explanation for what's going on so right so this is the real story behind ai ai

is the hot thing In music but not because it's great music I've never met anyone where I say what's your favorite genre of music oh I love this AI stuff yeah I just can't just this AI music is my favorite genre I've never met maybe that person exists I've never met them so the AI is happening not because it's great not because it has a fan base not because it allows some improvements over the music that that lowly folks like you or I would make it's being used to save cost In in a deceptive way

and that's my fear is that what's happening with AI is it's a cost savings measure being forced duplicitously on the market for the benefit of the companies and hurting the fans and hurting the musicians okay what about Tik Tock and AI well this is the same question it was very interesting a few months ago Universal Music pulled all their songs off of Tik Tok and they complained bitterly and they complained about royalties but the other thing they Complained about was AI they said well we're not going to come back to Tik Tok till you get

rid of AI because we fear you're using AI to do exactly what I talked about is you're going to move the audience to AI music so you don't have to pay Universal Music and I just a few days ago Universal Music came back to Tik Tok they apparently they patched up their differences but I've seen no statement from Tik Tock that they're getting rid of AI this is they're wetted to that and one of the things I think you're going to see is no one will ever spell it out for you you won't see the

head of Spotify or Tik Tok or any of these companies say we're going to squeeze the musicians and the labels with AI they don't say that but that has to what's happening isn't the uh reason that you that Universal Music Group came back one of the reasons because they can't figure out how to promote records without Tik Tock well this is the sad story of our times right I see this repeatedly is people go to war against these big Tech platforms and I always predict that the tech platform will win the war and I've been

right every time right every time I've been correct and it's sad you see Universal Music say well we're going to go to war with Tik Tok and force them to give in and if Universal Music can't do it that what Universal Music controls what 30 35 32% 32% of of the recordings Out there if they can't get concessions from Tik Tok who can and right around that same time Neil Young came back to Spotify you know he said I'm never going to be on Spotify again Joanie Mitchell came back to Spotify yeah and I don't

blame them because what choice do we have no choice the platforms the platforms set the rules and the rest of us have to follow them and this would be okay if those people Really knew and love music but look at the people that run these platforms they're not music lovers like you and me or your audience out there these are people that are techies and they have completely different goals and priorities than having a flourishing music ecosystem they want to benefit themselves they want to benefit their companies financially and if the music suffers well they

just are willing to live with it one of the things that I Find interesting between Spotify and apple is that Spotify will show you the streaming numbers of every single song on an album A lot of people that follow my channel when I make a video and I made a video about this song called blinding Lights by the weekend it's the most streamed song on Spotify 4.2 billion streams and people say oh that's all Bots now people I think that write this stuff first of all Spotify has to pay these artists for this and the

idea The the number 4.2 billion is a massively big number I think they're thinking of a bunch of of cell phones in a room just on repeat trying to play this thing 4.2 billion times and just because they haven't heard it because people are essentially in silos because that's how the algorithms have placed them oh you like this and you're going to like something else it's pretty much just like this well there are Bots out there and I don't want to Minimize the impact people tell me that PE that there's money laundering going through Spotify

using Bots and that this is how people they you they get their dirty money they have the Bots run up plays for some track and then the money comes back from Spotify and it's been laundered now I don't know if that's true or not but I've heard that I'm actually more worried about something else in that trusting that the numbers are Accurate and people are actually listening places like Spotify still have games they can play let me give you a very amazing example I think uh the story of Johan RoR from Sweden very interesting individual

Johan RoR because he has achieved 15 billion streams on Spotify now that's a large number let me tell you how large it is that's more than Michael Jackson right that is more than Elton John it's more than Abba you know it's nobody out there with maybe Two or three exceptions in the whole world can get the kind of streams Johan rur is nobody knows his name now why is that well Johan R never uses his own name in his music he has 656 different aliases sometimes there's a man or a woman or different National groups

or whatever he never uses his own name he uses 656 different names and then shows up on all these playlists he is on 144 Different official Spotify cated playlist reaching 62 million People sometimes he's 40% or more of a single playlist but no one knows about it because the name changes so they're able to push all this traffic to Johan R now why is Spotify doing this now I got an email from somebody I can't say if this is true they said Ted you didn't hear this from me but Spotify owns all the rights of

those songs and they're using this big surprise he Swedish Spotify I know right Down the street from the Spotify headquarters now I can't prove that they are using Johan rur to avoid playing paying royalties to real musicians but what other explanation can they be and let me give you a sort of a a hint of the disparity here I started looking at his music and the music is all just you know banal background music nothing to get excited about and I found one of his tracks on Spotify that had gotten four or five million plays

okay Then I found the same track on YouTube it had a 100 plays right well wait a second if this is such a great song exactly if everybody loves this song Why does it only get 100 plays on YouTube so what I'm worried about is there are these games that are being played there's no disclosure and this is not good for the music ecosystem again they're forcing this music on people and they're only able to do it because the listening experience has become so Passive in the old days you went and bought an album you

always knew who you were listening to cuz you had purch this record with Hard Cash you had to reach into your pocket to get Spotify has deliberately tried to turn the listening experience into something passive now is that good for the music culture where people don't know the name of the artist you see this all the time will be playing in the radio and and someone will say I love that song but they don't Know the name of the artist they don't know the name of the song is this good I don't think so and

I and so I I worry about all these ramifications that these corporations are trying to maximize their income and God bless them I hope they they have nice corporate Jets and the yachts and the whole nine yards but what they're doing is not good for the music culture and that's why there's a certain sense of stagnancy now in the music culture it Doesn't feel like there's anything vibrant happening and that's by plan I fear that's by plan that the most powerful people in the world controlling music who are the CEO of Spotify CEO of Apple

you know these are the people that actually control music now they're not musicians they're not music lovers they're taking steps that create the stagnancy wasn't the Spotify business model flawed right from the beginning there's there's a certain there's only a Certain number of people that can afford to pay when you have a subscription model like that that pretty much all subscription models eventually run out of people well I ran the numbers back in 2018 when Spotify listed on the stock exchange I got the public filing and this is what I do I analyze all the

numbers I'm I'm sort of a an analytical nerd and I I did all the math and in 2018 I said this this streaming model doesn't work there's no way they can Charge $9.99 cents a month for all the music you want to listen to and make a profit right they will never achieve a user base to do that well it took them 18 years from inception to find out that I'm right and so finally what you've seen in the last year Spotify started raising prices dramatically well that's all they can do as did Netflix and

all the places because they realized that the model they had been working With wasn't going to deliver enough cash to pay all the stakeholders yeah and so now we're in a situation where the whole streaming model is built on cutting cost raising subscription prices and then playing these little games and it's I think it's very ominous that just a few days ago Netflix announced that they are not going to tell shareholders how many sub subscribers they have anymore well this is amazing because for years they've Been bragging about subscriber growth and we're going to get

more growth and this is the whole engine of our business is adding more subscribers The Last quarterly report they said you know the subscriber stuff we don't we're not going to tell you about that anymore don't worry about now what does that mean it means that they have given up trying to attract the audience and get the audience excited and build it they're going to cut costs they're going To raise prices and they're going to play all the these crazy games with their algorithms and whatever and that's that's sad so it's happening in movies this

is happening in books it's happening in journalism and it's happening maybe most of all in music The Musicians are like the canaries and the coal mine they're the first ones that die and topple over and after the musicians go everyone else would say wait a second you that's because it's g Whatever your job is now the same kind of AI stuff is going to happen there down the line so you should pay attention even if you're not a musician uh or you don't depend on the music business you should care as a fan but even

beyond that you should care because this is the same thing that's going to happen throughout culture I'd like to take a second to talk to you about this channel Believe It or Not 57% of the people that watch here regularly are not Subscribed so I would encourage you to hit the Subscribe button now this will help me get even more of my dream guests in the future thank you Ted you were talking last night about the music simplifying and that that this is part of a very long cycle well I wrote a book oh back

