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A READING LIST FOR THE END OF CIVILIZATION

By Ted Gioia

Not long ago, I got touted in The Atlantic as the ultimate source on the death of civilization. I responded with denials, and even offered to take a polygraph test.

I’m innocent. I’m just a patsy. They’re trying to pin this on me—don’t believe them.

Then I pulled out the ultimate alibi: The death scene was a set-up. Civilization isn’t dying—it’s coming back. Just give it time. (I spelled out the reasons in this article.)

Ah, but I still had some things to explain. That’s because The Atlantic published evidence of my complicity—all because of 41 mysterious books.

Here’s what they pinned on me:

Last year, I visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.

He welcomed me into his suburban-Texas home and showed me to a sunlit library. At the center of the room, arranged neatly on a countertop, stood 41 books. These, he said, were the books I needed to read.

The display included all seven volumes of Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ; both volumes of Oswald Spengler’s World War I–era tract, The Decline of the West ; and a 2,500-year-old account of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, who “was the first historian to look at his own culture, Greece, and say, I’m going to tell you the story of how stupid we were,” Gioia explained.

Gioia’s contributions to this lineage of doomsaying have made him into something of an internet celebrity….

In the aftermath, everybody was asking about those 41 books. Did I really have a reading list for the end of civilization?

With some reluctance, I agreed to share it. I’m doing that today. But don’t hold it against me. Books are just circumstantial evidence. I didn’t actually kill civilization—I just read about it. I never left my comfy chair.

It’s true that I earned a living, some years back, as a kind of futurist. This is a valuable skill in turbulent times. I probably handled this vocation with a more holistic approach than others. That meant that I took old books and primary sources very seriously, and used them to interpret current day statistical, anecdotal, and theoretical information.

In my world, game theory and data analysis co-exist with history, philosophy, and literature—some of it two thousand years old. If you can bring those together, you may gain insights that others might miss.

That’s what I try to do here at The Honest Broker.

With that proviso, I’ll recommend the following books on societal collapse. It’s not the full 41 volumes mentioned above—but below I will discuss 22 of those titles.

Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

I’ve spent a lot of time with Edward Gibbon—this massive work fills up seven volumes in my Bury edition. I won’t try to summarize a work that covers 1,500 years and took almost two decades to write. Instead I’ll cut to the chase.

Gibbon is one of the greatest writers in my native tongue. I rank him among the top five prose stylists in the history of the English language. He’s worth reading if only to admire the beauty of his sentences.

But I have less patience for Gibbon as a thinker. He was a true child of the Enlightenment, and approached everything with an extreme rationalist bias that has aged poorly. He doesn’t seem to grasp human fallibility and moral cowardice—key factors in Roman decline. Instead he so desperately believes in the glories of progress that he accepts the worst abuses of power—abhorring what he should praise, and praising what he should abhor.

That’s happening nowadays too in progress studies (as they call it), in case you haven’t noticed.

In How Rome Fell, one of the best recent works on the same subject, historian Adrian Goldsworthy insists that the lessons of the Empire’s decline have “more to do with human nature than specific policies.” But Gibbon—who was also a professional soldier for another Empire—has a hard time grasping this, or drawing out the requisite conclusions.

It’s especially ironic that Gibbon’s great work was published in 1776—shortly before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Gibbon as a member of parliament had recently voted to send more troops to America to suppress the freedom fighters.

You can’t rely on a person of this sort to critique tyranny. But Gibbon pushes his respect for authoritarianism to extremes. In a book on the decline of Rome, he doesn’t even include the collapse of the Roman republic. He starts his history after that event.

For him, Caligula and Nero (and dictatorship in general) are part of the glory years.

Simone Weil, building on this same insight, would tell you that the Romans became enslaved to their emperor because they had already accepted the legitimacy of slavery. They became subject to violence and domination because they had built their own empire on these values.

What goes around comes around.

Gibbon can’t grasp that. Maybe I shouldn’t expect repudiations of slavery, colonization, and wars of conquest from someone living in an age when these were taken for granted. But there’ a lesson there: If you’re seeking critiques of imperialism, you might not trust the opinions of an imperialist.

But Gibbon is provocative, influential, erudite, and as eloquent as they come. If you disagree with him (as I do) you still need to wrestle with him. So enjoy Gibbon for all the right reasons, especially literary ones, but if you want to understand the fall of Rome, you would do better reading five other sources I’ve selected below.

Let’s start with modern commentators.

Adrian Goldsworthy: How Rome Fell
Bryan Ward-Perkins: The Fall of Rome

Adrian Goldsworthy is your single best starting point on this subject. He sifts through the evidence fairly, and with a moral compass—which is necessary when studying the fault lines in ancient Rome. But Ward-Perkins also offers essential insights, drawing from recent archeological evidence that Gibbon didn’t know about.

Now let’s move on to the primary sources. These three books are, I believe, essential readings in Roman decline and decadence.

Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars
Tacitus: The Annals of Imperial Rome
Procopius: The Secret History

Years ago, I got interrogated in a courtroom as a potential juror in a high profile case. The lawyer asked me: “Why do you think somebody would commit a terrible crime like this?”

I responded with erudite sociological and psychological explanations, but I summed it all up with the simplest reason of them all: “Sometimes,” I said, “it’s just a matter of bad people doing bad things.”

That got me bumped from the jury. I was deemed too soft on crime.

But I will stick up for what I said that day. There are plenty of fancy explanations—for things like the collapse of Rome. But sometimes it’s just bad emperors doing bad things.

There’s plenty of that in Suetonius, who is our ultimate source on decadent rulers and failed leadership. Gibbon ignores all this—as noted above, he doesn’t even include this period in his massive study. But anyone who has worked under an incompetent or immoral leader will know immediately how much destruction a single bad actor at the top can cause.

Tacitus takes a more institutional approach, and will make you weep for the victims of failed republics and cowardly senators. The problem isn’t just bad rulers, as he sees it, but weak elites who don’t want to make waves. For that reason alone, his annals are sadly relevant today.

Finally Procopius gives you the inside scoop on the moral degradation of the Byzantine phase of the Roman Empire. He saw Justinian and Theodora up close and personal, and risked his life by putting it down on paper—although he wisely kept his Secret History a well-kept secret during his lifetime. Here, too, Gibbon ignores most of these tawdry details, and even takes the side of the abusers.

These books are better than any theoretical accounts, and will make you feel viscerally what dysfunctional political structures are all about.

Now lets leave Rome behind (finally!).

Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West

This is another massive work, like Gibbon’s. But you can’t ignore either of these sources—because these are the two most frequently mentioned titles when cultural collapse is discussed. It’s unfortunate that people who cite these authorities have rarely read them.

Like Gibbon, Spengler is a poor theorist. His cyclical theory of history gets more tendentious the more he struggles to support it. So I advise you to ignore his endless categorizations and comparisons between civilizations (which he divides into three types: the Apollonian, the Magian, and the Faustian), and instead focus on the insights and observations he delivers along the way.

On a micro level, Spengler can be absolutely stunning. For example, read my account of Spengler’s predictions for the future of big cities. He got that right, no? He is also prescient in his analysis of technology and the degradation of modern culture. So enjoy his shrewd perceptions on the micro level, but remain skeptical when he tries to squeeze everything into his system.

By the way, if you find The Decline of the West too daunting—because it is 400,000 words in a tiny font—you should consider reading Spengler’s short book Man and Technics from 1931. Or, even better, make time for both.

Here, again, I suggest that you balance his theorizing with case studies of actual institutional and social collapse. For a start, I’d recommend these five books.

Svetlana Alexievich: Secondhand Time
Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution
Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
Barbara Tuchman: The March of Folly
Johan Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages

These books look at specific examples of decline, but with a narrative sweep and granular details that will sometimes remind you of epic works of fiction. I believe that this attention to the human and circumstantial elements is necessary if we hope to understand how decisive events play out in the real world.

Svetlana Alexeivich won a Nobel Prize for her oral history of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This was a rare instance in which the literary award went to a work of non-fiction. But the honor was well deserved.

Thomas Carlyle wasn’t an actual participant in the French Revolution, but you might think that he was, given the vivid immediacy of his account. I’ve returned to books about this period over the years, and for good reason—between 1789 and 1804, almost every possible social conflict played out on French soil, with monarchy, democracy, anarchy, military dictatorship, and various forms of tyranny all battling for control of a nation. So you may want to check out other key works on this war (Burke, Tocqueville, Madame de Staël, etc.).

Thucydides invented this genre of historical narrative. His account of the Peloponnesian War remains an essential source for anyone who wants to know how nation states pay a price for overreaching. Barbara Tuchman is a modern equivalent of Thucydides, and applies a similar approach to other conflicts, especially the Vietnam War.

Finally, I recommend Huizinga’s account of the decline of the Middle Ages for a case study in a different kind of social shift. In this instance, the final blossoming of a doomed society is presented as something to savor, almost as if it were a work of art.

Now I want to turn to books with a more theoretical approach. These particular authors have been invaluable guides to me over the years—and have enabled me to make accurate predictions in turbulent situations.

José Ortega y Gasset: The Revolt of the Masses
René Girard: The Scapegoat
Simone Weil: The Need for Roots
Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power

I’ve frequently cited Ortega, whose description of populist revolt is a touchstone for my own analysis of current social trends. While everyone else focuses on the conflict between Left and Right, Ortega reminds us that the more decisive battle is sometimes between Up and Down.

I believe that is true in the current moment

I’ve also written several times about René Girard, whose concepts of scapegoating and mimetic desire help me understand surprising social phenomena that might otherwise be inexplicable. Check out my article on twelve things I’ve learned from Girard for some examples.

Simone Weil was a brilliant commentator on the challenges of rebuilding Europe after World War II. She offers interesting opinions and concepts on almost every page—and a few of them are rather odd. But they’re so many valuable insights here on matters of relevance today, that she is required reading for those trying to survive in our turbulent times.

Canetti is another wise guide. He spent decades on his study of crowd psychology, and he is just as erudite as Gibbon or Spengler, and far more reliable as a prognosticator.

Canetti won a Nobel Prize for his work—so you might assume that his ideas are well known. But that’s simply not the case. Crowds and Power is a neglected book, especially among the people who might benefit most from reading it.

Now I want to recommend works of science fiction. This may seem out of keeping with the sober nature of the preceding titles. But sci-fi is a useful tool in teaching us how societies can go bad.

George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

These books offer different takes on dystopia, but each one captures a relevant aspect of our current troubles.

• Orwell correctly anticipated the rise of mass surveillance and the degradation of both thinking and language.

• Shelley grasped the danger of tech overreach—her Dr. Frankenstein will remind you of today’s vainglorious billionaire entrepreneurs.

• Bradbury saw a coming age of censorship and shrinking literary culture.

• Dick foresaw the collapse of reality and rise of bogus replicas of human culture.

• And, finally, Huxley capture the scariest idea of them all—namely that pleasure-seeking individuals will simply stop caring about anything except themselves, and thus (like the ancient Romans) sit back and let the collapse happen.

Let me conclude by recommending one last literary work….

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust

The Faust legend tells of a man so obsessed with personal aggrandizement and scientific control that he sells his soul for more progress. This may be the defining story of our own time, and Goethe understood its dangers more than two hundred years ago.

By the way, that’s one thing Spengler got right in The Decline of the West. He grasped that our society today is essentially Faustian in its orientation. If you understand this, many things start to make sense. (I hope to write more about this in the future.)

I won’t give away plot spoilers, but you ought to know that this kind of deal-with-the-devil story always has an unhappy ending.

