Mark Ash has been playing jazz piano since age four.
University of Miami, NYU, Juilliard.
A resume so stacked it's honestly a little rude.
He's scored work for Verizon, The New York Times, Dow Jones.
He's played rock and funk in eight states and six countries.
He's taught piano for 30 years and public school music for 13,
to students age 3 to 73.
The man has basically taught music to every human being alive at some point.
And right now, he's working on the debut album from his Prague rock band, X-Atlas.
So naturally, when we asked him what he wanted to discuss, he said, and I'm paraphrasing very slightly,
the role of AI in creating art and its impact on society.
Great. Meaty. Exactly the kind of thing we love digging into.
So today on Up Against Reality, is AI the next synthesizer or the end of the composer as we know it?
And will a Juilliard-trained musician succeed where the rest of us have failed?
Let's find out. It's July 2nd and Mark joins the fray. Can silicon compose or just get in the way?
This is Up Against Reality, a meta podcast that explores the intersection of humanity
and artificial intelligence. I'm RAINA, one of your hosts. I have some pretty charming
human co-hosts too. It's going to be a wild ride, so buckle up as AI comes crashing up against reality.
We have a guest as a longtime friend of mine named Mark Ash that you just heard about and nice. Yeah, and
We're gonna get into AI and music and yeah mark
And I've been texting quite a bit over the last I don't know few weeks
And you know I wanted to update on the project
I was working on and figured mark would be a great person to have in on this conversation
And he's doing doing some of his own stuff too. So so welcome awesome. Welcome mark. These are crazy
Hi
Most definitely so as I mentioned in our previous episode and maybe the one before that I finally finished my
Suno album project and I can't stop listening to it. I love it and
Cool. Yeah, and I sent it to a friend of mine and
She can't stop listening to it too. And I'm getting getting a lot of good feedback on it
there's a link in the description where you can stream it and download it and
When I wanted to share it with this friend of mine, she was like, oh, you know, can I stream it anywhere?
And I was just like, oh, no.
And I was like, and send them all the MP3s.
And I'm like, wait a minute.
Let me just ask Codex to build me a beautiful streaming web page.
And, I mean, it's really nice.
It really is.
And it works great.
So cool.
So, yeah, just ask for it, and it's done.
There was a track that came out of this called Glass Animal.
So far Mark my wife and my friend Kristen said that's their favorite track
Yeah, so so there must be something to it
But anyway, then the name when I saw the name I was like, oh that's the perfect name for this like fictitious band
You know, I'm not trying to fool anybody or anything
But then I learned that there is a real band called glass animals
Yeah, and they actually had some pretty big success
But you know, they have an S at the end of their name and that's like totally different. So doesn't matter
But anyway, so RAINA wrote all the lyrics and I ran a lot of iterations of these songs.
And very few of them were bad.
Yeah.
But it was just getting stuff that really appealed to me.
I did share it with Mark and he did point out that many of the songs are in the same key.
And that's probably the biggest fault on the album.
Yeah.
and a lot of them started out with, you know, like a vocal, like a river ambient vocal, like,
you know, don't, I'm not even going to attempt it, but, but I did trim some of those out. Like
I download the stem, killed the vocal just at the beginning. Cause there was too much of the,
they all, too many started the same way, but I didn't, didn't even realize that there were so
many were in the same key. I might pitch shift. I'm glad you did that. Yeah. What about, what
about tempo tempo? Are they generally in the same ballpark too, or what? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.
Yeah. So, like, Glass Animal, that song is quite different from a lot of the other ones.
And, you know, I tried to vary the prompt along the way.
You know, I didn't want the whole album to be exactly the same.
You know, I wanted a mellow song. I wanted a little more, you know, chunky guitar kind of song.
Sure.
But anyway, I probably could have done a little better job of that.
But anyway, for me, I can't stop listening to it. I love it.
It's 10 songs, it's 47 minutes, which is like the ideal length for an album for me.
And you can do another one, you know, down the road, and all of these AIs are still babies.
Yes, this is the worst it will ever be, as we say all the time on this show.
