Not surprisingly, I agree. I have been wondering—can an AI-generated piece of music have soul?
Yes. I signed an NDA, so I’m not allowed to say, but I’ve seen things that have extremely blown me away. I do worry about the future of art a bit. I think future cities will have low-tech zones, or low-tech schools, and there’ll be boutique analog artists.
Would you spend time in a low-tech zone?
I like the high-tech zone. I’m a very pro-adventure person.
I never would have guessed.
I get my joie de vivre from exciting, novel things and experimenting and exploring.
If you had an opportunity to go back to, like, any recording session ever, what would you choose?
I would go see Beethoven. But that’s not a recording session. I’d try to check if Beethoven was actually deaf. But the Ninth, that’d be sick. That’s what I like. I know it’s basic, but I love, love Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. So I’d probably go see that, I guess. Also, I think I could be wrong about this. But Vivaldi was at a school for girls, writing all this music and getting 10-year-old girls to play it. I like the idea. It seems so aesthetically ridiculous.
How about films, are you interested in that?
I think cinema is still the best art form, although games can be up there. I do want to make films. A Midsummer Night’s Dream update would be so sick. It maps on to AI really well—what if the fairies were actually made of artificial intelligence?
What other themes would you look at?
I’m obsessed with inaccurate historical text. The past five years of my life have been super bananas crazy, but not in a manner that I can publicly speak about. So I want to write the Icelandic saga version of my life—a super over-the-top, magical, inaccurate version, like a historical text based on a true story.
Like Sofia Coppola did with Marie Antoinette?
I’d be even more bananas than that.
I want to get to that bananas life …
I’ve got NDAs. It’s hard to talk about things very explicitly without saying things about other people’s lives who are very private.
Well, I do want to ask about Elon.
You get one Elon question.
We’ll see. But here’s a question. Both of you are super unique people. I’m curious what you learned from him. And what he learned from you.
I learned from him, like, the best internship ever. People don’t like talking about Elon, but it was incredible to be right there watching all that SpaceX stuff happen. That’s a master class in leadership and engineering and makes you understand how rare it is to have a leader of that quality.
And Twitter?
I know, the stuff on Twitter doesn’t make it look like that. He didn’t build the culture there. And the cultural fit has obviously been very intense. He holds his people to really high standards. Watching him, I understand how difficult it is to be a great general and do something of that magnitude. Elon has an old-world kind of discipline I really respect. And I think it rubs a lot of people the wrong way. They don’t want to be in that hardcore zone. If you’re not consenting to being in that hardcore zone, I get it. But he’s challenged me a lot. I learned a lot about running my own team and my own life. I’m now way tougher and smarter than I used to be.