in 20072 2008 called the birth and death of the cool and I was looking at what it means to be cool this this was the idea behind the book I was going to write a history of coolness and I had This assumption that people always wanted to be cool and always would want to be cool this was like a Timeless quantity and what I saw doing my research is that in fact this isn't the case that uh these Cycles last 50 60 70 years and there was a cycle in which people wanted to be cool

which they didn't want to be during the Great Depression that was people weren't like worried about being cool during World War II people weren't worried about Being cool but after the war Miles Davis the birth of the cool and the beatnicks and Jack kowak and Lenny Bruce and the edgy Comedians and Marlin Brando and coolness became something important and then coolness had like a 50 60y year run started to die probably the first warning sign was when the word cool stopped being applied to people like Marlon Brando or Miles Davis and it was applied to

merchandise now it was the running shoe That was cool or this device was cool it was a marketing program coolness no longer was some personal quality you had it was used to Market a product and then the whole coolness in society disappeared a chapter in my book is called America's lost its cool people are just angry at each other used to be I'd get together with with my Bros and we try to be as cool as possible now even the word hipster became a term of Abuse a coolness became suspect and sort of this culture

of anger and outrage emerged it's a 50 60 year cycle curiously enough I was uh reading a book by Ray doio the finance expert the super investor and he says in finance there's a 50 60 70 year cycle too and he says the reason people don't understand this and this gets back to the point you were mentioning is that the cycle generally takes a whole human lifetime so we only live through the Cycle ourselves once now if you live old enough towards the end of your life you start seeing a repetition of what happened when

you were starting out right because the cycle is starting to repeat now what do we see happening in culture right now is we have had in commercial music a lessening in the complexity of Music decade after decade after decade right to the point now most of the hit songs now are these four chord songs yeah if that if that you're You're lucky you're lucky to get those those four chords and a lot of people think well that's the way it will always be even you and I at times we get we get depressed and we

say you know where are the great maximalist songs of the past where all sorts of surprising things happened and and chord changes and unexpected interval leaps where have they all gone and if I asked you who were the great people at writing songs with this sort of maximalist I'm going To surprise you aesthetic the names we would come up with would all be dead people or people 70 or older so we would mention McCartney or Stevie Wonder Mitchell barar sonheim and I know many people think well that's that day is gone it'll never come back

but I believe these things come in Cycles there was a period back in the early 50s when music was getting very simple and then with the Beatles and back and all that start getting more Complex again and and so if you there is a cycle and generally the this is the very interesting thing I got this from a book called The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros who sort of a strange guy but he had this theory he calls it the theory of reflexivity and this has been very useful to me in predicting Trends what

Sor says and he he's actually became a billionaire using this he traded currencies and this was his theory of reflexivity that made him a Billionaire and he said the secret is the trend always goes on longer than is sensible and it will eventually reverse but it has to get to a ridiculous extreme before it reverses so even when you say well the songs couldn't possibly get simpler you know they can't possibly get simpler than they do what what Sor will say eventually it has to push to an extreme and then it reverses because people are

so tired of it right now does This happen in culture well let me give you an example of where it's happening right now in the culture look at movies mhm the folks at Disney said well all we got to do is a Star Wars war movie and a Marvel movie every 10 weeks and we're going to get rich right and that worked and it worked and it worked and at a certain point it just seemed ridiculous but even at the point where it got ridiculous they kept on doing it and then finally yeah the box

office Receipts stopped I've done the analysis on this and you see the monthly box office in the movie business is awful there was a big burst for a few weeks with Barbie and Oppenheimer that's right but that's gone yeah now if you go back before the pandemic the movie business had more than10 billion in box office receipts for more than 10 years in a row the way it looks now it'll never hit those numbers again and it's because they push the formula to the ridiculous Extreme and then it will reverse and I think that's going

to happen in movies I think it will happen in music and so people always look at me and say Ted you're full of Doom and Gloom I well no no I'm actually optimistic but I believe you've got to get to The Bitter End of the cycle and then it will reverse think that the that movies and music are on the same cycle or does one precede the other I think they they're on similar cycles and so I always pay attention to Movies and I ask myself what has happened in the past when the formula didn't

work and so I look at for example the 1960s going into the 60s there were two formulas in Hollywood that always worked the western movie right and the musical and so they push these and it was everywhere when you and I were growing up there were three TV networks and everyone at any night of the week you turn on there would be a Western on One of those three channels sometimes there was a Western on two or three of them just westerns were everywhere yeah and they pushed it to a ridiculous extreme to a point

where even the most devoted fans of cowboys even CL would stop making no even CL that's no that's great even Clint East would stop naking the The Westerns and the musical died out too you had The Sound of Music and then after that the there were it was almost impossible to have a hit musical Movie so what happened in the movie industry then I think it's very interesting the studios were desperate and they said well we've got to take chances now which we hate to do we here in Hollywood the thing we hate to do

is take chances but we have no other alternative so when it as the Western died the musical died the formulas died they started doing these edgier films these grittier films these risk-taking films so you have things like The Godfather and Chinatown and taxi driver and some people will tell you these were the best movies of all time but the fact is they were edgier they were grittier and they were full of risk-taking because Hollywood had no other option well if you look at the Godfather they tried to get Copa kicked off the movie many times

the studio hated it theyed Chino they just a million times that nothing worked on this movie if you're going to do a crime movie you got to Have shoot ups every 5 minutes but Copa understood you needed to do something different at that stage in cinema history yeah I believe we're at exactly that same point now what's the one thing Hollywood would hate to do right now is anything edgy that's right don't do anything edgy or you but that's what the audience is hungry for so Hollywood is now in a point where they're going to

have to take risks and do things that are a little bit different more Ambitious I think music's the same way mhm I think music is the same way because you that same period where you had this risk-taking in movies you had it in popular music too you know the Beatles broke all the rules so it was a period of like five six seven years you could do anything yeah you could do anything and if you were a rock or pop Act and the record labels understood we've got to give these people some freedom and it

drove them nuts to get People like Brian Wilson freedom because he would do crazy things but that worked once and I know people don't believe it's possible I hear people say Ted will they'll never these record labels will never give people creative freedom the way they did in the past and I said they will not have a choice they will not have a choice because the formula eventually dies when the music industry started to collapse after uh Napster happened 1999 and then Provits started to decrease after the year 2000 dramatically every year absolutely 1999 was

the peak year for the music industry so then the label started saying okay we need to hire producers that can write songs okay we need to hire uh we're going to have less money so we have to get higher producers that can also mix the songs then it became these people the max Martin would would spring up that actually could write the hit songs for the artist they Could get the they could build the tracks things like that and they would have these Superstar producers that was the era of that now we're in the era

where there are seven writers on every song and eight producers nobody can write their own song Anymore where there is no Joanie Mitchell there's no Stevie Wonder there's no people that can literally write a song themselves or at least no one that's trusted by the record label it used to Be that they had to have their um if if a record failed well listen I hired this producer I hired this mixer and there are people that have had many hits so I'm safe with my job nobody wanted to take a chance to to your point

now we're at this this point where everything is done by committee absolutely so it's got to it has to revert to something else I think I agree with you on that and there's someone once told me this said there's never Been a great work of art created by committee right and there no literary masterpieces probably the only exception is the King James version of the Bible where King James had a committee put that together and it's it was probably divine intervention mention is my theory on that that made sure that that got through but for

the most part when you get the committee things start falling apart now the rule of thumb I have is I look at the song and I count how many Chord changes there are then I count how many songwriters and if there more than songwriters than there are chord changes that's a warning sign that's a real you know if there are only four chords in the song and there are eight composers know something's going wrong there but what's really going on there and to me this is part of a larger problem first of all what what's