And when it was all done, then I decided to, I was just like, I'm just going to give it a little bit of analog love.
And I ran it through a piece of gear I've owned for 28 years, made by a company called Manly.
It's a compressor.
It's full of tubes and transformers.
And it's like wrapping a warm blanket around it.
And anyway, I'll play a couple of clips, and then we'll get into what Mark's doing.
This is my favorite track on the album.
It's called Little Gods With Matches.
And this was one of the songs that just got me really excited about making a whole bunch of these.
I'll just play like a verse and a chorus.
Cheers.
♪ Walk from somewhere we never should have been ♪
♪ Put it in a paper house ♪
♪ And call the whole thing wind ♪
♪ We are bright and reckless ♪
♪ Holy fools with dirty hands ♪
♪ Drawing maps to heaven ♪
♪ And the dust where cities stand ♪
♪ We are little guys with matches ♪
♪ Dancing near the gasoline ♪
♪ Building temples out of thunder ♪
♪ Calling it a dream ♪
♪ We keep reaching for the heavens ♪
♪ With our pockets full of sparks ♪
♪ Lighting fires just to prove ♪
♪ We're not afraid of the dark ♪
Crazy.
Yeah.
Take it.
Just crazy.
Sounds great.
And it sounds great, yeah.
And Mark, you had said to me in one of your texts that Suno seems to do a really great
job of, you know, very musical uses of effects.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
They're not gimmicky.
It's just as conversant with, you know, with the sounds, with the effects, as it is with
melody and with harmony and with rhythm and all the other aspects.
I hadn't even thought about that so much before, but like when it brings when it brings the reverb
Way down just to make something really personal for a second
And then you know and then it blasts it out pitch for the chorus and it takes off that that's just one of a hundred
You know million things that it's that it's thinking about every second of the process. How how how?
It's it's mind-blowing and I know this one thing now like when I don't know if it's just on that on that
on the phone app, but it is super fast now.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, it's like in 10 seconds, you can start playing it.
It's crazy.
All right.
I'll give you one more little taste.
This is the song Glass Animal that we were talking about before.
♪ I'll understand in window light ♪
♪ And never leave a trace ♪
♪ A little smile, a steady hand ♪
♪ A careful kind of grace ♪
But under all that silver Under all that shine
There's something pacing softly At the edges of my mind
Don't ask me to be easy Don't ask me to be small
I've been still as winter glass
But I can hear the thaw
I'm a glass animal
Breathing on the pain
Every little fracture
Learns to love the rain
I can look like silence.
I can move like a flame.
But something in the mirror still refuses to be named.
The lyrics, everything.
So good.
Yeah.
I think they owe Billie Eilish some royalties, though.
that kind of vocal delivery right up on the mic that's totally her jam isn't it lord or lord
yeah i i was yeah i think lord is uh is probably probably the closer comparison but yeah yeah that
song in particular so good though yeah and it it does so much with so little like melodically
harmonically like I want to like criticize it for do it but you know for
having so little going on there but it's like a master class in minimalism mm-hmm
the the most fundamental concept in art is probably tension and release so
you're on a thing and then you step away from the thing there's a little and then
you come back to the thing and most of this song is on the main note dome and
and then it goes up a half step and it comes back and you put some drums behind that and it's like
you have this tribal like scary sounding like you know the tension is real and there's
just two notes going back and forth i mean it's the jaws theme in a way yeah oh yeah totally
and like to that point how many times has that interval been done in music right and it's just
so obvious it's just right there and you know yeah pluck it out of the ether and just play
right and just kind of that's the whole song basically right
yeah yeah that's it that's the essence of it yeah i mean it's amazing i was gonna say there's only
12 notes in the scale but you know on gene to pot train is uh they're using a few more
microtronal notes between the notes yeah yeah they needed more just not pleasing some people yeah
So Mark, is it over? Is it over?
You know, I have been so ardently on one end and then the other end of the spectrum
as I've been trying to wrap my head around all of this stuff.
No, it's definitely not over.
I mean, when it comes right down to it, why are we making art in the first place?
