Below I share my origin story, drawn from the archive of The Honest Broker. It tells you how I became who I am.

I present it here with some hope that it might help others on their journey.

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How I Became the Honest Broker

I rarely talk about my workaday life before I settled into music and writing. Those days are far too strange and confusing to convey without writing a whole book about them. And I’ll never write that book because a lot of it I’d rather forget.

Other people in the creative economy have day gigs, but they are usually simple to describe—waiting on tables, tutoring school kids, driving a taxi, would you like fries with that, mister? But my work wasn’t anything like that. I took on projects that sent me into unfamiliar terrain all over the world, and thrust me into odd and unpredictable situations. The deliverables were always high stakes, the work often secret, surrounded by confidentiality agreements and cautionary warnings, and the agenda rarely going according to plan.

I’ll admit it: I was like a person with a split personality in my twenties. I was obsessed with music, working to advance my piano skills, and digging deeply into the research that would eventually result in so many later books and articles. But I also had to pay the bills, and I possessed a few highly marketable skills. I had an ability to analyze complex social, political and economic situations, a way of navigating through turbulent waters, a knack for making the right move at the right time. These skills caught the notice of powerful people, and they would put me to work to solve their problems.

And, oh man, did they have problems. They would thrust a plane ticket in my hand, and send me packing—off into situations that might involve everything and anything.

The good news: My bosses paid well. What they wanted was never simple or straight-forward. But if I could pull it off, I got rewarded with enough money to cover my costs during long stretches solely devoted to my music and writing.

I have little desire to dwell on the details. Many of them are still confidential, and telling too much could get me into trouble. Much of it is a blur any way—Bangkok, Medellín, Cannes, Shanghai, Prague, Copacabana, Macau, Paris, Tasmania, Jakarta, Tijuana, Frankfurt, Krakow, Tokyo and all other places I went on my various missions.  So many cities, so many crazy days and long nights.

But I need to remember it, if only because I have to tell you about the Honest Broker.

This particular project brought me to China. I was trying to set up an operation in a remote province, far outside my comfort zone, and couldn’t seem to figure out how to maneuver among the various interests and stakeholders. My patron was one of the wealthiest men in Hong Kong, and by using his contacts, I gained access to people who normally operate behind layers of intermediaries and gatekeepers. But even these contacts led me on an endless runaround. My sources gave me  conflicting advice and confusing directions. Everything felt wrong and nothing seemed quite on the level.

I knew I needed help, but had run out of options. Then I met the drunk Australian.

He wasn’t a contact on my list, and I can’t even remember his name. This was a chance encounter in a hotel bar late at night. But this hard-drinking Australian was talkative and had interesting things to say. He had spent most of his life bouncing around the capitals of Asia, and was a high-level operator in his own spheres. He bragged about his insider’s knowledge, and claimed—with some accuracy, as I came to discover—that he knew how to maneuver in China better than the clueless Westerners who were now appearing on the scene. He had traced the secret paths to power and knew all the dangerous mistakes amateurs always make.

He reeled off a list of them. “You go into a province or city and flash around some money, then expect the local officials will help you? Forget it. They’ll rob you blind, and even make you bribe them for the privilege. Same goes for the party leaders. From each according to his ability, and all that, my friend. And forget about lawyers—the legal protections here are like this”—he held up his empty glass, then flipped it over as if to emphasize the nothingness of what he was offering to the gods of Marx and Mao. “As for the bankers, you might as well call them wankers.”

The empty glass was also a sign that I needed to order another round of the local brew, and I quickly complied. My new friend fell into a meditative silence until further libations arrived. Finally, after another sip on the stomach-destroying glass of baijiu that passed for spirits at our watering hole, I asked the obvious question.

“So what do I do? Who can I trust?”

“That’s easy, mate. You need to find the Honest Broker.”

This sounded appealing enough, but I had zero idea what my new acquaintance was talking about. He might just as well have told me to go to Oz and consult with the Wizard.  

“Who, exactly, is this Honest Broker?”

“There’s at least one in every city. But don’t expect their business cards to say ‘Honest Broker’—that’s just what I call them. But that’s exactly what they are. Sometimes they don’t even have an official position. But they are the key to everything.”