going on is economic in that being named one of the songwriters is to get you a share Of the composing and Publishing royalties and so this is almost like the stock options you give somebody you're hiring a team to run a tech company and you want to get this person involved and you give them a little taste of the action and this person gets to dip their beak and and so the what's happening is it's almost like a negotiation over how you're going to allocate the money and then that shows up as the songwriting credits

now this now maybe this makes Sense financially but it's ominous from a creative standpoint and to me it reflects the larger change in the music industry that alarms me tremendously which is record labels are turning into intellectual property management companies IP Management in that they're not trying to get the next great record they're trying to build a copyright point portfolio right a portfolio of songs and the people that run these things are bankers lawyers and Accountants now God bless them I love Bankers I love lawyers especially lawyers working for me I love accountants but I

want people that are guitarists and piano players and sax players and basist and drummers these are the people I want involved in the creative end of the music business now here's a fact that you're not going to hear elsewhere because it's sort of hidden in the financial statements look at Universal Music Group you said before they have 32% of the songs out there right what people don't know is they are growing their publishing business five times as fast as their recorded music business so people look at Universal Music so this is a recording company well

not for much longer because the the only thing they want to invest in is publishing rights now what do this mean publishing writs means you own part of an old song you might be buying a song that was written 20 years ago 40 years ago 60 years ago whatever when you do a recording you're focused on the future I'm going to create music that never existed before right I'm going to build an artist I'm going to build a career it is very dangerous for the culture to have companies like Universal Music care more about the

past than about the future people ask me all the time why is the music cult culture feel so staging I said this is by Design the people running these companies would rather have you listen to an old song than a new song and this gets back to the AI especially if in the future they fear that these AI songs are going to steal their royalties their response is going to be to Pedal license agreements of their old songs they're going to try to get them in TV commercials or whatever and once again God bless them

I hope they make a lot of money and I hope they have the Nice flight on the corporate Jet and all the things that these execs want but this is not healthy for our culture because somebody should be investing in the future of music and if all the large companies want is these old songs we're in trouble and it's not just Universal Music Group Sony's doing the same thing they just cut up $500 million catalog purchased the other day Concord was trying to buy this portfolio all the record companies have lost faith in the Record

business and this can't be a good thing if you love music the labels now depend on artists having their own following before they even get signed and that that is a terrible proposition as far as I'm concerned you know that's it's you have to have proof of concept before they will invest any money in what you're doing it's like but by that time why do you need the record label no they're What they're doing fundamentally won't work for them right in the old days the the record labels knew how to launch new stars it's never

been easy right but at least they took care they tried to scout good talent they would hire a good producer they would get good songwriters and then they would take this new artist and they would invest in marketing maybe there was some payol or to I don't know but basically they could take new stars and develop them which they needed for Their future they had to do this they had they had no choice what you see lately is they've either lost the ability to do that or the interest in doing it or probably both what

I see is you I actually had an an an anr person from a label call me up because he wanted to argue about one of my articles and I was going back and forth with this guy and at one point he said Ted I got to admit you're right we would never sign a new artist now unless they Already had an audience on Tik Tok right I basically he was saying we don't have a clue how to build a career we got to find someone who's already doing it but what benefit is there for the

record label at that point because they're going to have to give away the store to sign up that people that's already happened already and you know back in our day you got a record contract if you got 10 15% royalties that was the best you were going to possibly do but Nowadays they have to go to these Tic Tac stores and say we'll give you 50% that's right and after five years you go the Masters and they have to give away everything to get these people because the label has no leverage the Tik Tok star

does that's right so they're fundamentally pursuing a strategy that's not going to work for the record label what they should do what they should do is once again I'm going back to this movie industry analogy they should be Willing to take risks they should build up their ability to identify promising young Talent sign them nurture and develop that talent and create the next generation of stars that would be good for them it would be good for the musician it would be good for us as audience members because we have something exciting something new something fresh

something different and not just we're going to Pedal the license deal of a song written 30 years Ago which is you know about as exciting as day old bread you have a substack that I subscribe to and I encourage everyone to subscribe to Ted substack I'll have the link in the description thank you so what's the difference between having a substack that you write on a really frequent basis as opposed to writing a book nowadays our books still as important as they were well every aspect of our creative culture feels like it's in crisis right

now it Just feels that way and it feels that opportunities are disappearing I'm constantly reading about layoffs at this magazine this newspaper um and obviously in the music industry as well Spotify just did layoffs the record labels did layoffs everybody's doing layoffs the culture feels like it's in a state of crisis but there is some good news there that I don't think is widely recognized and I call it the battle Between the macroculture and the microculture okay okay now the macroculture I mean the big Legacy institutions Sony records CBS Disney or even someone like Spotify

these are big huge Enterprises New York Times whatever these are enormous now the micro culture is people like you and me right we're out there doing it on our own and and for a long time we're so small people don't even notice right what we're doing but the Fact is there are a lot of us now and we're growing right and some of us are growing quite rapidly and so I've been telling people is 2024 is the year when the microculture is going to triumph over the macroculture people don't recognize that the audience is Shifting

they want you what you're doing obviously they want what you're doing I hope they want what I'm doing or people like us Because we have a little bit more freedom we have a little bit more flexib little bit flexibility we're a little more Frank yeah maybe we are a little edgier U and so getting back to my own career I was I'm now working on a platform called substack which allows writers to run their own writing career and substack takes care of all the details from me they'll send out my writings to an email list

they'll keep track of the list they'll charge Subscriptions they'll do metrics and and I get to publish whatever I want yep I can publish whenever I want I own all the intellectual property if I leave I get to keep my email list everything they do is designed to empower me and then I'm able to take it and run with it and so this allows me to have a successful career in the micro culture while the macr culture is collapsing now let's look at at at at your end of the world so you're doing it Differently

you're like on YouTube or whatever but check out this fact I think this is very revealing the total ad revenues on YouTube now are more than the total revenues of Netflix oh yeah that switch over happened about 18 months ago but people look at Netflix as one of the the largest entertainment companies in the world and when they think of people watching Video Entertainment or assimilating things through a screen the first name they Think of is Netflix but in fact the micr culture is now larger than that and in fact if you look at all

the big platforms out there they're all built on this microculture thing this is how Mark Zuckerberg gets Rich he's not posting this stuff on Facebook right he's got a 500 million people doing that what Google is doing with YouTube they're not out there putting these videos out you're putting the videos out or me on substack yeah and people look at it and They think it's well the they're just these large companies out there but these large companies are based on this vibrant macro culture we used to call it a counterculture yeah yeah and uh and

I think that name should come back but I think there's a lot more happening in the culture now that is healthy that's successful that's growing that's buoyant that's risk-taking the next step has to be for the large companies to recognize this And try to either work with people like you or me or to try to develop something like that themselves because they're so unwilling to take risks right I mean you'll do a video and you'll come up with some idea and I'm just going to do it right I you talked to me last night about

some of the things you're planning to do and you're I'm just G to do it right and I do that I just sit down this is a crazy article I'm just going to publish it sure but and these large Companies are so they're so scared of doing that but what they need to recognize is there's a turn in the culture it is vibrant there are things happening at this ma this micro level this alter alternative level this alternative culture is out there and it's actually the success story it's the healthy story and it's the pathway

for the future even for the large companies when they finally wake up and start doing what they're supposed to do people Ask me Rick how do you know when to publish things why don't you publish things on the hour and I said I publish things I publish my videos whenever they're done doesn't matter when they're done and my interviews are all different lengths there is no standard length interview an interview is as long as it needs to be absolutely well you know I was getting on the plane to come here and I said you know