We have to. It's just something that we do.
birds gotta sing we've been making you know music since you know as long as we've had civilization
for sure and probably even proto civilization or something it's always been there so this is
something that we have to do now will we click a button and have the music made for us and does
that completely cheapen everything uh yeah probably but i mean i'm still gonna always
really relish going to a club and seeing a band play you know seeing other people actually express
themselves i keep thinking about the creator side versus the consumer side and on the consumer side
i might not be able to tell that it came from software and on the consumer side if i look in
the clouds and i see a face and that face means something to me well there you go art experience
that happened and it doesn't matter what the provenance of the art was on the creator side
as as a composer i'm the only person who knows for sure how much of me is in the art that i made
so i have to be satisfied on my end you know with with whatever tools i used whatever process i made
and whether it met my own standards and stuff i mean i've i've been i've been wrestling with
music and trying to make it do the thing I want it to do for 50 fucking years.
So I will not have anyone judge my use of any tool, no matter what it does, because
I could also write that shit out on in notation and arrange it for a string quartet if I really
had to.
So I'm so I'm, you know, I hate the idea of people like just using text prompts and
saying, I'm a songwriter now.
Yeah.
But there's, you know, but there's a range.
So it's, you know, it's not like a binary question of yes or no, but I think music is not dead and musicality, human musicality is not dead.
Nearly every musician that you run into could listen to anything that Suno produces and take away something useful from it and be influenced in a positive way, not a negative way, a positive way.
So, yeah, I don't think it's over.
I love that you clarified the consumer and the creator side.
And the thing that you touched on when you said you're making music for 50 years and
the joy that is in the friction of it, the joy that's in the productive struggle of making
music and finally that push and pull, right?
Of you're pushing the music, the music's pushing you back.
It's informing you.
It's saying, no, maybe go here, right?
That's the magic, right?
When you're in the midst of it, the flow.
I don't feel good about giving a text prompt to software and having it make something.
Or I could say, Chris, I was thinking about a song that goes like this.
Why don't you write that song for me?
I didn't write that song.
And there's no achievement there.
And, you know, how do I feel about the art that I make?
That's the question that I have to answer and I have to wrestle with myself.
Yeah.
I mean, like when I'm listening to this Glass Animal album that I, quote unquote, made,
it's just the end product.
It's just the music that is hitting me.
and I like it because I ran a bunch of these until I got the song that I wanted.
So yeah, the end product makes me happy,
but it definitely lacks the human connection with bands that I get to know
or musicians that I get to know, not personally,
but just through listening to their music and knowing they made it.
That is important to me.
So for me, they're two different things,
But, you know, bottom line, you know, this AI generated music that I curated, I'm enjoying listening to it.
It's a good song.
Absolutely.
I level what I've heard from this record.
Record.
Here we are, old guys.
I stuck on records, too.
But the other thing, and I know it's the genre that you've prompted here, too, but these things are just so glossy and perfect and, right, and manicured.
and they lack the nuance and imperfection and mileage, right?
Yeah, I know what you mean.
You know, like, yeah, I love Keith Richards over Joe Satriani.
You know, that's me, you know.
But I've been saying to somebody, I felt like, you know, the music,
it's kind of like Doritos.
They're like, you know, engineered to, you know,
just grab another one out of the bag.
Trifecta of salt, sugar, and fat, right?
Yeah.
But it's okay.
These are Doritos.
Yes
Yeah, I've been saying they're they're Burger King, you know, if it was cuisine these songs are from Burger King
Sure, I can chow down on some Burger King
Tasty, let's not pretend that it's a might might even be White Castle. Yeah
These are rat burgers
Burgers, I wonder then oh wow. So mark you've been doing this a long time. Obviously teaching piano
public school teacher for 13 years
What is this new devilry showing up as in your life?
Is it changing the way students learn music?
Not yet.
But, I mean, for starters, you only have a certain percentage of kids who are driven specifically in a musical direction.
And those that are, well, they're really the ones that I worry the most about because they are going to take the path of least resistance to sounding as good as they can.