That’s a good start for your reading in societal collapse. It doesn’t include all of the books on my list—but I’ve discussed more than half of them above. Perhaps we will revisit this matter again in the future.

Back in 2024, I learned that somebody was trying to steal my readers with an AI book. Chatbots were still a a new thing, but I was already a victim. And it’s only gotten worse since then—AI slop is now flooding the market for books, music, images, podcasts, and every other creative field.

I thought I was smart enough to avoid it. But this week I got tricked into buying a slop book.

Here’s the back story: I’m excited about the World Cup, but want to improve my knowledge of the leading teams and players. So I ordered a book online that promised to be the “ultimate insider’s guide.”

When it arrived, I opened up the package to find a shoddy booklet that looked like it had been printed on a home computer. The illustrations were almost certainly AI generated. And the last eight pages were just blank lined paper—so the reader could take “notes” on the games.

But the text itself was the giveaway.

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Here is opening of the Introduction:

The FIFA World Cup is not merely a sporting competition. It is the heartbeat of a planet that stops, holds it breath, and exhales in euphoric unison once every four years. From its humble beginnings in 1930 to the colossal globe-spanning spectacle it has become today, no event on earth gathers more eyeballs, more passion, or more raw human emotion than the World Cup. Entire economies pivot on its results. Lifelong friendships are forged in stadium queues. Children in São Paulo, Lagos, Tokyo, and Manchester fall asleep dreaming of the exact same trophy….

It goes on and on in that vein, page after page—filled with empty pretentious phrases and vague generalizations. In the entire book, there isn’t a single thing I found of value—none of the insights and analysis I’d sought.

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A few weeks ago, I got pushback because of a passing comment I made in the article “My Nine Rules of Criticism.”

“Music has far more objective standards than most people realize,” I wrote. For some readers, these were fighting words. Naysayers came back at me in full Big Lebowski mode—declaring: That’s just, like, your opinion, man.

That’s how they see all evaluations of music—and of other art forms, too. Everybody has an opinion, they tell me, and they’re all equally subjective.

I can see why this is a popular view. It’s a very democratic notion, and a great equalizer. A music critic gets a vote, but so does the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.

Everybody picks their favorite song, their favorite musician. Whether it’s Beethoven and Bach, or just “Disco Duck,” it’s all good, man.

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I wish I could agree with this.

It would burnish my populist (and poptimist) credentials. But I’ve spent too far too many years in music, and in almost every kind of capacity. What I’ve learned from these cumulative experiences permanently banishes me from the ranks of populists and poptimists.

I’ve performed and recorded. I’ve written songs and have my own music publishing company. I’ve raised money from investors and launched various music businesses. I’ve produced albums. I’ve licensed music. I’ve taught music in classrooms and practice rooms. I’ve written thick books of music history, and more than a thousand shorter reviews and articles.

Put simply, I devote hours every day to music—and have been doing this for dog’s years. So I can tell you with total confidence: All musicians are not created equal.

I know this with certainty because there are at least some objective tests and standards.

I was planning to write about this at a future point. But when I saw Rick Beato’s latest upload to YouTube, it spurred me into action—because he conveys the essence of this reality in just a few seconds.

Here Beato revisits his breakout video from ten years ago. It went viral with a vengeance—and for a good reason.

But it’s a very simple video. All he does is test the musical aptitude of his eight-year-old son Dylan.

The test starts by asking his son to identify individual notes, but it soon gets harder—much harder. Rick eventually presents the child with thick, dissonant polychords, and asks him not only to identify the notes, but also describe the sounds in terms of music theory.

Dylan handles it like it’s nothing. And he is just eight years old. It’s really quite stunning.

Go to the 2 minute 30 second mark here, and watch. You will see why this caused a sensation when it was first released—and generated more than four million views on YouTube.

After watching this, do you still think all musicians are created equal—and that there are no objective differences? Is everything just opinion and personal preference?

This debate is more relevant than ever now, given the controversy over the recent ranking of songwriters in the New York Times. Some observers felt that the internal criteria applied in the construction of this list had little to do with musical standards.

In other words, it was a Lebowski kind of list.

And now the Times seems to be nervous about its own list, publishing an alternative one (more on that below).

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I never expected to write this article.

That’s because—as I’ve explained elsewhere—I’ve never been a fan of cowboy movies. I avoided them even as a youngster and, in later years, never really gave them a chance.

They were filled with tired formulas, repeating the same simple stories over and over. Man shoots man. Man loves woman. Man rides horse. End of story.

Or so I thought.

I now know I was wrong about all that. The best western films are filled with surprising and contradictory tales, much like the myths of ancient times—where deities can act godlike one day, and disrupt everything the next with some unexpected transgression.

The western, when shaped by a visionary filmmaker, is just like that. It’s a wide open playing field with no rules whatsoever. So you can play it all almost any way.

The comparison with myth is relevant. I finally came to embrace movies about the Old West because, I gradually realized, they define the grand American mythos, whether we like it or not. We have inherited these stories, and need to make sense of them—because they tell us things about ourselves that we won’t learn any other way.

At least that’s what I finally decided. And that’s why I recently immersed myself in these films—binge-watching them over the course of several months.

I’ve now emerged from this rich experience with a guide for you. Below is the first installment of my survey of the 50 essential western films.

I chose these films based on their mythic splendor and cinematic excellence, but also with an eye for movies that shook me up—breaking new ground in brash new ways. In aggregate they represent a picture of American life as rich as anything you will find in any other creative idiom.

I’m sharing these in chronological order. So I’m starting with a film from 1903—and we will gradually make our way toward the current day.

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The 50 Essential Western Films

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

Thomas Edison gets credit for lightbulbs and recordings, but he also helped launch the western genre—without ever leaving New Jersey. The Great Train Robbery, released by Edison Films in 1903, lasts just 13 minutes, but that proved sufficient to thrill audiences and establish the commercial viability for films about gun-toting desperadoes in cowboy hats.

The highlight of the movie is a single 20-second scene, disconnected to the plot. It shows an outlaw firing his gun straight into the camera—and has been borrowed and parodied everywhere from Chisum to Tombstone to Goodfellas. The Wild West may have been disappearing in 1903, but the Western film was just starting.

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We are rapidly approaching the 250th anniversary of the United States, and I’ve been asked by various parties to pick the quintessential song (or songs) about life in America.

So I’m turning to my readers—the ultimate brain trust on matters musical. Help me build a definitive US of A playlist.

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When you light up the barbecue on Independence Day, what song do you want playing in the background? When you hear America singing—as Walt Whitman described it—what’s the tune? When the nation gets up to dance, who is setting the beat?

I have a few ideas. But you probably have better ones. So let it rip.

It’s hard not to be impressed by online label Red Note Records—at least at first glance. The company launched on YouTube in November, and has already released more than two thousand recordings!

The company is staunchly committed to the jazz idiom, putting out hundreds of albums in just the last few weeks. But I know a bit about jazz—and I didn’t recognize the names of any of the musicians or bands.

As it turns out, none of them are real.

“Ensemble names and personnel listings in earlier releases function as formal and narrative devices,” according to the label’s YouTube page, “rather than documentation of specific recording sessions or individual performers.”

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Even so, the artist rosters still sound vaguely familiar—typical performers are called Miles, Hawkins, Coleman, etc. Jazz fans will recall actual music stars who bore those same names.

The album covers have a persuasive vintage look, even with some evident wear-and-tear on the margins, as if they had been part of a record collector’s personal archive for many years.

Sometimes the musicians even look familiar. When I saw Red Note recording artist “Jackie Donaldson” I couldn’t help but be reminded of Dave Brubeck. In fact, the entire cover design feels like a rip-off.

Or check out this Red Note artist, who bears and uncanny resemblance to modern jazz piano great Bud Powell, who died back in 1966.

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Below is my latest roundup of great new music. I often claim that I’m recommending records you won’t hear about elsewhere—but that’s especially true today.

Are you ready for a guitar-toting Greek Orthodox priest with a taste for the transcendental? Or the new star of the Polish Noir? Or a Toys “R” Us reframing of the British Invasion?

Probably not. But read on anyway.

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Atabasca: Atabasca
Italian Cinematic Funk Trio

In 2023, three Italian musicians came together with a vision of a different kind of groove music, drawing on eccentric sound textures—played by lap steel, kalimba, and guitar, supported by bass and percussion. The music is intensely cinematic, summoning up visual images of debonair spies on late night missions. If I led a cooler life, I’d adopt this as my personal theme song.

Harrell Davenport: Young Rell
19-Year-Old Blues Musician from Mississippi

This young blues musician from Vicksburg, Mississippi will release his debut album on Friday, but he’s already stirring up interest. He’s a triple threat on guitar, harmonica, and vocals.

Chicago harmonica star Billy Branch has been teaching blues for 46 years but, he claims: “Never have I encountered anyone as young as Harrell Davenport with such a laser focused drive and ability to play the blues as it was played in the bygone golden era of the masters.”

Most of the music on the album is still under wraps. But this will give you a taste of Davenport’s precocious maturity.

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This would typically be behind a paywall. But I’m making it available to everybody. So enjoy!

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Media Companies Invent a New Kind of Stupid

by Ted Gioia

Imagine if sports journalism were like an actual sporting competition—and the best team wins.

In that kind of contest, could any periodical in history surpass this lineup:

• William Faulkner reports on a hockey game.

• Robert Frost covers baseball.

• Carl Sandburg offers golfing tips.

• John Steinbeck contributes a story about fishing.

• Ernest Hemingway writes on bullfighting.

This sounds like an editor’s fantasy. But these are actual stories and bylines from Sports Illustrated.

For a period of fifty years, this magazine set the gold standard for sports journalism. Nobel and Pulitzer winners wrote for them. Sports Illustrated even convinced John F. Kennedy to write a freelance article. In fact, that was one of the first things JFK did after getting elected president.

How do you kill a brand as powerful as Sports Illustrated?

It’s easy, you can do it in one just one move. You just need to embrace the most exciting, futuristic technology of the 21st century.

That’s what Sports Illustrated did. The world’s most respected sports magazine gave up on Hemingway and Faulkner, and started publishing AI slop. The editors clearly wanted to hide this—they pretended that the articles were written by actual human beings. They even created fake bios with photos for the non-existent authors.

When a journalist from Futurism asked them about this, they quickly deleted everything.

Former SI journalist Jeff Pearlman now mocks the magazine as an “empty vessel for selling sh*t to idiots and for getting people to gamble away their money on sports.”

But the damage was already done. The magazine’s reputation was on the mat, like those bloodied boxers it had covered over the decades.

Just 55 days later, Sports Illustrated announced that it was laying off most of its workforce. The media reported that Sports Illustrated would stop operations completely.

A few months later, a new publisher stepped in as savior. But there wasn’t much to save—at least as a journalism business.

The latest move happened yesterday. The new owner laid off 12% of its workforce, including several of the remaining skilled journalists from the pre-AI era. Some of them are in desperate shape.

Former SI journalist Jeff Pearlman now mocks the magazine as an “empty vessel for selling sh*t to idiots and for getting people to gamble away their money on sports.”

It’s now a brand name, he insists, with nothing behind it.

That’s all Sports Illustrated is. It’s a name. It’s something to put on cruise ships. It’s something to put on clubs. It’s something to put on popcorn. Literally, there’s a Sports Illustrated popcorn.

This is what AI actually delivers in the media world right now.

The exact same thing happened to the people running National Novel Writing Month. They embraced AI—and then they soon went out of business.