He proceeded to explain how Honest Brokers play a hidden but vital role in communities without a history of legal protections and stable institutions. Their influence and power is built solely on a reputation for straight talk and trustworthy dealings. “They are true brokers, intermediaries between others. They aren’t going to participate in your deal, no matter what it is. They are go-betweens, really. But do not underestimate the power of this kind of brokerage. Whatever you need—a loan, a building permit, political influence, a place to land a private jet, whatever—they will introduce you to the right people and steer you away from the sharks.

“And they do this for a very simple reason: their prestige is enhanced by making these connections. In many cases, they don’t even want to be paid. Or let me put that differently—you repay them by becoming a trusted contact for them in future dealings. The Honest Broker may help you for free right now, but don’t be surprised if you’re asked for assistance on something completely different months or even years later. You Yanks have a hard time grasping it, and are always looking for shortcuts. But the Honest Broker plays the long-term game, mate.

“Find your Honest Broker, and your problems will be solved.”

This proved to be valuable advice, worth far more than the cost of drinks. Over the next few weeks, I changed my approach completely. I made inquiries, compared notes, and finally found my Honest Broker—who did solve my problems, just as promised. My mission accomplished, I returned back home to California and tried to forget all about it.

I put my passport out of sight. My world shrank back to manageable dimensions, and my days were spent at the two keyboards, the piano and the word processor. I was getting back into my music groove again.

A long time went by before I realized the real importance of what I had learned in China, and how it applied to the other half of my split and fractured life. I was putting energy into a new sphere now, music criticism, and trying to create a rule book for how to make it sizzle.

Yet criticism seemed such a degraded form of writing at that juncture. I had already seen the collapse in literary criticism—in fact, I had lived through it as a student at Stanford and Oxford. The whole enterprise had turned into a circus sideshow over the course of just a few years. Critics now aspired to quasi-celebrity status, and they exploited their roles as arbiters of taste to engage in the worst sort of strutting and preening. The more outlandishly they sold out their craft, opting instead for self-aggrandizement, the larger the rewards they received. This blight took root first in France but quickly spread elsewhere. And now the taint seemed to be seeping into other forms of criticism as well. Whether the subject at hand was a movie or a meal or a TV wrestling match, the critics were the real stars, and everything else subservient to their self-serving deconstruction of anything in their path.

Music reviews seemed to occupy the lowest rung of all, with their own distinct set of vices. I saw critics who just regurgitated record label press releases. Or took all sorts of freebies from power brokers in return for—well, just guess—without a tinge of hesitation or guilt. Or used their influence to get close to stars, churning out favorable coverage in exchange for access. Or announced the arrival of some new savior of the music every month, hyping short-lived trendsetters in a never-ending process of spin. Exaggeration and hipper-than-thou pretension were the calling cards of the field. With an ample supply of those, and a backstage pass, nothing could stop you.

I admit, with some shame, that all this appealed to me in my twenties. The idea that I could adopt a pose as a critic, and launch myself into some higher sphere of coolness—and maybe even hang out with superstars as part of the deal. . . . Well, that was why you picked this vocation in the first place. Wasn’t it? There were compromises, sure, but didn’t they exist in every field? I soothed my conscience by recalling what Hyman Roth tells Michael Corleone in The Godfather II: “Michael, this is the business we’ve chosen.” You get to swagger like a wiseguy, and grab whatever you can get your hands on, just so long as you’re willing to dispose of a few bodies along the way.

I could play this game, was even good at it. I got published and started receiving some recognition for my talents. But I was troubled nonetheless. This didn’t feel right. It didn’t add up. Was this really the right way to do it?

And that’s when I remembered the Honest Broker.

The Honest Broker now reappeared in my psyche as an inner voice, an avenging angel whispering in my ear. Remember me? The Honest Broker puts forthright expression and straight dealing above everything else. The Honest Broker doesn’t look for direct benefit in any endeavor. The Honest Broker is just an intermediary, not a beneficiary. 

But all that seems foolish—because what do you get out of it?

Day by day, the whispering got louder, turned into a constant drone. Do not underestimate the power of this kind of brokerage…the Honest Broker plays the long-term game, mate. Over time, that scrupulous fidelity and reputation for trustworthy advice beats out all other strategies. The Honest Broker is irreplaceable, and all the more so when other guides have become unreliable.