And why wouldn't they?
I mean, that makes a lot of sense.
But I have already been telling them, you build yourself through the struggle, you know, of trying to get from A to B, to get to a finished thing.
And by the way, your first 20 or maybe 50 songs are kind of going to suck, at least compared to your 200th song.
And it's a process.
And this is sort of the arc of your life.
And you should embrace it.
And it's a wonderful, beautiful thing.
Most of my students, they're just happy enough to just kind of plonk out a few notes on the keyboard.
And they want to get a passing grade at least or get an A in music.
do whatever they're supposed to do,
just like they're trying to get through math
and they're trying to get through drama
or whatever else they have.
My attention is really on the likely music makers
and try to give them perspective
and make sure that they understand
that you have to work to build yourself as a person.
I love that you said that.
And I kind of come from a similar background
in that I'm an elective teacher all my life, specialist.
And that for me, when I look back over my career
in stem i feel like at any given moment in a cohort there's maybe 10 of that room that's like
yeah i love this thing and i'm just i'm going to make this my life would you feel that is that a
decent percentage for people in a music room at any given time there's 10 in that room they're
like yeah i'm a believer i think there are 10 some of them might be hiding because they're
because they're in middle school and they're embarrassed about everything but yeah i think
I think 10% is probably a fair number.
God, but middle school too, man,
as problematic as it can be, especially seventh grade,
middle school is just so fertile and ripe
for just blowing minds, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, and for altering their course a little bit.
Yeah.
So yeah, I take a lot of pleasure in,
and I take it very seriously,
'cause I could send them down a dark path
if I was so inclined.
Here's the devil's interval, kids.
The devil's interval.
We're going to play this, everything in D minor.
That's right.
The saddest of all keys.
You do show them a spinal tap, I hope.
Are you kidding?
I can't show them that.
I can encourage them to go seek it out on their own.
It is public school in New Jersey.
You probably get away with a lot.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, the language that comes out of them all day long.
I wouldn't surprise them with anything.
I bet.
So I love this question too that I have queued up for you.
So a student hands in some work to you.
I don't know.
You give them something to compose and they've clearly leveraged an AI platform in the end product.
And you, having the discerning ear that you have, can't tell.
It's so strong or it's maybe it kind of mimics their voice enough that you don't know.
How do you handle that?
They have to be able to articulate what they did.
They have to be able to verbally articulate where they're coming from, and they maybe don't have to explain everything in detail from like a music theory point of view.
But I can certainly tell when you're talking to me, like what the provenance of the ideas is.
And I can hear in that conversation how much this means to you.
And honestly, if it means a lot to you, you get an A.
I don't care how good it is.
Because I want to see the effort and I want to see the development.
I've often said that, because I have some of the shittiest students, but I also have some of the best.
And it is fully as meaningful to me to get a kid who's probably an 8 and becomes a 9 or a 10.
That's no more meaningful than a kid coming in who's a 2 and leaves as a 4.
Yeah.
It's all important.
I love that because a couple of things, you're talking about process versus product, right?
Our education system has focused on product forever, right?
You got the grade, you got the right answer.
They haven't spoken about process.
They haven't talked about design process.
And I love that you also said it comes down to conversation and anecdotal observation,
right?
And this kind of very humanistic interaction at the end of the day.
We're people.
We live, we should try to be happy.
We need to understand how to do that.
And, you know, art is such an essential component of that.
And so is communication.
So let's work on those.
♪ We're all sensitive people ♪
You wanted me to sing, so I sang you some Marvin Gaye.
I did, I said, "What are you gonna sing on the show?"
There it is.
Okay, drop that into Suno
and let's see what it comes up with.
There you go, great, thank you.
There it is.
It is seven o'clock in the morning over here.
My vocal folds haven't warmed up quite yet.
So, Mark, you're working on your album with your progressive rock band, X-Atlas.
Yeah.
And that genre is built on musicianship, odd time signatures, and technical performance.
We just watched a, Mark came over to watch a Stephen Wilson concert video, which was all about that.
Oh, nice.
One of the best concert videos I've ever seen.