You might think that others would learn from this example, but this month the folks at the Commonwealth Prize are in the process of self destructing over AI. The judges didn’t test for AI until after giving out the prize—an unwise move in the current environment.

Is Business Insider now going to learn this same painful lesson?

Check out this timeline:

• May 15, 2025: Nieman Lab reports that Business Insider is prodding its writers to use AI more. They have even launched an internal leaderboard—which celebrates the ten employees who use ChatGPT the most.

• May 29, 2025: Business Insider announces that it is getting rid of 21% of its staff.

• June 1, 2025: Semafor reports that Business Insider is asking its journalists to read books about AI—but the company recommends books that don’t exist. Yeah, AI does that kind of stuff.

• August 21, 2025: Business Insider admits that it got scammed into publishing two freelance articles written by AI, and apparently filled with make-believe facts. The articles were taken down from the web.

• September 5, 2025: The Daily Beast reports that Business Insider has now “quietly deleted at least 34 articles written under 13 different bylines.” It appears that the periodical had been scammed repeatedly into publishing fake first-person articles by fake people.

• May 14, 2026: Business Insider announces more layoffs. This marks four years in a row with headcount reductions.

• March 26, 2026: Subscription numbers obtained by Status, show that Business Insider is losing readers at a rapid pace. The number of paid subscribers has cratered from 185,000 to 135,000 in just three years.

• May 20, 2026: The CEO of Business Insider resigns.

That whole ugly drama played out in just one year. Say what you will about AI, but it sure is fast.

What will happen next? Only time will tell, but if I worked at Business Insider, the first question I’d ask ChatGPT is about job openings elsewhere.

Which media outlet will be the next to discover the wonders of AI? If you’re a journalist, you better hope it’s not your employer.

We will continue to track this at The Honest Broker. That will be necessary because AI isn’t going away—although the companies that use it just might.

Which web platforms do I trust?

Choosing between them is like picking which Mafia wiseguy gets my protection money. Most platforms stopped serving users long ago—and have now switched to audience capture strategies. That’s the modern equivalent of the company store1, where prices are set based on pain thresholds, not market value.

In an audience capture business, you make it hard for users to leave—and then see how much you can squeeze out of them. Spotify serves as a case study for this approach.

The company kept prices low until it had captured a large user base, but now has switched to harvesting—routinely boosting its price, each time just a little bit more. They recently announced the third price increase in less than three years. Subscribers are the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water—if the temperature rises slowly enough, they get cooked without ever realizing it.2

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That’s the state of play for Spotify users right now. They still think they are in a hot tub at the resort, but they’re actually on the dinner menu at Regeringsgatan 19 in central Stockholm.3

Almost all of the news from Spotify is unpleasant these days—but also quite revealing. We’re now in a volatile situation that could result in a completely different streaming environment five years from now.

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Today feels like the end of an era for jazz fans. Something has changed—that’s the pervasive mood right now. And things will never be like they were before.

Yesterday, saxophonist Sonny Rollins died at age 95. And today is the centenary of Miles Davis’s birth (back in Alton, Illinois on May 26, 1926). The juxtaposition of those two events is unsettling.

I was planning to celebrate Miles at 100 today, but now I’m also grieving the death of the last superstar of that same generation. Put those two milestones together, and it’s an uncanny moment.

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Rollins was the last surviving musician who had appeared in the most famous jazz photo in history—the “Great Day in Harlem” image from August 12, 1958. That was when 57 illustrious musicians gathered together at 17 East 126th Street for an Esquire magazine photo shoot.

The image was used to illustrate an article called “Golden Age of Jazz”—and it really was golden back then. Most of the jazz greats were still alive, and a star-studded assembly of them had gathered together in one spot.

That photo is like Raphael’s School of Athens for jazz fans. It’s a stirring visual reminder that these legends were once real people, and coexisted in the same time and place.

In 1996, Life magazine commissioned Gordon Parks to gather the survivors for an updated photo at the same location. The building was by now decrepit, bricked up and covered with graffiti—and only 11 musicians appeared for the reunion.

Their numbers continued to dwindle and, after Benny Golson’s death in 2024, Sonny Rollins was the last survivor of that Great Day. But now he’s gone—and this Golden Age survives only in the fading memories of older jazz fans

We still have the recordings, of course. In those grooves, these artists live on forever young, full of funk and fire. Miles and Rollins not only survive this way, but are still joined together as they were in real life in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio back in 1954.

But the permanence of vinyl can’t hide the larger fact—namely that jazz history of this sort can no longer be experienced live and in-the-flesh. This is a relatively recent phenomenon.

When I first became a jazz fan, the recorded history of the music wasn’t even fifty years old. I could see the pioneers of every style of jazz on the bandstand —and that was true whether I focused on Chicago jazz legends of the 1920s or Swing Era stars of the 1930s or the beboppers of the 1940s. And on and on.

You couldn’t even call this jazz history—it was just jazz, plain and simple, in all its living glory. And I nowadays describe this as my education, but it didn’t feel like schooling back then. It was too much fun for that.

I now write books of jazz history—but they are a poor substitute for those kinds of immersive experiences. But still, I try my best to capture in my books the unfettered enjoyment of those direct and unmediated encounters with the jazz greats.

If we ever lose the fun of this music, we will be in bad shape indeed. Preserving it isn’t easy in the present day, when jazz is primarily propagated at schools and colleges—and is permeated with a pedagogical zeal that was completely unknown to the music’s originators.

Don’t get me wrong, Louis Armstrong most certainly educated a bunch of people—but they were rarely aware of it. They thought they were out for an evening of fun and revelry.

Even Miles and Rollins understood that—they knew they were serious artists, but they never tried to demonstrate jazz history. They just embodied it. And brought it to life, night after night, on the road and in front of paying audiences.

So go ahead and listen to those classic records today and pay homage to the dearly departed. But if we really want to hold on to their gift from the past, the best way is by supporting jazz out in the wild—at the jam session, in the clubs, even out on the streets.

Even so, I will dwell happily in nostalgia for a little while longer today—and share two of my favorite videos of live jazz. They feature the two musicians I’m thinking about right now.

First, here’s a film of Sonny Rollins in full flight. This gripping performance from 1986 serves as the opening for Robert Mugge’s documentary Saxophone Colossus. When I first saw it, I was unaware of the injury Rollins had sustained during the filming. That only adds to drama.

And here’s a rare video of Miles Davis playing “So What” (from the iconic Kind of Blue album) alongside John Coltrane. As hard as it is to believe, this kind of music was once on television.

So today I celebrate these past masters, and invite you to do the same. Tomorrow let’s help build a musical culture for the future they would be proud of.

It’s painful to admit, but the comments emails from readers are sometimes better than my articles. So let me put aside my pride, and share some recent responses.

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Reader Jennifer Keishin Armstrong discovered that an AI bot wrote a biography of her life. Even worse, it made up stuff.

She provides more details in a scary article:

It states my birth year as 1975, which is close but three days off: I was born on Dec. 29, 1974. Then things get truly crazy. It names my mother as Michiko Armstrong, who taught Japanese language and culture at DePaul University, and my father as David Armstrong, a professor of English literature at Loyola University. It says I’m married to a man I met at Northwestern University and have two teenage sons. We move a lot for my job, it says, though it doesn’t say where we’ve lived. We did, however, apparently go to India so that I could research my book When Women Invented Television, which is about pioneers of American television who never go to India. In perhaps the standout moment of this narrative, one of my sons watched Sex and the City with me and shared his insight that Carrie is actually a hoarder, which I apparently put into my book Sex and the City and Us.

There is literally nothing correct in this entire previous paragraph. I cannot emphasize enough just how wrong all of this information is. And now it’s out in the world in a “meticulously researched” biography, stated with great confidence.

In response to my article on the disappearance of midlist books from major publishers, reader Stephen S. Power shared some inside information. He shows how a simple accounting change (borrowed from the Mafia!) destroyed opportunities for thousands of authors.

When I was a senior editor at Avon Books, we were bought by HarperCollins in 1999. The first change they made was to give us a new P&L to use. It was exactly like our old P&L with one thing added: a $20,000 skim for Harper from every book, regardless of sales projections.

It was pointed out to Harper that we were primarily a mass market publisher (they wanted us for our romances), and mass market worked because each month our list was set up like a baseball organization. You’d have 1-2 super lead titles and 3 general leads (the major league team), then genre leads (AAA), then increasingly smaller books in each genre (for example, Mystery 1, Mystery 2 and Mystery 3, your low minors). Ideally, you’d build an author from a genre title to a genre lead to an overall lead.

The best part of the system was that a book could save your month from any position; the leads might tank, but some book from Columbus would come up and sell 100K+ copies (looking at you, TV tie-in edition of Christy).

Charging each book $20K, like a mobster taking his cut out of a pot in an illegal poker game, would make it financially impossible to publish most of these books, most of which we didn’t pay anywhere near $20K for. I don’t think Harper cared.

Soon I didn’t either. Their second act was to lay me off. And now mass market publishing is basically dead.

Here’s an email I received from Brady Purcell, nephew of audio guru Denny Purcell, who did the mastering on 500 gold records:

I am writing to you from Richmond, Indiana, the birthplace of recorded jazz, and I hold the archive of my uncle, the mastering titan Denny Purcell. I am currently fighting to protect the integrity of the original 1989 Elvis digital masters, which are being systematically scrubbed from history by corporate algorithms.

The industry has spent over a decade pushing a “cleaned-up” 2015 narrative that is a complete fabrication. This isn’t a remastering choice; it is a technical fraud designed to sanitize the record and bury the original source.

I am in possession of the original 1989 Sony PCM-1630 working master. This tape holds the raw, physical reality of the sessions, including two distinct intros to “When Your Heartaches Begin”—a detail that has been erased in the current algorithmic version.

I have the evidence to prove the 2015 version is a lie:

The Extraction: After the tape was baked for 5 hours on April 2nd and April 3rd, I successfully extracted a bit-perfect clone of the original 1989 data.

The Verification: The data has independent mainstream verification with zero interpolations and exceptionally low CRCs. It is the raw, unadulterated source code of the Elvis sessions.

The Smoking Gun: The 1630 header data on the original master acts as an immutable technical fingerprint. When compared to the “official” 2015 digital release, the data discrepancy is absolute. The 2015 version is a scrubbed, hollowed-out substitute.

The Provenance: This is supported by the Shelby Singleton-verified materials. This is a direct, documented line of custody from the Purcell archive.

I have a detailed technical dossier available upon request.

I am being stonewalled by the institutions that should be safeguarding this history because they know this 1989 evidence exposes their 2015 narrative as a fraud. I am not looking for a payout; I am looking for the truth to be documented before the industry succeeds in permanently scrubbing the record.

I lack the technology acumen to judge this, but Brady says he has evidence to back up his claims.

A subscriber who wishes to remain anonymous alerted me to widespread impersonation of famous dead people on YouTube. This started when he found “more than 700 fake Richard Feynman videos uploaded within the last few month.”

He adds:

Thumbnails for these videos consistently show Feynman’s face and name while the small print says things like “Visual lip-syncing, narration, and edited footage are used solely to enhance clarity and engagement. There is no intent to impersonate, mislead, or imply direct involvement”.

I have no doubt there are many more. And now I have discovered the same thing happening with talks by the philosopher Alan Watts.

This is alarming. And the big web platforms don’t seem to care.