I should publish an article before I get on the plane and I Said I don't want to get up earlier in the morning I'll just publish it like one in the morning you know so I publish it in the middle of the night everyone would tell you can't do that Ted you you can't publish your article in the middle I don't you know I actually think my readers like the unpredictability of what I do yes because they find it refreshing and it's in a stagnant culture and I do believe many aspects of our culture are

Stagnant this is what the hunger is for people people want surprises almost I mean I tell people I would rather get a slap in the face than to see a Marvel movie Just because the slap in the face would like oh yeah that woke me up a little bit you know and I think a lot of people are feeling that way and so in many ways the best thing you can do at this stage in the culture for creative person and I know a lot of your audience are creative people out there is take Risks

and now that you're forced to do it on your own because the institutions aren't helping you anymore Universal Music isn't helping you anymore uh New York Times isn't helping you anymore you got to do it on your own well the that's a burden but there's a Advantage with it because once you take responsibility for your own creative Ventures nobody can stop you from doing that risk-taking and that's what's going to save us one of the topics you wrote about recently is H Was called one of your substs how coffee became a joke now I love

to drink coffee and you love to drink coffee and and uh this is kind of a not necessarily a topic that you that you would write about normally and I found it really fascinating talk about that for a minute well I write about almost everything but mostly M probably half of what I write about is music but the other half I all right about almost anything and it has to be something related to Culture uh and of sometimes movies or books or whatever but the other day I was looking Starbucks had announced their results and

it was abysmal the revenues were down the profits were down same store sales were down I like to go through the numbers but this was just a horror show from start to finish and I started asking people I know how did Starbucks falter they're selling a addictive substance I mean how Stupid do you have to be not to be and you know when we went to high school there was like some guy in the class that was like the stoner and and all his brain cells were burned out but even he could figure out how

to deal drugs I mean even he had enough brain cells still operating if you're selling an addictive substance you should be easy to find a way to make money but substack uh article on on on this coffee thing it all came back to to the fact that the Coffee sales were declining so I started asking people why did uh Starbucks falter and some people would say well the prices are high or the economy is soft but a lot of people said a joke these drinks the the mermaid Frappuccino or the and I and I was

talking to my my my son and he's saying well Dad the worst one is this new coffee they have mixes coffee and olive oil I said what do you mean no no no Dad it's unbelievable it's called the oato and They mix coffee and olive oil and he said eventually they're going to have to get rid of it but they're still in the store so I just I did this article how coffee turned into a joke and I started with my own life story where when I was a kid they my parents gave me coffee

when I was in the Cradle couldn't believe that and my dad when I was like eight years old he would give me cup of dark Rose before I went to school and when I was in fourth grade I Decided I was going to launch a rebellion so I told my dad I said Dad I'm not going to do this anymore I'm a kid kid shouldn't drink coffee and he sort of looked at me and he said children need something warm in their stomach before they go to school he wasn't talking about oatmeal or Quaker Oats

or like a cup of dark roast is what I needed and the fact is I can laugh at this and I don't know if It's good to give kids coffee I don't know but I do know I attribute a lot of My Success to this because I I would go to like fourth grade and I would just rip through those multiplication tables and the spelling be and I'm just all the other students are like sleepy eyed and so any anyway I wrote an article on this and it was a very successful article and when I

put it out I said can I write an article about coffee I'm a music critic For Heaven's Sake what am I writing About coffee but I do think people want to hear the honest story and if there's something that interests you or interests me the best thing for us to do is to run with it is is to take the things that excite us and interest us and bring it out to the audience well as soon as I saw that you were writing an article on coffee I said oh what's Ted have to say about

coffee I to read that I I went uh my my 11-year-old Lea today Said can we stop at Starbucks on the way to school and I said why they have some new drink out it's like a bubble tea thing so I was like okay I said it's that blue thing and I said Leela you should never drink anything blue she's like okay I want to Blue does not exist in nature except in the sky your food products so we so we stop and I get her this thing and all of a sudden she takes a

few sips she says this is terrible and she hands it to me to put him in the cup Holder and I said what's bad about it she said everything and I just laughed and I thought about your article about this it was she said it's sweet but it and it tastes awful well this goes back to what we're talking about movies and music I know people think well this coffee thing is very different but in fact how did Starbucks falter and they faltered because they thought they had a formula figured out they had come out

with this sweet drink called the Frappuccino yeah that everybody loved and they said well we got to do more sweet drinks and then they just it was like the Marvel movies at Disney we're going to they just and and they just kept on churning it out and it got to the ridiculous point and then it got to this this the of reflexivity I'm talking about was more than ridiculous yeah olive oil and then finally the sales start going down yeah so they'll have to they'll have to retrench they'll have to Go back to making more

serious drinks it started with a pumpkin spice latte though didn't it had no pumpkin in it I mean that was that was something was wrong if they call it the pumpkin spice latte and there's no pumpkin in the drink but this is It's a lack of gravy toss it's a lack of seriousness in the culture and I and I think we all suffer from that so I think coffee is a sign of it I think the music is a sign of it I think the movies is a sign of it uh you Can't reduce things

to a formula you really can't once you start doing something over and over again you get called The Go diminishing returns and I think this is a problem in culture you know I had this this guy came out to interview me the other day and this was funny he flew out to my home and he's writing for a big magazine and he said Ted I want to write I want to write this and I need to talk to you because you're the best expert in the world on this Subject now what is the subject what

what is the subject I'm the the greatest expert in I music or jazz or like good looks or something I'm trying to think what can I buy how how to pick up women I what what am I like the greatest expert in the world on and he said I'm writing an article about is society in Decline what is I'm the expert on I don't know to be to be insulted or complimented but what I told him and this is important I said you got to Realize that we look at the long history of decline where

the Roman Empire collapsed or whatever but in fact the more common thing in society is not decline it's stagnation right it's stagnation where for long period it seems like nothing new happens there were long stretches of the Middle Ages that's right that were like I know some medievalists are going to get angry at me oh you know the m and I hey I love the Medieval Era as much as Anybody you know but still there were long stretches of the Middle Ages where nothing changed and if you have the Roman Empire in fact the Roman

Empire lingered on a long time that's right you know the barbarians came to the gate then they left and they just then just nothing happened and and so I do think that there's a risk not that we're in some sort of situation of collapse although I don't rule I know people say there got To be a Civil War I I don't I don't rule that off but in fact the more prevalent risk the more dangerous risk is that as a culture we're entering a long period of stagnation in which everything got reduced to a formula

and the formulas start to feel boring and so that's what links what's happening at Disney where the stock dropped 10% day before yesterday what's happening at Netflix where they won't Tell you the subscriber numbers what's happening at Universal Music where they want to own just old songs what's happening at Starbucks where the the no one wants the sickly sweet drinks anymore uh so that's a risk and so how do you get rid of stagnation it goes back to this microculture right people taking risk and they're going to do work at the low level because you

work for these big companies heaven forbid they would they would fire us that's right we Show up theyd fire us before lunch these big Marvel action movies and the use of multiple people you can't just it's just kind of like the multiple songwriters they can't just have one one person that's the lead actor actress of a move movie they need to have five different ones that are all these characters comic book characters or whatever they are same thing as we need eight producers on a song and seven songwriters that's it's like the Justice League you

know of Songit but and it goes behind the scenes too there's too many too many cooks making the meal now right so you have these different protagonists and and each of these Stars wants a certain amount of screen time and their agents are getting in into the the mix but then there are all these decision makers from the studio too I know some people that work in the entertainment industry and they just think it's a Horror Story it's Impossible to have a Creative Vision get all the way through to the end product because there's so

many bureaucrat rats interfering at every step along the way and so this is why the real Vitality is going to come from from the lower end you know where people that are willing to take risks they really they really are and I think it's actually starting to happen the problem is is it's not recognized in the organs of the mainstream media it won't get written up In the New York Times it won't get uh mentioned on CBS News or whatever because the people people that run those institutions are sort of locked into the macroculture right