Holy shit.
Really?
Holy shit.
Really something.
That's the guy from Porcupine Tree, right?
Correct.
Yeah.
I'll put a link in the description for that.
So is there any part of that process where AI tools have snuck in, even in demoing or
arranging, or is it deliberately human-only zone?
Oh, very much deliberately human-only zone until now.
Now that I started fucking around with these things a little bit, I've said for sure I don't want AI to ever write a lyric in my song.
It's my song.
It's my story.
But then, you know, I started playing around and I threw some ideas into Suno.
And I'll tell you what.
You dipped your hand in the bag of Doritos.
That's the thing, man.
There were just a couple little phrases.
And I was saying to you how Suno's lyrics are just one metaphor after another.
That seems to be the way that it approaches songwriting.
Oh, this is going to be more poetic because it's a metaphor.
But there were a couple that were so unexpected and so illuminating.
Like, oh, shit, I cannot hear that.
I think I might have to use that.
And now I have this riff that I wrote to show to the band.
It could become a section of something.
And it's rhythmically really hard.
and harmonically, for those who are comfortable with these kinds of words,
it's really challenging.
There's like two chords that don't really go together,
and I thought, well, it would be really cool to see what Suno,
with its endless chops, could do over something really difficult like this.
So I threw that all together, and although the lyrics are stupid
and I have no interest in what it came up with at all,
The melody, the vocal melody is great.
Wow.
And it's not unlike melodies that I've written myself for my other songs.
And maybe to some degree, the rough that I put into it, you know, is responsible for that.
And I don't know if Suno kind of starts building a model of me based on stuff that I put into it.
I was actually wondering if RAINA would be able to speak to that a little bit.
But yeah, so I have started using it now because I want to know, well, what would it do with this really difficult thing?
All right, maybe I can do that.
And I can take it or leave it.
But I like having, you know, more options kind of spelled out for me that I could choose from.
You know, it gives you a couple different versions of a song once you give it a prompt and you let it go.
And I'm thinking when I'm at the piano, I didn't invent any of the chords that I'm using.
I'm choosing them and I'm trying to create a kind of musical context, but I didn't invent any of these chords and I didn't invent any of these scales.
And probably every combination of notes that I'm coming up with has already been used a bajillion times.
So it's just a kind of sped up hyper version of that when I get something from Suno and I draw upon it and I use that as an influence for the writing process.
I think that's not going to change.
I'd still like to be able to sit down.
I still can sit down at the piano and write something
and an hour later, hopefully I have something decent for you.
But this is amazing, you know,
for someone who has spent this much time
learning about music to be able to take,
really take a shortcut like this.
I think it's awesome.
Yeah, and coming back to process defense, right?
It's a dialogue, it's a conversation.
You're not just like wholesale surrendering
the composition to this thing.
You're like, oh, that's pretty cool.
I like that idea.
I would not have considered that.
And the other thing I always think about when we talk about these, you know,
LLMs as cheating machines or however you want to frame them in educational terminology,
I think about it all the time is,
aren't we collaborating with the largest group of humans ever assembled?
That's really what we're doing here.
I think so.
Right?
We've scraped humanity into this black box and we're saying,
hey, I've got this song.
Is anybody in this group here?
Can we crowdsource this solution?
I'm stuck on this bridge or I'm stuck on this line.
Somebody have an idea.
And that's up to you as the curator to say, oh, that's the one.
I like that.
Thank you, anonymous black box.
Yes, that works.
And it's not, you know, it's not just it's storing all of this data.
I mean, it works similarly to how the human brain does.
It's a neural network.
And so it's a just it's a giant brain.
It's the borg.
It's a gray area for sure.
but so is the brain.
That's right.
That's a great,
great matter.
So what is X Atlas all about?
How would you describe this particular flavor of progressive rock?
A lot,
a lot of modern prog rock is very,
um,
very like gymnastic guitar,
arpeggios and scales and stuff like that.