Here’s an observation about the spread of AI music into public life from reader TekTok:

I heard my first AI jazz the other day. I was in a small Italian restaurant in NYC—no TVs. They usually have Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett on as background music. When I walked in, the soundtrack was a jazz piano trio. Perfectly recorded. I couldn’t recognize the pianist. Not a note out of place, wonderful touch. Perhaps a previously unreleased Keith Jarrett recording? But even Keith Jarrett hits bad notes occasionally. Then I noticed that there was no change in dynamics. After about 2 minutes, I realized there was no cyclical chord structure—in other words, no song. The chords were quite hip and the bass player dutifully outlined them but there was no coherence.

Then it switched to a guitar trio, same deal. Impossibly perfect solo, no dynamics, chords going nowhere. At this point I started to feel anxious and told the bartender to change the channel or I would walk out. I don’t think anyone else in the room noticed or cared....

Reader Roland Ramanan pushes back on my opposition to AI, and asks me to specify the contexts in which I’d support it. I offered this brief answer (which I may expand in a future article):

I’ve been very clear about my support of AI if it meets three very reasonable demands: (1) TRANSPARENCY—let us know when it’s used; (2) LEGALITY—don’t train it on copyrighted work without the author’s approval; and (3) PERMISSION—don’t force people to use it unless they specifically opt in.

These are very modest requests, but it’s revealing that most of AI would disappear tomorrow if they were mandated. So the AI companies are stonewalling at every turn.

It’s pointless having more detailed discussions on AI use cases until we have these simple guardrails. Otherwise AI will be used to deceive, rob, and manipulate the general public—those are, in fact, the key use cases at present. I’ve described it elsewhere as “spamming, scamming, and shamming.”

Tech companies that promote these abuses should face consequences. What reasonable person could think otherwise?

Feel free to add your own words of wisdom in the comments.

In just the last few days, the anti-AI movement has achieved a stunning new milestone. It has actually united the Left and Right in a common cause. That’s how much this intrusive tech is now hated.

Check out the new Senate GUARD bill to protect children from AI—it passed committee with unanimous support from every Democrat and every Republican. All the lobbying dollars spent by Silicon Valley couldn’t buy a single politician.

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Almost at that same moment, the French Senate passed the “the most artist-friendly AI copyright bill in the world.”

It totally blocks tech platforms from stealing creative work for AI training. Instead of requiring artists to prove plagiarism, this new law flips the burden of proof. The assumption is that AI is always trained with the work of others, so tech companies music prove they didn’t plagiarize.

Once again, this bill passed unanimously in the Senate. Nobody took the side of the tech platforms.

This bill still has to get through the French Assembly. So expect AI companies to use every trick in the book to stop it. But they are now fighting a losing war. No politician can afford to be seen as pro-AI in the current environment.

And once this legislation passes in France, it will spread rapidly to other countries.

AI backlash is a huge national issue, but it’s also the hottest local issue right now. Across the US, more than 300 bills restricting data centers have been introduced in states and communities. At least 14 states are considering total moratoriums. And in places where politicians hesitate, the public is stepping in—putting voter initiatives on the ballot.

Silicon Valley has totally lost public support, and now will get punished brutally with legislation. But litigation will be just as painful. Tech companies are now routinely losing jury trials—they are so disliked by the public that going to trial almost always ensures a loss.

“71% think AI is moving too fast. Just 2% say it’s too slow. In other words, there are more people who think the Earth is flat than AI accelerationists.”

They will deserve every spanking they get—because they are ruthlessly force-feeding AI on an unwilling public for financial gain. And this is now obvious to every impartial observer.

Despite all this, AI advocates are still in denial—as we can see from a rash of revealing news stories from just the last few days.

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Some time ago, I shared a list of favorite quotations—suitable for all occasions. I’m finally getting around to publishing the second installment.

If you have personal favorites that I’ve missed, please share them in the comments.

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“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
Wendell Berry

“The only thing that matters is on this page.”
Advice written by Robert Caro on an index card taped to the desk lamp above his Smith Corona typewriter

“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
Annie Dillard

“You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.”
Alan Watts

“If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: ‘He was ignorant of my other faults else he would not have mentioned these alone.’”
Epictetus

“Don’t ask how people are doing, ask how they are sleeping. You’ll learn a lot more.”
Andrew Huberman

“Practice like you’ve never won. Play like you’ve never lost.”
Michael Jordan

“When the axe came into the wood, many of the trees said: ‘At least the handle is one of us.’”
Turkish proverb

“It’s only words—unless they’re true.”
David Mamet

“We could ride the surf together.”
Brian Wilson

“I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.”
Christopher Hitchens

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A few days ago, a major newspaper published an unusual piece of film criticism. The author wants fewer films released—has a journalist ever asked for that before?

The writer’s hate is targeted on one specific genre: Musician biopics. “Aren’t we tired?” asked journalist Rebecca Shaw. “Wouldn’t it be a good time after four individual Beatles movies to have a break from this genre?”

She won’t get her wish. The exact opposite will happen.

We are still in the early days of pop and rock biopics. There are more coming—a lot more. A few days ago, Paramount signed a multiyear deal with Warner Music, which gives it a “first look” movie option on the label’s roster of music stars.

According to Variety:

There aren’t any projects in development, though WMG’s roster includes legends like David Bowie, Cher, Phil Collins, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, Madonna, Joni Mitchell, and Frank Sinatra, as well as contemporary stars such as Charli xcx, Coldplay, Dua Lipa, Bruno Mars and Cardi B.

As if that’s not enough, Warner Music has a totally separate deal with Netflix, focused on making music documentaries. And the next step is obviously AI-generated music videos or full-length films with those same artists.

They will milk that roster like it’s a prize Jersey cow. The more moos, the more moolah.

And you can bet your bottom stablecoin that every other big label is looking to sign similar deals. After all, the entire music industry wants to make bank on dead musicians—not living ones (they’re too cranky and hard to manage).

Nothing can stop them. That great bandstand in the sky is filled with talent. And in a music culture where most of the biggest names are septuagenarians or octogenarians or some-other-even-older-genarian, the ranks of the glorious departed are poised for rapid growth.

Yes, if you’re a musician, there’s never been a better time than now to be dead. Hollywood and the music industry are in total alignment on this.

And they now how have Michael to point at.

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Maybe you thought Michael Jackson was canceled. After all, he faced repeated abuse allegations, and even made a big settlement to avoid trial—with more accusations coming to light after his death.

Maybe you thought Hollywood is driven by cancel culture. I keep hearing that nowadays.

But I now know better.

I’ve always been skeptical and conflicted about cancel culture. (See my views here.) But even I’m surprised by how fast it has disappeared as an economic force (and not just social media noise—which, like death and taxes, is now eternal).

In fact, there are plenty of recent examples of artists getting a boost from cancellation.

Here’s the unspoken truth: Everything in Hollywood is driven by money—and if the audience wants Michael Jackson, despite all the scandals, the entertainment industry will deliver him on a silver platter.

Even so, many were still skeptical about a Michael Jackson biopic. Hollywood wagered $200 million on this film—but what about that audience? Would mainstream America actually buy off on this? Can you really ignore this artist’s problematic private life in our sensitized post-Epstein environment?

We now know the answer is a resounding yes.

The Michael biopic is drawing huge crowds, and is the hottest movie in the US right now. The film has generated a stunning $700 million in ticket sales since its debut four weeks ago—that already makes it the second biggest music biopic in history, beating out Elvis (2022) and poised to surpass Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).

In a spillover effect, Michael Jackson songs have returned to the charts after the release of the film. This is a dream come true for the major record labels—their highest priority in 2026 is to shift the focus of the music industry from new songs to old songs. A few years ago, that might have seemed an impossible task, but it’s actually happening.

Check out the biggest hit songs right now. It’s not just Thriller thrilling again—the whole list is yesterday’s news.

The last time old songs were this popular happened before the Renaissance, during the so-called Dark Ages. Back then, the Church imposed this reverence for antiquated music. Nowadays the same thing is happening, but the proponents are the lawyers, accountants, and wannabe private equity bros who run the music business.

Get ready for more of this—in both the music industry and the film business.

Hollywood may still be in a state of crisis, but movies about musicians are hot—seven out of the top ten all-time singer biopics were released within the last decade. Even as superhero and sci-fi movie franchises falter, these celebrations of hit songs of yore gain in popularity.

You might say that music movies are the new franchises—and will get the same sequel/prequel/spinoff treatment

It’s already happening. For example, the first Elvis movie from 2022 was followed by a second one, directed by Sofia Coppola (told through the perspective of Priscilla Presley) in 2023. The King also shows up in Elvis and Nixon (2016), the Sun Records TV series (2017), and the HBO two-part documentary Elvis Presley: The Searcher (2018).

Yes, Elvis is alive—at least as a box office phenom. Or consider the four Beatles movies slated for release in 2028. Meanwhile those other franchises (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc.) are in the doldrums.

Michael Jackson is also destined for franchise status. The Michael biopic ended in the late 1980s, and left viewers with a teaser quote: “His story continues.”

“We absolutely have more story to tell,” brags studio exec Adam Fogelson. And if they can turn a tiny Hobbit into three films running 532 minutes, just imagine what they can do with the King of Pop—with his 35 gold records and all that Jackson 5 prequel material. If people keep buying tickets, the story could go on forever.

All this might not be so bad if musician biopics weren’t so fake. The whitewashing of Michael Jackson is just another example of the phoniness. I’m now old enough to watch films of this sort where I knew personally some of the people portrayed onscreen, and the gap between the film and reality is wider than Snake River Canyon—and way too wide to jump if you care at all about the real artists and real history behind these films.

Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoy these movies—but almost solely for the songs. The wise director puts them at the forefront of the film.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a perfect example of this. Most of the last half hour of the movie is just the reenactment of a single concert. That left us all feeling good when we walked out of the movie theater.

Yes, this is how you make a musician biopic.

So now you know that I’m no Grinch. I like familiar hit records as much as any other Who in Whoville. But I also like new music.

That’s always where vitality and excitement reside in our culture. That’s where surprises are still possible. That’s where the future is born.

Not long ago, Hollywood made millions of dollars from movies that featured all new songs. Can you believe it? Those films were called musicals, and in many years they were the biggest box office successes in the land.

Families would go see The Wizard of Oz or The Lion King or Mary Poppins, and fall in love with music they had never heard before. Disney exists as a film powerhouse today almost solely because its founder built his blockbuster movies around new songs. His successors have forgotten how to do that—or maybe they are just too lazy or risk-averse to try.

I’d like to see that happen again. And I don’t see why it’s not possible.

In those days, there were also movie musicals featuring rising pop and rock stars. The Beatles made movies with all new music. Elvis did the same. These happened at the outset of their careers, when they breaking down barriers and creating new sounds. Now those very same artists, most of them dead, are coming out with movies again—but they’re filled with songs old enough to get a 15% discount at Denny’s.

Sure there’s also a place for these jukebox movies filled with melodies from the last century—just like there’s a place for karaoke and cover bands and all those other tributes to the past. But none of these tributes would exist if some innovative musicians (and their record labels) hadn’t been willing to take a chance on these songs when they were new and untested.

So go ahead and see Michael. Feel free to stream all his old hits, and get up and do a moonwalk dance, too, if you want. But let’s also leave some space in the culture for new musicians, new songs, and new stories. Otherwise we’re just living in the past—and that’s a terrible disservice to the future.

Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Ted Gioia.

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Ted needs no introduction here—The Honest Broker is his newsletter, after all. But I want to tell you a little bit about how Ted and I started this project.