Again and again, I asked myself the same question: Could the Honest Broker be a role model for me as a critic? Even more to the point, did the Honest Broker represent an entirely different model for criticism? Precisely the correcting course we need at this juncture in cultural history?

And here I must make another shameful admission. My initial reaction to this line of thinking was to resist it, and even ridicule it—and for the simple reason that it didn’t gratify my ego. The critic as celebrity was much more appealing on every level. Even the title of “broker” was a huge letdown, especially when I considered the other options. Stanley Crouch had just released a book of critical essays entitled Notes of a Hanging Judge—now that sounded cool. The Hanging Judge? How could I get a nickname like that? I tried saying out loud: Notes of an Honest Broker.

Hell’s bells, it just didn’t have the same ring.

Even so, I saw my approach to writing change over the next few months. Without even consciously admitting it to myself, I was taking on the persona of the Honest Broker. I began measuring my own methodologies against ideal standards of fairness, and nagging myself when I strayed from them. I started paring away at exaggerations and posturing in my prose, and worked to find other ways of imparting color and vitality to my sentences. Above all, I started worrying about my reader—because, after all, wasn’t the reader the real person I was supposed to serve? Wasn’t the reader the beneficiary of my brokerage services?

This too was alarming. Pleasing musicians or editors brought more tangible rewards. What did I get out of serving some lousy, anonymous reader? The ingrate wouldn’t even recognize my noble sacrifice.

Then I reached the most abject level in this whole process of self-abasement. I started worrying about whether the reader would actually enjoy the music I was recommending.

This was a whole new consideration, one that had never dawned on me before. And I could tell by consulting various cutting edge critics, that this issue hadn’t got on their radar screens either. They didn’t give a rat’s ass for the reader’s musical pleasure. Or, if they did, they made sure to hide it at every pass. I started reading  music reviews just looking for the words: enjoyment, pleasure, delight. They had gone missing in action. Why didn’t anyone talk about them? Shouldn’t enjoyment be a make-or-break part of the deal? Yes, a critic expands the readers’ horizons, informs and educates, but also guide them to pleasure. After all, wasn’t that why I listened to music? Wasn’t that what brought me to my vocation in the first place?

Lost in this maze, I started recognizing all the other priorities that people had who wrote about music. And the more I mulled over the ecosystem, the more polluted it seemed. I saw smart people who wrote entire books about music with the aim of securing tenure from their elder colleagues in a college music department. I saw others twisting themselves into all sorts of contortions in order to win a grant or please an editor or curry favor with some institutional power broker. I even read reviewers who wrote with the apparent goal of ingratiating themselves with other reviewers. Talk about the blind leading the blind!

Above all, I noticed a whole syndrome that I came to call the Clement Greenberg problem—named after the art critic who achieved enormous success (and very large paydays) by heralding the work of Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists. Greenberg had made it clear that the single most lucrative move for a modern-day critic was to announce the newest new thing, the coming revolution that would sweep everything else aside. And he had proven so influential that, by the time I came of age as a critic, a revolution in music was getting announced every few weeks. I couldn’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about some futuristic, world-beating sound that had altered all the rules—and then a few weeks later it would be forgotten, replaced by something just as ephemeral. The whole thing was a joke to anyone who looked at it from the outside, but within the feverish world of music journalism, no one could figure out any better way to operate.

And there I was, the poor Honest Broker, with my ridiculous self-chosen nickname, and so few tools at my disposal. I had no revolution to peddle, not even a medium-sized riot or back alley scuffle.

I knew if I was going to make this work, I had to equip myself better. This would be a long, tough journey. I had to educate myself more deeply, learn as much as I could about music, especially the riches and beauties that others might miss. My new concern with musical pleasure might even turn into an advantage here, opening my ears to sounds the celebrity critics would scorn. I also had to learn how to write better, with more incision and imaginative grasp of the subject at hand. Above all, I had to think about the reader, with far more clarity than I had done before.

Perhaps the reader would even think of me some day.

Could I wear the title of Honest Broker with pride? Well, that might be too much to ask. I am just a broker, merely an intermediary. Sometimes I don’t even get paid for my services.  

But maybe, just maybe, this can work. That’s what I kept telling myself, over and over: It’s the long-term game, mate. It’s the long-term game.