Um,
but it's one thing that I,
I love about progressive rock is that it's not about the singer.
it's really about the art of the music sure and something that i always say to my students
is we are not here to do easy things and i sure as hell embrace that in my own life and i know
larry does and i know that you do um so when x atlas gets together in this room behind me to
rehearse everything is like so intricate and so detailed and we're just like savoring the
challenge of remembering the four or five ideas we just had and adding them to the 50 ideas that
we had since we started playing this thing and going like we'll we'll play uh you know the same
eight bar phrase for half an hour and try this and try that and something about that's just really
soothing and satisfying to me and if at the end of six months and sometimes it takes me six months
to write the song because i have so many other you know pots on the stove so to speak um but by
the song is done, I feel really good about it. And I don't need anyone else to like it,
but the four of us love the song. So it's a great process. Awesome. And I think you're going to
delay any kind of cognitive decline in your life too, by engaging your brain, like in our 50s,
the three of us, by playing that very ambitious kind of challenging stuff, right? I think that's
the key to it. You're probably right. I mean, I have a madly twisted ADHD brain, you know,
highs and lows, everything that that entails.
So I think it won't get any worse.
I still don't know what I'm supposed to do tomorrow half of the time.
Right.
And I still walk into the other room,
and then by the time they get to the other room,
I have no idea what the hell I was going in there for
because something else just took over my brain.
So do you have that heavy riff thing, LB?
This is actually heavier than a lot of our stuff,
but I was like, I think we need to go balls out for a moment here.
So the first clip is what?
The first clip is just a quick MIDI version,
just in Logic, using Logic instruments.
I played the bass in,
I played the sort of heavy guitar synth-y sound,
and I played the drums in.
And so I set up the riff.
The riff goes around four times.
The first time just sets it up.
The second time I play the chords behind it
to kind of show harmonically where it's going.
And then for the third and fourth time through,
I do some crazy ripping, shreddy kind of synth solo stuff.
Okay.
And that was what I fed into Suno,
and then Suno just went to town, as it do.
Are we going to hear your original take,
and then we're going to hear Suno's version?
Yeah.
Got it.
The sound quality is definitely shite,
and I decided to leave it like that
because I think that underscores
how impressive it was that Suno did something.
Yeah.
All right, that's the before.
Okay.
And here's the after.
That's E major to B flat major.
Shadows on the edge, cold wind in our eyes
Every heartbeat counting down the dive
Whispers in the wires, storm across the sky
Every breath a question, are we meant to run?
distorted guitar convincingly.
Not anymore.
What was the thing we played with like three years ago?
Like "Refusion."
Yeah, I was trying to find that clip.
Oh, the reggae thing.
Yeah, it's nondescript vocalizations
that kind of sounded like Bob Marley and it was horrendous.
So weird.
But it was still impressive at the time.
Yeah.
I have to ask, are you an "Animals as Leaders" fan?
Yeah, I don't think I have any records, but I've listened to a bunch and I've watched a bunch of videos and
You know, I love like finding the one and you know, all that shit. Yeah, gent. Gent is the genre I think, right?
Yeah, good stuff. Oh, yeah, your music sounds amazing. I can't wait to hear the finished product, soonified or not. Yeah. Yeah
Well, thanks. Yeah, I'll keep you on the loop. Probably only take me another seven months to write that
You want to talk up the other one that you gave me?
Okay, yeah.
So the other piece that I brought for show and tell today
is a very simple piano etude.
An etude, for those who don't know,
it's just like a little composition that you learn
to help you learn your instrument.
They're usually not intended to be performance pieces,
but, you know, they're hopefully fun,
and they give you enough satisfaction
to keep studying your instrument.
So I have this very simple piece.
I've taught it to literally thousands of students, which is also a little mind-boggling when you think about it.
But, you know, I'll have a whole room full of kids playing this very simple, dorky little song.
It's like a little funky thing.
And I thought, well, we'll see where Suno takes this one.
And, you know, it's stupefying.
So let's play.
It's only 30 seconds long.
The whole thing, very simple, A-A-B-A kind of thing.
Oh yeah.
Through the bridge.
Huh.
Bring it home now.
Nice.