I received a message on Substack last year, and when I saw it was from Ted, I assumed it was fake. But it turns out it was real, and Ted asked me if I wanted to get lunch. After talking for a few hours about books, Substack, and new media, Ted asked if I wanted to launch a podcast on The Honest Broker. His only rule: I needed to find the most interesting people as guests.

Well, this meant that eventually I had to interview Ted. We sat down to talk about media consolidation, building alternative institutions, and human creativity.

Below is a transcript of part of our conversation. For the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.

I know you’ll enjoy this.

A CONVERSATION WITH TED GIOIA

JARED: Ted Gioia, thank you for joining me.

TED: Well, thank you for having me. This is something we’ve long awaited.

JARED: I want to start off with a big question. I think it’s fair to say that we’re living in a time of it institutional collapse. We had these prestige institutions that we used to rely on: The New York Times, The New Yorker, academia. And people could rely on them to vet new writers, vet ideas, and movements, and they just did a lot of credibility building for us. It took a lot of the work out of our hands. I think we just don’t have that same trust in those institutions anymore, and people don’t rely on them in the same way anymore. And things are increasingly more decentralized.

Now, part of me finds this really exciting because it means for people who operate outside of those systems—I think you and I would be two examples—it means there’s more opportunity. But it also raises the question of whether or not we need to start building new institutions.

TED: Well, there’s been a great promise that the internet would open up everything to us. All of a sudden, if I’m a writer, a musician, a visual artist, a videographer, all of a sudden, I could reach my audience directly with the internet. And we thought this was going to lead to an enormous blossoming of culture where everyone had this freedom and a thousand flowers blossomed.

But that hasn’t happened, really. And in fact, what you see is that the institutions have become more consolidated and stagnant over time.

Let me give you a few figures. Right now, most of the movies made come out of four Hollywood studios. They control it. Most of the movie distribution into the home comes from just four streaming platforms. In fact, in many instances, it’s the same company doing the movie-making as the streaming.

That was illegal until very recently. In 1948, the Supreme Court said that a movie studio could not own distribution. And that allowed a lot of freedom. After that, there was a real flourishing of indie movies in the United States and overseas. But now we’ve stagnated to the point where there are just four streaming platforms, four movie studios.

In music, it’s even worse. There are just three companies that control most of the hit songs. If you look at publishing, five companies control 80% of the books out there. It’s just ridiculous.

As these industries become more consolidated, they become more bureaucratic, they move more slowly, they’re more cautious. Yet we’re more dependent on them than ever before.

Now, we’re lucky that we still have an opportunity with a counterculture—and I’ll talk about that later. But I think the first thing you see is that the institutions have killed themselves by this consolidation, swallowing up their competitors, and creating this monolithic culture that’s not good for anybody.

JARED: And I think it creates a winner-takes-all mentality, where before you could have movies that did well, but they kind of fall within the middle of a normal distribution. And then you’d have some outliers that did really well, and then you’d have some that bombed. And I think that as things have become more decentralized, you have many more flops. They never get off the ground, or they can’t even get funding to begin with. And then you have these big winners that take everything and maybe that that group has grown a little bit, and then it’s the middle of the culture that seems like it’s been hurt the most by this.

I mean the band that sells well but isn’t going to go platinum. The writer who is a solid mid-lister but may never make the Times list. Someone who could make a living writing for magazines but couldn’t necessarily get 100,000 readers on their own newsletter. And that just seems like a less interesting culture because it doesn’t give that kind of room for experimentation or just that kind of pluralistic flourishing that would allow people to just have interesting ideas.

TED: I lived through much of the transition. I started out life writing books, and I was what they would call a midlist writer. That meant I wasn’t going to sell a million copies. I wasn’t going to be at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, but I would sell enough copies to be profitable. And so my first two books, you know, the expectation was I would sell 5,000 to 10,000 copies, and that would be fine.

My third book really broke out and then it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. But today I wouldn’t even get a chance to get to that third book because from the get-go now they don’t want to publish a book that doesn’t have the potential to do 50,000 to 100,000 right off the bat. This presents a tremendous obstacle to young writers and they don’t have a solution

It’s even worse in movies where the studios don’t want a movie that would be profitable but not have that blockbuster aspect to it—they want a movie that could have a billion dollars in revenue. If you go look at the best movies in the history of Hollywood, very few of them had those blockbuster numbers. But where would we be without the Citizen Kanes of this world and the smart indie films that are being squeezed out?

JARED: There used to be this saying in publishing that the best advertising for your first book was your second book. So it was thought, okay, your first book didn’t sell that well, but you get a second book. Maybe it’ll pick up eventually. If your third or fourth book sells fabulously well, people will say, " What else has this guy written?”

I bet your first book, after it sold a few thousand copies, sold a lot more after your third book sold 100,000 copies.

TED: You’re exactly right. The first book I wrote is called The Imperfect Art. I started writing that the day I got out of the philosophy program at Oxford. Eventually, it was very successful, but at first, no one wanted to touch this.

I had a prominent agent say, "This is not a real jazz book.” You should be a real music writer, not one of these phony music writers. But I did get it published. It sold a few thousand copies. But now, let’s fast-forward to 40 years later. I’ve gotten two translation deals for that book in the last 12 months. And the only reason that happens is that I used that as a stepping stone.

It’s one of the reasons I like Manfred Eicher at the ECM label. He has artists on that roster that he’s recorded for 30 or 40 years and have never had a hit record. But he believes in them. This is part of why his audience trusts the label, because they see his personal loyalty to what he believes in. We need more of that. But in fact, we get less of it.

The loyalty factor is gone. It’s very hard now to find a publisher or a record label that will be loyal to you for more than one project.

JARED: And it seems like consumers have changed their mindset in response to this. There were times in high school that if a new band came out from a label that I liked, I bought the CD. And even if I hadn’t heard it, because I’d say, I trust this label. I like what they do. I’ll keep buying it.

And people used to think about publishers like this too. Knopf used to run ads for Knopf, not just for their books. They would say, if you have the borzoi on the book, it’s a book worth buying. But Consumers don’t think about it like that anymore. Maybe they do in some parts of music, but do they do that with any of the big five in publishing?

TED: Well, they do it in the indie world, and we need to talk about that because in the indie world, you do have loyalty to a specific person, a specific name, a specific creative umbrella. But for example, in music, how can you? Is there anybody at Universal Music or Spotify who we might say is a person whose judgment I trust? No—and if you look at the interviews with them, once again, they just talk about financial metrics.

The whole corruption of aesthetic language is the application of financial jargon to artistic creativity. This is why instead of calling a work of art by its real name, we call it content. This is why we call a movie a brand franchise. This is why the head of the big AI music company talks about the productivity of being able to release 100 tracks in a week. These are all words—this jargon, this terminology—that come from the business world. It has no place in the creative world. But it’s become so pervasive that even artists begin to talk about their own work as content.

This is something that is only happening because we have replaced a tradition where you have a person who has values and applies those values. We’ve replaced that with a business/finance optimization mindset across the creative economy.

“You’re going to start having private equity roll-ups on Substack…..People have no idea what’s coming down the pike.”

JARED: But there are the indies. There is a Texas-based publisher that I like a lot called Deep Vellum. They publish a lot of very experimental literary work. They have a sub-imprint called Dalkey Archive that reprints classic works, a lot of modernist stuff that’s fallen out of print. They just reprinted Gass’s The Tunnel. which was out of print for God knows how long. I actually I donate money to them every month, and they send me a book, and I would only do that because I trust their taste.

TED: And it does exist, but you have to seek it out. Where does the counterculture exist now? It’s indie presses like you mentioned. I think the indie culture operates on Substack. The indie culture operates on YouTube—which is curious because YouTube is owned by Alphabet. But still it’s become a platform where indie people can speak their mind. You find this on Bandcamp, where bands come out with their own album and work directly with their fans.

There is a counterculture out there, but it’s struggling now because it is starved of cash. The media often operates on advertising, but two companies control 60% of the ad money online. It’s Alphabet and Meta. So basically, two companies control that.

The other way is to get your name out through social media. But two billionaires control social media. It’s the same consolidation on the institutional side that we saw on the creative side. I really think there are about 50 people who control the culture now, which is frightening.

Go back a generation. Tom Wolfe made an amazing claim. He said the art world is controlled by 3,000 people. Now what did he mean by that? Well, he’s talking about painters, sculptors, and he says that these 3,000 people decide who’s hot and who’s not. Now 3,000 people, that didn’t seem like much, but that would be great compared to what we have now.

JARED: And we see this even on places like YouTube, where big channels are getting bought by private equity. And I think, inevitably, they kind of get turned into content farms.

I actually received an email a few days ago asking if I would audition to be the host of a spinoff channel of one of these channels, which had been bought by a private equity firm. I’m not going to do this. These channels became their own content engines, but you have to industrialize the production process. These creators made a formula that worked for them, but I know some of the channels that have been bought, and they’ve become worse because they get standardized There’s no authenticity to it anymore.

I wouldn’t be shocked if eventually you saw people buying newsletters on Substack.

TED: I fully expect that. Two years ago, I said you’re going to start having private equity roll-ups on Substack. That will inevitably come to all these channels, to YouTube channels, Substack—that’s going to really take off. People have no idea what’s coming down the pike.

Now, what does that mean for us? Well, for culture, that’s bad news.

JARED: What’s the response to this? Clearly, there are real problems. Do we just sort of remain fiercely independent and say we can’t be bought, or do we try to build competing institutions?

I think tastemaking is a real role in the culture, without those independent tastemakers, you just are kind of ceding all the ground to corporate control. What’s the positive vision that kind of comes with all the doom and gloom?

TED: Well, if you go back in the late 1950s, there was a debate in England. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. It was called the Two Cultures Debate, and the two protagonists were C.P. Snow, who was a novelist who had become like a civil servant and a quasi-technocrat and F.R. Leavis, the literary critic. And they debated the two cultures—in which one culture was scientific culture and the other one was humanities. Which one was more important? Did you need both?

I would say we need a similar debate now, but the two cultures are different now. There’s the institutional culture, and then there is the alternative culture. Unless you find some way of mobilizing an audience for them, we’re going to be in deep trouble. So, a lot of what I do on Substack is serving as an advocate for the counterculture. I serve as an advocate for the indie creator. I am always promoting others’ work.

I think the way it has to work is we need to create parallel institutions. I think we’re going to need to support these parallel institutions, and there’s going to be a parallel culture.

“We have monopolies and cartels, and what we need to be is trust-busters….We’ve got to create alternative platforms so that creative people can reach their audience.”

So there are some things we still need to do. For example, look at all the awards and prizes given out in culture—all of them go to the institutional people. This is one of the things I said when I first met the people running Substack. I said you’ve got great writers here, you’ve got great creativity, but you need to get the kind of credibility that comes with awards, and you should do awards every year for indie writers and indie music—because we need to have that institutional support for what we do.

I saw a figure the other day, it was horrifying. It said that if you look at all the big books that have won prizes in this century, they were represented by just 25 literary agents. That’s what you call a cartel! We have monopolies and cartels, and what we need to be is trust-busters. We’ve got to break up the monopolies. We’ve got to create alternative platforms so that creative people can reach their audience. Because the audience is hungry for this.

JARED: There are two paths that come to mind. They’re very different, but maybe they’re mutually supportive. One is just to give people money. You know, there’s a writer who can’t quit his day job so he can’t finish his novel, but you know he’s great. Give him money. There’s a painter who needs more time to paint. Give her money.