they're all in New York and they all talk to each other and they don't understand the vibrancy happening in the culture at that Grassroots level because I see what your subscription base is doing it's doubled since I was here last that's right I'm doubling my subscription base And so clearly there's an audience out there for us but we're taking risks and also and don't underestimate the import of this we're trying to talk honestly because what what's the big crisis in society right now what's the biggest scarcity it's a scarcity of trust right the surveys show

that everywhere uh they don't people don't trust the media they don't trust politicians they don't trust universities they don't trust the experts there's a a crisis of trust out There if people go to my substack it's called The Honest broker right and I don't pick that name frivolously and it's a burden if I say that I'm the honest broker there's a burden on me to speak frankly and and not Dodge around things uh and this is I think the secret sauce right now probably the secret sauce for you I know it's a secret sauce for

me is I'm trying to develop a relationship directly with my reader just like you are you're have A relationship with your audience and it's almost like a one-on-one relationship with each one individually I have this thing and I stole it from Kart he always talked about that individual who is my reader which is interest he's writing books and maybe million people read the books but he views I'm talking to an individual each one there's a relationship going there and so I now try to Write like the way I would talk to you across a table

and even you and I this is interesting if your viewers at home don't know this but we were at dinner last night and the conversation we had then is pretty darn similar exactly like this that's right we don't fil we get in front of the camera we don't we don't filter it that's right we don't fil not very much you know we don't filter it and that's that's the secret sauce now is to have that Honesty because people Want something they can trust and if you fool them they will not come back to you so

that's got to be the standard we aspire to and I know I did this article about the crisis of trust and I I came up with a list I asked myself why would a writer lie in an article say something they knew wasn't true and I came up easily with a list of 20 reasons okay more than are some of those a lie to please my editor okay I will lie to get clicks on the article I'll lie to protect a source I'll lie to help a cause I'll lie to help a political candidate I

will lie to get tenure at the University I will but I I easily came up with with more than 20 reasons now I can't measure how prevalent those are in society but I have a hunch that this is happening more than it should right and so that creates an opportunity for us on the the micr culture is if we just speak from the Heart and try to call it the way we see it doesn't mean we're always right you know I I'm wrong I will I but I'm not wrong because I'm trying to mislead I

may be wrong because I didn't figure out what's going on but I will then own my mistake and but if I can talk honestly I think that's that has done more for my writing career than anything honestly that my writing career has benefited from talking directly with the reader one on-one and trying to speak as Frankly as possible in a very conversational mode it's interesting because when I first started my my channel I I didn't know anything I've never been in front of a camera before I never talked to a camera camera but I thought

where do you actually sit do you sit in the center I like well that's kind of how people would look at you and they're you you could use the thirds Rule and be on one one side documentary style or whatever I was like no I'm Going to sit in front of the camera because that's how people would talk and you just look directly into the camera and you talk to it like it's a person because you're talking to the audience in that way and that's how you build that that uh that bond between people and

then I thought to myself well I can I can't take money for I can't be Shilling products or anything first of all that's not my personality um and then who's going to Believe what I say about everything if I'm trying to sell you on something so I never did any endorsements or anything except for my signature guitar from Gibson which I give all the proceeds to charity yeah and that was the only way that I had agreed to do that but I I think that um people know when they tune in to my channel that

these are my beliefs I don't temper them to uh I I get people mad at me for certain things if I will criticize an artist or Something like that or just give my honest opinion on it but at least they know that it's my honest opinion on it and it's not based on me getting rewarded for it by some company absolutely and you and I know there are we're both critical of the music industry and we've both said a lot of critical things just in our conversation here but there are also people people we trust

yes in the music business and I look at someone like Manford ier that Runs ECM records or there a handful people like this that I trust these people I trust these people and that's the basis of my financial relationship with them right so I I will I will buy the album but I know that Manford ier is not TR their how do I maximize income from Ted right if if if what Ted wants is not what his vision is well screw Ted yeah because he's committ it yeah and that's the other thing and people often

ask me this I talk about art and how Important art is and people say well there's no real difference between art and entertainment there how can you really you may think something's artistic but who are you who are you to judge I no no no it's very it's very important is that entertainment gives you exactly what you want that's the Entertainer's job is I'm going to give you exactly what you want but the artist doesn't operate like that right the artist makes demands on you Right that's the essence of the artistic experience yeah and because

of those demands you go into a an artistic situation it may be different than what you expected MH and the upside is if it works it was mind expanding it took me somewhere I would have never gone on my own right if I had just demanded entertainment they would have delivered something that was going to be up to formula and abs absolutely expected and so I'm always a big believer in these People that make demands on me if I trust them I want them to make those demands on me and this gets back to the

issue of the algorithm because the algorithm is in this entertainment area where it will just feed people again and again what they already have consumed because the algorithm is a backward-looking mechanism it only can tell you what song to listen to today based on what you listened to last week last month Last year right and I I think algorithms can be great I think that sometimes they're useful but we also need some force in society that Embraces new things yeah and and so I least have a chance of having this mind expanding experience where something

new came to me that was beyond anything I'd heard before I would not find that on my own I need the artist to challenge me and so we need more of that and the people out there that do that get my respect they Get my support and they'll make money from me too but the beautiful thing is I know that's not what drives them I know that's not what drives them you had an article recently where you talked about how culture is changing at warp speed what do you what do you mean by that Ted

well absolutely what we've got is um an interesting situation where there does seem to be this sense of of stagnancy and um sens everything we've seen before I even the elections a Reboot I mean we're going election is going to be a reboot that's right and wherever you look in society it looks like things have sort of slowed but I do think what we're seeing now is uh these companies are being forced out of their comfort zone because uh what has happened hasn't worked before and they're embracing these technological solutions in which they want to

change all the rules at once AI is a classic example of this virtual reality is Another one companies are putting huge bets on this and they want to use this to change the culture immediately into something that they can monetize now interestingly enough this is all part of a shift from what I call the active culture to the passive culture okay and so I would say the active culture is once again in the past you would go to uh record store and you'd go through all the records I'm Going to choose this one right and

then you would go listen to it and you would be fully formed now the passive culture and it's happening everywhere the algorithm is the classic example of it is you don't have to make a choice the choice is made for you and so they can shift you wherever they want that warp speed listen you're going to listen to ro Johan R today you're going to listen to to Jenny Jones tomorrow and Bill Smith the day after That and the next extension of that is going to be virtual reality yeah what what are your thoughts on

that well you truly become a couch potato at at that point where the whole experience is just coming at you and you're just you're totally passive about this now I don't think this is a terrible thing and I think it might have some sort of benefits and uses but when your whole cultural experience becomes passive there are risk that come with That you know and uh example I'll give is when I go to Spotify now or to any one of these platforms they want to send me to these playlists that don't have even any artist

names it's like uh this is jazz for studying this is classical music for relaxing this is Rock for partying the playlists are all these generic things and they're embedded in you situations in your life and I fear that this is where some of these games Are being played so for example I will find these Jazz playlist on Spotify now I think I'm considered I I don't think I'm being immodest to say I'm considered one of the world's greatest experts on Jazz so if I see a jazz playlist certain are if I see a jazz playlist

and I don't recognize any of the names of the artist not good that's not a very good playlist something something's not right something is wrong going on here and so This is this is the the ideal of these large companies now is they'll use the AI they'll use the virtual reality and they'll use these other new technologies to constantly push us wherever they want want us to be on that particular day but this this is this is what leads to uh uh a sense of of um banality to the whole experience because I don't know