A year ago, I warned readers about Meta in a provocative article entitled “Is This What a Bubble Looks Like at the Top?” I had many reasons for skepticism about Mark Zuckerberg’s empire, but focused on a single absurd fact in the opening paragraphs.

Meta fans were angry at me, but subsequent events have validated my concerns. Meta’s shares have fallen almost $250 per share since then—that’s a decline of half a trillion dollars in market value.

And the situation at Meta is now getting worse, not better:

• Earlier this year, daily active users on Facebook and Instagram declined for the first time ever. This is devastating news for the Meta—because the company’s social media business pays the bills for all its boondoggles.

• A few days ago, Zuckerberg talked about a plan for selling Meta’s excess AI computing capacity. This shocked Wall Street—Zuckerberg is spending hundreds of billions on new data centers. But that makes no sense if the company already has excess computing power.

• Meta’s quarterly investor call yesterday made matters even worse. Earnings were far below estimates, but free cash flow numbers were a total disaster—down more than 90%. Guidance for the future was (no surprise here) cautious, and Zuckerberg refused to give any estimate of next year’s capital investments, which are already out-of-control and spooking investors.

• Zuckerberg used the occasion to publish a bizarre opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal—proclaiming himself as a champion of human potential and an opponent of centralized power. This is the same guy who laid off 8,000 employees a few days ago, and is building a data center as large as Manhattan. By the way, Zuckerberg himself can’t be fired—because he limits the voting rights of most shareholders.

Yes, it’s been a bad week for Mr. Z. But all of the above is just the tip of the iceberg.

Below are nine far more terrible revelations about Meta—much worse than the earnings call yesterday. They paint a disturbing picture of a business out of control and descending into chaos.

After looking at them, you will legitimately ask if any company has made more bad decisions in the history of capitalism.

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Below I continue my survey of 50 essential western films. (Click here for part one.) I’m sharing these in chronological order. In this installment, I cover films released from 1955 through 1968.

It was a strange period for cowboy movies. The mass audience would soon abandon the genre, turning instead to space operas, disaster films, and superhero movies. The whole idiom sometimes now felt like a tired string of clichés—almost the antithesis of the free and untamed ethos that had originally made the Wild West so appealing.

But this shift in preferences also allowed—or even required—directors to take more chances when dealing with western themes. So in some ways, this end-of-an-era mentality produced many of the most innovative films in the genre’s history.

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The 50 Essential Western Films (Part 2)

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

This film is as tightly constructed as a Greek tragedy, and even abides by the three Aristotelian unities of time, space, and action. The entire drama plays out over the course of a single day in Black Rock, a small desert outpost, where a World War II vet named John Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) attempts to repay a favor to a Japanese soldier who saved his life on the battlefield. But he finds himself unexpectedly caught up in a criminal investigation, with the entire town conspiring against him.

The film features five past or future Oscar winners—Tracy, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, Walter Brennan and Dean Jagger—who between them would eventually earn eight Academy Awards for acting. That’s essentially half of the cast, and it ensures a gripping ensemble performance rarely surpassed on screen.

Together they create a slowly building tension finally resolved in a fiery desert confrontation. The widescreen CinemaScope technology is artfully employed, and André Previn makes full use of its stereophonic capability for his brash, electrifying score. This film has been unfairly forgotten, but rewards repeated viewings.

The Searchers (1956)

John Wayne was often criticized for playing the same role over and over. But that’s not entirely fair. As we’ve already seen with Red River (1948), he sometimes took parts that undercut the simple heroism of his public image, defying the standard formulas of the genre.

In The Searchers, Wayne plays a Civil War veteran on a mission to find his niece, abducted by Comanches. But he grows obsessed with vengeance and hatred—no doubt shocking moviegoers unready for this ignoble side of the Duke. Yet The Searchers undercuts its disruptive story lines with the sheer beauty of its delivery. Director John Ford, taking full advantage of Technicolor technology, never made a more visually stunning film.

Even from that first scene, when the cabin door opens, you know you’re in for a magical experience. It’s like that other Hollywood doorway leading to Oz, or the journey to Narnia from the back of a closet. You almost feel as if you’re leaving your seat in the cinema and entering a spectacle from a different time and place.