The other option is to start building things like more publishers. I mean, I have a fairly simplistic view of the economy, maybe, but my thought is that competition is good. I’ve talked to you about this before, but I have a pipe dream of starting a publishing company one day, and the idea is to find writers I really care about. That’s harder than giving grants, because it requires logistics and overhead and salaries, but I think you need that too. You need those smaller institutions that can serve as disruptors.

TED: Let me make a prediction. I think you are going to find influencers becoming their own institutions. The last time I saw Rick Beato I said, “Hey Rick, we are very disappointed in what the record labels are doing. That means you’ve got to be the next record label.” It sounds like a strange concept, but it really isn’t, because Rick Beato has millions of followers. Why? Because people trust Rick Beato. They trust him more than they trust Universal Music or Sony.

This is the opportunity. The influencer is who people trust. And then the next stage will be the influencers turn into institutions of their own.

JARED: I would want it to be that when I retired or died, someone else was running it, and it was its own institution that could continue right. Knopf was a great publisher even after Alfred Knopf died. You you want institutions that can continue, that can survive any one person. That’s my hope.

TED: And that will happen. I think we are still five years away from that. But the trend I see is, first of all, the mainstream culture will continue to die and stagnate and lose the trust of the audience. That’s already almost played out. They will not be able to turn around their businesses. They really won’t, because they’re so bureaucratic in a consolidated industry.

So the next stage is you’re going to have an alternative creative economy, and you’ll have alternative platforms. These will start as influencers, as individuals. Then the individuals will spin off businesses, and the businesses will survive. And this will be the breath of fresh air we need. What people like you and I want to do is to accelerate that process.

JARED: We talk about trying to build things outside of the clutches of the billionaires and all the conglomerates. But I’m a YouTuber, and I write on Substack. You’ve got a new sort of phase in your career when you started writing on Substack. So we, to some extent, operate within these systems. I’m just curious how you think about that relationship.

TED: Well, Substack, like any platform, is owned by investors, and that always poses a risk because the investors may have completely different goals than you and I have as creative people. And so this is something we need to take seriously, but at least with Substack, we have protections. The first and foremost one is I control all my intellectual property.

But probably our best safeguard is that Substack staked itself out from its early days onward as a supporter of writers and creative people like us. If it starts jerking us around, we leave. So we don’t have any complete and full protection with Substack. But to my mind, this is a gamble I’m willing to take. What I try to do is operate within the Substack system and be a positive influence inside it.

And so far, Substack has allayed my concerns, and they have rewarded my trust. But this is an issue. And whenever you’re involved in any sort of institutional setting, you always have to ask yourself, "Am I aligned with their values? Are their values aligned with mine?”

One of the good things about any indie culture is that in a thriving indie culture, there are thousands of voices. There are thousands of alternative newspapers. There are indie radio stations. In a thriving indie culture, no one has so much power that they can corrupt things. And that’s one of the reasons why we need a widespread counterculture. And even Substack, Bandcamp, Patreon, they aren’t enough. We need more indie institutions.

JARED: And when you started growing on Substack, it seemed like you broke a big rule. When I talk to publishers, they want to place you in a really narrow niche. You write about X and Y, the intersection, something like that. They want to be able to label you really clearly. And if you sell them one book, and then maybe you want to talk about writing another book, they want to know if it is the same sort of book. And I think you see this a lot with people who have successful debuts, especially in nonfiction, and their second book should just have the same title with a 2 at the end. They never sell as well, but publishers seem to push them in that direction. But when I look at your Substack, I see that you write about everything.

TED: For a long time, editors only wanted me to write about jazz. But in fact, what I found after I launched on Substack is that my articles on other subjects actually have reached a larger audience than my jazz articles.

I think, in general, society pushes everybody into tight pigeonholes. You have the person at the factory that just makes part of a widget every day. You have all sorts of talented people who are told to do the same thing over and over again. But when you give a talented person the opportunity to go outside this narrow pigeonhole, they will pleasantly surprise you. So I’ve taken that to heart myself—and I’ve been rewarded for that.

I decided early on that the most scarce thing in media was trust. And that if I could earn the trust of my reader, I would be rewarded, and they would be rewarded. So that was the turning point for me. And I think other writers minimize the importance of this. If you are not earning the trust of your reader you’re creating a problem for yourself.

But there was a second thing I did, and this almost happened naturally, but it proved to be very important. Throughout my career I’ve changed my prose style for every book, and if you look at my various books you’ll see the way I construct sentences and paragraphs changes over time. When I joined Substack, I decided I needed a new way to write for Substack. And what I decided, I think, proved decisive. I decided I would write the way I talk in conversation.

As you know, when we sit down and talk over a meal, we speak very candidly. We speak very frankly. It sounds a lot like what we’re doing right now, too, because we’re very frank here. But that’s what makes a personal conversation so interesting. So, I decided I would write the way I speak to a trusted friend in conversation. I would do that with my Substack. It’s conversational—and it’s fitting for a counterculture or an alternative culture or indie culture to have that conversational vibe.

JARED: How do you think that’s going to translate to when, say, people who blow up on Substack want to write books?

TED: I’ve asked myself this question because I’m toying with the idea of going back and writing books again. And I ask myself: Do I write the same way for a book as I do on Substack? And my feeling right now is no. My thought is that if I write another book, once again, I will reinvent myself for the nature of the book. My style as a writer must adapt. So if I go back to writing books, I will probably change my style and it’ll be less conversational.

But there’s also an argument you could make that the next phase in writing books will be more conversational books. I take that possibility seriously.

JARED: I saw a phrase that was sort of levied against a few recent books that have come out from writers who have gotten kind of big on Substack, and they called them ‘Substack books.’ This was meant sort of pejoratively to say that Substack is really good for developing an idea across maybe 3,000 words, but it’s not lending itself to sustaining an idea across 50,000 or 60,000 words, and that some people, as they’re making the leap from writing essays on Substack to writing a book, tend to group Substack posts thematically into a book.

TED: I think that’s true, but you know I blame the publishers for that. As you know, I made a decision five years ago to put all my energy into Substack. During that period, I’ve turned down every freelance inquiry unless it allowed me to publish what I wrote on Substack. And so I’ve turned down all sorts of book opportunities. But I continue to hear every few weeks from some editor at some publishing house, and the query I get is almost always the same. What they say is, “Ted, I saw this article you wrote last week. Could you turn that article into a book?”

I tell them that’s not a good idea because there’s going to be a lot of padding. You can’t do a book that way.

What you find in publishing now for these Substack books is the editors are doing exactly what I said. They find some Substack writer and say turn an article into a book, and you get a book out there that doesn’t work very well. The problem there, though, is not that the Substack writer doesn’t have talent; it’s that this is how editors operate in the current day.

They have become so cautious. And also once again it’s the intrusion of financial metrics.

JARED: I have a book coming out next year, and it’s a very slow process, but I also had a lot of time to sit with my ideas and that was so helpful. That book is so much better than I thought it was originally going to be, and I hope other people agree. I wrote a proposal, I started working on is, I worked with an editor, and then I thought I’d finished it, but we edited it again for three more months, and it became much better in those three months. There was real value in being able to be slow. And that’s my big worry if we go all in on new media. Sometimes art requires that time. And that’s the one thing I don’t feel when I’m producing stuff for the internet.

TED: Some projects require time, absolutely. But we need to reclaim the publishing industry—the publishing industry and the slow process of making a book. We can’t let that go away, because as you’ve pointed out, sometimes you need to have someone support you for three, four, five years to make it. We need to reclaim publishing with real diversity and a real, broader net. And until we do that, we’re going to be in bad shape.

I would like to see Substack get involved in publishing books, for example. You know, that might be a way to do that. I think with print-on-demand now, you could do publishing without a huge amount of overhead. And so that might be the next step.

JARED: Do you have big projects that you want to take more time with in the future?

TED: I always have more ideas than I can pursue. But yeah, I could see myself once again going back and spending years on a project or even going into fiction. I’ve written a lot of unpublished fiction, and it would be nice to be able to turn to that.

JARED: Let me ask you about something different. I’m noticing a recurring phenomenon that when a new band pops up, they’re marketed as sounding like a band from twenty years go. Do you see this too in music? Is there more of an emphasis for a new act to say, " Oh, we’re recreating this old thing” rather than making something new?

TED: Once again, I blame the institutions, not the artists. The institutions have created very hardened genre definitions. So if I come out with a country song that sounds different from the other country songs, it won’t get on the radio. It won’t get on the playlist. That’s why if I listen to country radio now, the songs sound the same as they did 10, 20 years ago. If I listen to the jazz radio station, I know that they prefer playing jazz that sounds a certain way.

JARED: I think it’s helpful to remember that ‘genre’ is a marketing term. But if you go in thinking, " Oh, I’m going to play this genre,” you’ve already started by putting yourself in a marketing box before you’ve gotten to the creative part.

TED: The most creative music now is happening on the margins of the genres. As you know, I listen to new music every day, and I take notes. I write a brief description of what kind of album it is. What I find is that often with the best albums, I can’t come up with the words. This person is doing something that doesn’t fit my narrow categories. Now, for me, that’s a great thing. This is mind-expanding, but for the music industry, it’s terrible.

JARED: Can we talk a little bit about the New Romanticism?

TED: That was a term I started using as a joke. I looked at the Romantic movement that emerged around 1800. It was a reaction to the industrial revolution, to the tech revolution of its time—to this intense rationalism. This was the age of enlightenment, where everything was supposed to be decided by human reason, so you had technology-intense rationalization and urbanization. And all of a sudden a number of artists said “We don’t want this. We want human feeling.”

So, I made a joke saying with technology so dominant and manipulative right now, we might need a New Romanticism. I just said that as a quip, and then over the next few weeks, I started thinking about it. and I said, “You know, this is actually true! This is what we need.” And I know that when I mentioned this, I got a favorable response.

But in terms of actually getting momentum behind the New Romanticism, we’re still in the very early days…..I think it is a broader indication of the direction we’re moving in.

JARED: Ted, we always end by asking for a book recommendation for the audience. Do you have anything for us?

TED: I’m going to return to David Foster Wallace, who’s had a very strong impact on me. In fact, it’s surprising because most of my influences that shaped my creative work came when I was very young. It’s very unusual after I reached middle age for me to find an author who would change how I view my vocation. But David Foster Wallace was one of them because of his focus on compassion, kindness, and also showing that you can still be very creative, intensely creative without abandoning those human virtues.

So I want to turn to a book of his that’s not very well known, but really is a good starting point for anyone who wants to read him. It’s a short novel called Something to Do With Paying Attention. This was part of the manuscripts he left at his suicide in 2008. And it’s a story that I often recommend to people, especially young people. I’ve given out this book as gifts. And it tells the story of a young man who’s lost. And he’s lost in very typical ways for our contemporary society.

He suffers from screen addiction. He’s struggling to find a purpose in life. He’s got depression. He’s trying to find his place in the job market. He describes himself as a wastoid—he just watches TV all day. And then he finds deliverance from this. He finds a purpose and meaning in his life, and it comes from a totally unexpected direction.

It’s a charming story, it’s a funny story, it’s a touching story, it’s a beautiful story—and in just 150 pages.

JARED: Ted Gioia, thank you for joining me.

TED: Thank you, Jared.

Fifteen days ago, the New York Times published its list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. Since then, all hell has broken loose in the music world. And in the last 48 hours, that Hades just got a lot hotter.

I’d been one of the 250 “music insiders” surveyed by the Times for the article—so the day after the list was published I shared my ballot here.