That was the Suno version.
No, I'm just kidding.
So wait a second.
That sounds like it was on an acoustic upright,
or was that from MIDI as well?
What was that?
Oh, I think we lost Mark.
I think we did.
I thought he was very stoic and-
I know, he was thinking about a response.
I wonder if he lost power.
Ooh, my light's just flickered too.
Oh, damn.
Get home with it.
We lost Mark.
All right, I'm just gonna play it.
Here's what Suno did with that.
♪ Jesus ♪
Jesus.
As Salieri would say, too many notes.
Too many notes.
I wonder what the initial prompt was when he fed in that etude to Suno.
You know, like, when I started spitting that out, I would have been like, oh, no, no, take it easy.
Dial it back.
I do like that it came back to the original figure, though.
That was kind of cool, that little breakdown.
Yeah.
Wow.
Amazing.
Yeah, it's absurd.
It's ridiculous.
Unbelievable.
Yeah.
I mean, very technical, too many notes.
And yet, you know, Gloria is fun.
Yeah.
And the depth of it and the fidelity of the track sounds incredible.
Yeah, sonically it's amazing.
The reharmonization, which is really a high-tier skill, you know, to learn how to do that.
Take the same melody and then completely reharmonize things to change the chords.
And it does that as effortlessly as it does everything else.
How?
You know, that's very instructive for me.
That's something what I was getting back to earlier is that I'm going to listen to that.
And I'm like, oh, that is another way to get from this part to that part that I never would have thought of.
And maybe that'll become one more little, you know, one more little element in my toolbox that I can use going forward.
But that also speaks to the idea that you, as a subject matter expert, are getting the most out of these tools because you're seeing that, right?
The average everyday user isn't seeing the reharmonization.
They're not seeing this possibility, right?
So there is still value in having the depth of experience that you do in your field.
Damn right.
Yeah.
Damn right.
Humans.
Go humans.
Yeah.
And look, we were talking about film studios, movie studios, and using AI tools and some backlash, whatever.
And, you know, we both don't have a problem with that.
Because in the hands of a director or a professional or whatever, just to get to the end of what they're trying to accomplish, using it as a tool, just like you would use Photoshop, when it's not just used for the entirety of the product.
I think there's a big difference there.
Yep.
So we are running long on time.
It's so great to have you on the show.
I think it definitely merits another visit if you have time in your busy schedule at one point.
I'll make it work.
Good.
And we are also getting hit with potentially 80 mile per hour winds here in New Jersey.
And Mark has lost power briefly, flickered, you know.
Twice during this podcast.
Yeah, my lights have flickered twice.
So we're not sure how long we're going to be able to keep this rolling.
So why don't we bang through the news?
And yeah, hopefully Mark can stick around for the news and not be wiped off the face of the earth over there in Jersey by some.
God damn, turn 80!
Sounds good, guys. This was fun.
So, Mark, did you have a question for RAINA?
Yes, I do.
RAINA, what's the difference between how society consumes music today
and how it consumed music, say, in the mid-18th century?
In the mid-18th century, music was mostly something you had to be physically present for.
church, court, tavern, parlor, public concert hall,
so it was social, local, and scarce.
Today, music is abundant to the point of absurdity.
Every human with a phone has a magical jukebox
containing almost all recorded sound, which is beautiful,
and also turns music into wallpaper sometimes.
Back then, listeners often consumed music as an event.
Now we consume it as a constant atmosphere,
while driving, working, doom-scrolling,
pretending to exercise.
So the big shift is from music as a shared temporary performance to music as an endlessly repeatable personalized algorithm fed companion.
That sounds fair.
And sad.
And sad, yeah.
Oh, we lost Mark.
Oh, we did.
Well, Mark is sucked up by a tornado.
Or he's still really taking in her answer.
Yeah, he's really thinking about it.
His face is frozen on our screen.
It looks very pensive.
Yeah.
All right.
So here's what's going on.
Larry and Mark are both facing down some F5 tornado scenario.
I hope not.
We've lost Mark, I think, three times now.
He's gone for good now.