the name of the musician I don't know the name of the song uh and it's it's all just coming at me in a very passive way uh This can't be good for the culture now let me give an example of what I think is positive and people will be surprised to hear me praise Taylor Swift because Ted doesn't look like a Swifty but I think it's very healthy the fact that the biggest musical event last year or even ongoing now right now is the erist tur by Taylor Swift she is doing 152 concerts on five

continents and she's selling them out and this is a billion dooll business right a typical Fan going to one of these concerts average is spending $1,300 that's the average of what they're spending for this whole experience of going to the Taylor Swift concert in some instances they're spending 5,000 10,000 you when she appears in Singapore people fly into Singapore that's not a cheap place to visit let me tell you they fly into Singapore so there people are coming from other countries to see This and this is revealing because what could be more old school than

a live concert and so we're supposedly in the digital age and the most exciting most financially lucrative thing happening in music right now isn't something happening on the Internet it's not a record sale it's not somebody streaming God forbid it's not AI it's a real artist going out there and connecting with their fans directly Just like that and I think that's great the only thing is we need more than just Taylor Swift doing that we need the whole music culture there because I like last week somebody told me that Taylor Swift had the top 14

slots that's right on the Billboard Chart yeah I'm not saying she had the top of the 14 all of the first 14 tracks were Taylor Swift to me this is like shopping in North Korea I don't know if you saw this cone and nobo thing he went to Cuba and he went To this market and these markets in Cuba there's one brand of everything there's only one brand of beer you have to get that brand there's only one brand of soup you got to get that soup there's one brand of tomato sauce and Conan had

this great thing it was so funny he's going into the store and he asked the proprietor do you have the the XYZ brand and it's the only brand there and the proprietor is such so relieved yes yes this is the brand I have well Taylor Swift is like that in music now it's it's like the only thing on the chart and I think she's having a positive impact but we need more like that because this is the antidote to the sort of whole passive thing it's an active experience of the fans connecting with the star

they love well the thing about Taylor Swift is that it's taken years for her to develop her career many records over decade and a half couple decades now it takes a long time to Develop an artist's career and with the fast pace of society and how quickly people Tire of things it's difficult to do that well this is the hard thing they call it the sophomore curse where your first album does well and then the second album sort of f out used up all your good songs used up all your good songs and it's aggravated

by the fact that the record Industries have lost pay patience in building a career and I go back to Manford iord ECM Where he's has some of these artists on ECM label he's been recording since the 70s shett 71 72 but some of the ones that are obscure that have never had a hit record that's right but he'll keep on recording them and he and this is we need to have producers and record labels that believe in artists and are willing to take chances and build the career because you're not going to get the Taylor

Swift if you give people uh a little chance and no no we'll go on to The next you know I was I was telling you about Bruce lenville who was telling me that his biggest regret in his career was he didn't sign Ava Cassidy tremendous singer died at cancer in her early 30s and then became Super Famous after her death yeah but there were so few recordings and lenville wanted to sign her but then he asked some advice from other people at the label and a you don't want to you don't want to sign Ava

Cass she doesn't have a style she just Sings all sorts of stuff she'll do a soul song a jazz song she doesn't everything she did she did amazingly but they didn't like the fact that she didn't have some simple formula they could Market her as and so lenvil decided not to sign her and then right when she was dying he realized he'd made a mistake and he called her in the hospital but she was this is like the last days of her life and he told me he said tell I made a Mistake my mentor

John Hammond wouldn't have done that you know Hammond discovered Dylan Springsteen ARA going back to you know uh Billy Holiday or what I mean John Hammond was a legend at discovering talent and what Hammond had told lenville is if you believe in an artist you fight for them you fight for them with your life you put your life on the line to fight for them and that's what creates great startom I remember when I'm old enough to remember when Dylan came out I was a kid but I remember the adults mocking him because of his

voice he has this this gritty voice and they just thought it was so ridiculous but clearly that didn't deter John Hammond from from pushing D well he eventually won the Nobel Prize in literature so Hammond knew what he was doing but this we need people like this and we need to build the careers and you're right Taylor Swift she built this over the Long hul starting from when she was in high school that's right she was in high school uh and I worry that the infrastructure and the music industry is not supportive to talents to

get them to that stage P anymore platforms like YouTube Instagram Tik Tok are places that people can go and put either parts of songs or songs out there develop an audience and do whatever you'd like to do you know with no editorial board telling you no you can't write that no You we have to have a lawyer check this out of course YouTube has its own law you know own own rules on the kind of things you can that you can put out but for the most part you can make videos on whatever you'd like

and your channel can be as varied as it like you can write you can write about whatever topics you'd like it's just governed on whatever you decide to do what interests you what interests you now Ted well I'm always excited about discovering the Next musician that's doing something fresh I devote two or three hours a day listening to new music I was wondering about that and I make a priority of listening to music from artists I've never heard of before from all over the world and in all kinds of genres do you take notes when

you're doing that no I just I just soak up the experience and a lot of it is not very good you know I I I'll admit there's a lot of bad music Out there but during the course of a typical week I'll listen to 2025 albums and there's always something that that week that gets me excited and over and I Tred at the end of the year I publish my 100 best albums of the year on substack and I always have a hundred albums there that are just that I get excited by and so this

is what keeps me fresh and vital is uh listening to music and finding new things that are happening out there and there's this Idea that um there's no great music out there anymore but it is the problem is it's all it's almost entirely coming from self-produced in Indie albums they're not coming from the record labels the majors the majors are not coming up with anything interesting to me it's very rare I hear an album from a major label that gets me excited and periodically I do a Roundup I'm going to publish one in a few

days these are nine 10 recent albums I like surprising Number of them are recorded at home people recording in their bedroom so that gets me excited in jazz nowadays and I to do the same thing with ideas I devote a huge amount of time reading every day I spend I'm considered a writer I spend more time reading than I do writing and people ask me well why do you do that and I said any process you have in the world your output depends on your input and the problem we have is society doesn't care About

our input and it should your boss never says what books are you reading what newspapers are you reading what movies did you see what music are you listening the boss doesn't care about that boss just cares about the output but the boss should care about the input that's right because if you're not learning new things and coming in with new ideas the output is not going to be very good so I manage my input I have very ambitious goals for for input I Spend most of my day reading and listening to music and then I'll

do two three hours of writing and but I thing is I need the input to have the output and so I tell people all the time is if you want to increase your creativity level your productivity level whether you're a writer or a musician or whatever you need to pay very close attention to that input and try to optimize it and so I'm always trying to invigorate myself I'm Trying to to get something in my head that's fresh that's new uh and so that makes every day interesting there's a thing a fluid intelligence versus what

what would be crystallized intelligence and people that fluid intelligence I guess would be people being able to improvise for example and crystallize is is people that use their life experience to come up with ideas if you're John Williams or something and you're writing and you're 92 and you have a whole Lifetime of of experiences to write I tend to like people's improvisations when they're younger in their career MH there's some something about I've always thought that people that are you know 30 and under maybe it's maybe it's that because the Beatles did their 13 records

and broke up the year that lennin and Ringo turned 30 but before they even turned 30 they were had broken up and they did all that music before they turned 30 years old Something about pop songwriting yes that encourage that that favors people that are young now you can have the exceptions people like Tom Petty that wrote many hit songs in his late 30s and his 40s and there there's many artists we can find find these these examples of but for some reason to me improvisation favors people that are younger you have people like yourself

and myself that are in their 60s that have a whole lifetime of Experience that we're building upon what advantages does that have over young people well this is interesting because you know we're involved in the music world which is sort of a Young Person's game um um and I know it's been true for me that my audience of readers really didn't begin growing till I was in my 40s and then it grew more in my 50s and I remember the day day I realized that I I published this book called The Jazz standards and I

got this glowing Review and I'm in my 50s and and it it was stting to position me as sort of like the this tribal Elder Who had who had withstood the wars and come out the other end and I thought maybe this is going to be my destiny and then my my readership really took off uh in my 60s I'm in my 60s now now my readership has taken off uh and your your audience is growing and I I think this I'd like to think this testifies to a life well lived and we've We've learned

things from our experiences and we're trying to convey them it doesn't mean that uh the youth doesn't have something to contribute as well because there's some things we need youth for and I do think a lot of the creative breakthroughs always come from young people but we have uh an opportunity as uh advisers to the culture or cators or uh uh being willing to offer Harsh criticisms or words of encouragement I think in a situation like that the cumulative experience is tremendously beneficial because I have to say I mean I often ask myself why didn't