I was unhappy with the results, as were many other music fans. But that might have been the end of the story. Surveys are always a bit dodgy—but what can you do about it?

Then I took time to learn about the Times methodology and was even more dismayed. In fact, I was miffed.

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I assumed that I was voting for the songwriters who would be included in the list. But I now see that the experts consulted by the Times only got to make nominations. The final 30 names were chosen by six New York Times music critics.

There never was a real vote. The Times got the results it wanted internally—the insiders made the final call. But the way they explained it to their readers was intentionally vague.

In small print, readers were told that industry experts “weighed in”—whatever that means.

Readers were invited to click on a link to learn “how we made the list.” But even here, the Times served up fuzzy language.

If you kept on reading, you eventually learned the truth. The Times took the verdict of the “experts” and then “ran it through a filter.” The survey was just a “starting point.” The actual top thirty was decided via a “conversation” among its internal team.

Huh?

The Times did share a few ballots, and even this small sample made clear how different the final list was from the survey of experts. That would be embarrassing for the Times under the best of circumstances, but especially so in the current environment—when that same newspaper has repeatedly expressed outrage about voter suppression and attempts to subvert democracy.

If the Times really believes in the importance of voting and standing by results, why doesn’t it just share the actual ballot count?

Even so, this all might have been forgotten. But last Friday, the Times made the mistake of releasing a video entitled “In Defense of the NYT ‘Greatest Songwriters’ List.”

Here members of the inside team came across as smug, maybe even contemptuous, in responding to music fans who reached out to them. At one juncture, a Times critic laughs at a comment from a reader—simply for saying that he went to the Berklee College of Music. Then he continues to chuckle and smirk as he reads the rest of the reader’s comment, before finally throwing it on the floor.

This music lover had made the mistake of defending Billy Joel. For a serious critic at the Times, that is apparently very funny.

In a curious coincidence, I had just published an article on music criticism the day before the Times released this video. In this article—entitled “Nine Rules of Music Criticism”—I made this claim:

Trust your emotional response to creative work, and be wary of critical stances that run counter to how it actually makes you feel….

Be wary of any critic who doesn’t seem to care about your enjoyment of music or other art forms. I’m not saying that the critic needs to agree with your responses, but a clear hostility to enjoyment and doctrinaire disregard of our emotional response to a work is a huge warning sign.

Little did I know that I would see this “warning sign” on display the very next day at America’s newspaper of record.

During the subsequent 72 hours, the backlash intensified. A fiery response from esteemed jazz pianist Brad Mehldau was ostensibly a defense of Billy Joel, but focused mostly on the problems with music criticism of this sort. He describes a music critic character type very similar to the one I warned against in my article:

He is a snob who wants to be hip, so he becomes a critic. He listens to music not because he loves music, but because of how it defines his understanding of himself, narcissistically.

But even this response was mild compared to Rick Beato’s take, which went live yesterday. Rick is a very smart guy with big ears and a deep understanding of music—much deeper than those Times insiders. And his words carry weight. By my measure, Beato has more influence than any music critic in the world right now, and when he says something, it gets attention.

Rick had already released a video about the Times songwriter list, and he rarely deals with the same issue a second time. “I don’t usually make videos back-to-back on the same topic,” he explains. But he was also irritated by the tone of the Times video and felt compelled to respond to it.

His rebuttal is going viral with a vengeance. It’s been up for less than a day, and already has ten times as many views as the original Times video.

For the most part, he just shares clips from the Times podcast—which are damaging enough—before asking in frustration: “You hear these guys competing for the worst take?” In his words, they come across as “the most pretentious, cork-sniffing smug people”—whose condescension is all the worse because they have “no background in music.”

Rick, I should add, is not just a pundit, but is also a very skilled guitarist, record producer, music educator, etc. He possesses real credentials—the same ones the Times critics lack—and not just opinions.

But did he go too far?

The people watching his video clearly don’t think so. It already has 10,000+ comments—that’s more responses than the original Times article received. And they are brutal.

That first comment has almost 8,000 likes. As I said above, Hades is getting hotter—especially that level of Dante’s Inferno reserved for music critics.

By my measure, around 99% of the responses are in agreement with Beato. All this adds up to a bad look for the New York Times. A very bad look.

It also tells you about the shift underway in media power. A few years ago, I couldn’t imagine a single person taking on the Times in this way and having such an impact. But the world has changed.

I’ve said it over and over, but I need to repeat it now: Trust is the most scarce thing in the media landscape right now.

Many journalists have fooled themselves into thinking that the institutional power of their employer is more important than this personal authority held by the trustworthy individual—but they’re wrong.

We’re now seeing how that plays out in the world of music criticism. On one side, we have a trusted individual, and on the other a team of institutional insiders. The response of the audience has already made clear which side wins in this kind of disagreement.

I’m not sure if the Times can muster an adequate response at this late stage. But if it wants a bit of that trustworthiness for itself, it ought to start by publishing an actual count of the 250 ballots it solicited for its songwriter list.

I suspect that it would be very revealing.

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How to Tell If You’re Living in a Binary Crisis

By Ted Gioia

I want to start with a story about Texas. It’s also a good description of what I call a binary conflict.

I recently wrote a letter of recommendation for an engineering student at Texas A&M. He’s an impressive, hardworking young man—with solid character and very trustworthy.

To help cover college costs, he does part time work helping people move. It’s grueling physical labor. But he never complains.

Someday soon he may be an engineer. But when he does a moving job, he has no attitude—and he puts 100% effort into the physical labor.

This young man recently showed up at a Texas house, where he was scheduled to help a family move But as soon as they opened the door, he could see they were shocked, even horrified, by his presence on their doorstep.

“I’m here to help with the move,” he explained.

“No you aren’t,” the woman at the door said, ready to slam it in his face.

“You don’t understand,” he replied. “I’m helping with your move today.”

“No, you are NOT,” she repeated, and pointed at his shirt.

His shirt had just one thing written on it: Texas A&M.

She scowled—and after a moment, explained: “This has always been a Longhorn house. We never let Aggies in here.”

And so he didn’t have a job that day. That’s how they roll in the Lone Star State.

And if, by some terrible destiny, a Texas A&M supporter marries a University of Texas fan, they put this “House Divided” banner outside their home.

That’s how a binary conflict works in society. Life may be complex—but it gets simpler if you can reduce things to two opposing forces.

But sometimes the binary conflict escalates into a binary crisis. When that happens, events spiral out of control.

Did you ever wonder why the biggest sports battles always involve two teams?

You could easily design a basketball court with three hoops—and play the game with three teams. Or four or five or any number you want.

But that never happens.

Despite all the talk of threesomes, you’re not gonna find one on ESPN. Well, not on screen—who knows what those athletes (or sportscasters) do after the game?

But every team competition I’ve seen in my entire life has featured a binary opposition—whether we’re talking football, baseball, hockey, volleyball, or even quidditch in a Harry Potter film.

It’s always two opposed forces.

That was even true when I competed in an academic contest during my student days—the national quiz bowl competition known as College Bowl. My team had to defeat dozens of other schools to win the national title—but every competition was a head-to-head matchup. We beat Yale in the televised finals, and the binary opposition was what drew the ratings.

The producers even told us so. “We like this Stanford versus Yale matchup—the ratings will be good.”

Only a few individual sports allow for multiple participants competing all at once. Can you spell B-O-R-I-N-G? That’s why track events and swim meets don’t get much TV coverage—audiences demand the binary opposition.

In my youth, I was a fan of TV wrestling, and I recall with fondness the famous Battle Royale, which took place once each year at the Olympic Auditorium in downtown LA. But these free-for-alls never lived up to expectations—because so many competitors made it hard to identify the enemy.

And it wasn’t just the audience that got confused Even the participants and referees looked lost up in that ring. Without the binary opposition, the sport felt meaningless.

Just look at a video and see for yourself. A bunch of dudes in a brawl should be a lot more exciting than this.

There’s a rule here, but an ugly rule. The key to effective teamwork is having a single enemy.

Now here’s something even uglier. The same team-building hostility is heating up over in the enemy’s camp. That evil team is getting bigger and stronger because it hates you—and precisely because you’re bonding with your own team.

Some of this stuff is so toxic nobody wants to talk about it. But I’ve actually seen management teams bond together more effectively because they all hate the CEO. That’s what finally brings them together, and gets them to cooperate.

But don’t expect to hear human resources explain this at your next office seminar on teamwork. The reality is that, at some companies today, workers bond together to battle HR.

Somebody should write a global history of binary conflicts—because no force has exerted more influence over human affairs.

Rome collapsed while its citizens fought over the colors blue and green. That sounds crazy, but it’s absolutely true.

I believe this is the single most significant fact about Roman history.

1. The conflict between Blues and Greens lasted for a thousand years.

2. During that period, each color enjoyed periods of dominance, and could have used its power to make tangible improvements and fix a broken system.

3. But they rarely did this—because were obsessed with punishing the other color team.

They won’t teach that in history class. But they should. It ought to be the first lesson.

It’s hard to explain this Roman mania, but here’s what I’ve written elsewhere:

The conflict may have started as a sporting rivalry, but in time the battling colors impacted every aspect of society. Your chosen color could influence your political loyalties, your pastimes, your religious views, and almost every other affiliation in day-to-day life….

The more you study the phenomenon, the clearer it becomes that the main motivating force of each group was hatred of the other group. Making the opponent suffer was far more satisfying than any mere policy outcome.

As a result, the most trifling incident at the chariot races or theaters could set off the factions, and as Rome declined the violence got worse. By the time we get into the fifth century AD, the conflicts sometimes took the form of pitched battles in the streets.

That’s what a full-blown binary crisis looks like.

It happened in Rome. It happened during the medieval witch hunts. It happened during the French Revolution. It may be happening in some parts of the world today.

How can you tell when you’re living in a binary collapse? Here are seven warning signs:

1. All conflicts are channeled into a single binary opposition between two teams. There is never a third team—if someone tries to create it, one or both of the two teams will work fervently to destroy the third option.

2. Each team is obsessed with punishing the other—and this becomes more important than taking steps that might help their own supporters.

3. The common good turns into an empty concept, and is only mentioned as a rhetorical device in attacking the other team (which is always opposed to the common good). Policies that might help everybody are ignored (as in the Roman example), because they can’t be used to energize team supporters—which is where all power and resources reside.

4. Even institutions and vocations that have no direct connection with the two teams get drawn into the battle. Everything becomes part of the conflict—science, entertainment, math, medicine, architecture, etc.

5. The fault of the other team is never a simple matter, but always involves a long list of extreme accusations. As Rene Girard shows in his book The Scapegoat, the same charges are invariably lodged against the other team—violence, sexual transgressions, greed, ethical abuses, moral corruption, violation of taboos, and a litany of other abuses. Even if the conflict begins with a single difference (class, religion, race, etc.), it soon expands to encompass every one of society’s most feared transgressions. It sounds absurd but, in periods of binary collapse, the opposing team is always accused, sooner or later, of incest, rape, murder, devil worship, profanations of all sorts.

6. Despite their espoused hatred, the two teams repeatedly imitate each other—in fact the hated enemy is also the main role model. Like warring Mafia gangs, they engage in tit-for-tat behavior. Hence, the exact same accusations are made, back and forth. Threats, excuses, reprisals are always identical; even promises for the future (after the victory) are eerily similar. These mirror-like reflections merely increase the polarization and escalate the conflict.