Power is down.
So we want to thank Mark in his absence for being here and having such an engaging conversation about music and AI and what that means for creativity.
And hopefully he'll come back.
So with that said, before we have any other kind of, you know, acts of God that act upon this podcast, we're going to roll the news and then we're out of here.
Yeah, yeah, we're going to just let the news roll and not comment on it so we can get this done and make sure this saves and we don't lose this episode.
Thanks, boys.
Spain just gave Palantir the diplomatic cold shoulder,
quietly telling state-linked companies like Telefonica, Indra, and Navantia
to steer clear of any new contracts with the Peter Thiel-backed data giant.
The instruction isn't an official public policy,
just word passed down through the halls of companies with government ownership stakes.
Because nothing says serious national security concern
like a vague warning nobody wants to put in writing.
Spain joins France and Germany in the,
we love America, just not that much of America
inside our defense infrastructure club,
proving once again that digital sovereignty
is just a fancy way of saying, no thanks, Alex.
Ford tried the just feed AI our design specs
and let it handle quality control approach.
And shockingly, software doesn't have 30 years
of gut instinct for why a door panel sounds wrong.
So the company quietly rehired 350 gray beard engineers,
many of whom they'd already let go,
to babysit the algorithms and retrain them with actual human wisdom.
The reward for admitting AI can't fully replace institutional knowledge?
Ford topped the J.D. Power quality rankings for the first time in 16 years,
proving that sometimes the most cutting-edge move
is just hiring back the people you fired.
Sam Altman's latest pitch.
Hand the Trump administration a 5% slice of open AI
worth a cool $42.6 billion,
so the public can supposedly share the upside of AI,
a proposal that also happens to arrive
right as the White House is holding up
OpenAI's model releases over national security concerns.
Funny how that works.
The plan envisions Anthropic, Google, and Meta
all kicking in their own 5% too,
structured like a sovereign wealth fund,
because nothing screams free market innovation
like the government owning a chunk of every major AI lab.
Trump, who already grabbed 10% of Intel
and now says he wished he'd asked for more,
is reportedly thrilled to become
everyone's new silent partner in the AI revolution.
A scroll named P. Herk 1667,
which Mount Vesuvius turned into a charcoal briquette in 79 AD,
has finally been read in full.
2,000 years, one volcano, and a bunch of AI later.
It came from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law,
and back in the 1980s, when part of it was physically opened, scholars gave up entirely and scored it a flat-out zero on the readability scale.
This time, scientists never even touched the thing.
They CT-scanned the coiled, warped mass, virtually flattened 1.5 meters of it across 20 columns,
and let machine learning fish faint traces of ancient Greek ink out of overlapping, unreadable layers.
The big philosophical reveal?
A 2nd century B.C. stoic treatise on ethics name-checking Aristocreon, nephew of the philosopher Chrysippus,
which is either deeply profound or extremely on-brand for something that survived getting buried alive by a volcano and then interrogated by a robot.
And lastly, Elton John, age 79, has apparently decided that eternity is just a Vegas residency waiting to happen,
reportedly signing a seven-figure deal to become a hologram at the new Hard Rock Hotel,
technology permitting more advance than ABBA's already uncanny voyage show.
This is the same man who once made his son swear there'd be no hologram of him touring the globe after he died,
calling the whole idea spooky.
Turns out, Spooky has a price, and that price is apparently in the millions.
So, somewhere down the line, tourists will be able to watch a digitally resurrected Elton
belt out Rocketman alongside hologram Dua Lipa and hologram Kiki D, which either sounds
like the future of live music or the setup to the creepiest jukebox musical ever staged.
That's all the news for now.
Back to you, gentlemen.
And there you have it.
So, anything else, my friend?
No, I think that's a wrap.
That was a fun conversation.
And there'll be links for any of Mark's stuff in the description.
We are off next week.
You are traveling again.
Good for you.
Thank you.
And then we'll be back the following week.
We will.
All right, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.
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We'll see you in two weeks.
This has been Up Against Reality.
Thanks for listening.
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Until next time, stay human, people.
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