I have these opportunities when I was younger you know I wish you weren't old enough I turned down I I'm not going to mention names but in the last three four months I've been approached by a dozen influential institutions will you write for us will you come give us a Talk will you and these when I was in my 30s I would have killed I would have killed to had these invitations I would have time to do I have to turn them down I don't have time uh and I always ask myself why didn't they

come when I was younger but the fact is I was not prepared for those opportunities when I was younger what I needed to do needed the time to develop and I needed the time to get the input and the experiences and and to mul Things over so I I do I'm not saying I'm I don't like living in a gerontocracy where all old people control everything I don't think that's healthy and we need I do believe that there are some things you get from experience and from putting yourself into learning situations over a long period

And I try to draw on that as much as possible every day you might might have a hypothesis on something and then you say okay I need to do the research on this to see if that's true Is that you do that a lot probably right you can't believe the I mean for example I had this idea and I have been researching this now for two years okay maybe I'll get an article out of it I don't but the idea is that what's happening in society now is mirroring what happened in 1800 okay okay and

let me walk you through this 1800 in the 1700s you had what's known as the enlightenment or the Age of Reason where everybody tried to do things rationally or algorithmically and everything is done by Rules by uh these great systematizer who were like entrepreneurs or like these tech companies and so uh in the enlightenment everything was rational and then there was a rebellion and the rationalists never thought it was coming they never saw it coming people were saying well wait a second you say it's rational but you you you Set up these factories and they

like sweat shops uh and eventually there was a decision that we need more of the culture driven by artists and creative people so around 18 00 you have Beethoven appear he's a celebrity right he's more famous than the entrepreneurs or the bankers or the industrialists just 50 years earlier check this out 50 years earlier the leading composer in Europe was heyen he had to wear servants clothing when he Worked for the estery that's right when he worked for the esterhazy family he had to work press like a servant he was scorned he had to give

all his intellectual property rights to his his uh boss and now you have Beethoven who's a celebrity yeah and so all of a sudden poets become more famous than uh politicians someone like people can't imagine how famous Lord Byron and Shelly and Keats were and this was a reaction against a society that had gotten too Cold too rationalistic too algorithmic and then these artists started creating great benefits for human beings because they were humanist so they're the ones it was in the 1820s finally you get laws against child labor this is where you finally get

laws against slavery and so you had a shift from rationalists and industrialist ruling the world to creative people so my theory is we're going through the same Thing right now you have these Tech Titans they control the world what we need is more of a creative humanistic spirit and that because a lot of these Tech platforms now feel manipulative I feel the sort of a command and control things not things I wanted to do on Facebook I can't do anymore the search engine results aren't as good as they once were or Twitter put this new

rule in and it just it feels like the rationalist algorithmic Society's getting too constraining so I'm going to get back to your question I decided 18 months ago that I needed to to learn what exactly had happened with the rise of Romanticism in the early 1800s when the culture had shifted from rationalism to more artistic and creative Pursuits I I devote at least an hour or day to studying this you know and I'm reading through Carl the French Revolution and all the books by William Blake The Poet who called the factories The dark satanic Mills

and Mary Shell's Frankenstein this was like a critique of of tech you have these scientists they create a monster right it's you this is so appicable but anyway I I have immersed myself in this sort of historical question I have I who knows maybe I'll get an article out of it I don't know but I will have things like that where I think this is a fruitful path of Inquiry and I will devote months and months to learning about this because I think it will guide me in what's happening now see it's not just I'm

interested in history it's no I want to figure out what's going to happen in our society in the next 5 10 years that's what that really excites me I I view myself as a futurist I have a very good track record in predicting I'm surprisingly good track record in predicting and so I will devote immense Amount of to try to understand how these situations played out in the past I think the same thing happened 200 years earlier where you had you're talking 1600 no yeah no you go where you had the biggest boost in the

economy back in that period was colonialism right so you went to the new world your pizaro and Cortez you bring back all the gold and you kill a million people or whatever but over in Italy you had the Renaissance with like Leonardo and Michelangelo or whatever and I say who do you want to be do you want to be on the side of Cortez and pizaro or do you want to be with the humanist and the creative people like Leonardo and Michelangelo I believe that happened around 1600 I believe it happened around 1800 and now

I believe starting in 2000 there's this new era in which the rationalist forces in society have gotten too powerful and the only thing that can save us are creative artistic Humanistic people I say all the time the problem with progress is people think progress is a new technology but you and I were talking about how bad the upgrades are my phone is not working or this or that and what we realize is that true progress is human beings flourishing and maybe we've reached a point that that the people running the tech companies aren't the right

people to get us to where we need to be for humans to flourish we need sort of this Humanistic creative artistic belief so my hypothesis is in 1400 this happened in 1600 this happened in 1800 this happened and now in 2000 we've got this next phase I I haven't written this down and I may you know I may never write this down but this is the way I think and so I'm constantly immersing myself into these Connecting Threads between what's happening today in the news today and these historical and Creative Studies in what happened in

the past how Do people even learn this stuff I mean you have many degrees talk about your talk about your your your you started out as a jazz pianist yeah well I I have I have probably the best education money can buy but I have to say it was the best education student loans could buy I didn't have I didn't have them I didn't come from a wealthy family but I did get into Stanford yep and I got an English major there then I got a scholarship to go to Oxford where I studied philosophy Politics

and economics and got got an honors degree there uh and I will brag that I beat out 12 Road scholars in my exam I I got a first and the 12 Road Scholars at second um and then I went to Stanford Business School to get a marketable degree in MBA all this time I'm playing the piano I mean when I was at Oxford I was gigging every night and I'm studying philosophy during the day this is like my dream life this is that's where the coffee Comes in this because what makes me happy is is

is balancing reading and music and creative stuff and analytical stuff uh but the fact is most of what I make my living on I I taught myself interesting and I think that I never took a class in jazz mhm I would have but I never went to an institution that offered a class in jazz and so I became a jazz pianist and I started writing about jazz that's my my main claim to fame and then all this analytical Futuristic things where I'm able to forecast the future see this came out of business school I started

working for people in Silicon Valley that wanted me to predict the future so they could make money how is this product launch going to go or how is how do we solve this problem and so a lot of what I've done and I never expected this to happen is I just took the analytical tools I was doing to analyze financial and business situations and applied it to creative And artistic things so that's why when Spotify goes public I analyze the financial reports because I'm good at this I can I can go through these Securities Exchange