7. People who try to operate outside this binary conflict have no impact. They are literally individuals without a team—which in a binary crisis is always the worst possible situation. They are the weakest of all parties. To have any influence, they must join one of the two teams…and so the cycle continues.

As Girard points out, the other team may actually deserve punishment. But he avoids trying to “determine precisely where injustice begins and ends.” The more salient fact is that, in a binary collapse, things always push to extremes, beyond any reasonable limits. In this totalizing ideology, degrees of justice or injustice hardly matter, and merely serve as rhetorical fuel for escalating the conflict.

He gives as example the trial of Marie Antoinette. Girard readily admits that the French monarchy bears a large degree of responsibility for the revolution and its violence. But when the Queen went on trial, the accusations became all encompassing.

Her foreign birth was frequently mentioned, and all her vices. (No, she never said “Let them eat cake!”—but facts like that don’t matter in a binary crisis.) And, eventually, Marie Antoinette was even accused of committing incest with her son. That was just slander, but (as noted above) these situations invariably escalate into demoniac obsessions—because there are no reasonable limits in a binary crisis.

Girard argues that this is a repeating pattern in human society. He focuses on the scapegoating, while I emphasize the collapse of all social problems into a battle of two teams—which can be an even more powerful, totalizing force.

So I will point out that after the King and Queen were finally executed, the coalition that killed them quickly broke into a new binary opposition—and the former team members started killing each other.

Tens of thousands of people died in the aftermath. In other words, the binary crisis was so strong it outlasted the murder of the scapegoat.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

Of course it does. That’s because this happens again and again in history—and it’s happening again today, especially in an election year. After all, politics is the main sphere where binary conflict plays out today. (Five hundred years ago, it was religion.)

But what if the binary opposition escalates into a total conflict—a binary crisis—and spreads into every aspect of daily life?

At that stage, the battlefield is everywhere. Everybody becomes a soldier—the gym teacher, the nurse, the fire fighter, the sports journalist, the film critic, the librarian, the checkout clerk at the drugstore, you name it. I’m not necessarily describing a military civil war—but that can happen too, and precisely in situations like this.

Many will seek a way out. But guess what? Anybody who dares suggest a remedy outside the binary conflict will be attacked by the now massive forces of the two teams.

And they will get lectured endlessly about the “lesser of two evils” theory. (When you start hearing that argument constantly, pay close attention—because it identifies the source of a potential structural shift in the situation.)

This oft-stated theory declares that you must always limit yourself to the best of two bad options—because anything else is EVIL.

Maybe that’s true. But there’s another theory, perhaps even more persuasive. This other theory states that a system which only offers lesser-of-two-evil choices is already broken, and people deserve more and better options.

Is there any escape from destructive binary conflict?

In the opening sentence to The Scapegoat, Rene Girard tells readers to pay close attention to a forgotten text from the fourteenth century. This work is Judgment of the King of Navarre by Guillaume de Machaut.

My learned musician friends will recognize that name. Machaut was the most innovative composer of his day—they even called his music ars nova (which translates as new art).

But the story Girard relates is more brutal than musical. He writes:

Guillaume claims that he participated in a confusing series of catastrophic events before he finally closeted himself in his house in terror to await death or the end of the indescribable ordeal….

There are signs in the sky. People are knocked down by a rain of stones. Entire cities are destroyed by lightning. Men die in great numbers in the city where Guillaume lives (he doesn’t tell us its name)…..

People continued to die in ever greater numbers, however, until one day in spring when Guillaume heard music in the street and men and women laughing. All was over, and courtly poetry could begin again….

In the case of Machaut’s story, the main source of the crisis is binary opposition between Christian and Jews. The latter are persecuted as scapegoats, and are even accused of responsibility for the Black Death. Soon lightning is striking, and stones are falling out of the sky.

I hardly need to point out that this was all ignorance and hate, not science. Jews didn’t cause the plague, or falling stones, or whatever.

But in a binary crisis, as Girard explains (although he doesn’t use that term, referring instead to crowds and mobs), natural causes are of no interest to anybody. The mob must always have human enemies.

That’s why the science in Machaut’s story is bogus.

But the music that marks the resolution of this conflict is the most accurate thing in the whole narrative. The scapegoating was a fantasy, but the music represented a real moment when a rupture healed, and the killing stopped.

Can we draw any comfort from this?

I note that music is the opposite of the sporting events mentioned at the start of my story. When athletes play, they turn against a common enemy—the opposing team. But when musicians play, they operate in a purer realm—and the audience still packs into the arena or stadium (the same venues!) for this peaceful way of forming into teams.

It’s easy to point out where music falls short. Historians of Nazi Germany, for example, like to point out that the same people who committed atrocities during the day, came home and listened to Mozart or Beethoven at night. Yet the very fact that we are shocked by this testifies to our expectation that music should pacify and soften, even in these extreme situations.

And consider those miraculous moments when songs prevail on actual battlefields. During the famous Christmas truce of 1914, opposing soldiers put down their weapons, and joined together in singing “Adeste Fidelis” (“Oh Come All Ye Faithful”). That happened on Christmas Eve, and the next day some soldiers actually crossed battle lines to exchange gifts.

The military leaders and politicians feared this. They hated it. One English general declared that this singing represented “the greatest danger” to troop morale.

He was probably right.

This countering of the binary crisis with music happens more often than people realize. Consider an example from pop culture.

Many were upset when country star Luke Combs recorded Tracy Chapman’s song “Fast Car,” and enjoyed a hit with his cover version. But what could they say after the two musicians joined together at the Grammy Awards?

If this keeps up, who knows where it might lead? The next thing you know, they’ll be exchanging gifts, like those WWI soldiers.

By the way, the power of music to defuse violent impulses is amplified if the performance takes on symbolic and ritualized elements of conflict. I don’t have space here to provide full details—this subject really deserves an entire book. Nobody has adequately told the story of ritualistic conflict in music, which shows up everywhere from marching bands to punk rock to American Idol.

But you can see it even in the video above, where Luke Combs clearly offers a symbolic victory to Tracy Chapman during the performance.

Anybody who knew what to look for could see this—just read the account in the NY Times, which spells it out, almost as if it were a heavyweight boxing match:

Combs never overshadowed Chapman. He knew that in that moment, no one could. Something about the way he looked at her said it all: His eyes shone with irrepressible respect. Here was a grown man, an assured performer who sells out stadiums, visibly trembling before the sight and the sound of the folk singer Tracy Chapman.

Real conflict is defused. But only because a ritualized resolution has occurred.

Music can’t turn the world into a 24/7 love-in.

But a song can create a 3-minute love-in. And if art short-circuits the binary conflict for even just that brief spell, it deserves our reverence.

Nothing in human culture has done more to bring people together than music. I discussed team-bonding through hate above, but you can form an even more beautiful bond through song. Many of us would not be here today if our parents hadn’t heard the right romantic song at just the right moment.

That’s real magic for you.

There’s scientific reasons for this. When we join together in singing or music-making, our bodies release the hormone oxytocin—which makes us more trusting and less suspicious of others.

And trance-inducing rhythms have a similar impact—although now its our brainwaves that are impacted, as well as our body chemistry. This is why dance is so liberating—it reduces our defenses, and actually lets us enjoy the moment when we become most vulnerable.

This is the role the arts should play in a divisive culture. Songs bring us together—and diminish the deadly energy of the binary crisis. The dance, by the same logic, is the opposite of the military march—it is the rhythm that frees us, instead of dominating us.

The same can be true of poetry, and painting, and movies, and games, and the rest of it. Even if they can’t defuse a crisis on their own, they are still the best place to start the process.

Right after I stepped off the plane in New Orleans, I saw Louis Armstrong, in beautiful bronze and larger than life. It wasn’t the most accurate depiction—his arms were too short, his head too large.

But Louis was laughing it all off.

That’s what he always did—laugh things off. And this stubby Satchmo had reason to laugh. That’s because, for all his faults, he still looked better than the city’s previous attempt at an airport memorial.

The story of how Armstrong got into the terminal tells you a lot about the city’s complicated relationship with its most famous musician—who left New Orleans in 1922, and never moved back.

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Instead of commissioning a new statue for the airport, they just removed an existing one on Rampart Street. (And it had been done pro bono in the first place—so the city never paid for the work.)

It’s a good reminder that musicians come and go in this city. But the truth is, they mostly go.

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Even I’m suspicious of critics, and I’m a member of the priesthood. One of my favorite movie scenes, from the film Birdman, shows Michael Keaton confronting a hostile drama critic—and saying everything artists have wanted to tell reviewers since the beginning of time.

It ain’t pretty. But he’s in trouble now, because critics always get the last word. The poor artist doesn’t have a Slurpee’s chance in hell.

You might be surprised at the amount of hate mail critics get. Or maybe you wouldn’t—perhaps you’re sending it yourself. Somebody should collect all this vitriol and put the best examples in a book. I’d call it The Critic Gets Criticized, but artists might just call it Payback.

Despite all that, critic is a great job. You get to spend your life in creative environments face-to-face with inspiring artists and soul-shaking works. You seek out greatness as your daily routine. That’s a sweet gig, even when you’re working overtime.

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Sure, the pay rate is lousy. But you get free tickets to concerts, and a few autographs along the way. There are far worse ways to earn to living. I know because I’ve had a more than a few of those jobs.

But if you pursue any vocation, you should want to do it well—criticism is no exception. So with that in mind, I offer nine suggestions below to anybody considering a career in this field.

I primarily focus on music criticism here, but these observation apply to any creative field—and to most other pursuits where criticism is practiced (in the workplace, raising children, teaching, etc.).

Let’s start at the top.

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If you’re a jazz fan, see how many of the nicknames in the poem below you can identify. And even if you’re not a jazz fan, keep reading—you will still enjoy this. Especially if you read it aloud.

I’m sharing this with the permission of author Gloria Krolak, who is also a broadcaster, photographer, and jazz advocate.

(I’m a lenient instructor. So if you want to cheat and look at the answers, go to this link.)

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The Fantastic Nicknames of Jazz

by Gloria Krolak

With apologies to Hayden Carruth*

Satchmo, Dodo, Pharaoh, Philly Joe,
Chico, Django, Dolo, Hi De Ho.
Snakehips, Hot Lips, Jeru ‘n Chu,
Eubie, Baby, Chubby, Tubby and Bu.

Plenty Kings, Queen just one, deuce of Jacks,
Gardens of Buds, pair of Boots and Sax.
Duke, Count, Baron, and Papa Jo,
A palette of Reds, Rosy ‘n Blue Lou.

So many Kids, Big Mama, ‘n Fatha,
Frog, Fox, piece of Cake, Maharaja.
Cag, Hog and Jug, Keg and Ragbaby,
The Senator, Guvnor, Pres and First Lady.

Cornbread and Fathead, the Judge ‘n Captain,
Bounce, Flip, Leap Frog over your Hammond.
There’s Tram, Slam, a Slim and a Ham,
Beaver, Mousie, Hawk, Hootie ‘n The Lamb.

Jaco and Guido, Dink, Chink, and Yank,
Spike, Punch, and Corky, Tex, Mex and Hank.
Brownie and Deedles, Bird and Crane,
Keter, Klook, Big Chief, Bubber and Trane.

The High Priestess of Soul, Professor Longhair,
Ol Blue Eyes, The Prince of Darkness, Papa and Bear.
The Divine One, Lord, God, and Tain,
Even The Great Dane with the Never-Ending Name.

* Hayden Carruth wrote a poem titled “The Fantastic Names of Jazz.”