Commission filings and find the secrets you know when I was telling you earlier that Universal music group is growing their publishing business five times as much as the recording business because I dig into the find they don't want us to know these things but I dig into the the Financial reports but basically I I have a a life that makes no sense cuz I did all these different things but somehow they started to Fus together in sort of a holistic way and and a lot of that is just luck but you get luckier if you

force yourself into new situations outside your comfort zone that increases your luck over time could you have done this though without the internet no I could not what I'm doing now and I think you probably feel the same the internet Has been curse and a blessing okay it's a curse uh because it's destroyed a lot of the institutions that creative people depended on in the past m in the old days I would have probably been a jazz critic for a newspaper those jobs are all gone right there used to be everywhere every city had two

or three full-time Jazz critics working the newspapers I if there are five left in the country today I'd be amazed um so the internet took away but all it it Toth away but giveth give us to us as well uh what the internet did allow was direct contact with the audience right and that turned out to me to be more than what I gave away because that's what I always wanted was that connection with the individual my reader out there I wanted to have that direct contact so what I'm doing right now I could not

have done without the internet so it's a blessing for me but I'm fully aware of How disruptive and destructive the internet has been for many creative people so I try to prepare them and I always tell people learn from the opportunities out there if you're a musician or writer or whatever try to connect with people because you can now with the internet you can connect with people all over the world maximize that if you had to give a student advice some is going to go to college for a degree next year yeah what are what

are the Areas of study people go into well there's a big push that you should do stems you should supposed to do science technology math stuff but as you know I've got this hypothesis that the next generation of leaders are going to be the creative people uh I I agree with you and I think the AI the first job this this is the the karma of AI is the the techies are pushing it on us but the first jobs that are going to disappear are going to be the tech jobs Programmers or whatever so I

I don't tell people to do Tech unless they they really believe in it I I always say you wait for the career to find you if you have a mindset that there's a Destiny for me in this world and you go out each day looking around you you will see people are are are needing what you can give that you if you have blinders on them or I'm going to be a lawyer a scientist whatever you can't see it but if you have a more open mind you you Will see there are places in the

world where you are wanted and it matches your skill set and your interest and I always tell people don't be a musician or a writer or whatever unless that calls to you and then you it's not like you choose you never and no I'm sure you didn't do this there was no point in my life I put together a piece of paper of being a jazz musician or music writer or whatever the pros and the cons if I had done that I wouldn't I wouldn't have Gone down the path there there weren enough Pros on

the the one side of the page is empty the other one oh you to starve you know you know that's not how you make the decisions you make the decisions because you feel this I there was a point in my life I felt I I'm not choosing this I have to go into the music path this is calling to me and so uh I would you know with my my sons I have two sons I didn't tell them what to study I said follow your bliss follow Your happiness my oldest son did a major in

history which doesn't seem very commercial but then he got a law degree at Harvard he's getting a PhD in Columbia right now and he's he's he could he's passed in the bar in New York Harvard log we could do whatever we want but he's decided he's going to be a professor and I don't give him any advice his his plan was much better than anything I could come up with right and Then my my youngest son who loves Bach is plays Bach all the time but he got a degree in philosophy and I didn't other

parents would would tell me why did you let your son steady philosophy this makes no sense what makes him happy and then he taught himself Finance he's got a a successful Finance career going out and is still playing B and I I told both my sons is follow your heart listen to your heart and soul so that that's the advice I give everybody and if they do That they will not be leted astray in my 20s I taught Jazz studies for 5 years um after I finished grad school at n see but I was I

thought to myself well this can't be my last career I love teaching people but not at the college level it was too political at the time yeah I left that cuz I got signed to a songwriting publishing deal as a songwriter and then moved to Atlanta in '94 and then I was taught guitar lessons At a local music store so went from teaching in a college to teach you in a local music store I taught 12,000 lessons over the course of from 1994 19 99 and then I started a rock band and I got signed

to a record deal that lasted for about 3 years or so in that time period Then I my side job was to start producing records and the band has one shot at making it and then when you don't and the chances of making it are very slim And then the band had their one chot and we didn't make it and then I'm a producer and then you work with a number of different artists and yet most of them have one shot to make it or maybe they're on their second record but then I felt like

okay well I'm really dependent in all these situations on other people either the people you're in a band with yeah people you're producing if they have the right song or if you can or if they don't implode for some Reason or if they're not good performers or whatever they have a record that that the label doesn't believe in and they don't promote it up until 2016 when I started this YouTube channel this was the first time that what I did my success was based on me alone and that was the most empowering thing well it

took till I was 54 till that happened but there was never really an opportunity for me yeah I mean I could have tried to make it as a jazz Performer but Jazz at that time in the late 80s early 90s was starting to become the music of unemployment is bring app called Jazz is the music of unemployment but I kept following music all along and and trying to and but my whole goal was just to learn that was it just keep learning well what you did and and what I did and and what I always

advise people to do is when you had decisions to make you took paths that brought you Outside your comfort zone right and I did this too and it's scary at times because you could keep doing what you've already been doing because you know it yeah and it's hell but it's the hell you know right you know and so but we want heaven and so we took the leaps and so I I'm I think in both our instances we're stronger at what we do today because we had the circuitous path and at many junctures we went

outside our comfort Zone and that is something I ADV that is one thing I did advise my sons I said do not be afraid of jumping into something that just seems far a field from anything you know you will be grateful later that you did that and so this is this is a useful life lesson but also it's just uh it's it's how you build your job skills it's absolutely how you build your job skills and there's something that's sad but Society wants to put each of us into a pigeon hole Right it decides very

early in our life you're going to do this and it's a very it's a very tight constraining situation and most people are not like that and particularly talented people aren't like that because talented people have an ability to go off into different directions and to develop different capacities and so this is a battle each of us must fight because the system is never going to give us easy Pathways right outside of that box right we have To fight our way outside of the box but what you'll and you'll see this we were just talking last

night about a a drummer that can also play the piano or you'll have uh you know somebody that that is good in music and then makes a movie and they're good in movies too and you're go wow this but that's what talented talented people are like that this is not this is not like lightning striking if you have people that have that kind Of talent talent is more flexible and so the the right decision is always the decision that takes you outside your comfort zone how long do you see yourself writing for well that's always

a good question I will I still feel excited invigorated every day by what I do uh and I will write as long as I'm feeling I'm writing at a very high level so if if I feel that I'm I'm repeating myself or it doesn't seem fresh uh then I will I'll I will step Back then um but uh right now I've I'm I feel that i' I've been given this it's a privilege I I was telling you about Jerry Seinfeld who 70 years old I think now somebody asked Jerry Seinfeld in this interview about um

George Burns yeah who he admired George Burns what did you learn from George Burns and what Seinfeld said mve me he said George Burns taught me to love this business love comedy the people are Great the audience is great it's a privilege to do this and I feel that about music and writing this is a amazing privilege so that's as as long as I feel that I love I love this I and I've been given this opportunity and it comes with a responsibility too but that actually makes it better I feel I have a responsibility

I'm trying to I'm trying to have a positive contribution to the culture in my own small way I try every day to have a positive contribution to The culture and then we're we're both mentoring other people in our fields and all that and so uh some of those things are going to continue to the duration even if I stop writing there's a whole world out there for me to to Mentor guide advise and and there all sorts of other things out there and it's possible I would transition from writing to something else at some point

uh but it I love the music I love the writing I love the the interaction I have with the Readers and if if I have my way that they last a little while longer let's hope well Ted when you wrote your article about coffee and talked about about about drinking it as a kid I I I always would say to myself man how is Ted so prolific he has all these interesting ideas he's putting out things all the time and then once I saw your article on coffee I said well that explains it well it's

like me showing up in Fourth grade and I got that caffeine running through the system so people will say I've talk about the Age of Enlightenment people will say that the Age of Enlightenment in Europe was based on coffee being imported into Europe before that people would go have a beer in the middle of the day and then they switched to coffee and economic output grew and you know books were published and uh so don't don't minimize the impact of caffeine that's right don't Underestimate it I I uh I am a huge lover of coffee

and uh that's how how I get my day started well Ted I really appreciate you coming in today it's so wonderful to uh to sit down talk with you again and uh look forward to the next time well this is always fun I had a blast the last time I was here I was delighted to come back and yeah let's do it again excellent I'd like to once again thank Ted for being my guest today remember Hit the Subscribe button leave a comment and thanks for watching