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Every now and again, I write about sports. But I only end up showing how out-of-touch I am.

Ah, I’ve put my foot into it again, with my response to LeBron James’s announcement that he is moving on—one more time—to a new team. This was my initial take on today’s “last decision” (as he describes it) to join the Philadelphia 76ers.

This man jumps around more than a knight on a chessboard. So much so, that these repeated relocations now define who he is, and how he will be remembered. After more than two decades in the NBA, LeBron has four championships, but will have started afresh five times with a new team. For someone chasing titles with his generation-defining talent, that ratio is out of whack.

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But even if he had more rings to show, LeBron would still force us to ask if chasing titles is a legit reason to abandon your team. Wouldn’t most fans say that greatness is defined by the opposite—namely when an athlete triumphs without first running away?

So if I could give him a nickname, it would be LeBron “The Decision” James. The irony is that, despite taking pride in his decisions, he is a man who can never make up his mind. Shakespeare’s Hamlet looks like a paragon of decisiveness by comparison.

Of course, this is just one more example of how poorly aligned I am with current sports culture. I’ve gone on record as praising six things about sports—and I never hear any of them mentioned on ESPN.

It’s actually far worse than that—the prevailing ethos in sports now runs totally in opposition to all six of these core values. Just consider that the hottest trend in professional sports today is gambling. That tells you how far we’ve fallen.

Not long ago, Pete Rose got thrown out of baseball for gambling. Nowadays he would earn a huge endorsement deal and launch his own betting site.

Yes, I wasn’t made for these times. But can I really be the only person who feels this way?

No, I’m certain I’m not alone. It’s just that the voices of those who believe in sports for character building are drowned out by a culture that puts money and winning above everything else.

Each fan also gets to make a “decision”—although it’s not covered in the news. And their cumulative decisions will determine the actual fate of the league

There’s a price to pay for this. A society that trains its youngsters with these degraded values on the sports field will soon find the same vices everywhere else. Long ago, Duke Wellington allegedly boasted that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Nowadays we could make a less enviable claim, namely that the corruption of our institutions starts in the youth sports leagues.

I’ve criticized LeBron for lacking loyalty. Sports insiders mock this view—but with tremendous hypocrisy. That’s because the whole profession of sports depends on the loyalty of fans. Without loyalty, every pro sports league in the world would soon collapse. So not only is loyalty an important value in team competitions, it’s actually a foundational principle that holds teams together and pays everybody’s salary along the way.

Yes, I’m an outlier. But I also think I’m speaking in the interests of the sports insiders too when I advocate for more loyalty, not less. If I could, I’d make it harder—much harder—for teams to abandon their cities. I would make it easier for teams to sign home town talent (bringing back a variant of the territory draft that once increased the likelihood that an NBA squad would actually include players from its home city. I’d take other steps to maximize the emotional ties between fans and teams, and vice versa.

It’s obvious that these moves would increase the popularity of teams. Even players would benefit—despite what you might hear to the contrary. It’s well known that players who stay with one team for their entire career are beloved by the fans, even long after they have retired. They have a happy home for life—along with lots of free drinks and dinners along the way—that the itinerant player will never enjoy.

But what about winning, you ask? I’d reply that the most successful NBA teams have tended to hold on to key players for their entire career—starting with their initial draft and continuing until retirement. Magic and Kobe and West and Baylor were always Lakers. Russell and Bird and and McHale and Havlicek were always Celtics. Duncan and Robinson and Ginóbili were always Spurs. When these same teams lost this sense of continuity and put too much emphasis into short term deals and luring free agents, their dynasties fell apart.

I mention those elite teams only in passing, because sports for most competitors does not result in a dynasty. The value of sports can’t be based by winning, because losing is just as common. And it’s even less dependent on a championship season—which few ever experience. For most competitors, the real value lies is those principles listed above—being there for your team, learning self-discipline, bonding with your community, handling setbacks and losses, and the like.

LeBron, of course, is free to pursue other values. But he will need to do it without me cheering him on. And at lease some insiders are aligned with me on this. For example, here’s a smart take that calls it straight.

There’s an old proverb that says “Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.” That’s exactly what’s happening in the NBA right now. They wanted a profit-maximizing world in which loyalty meant nothing—with ultimate freedom and mobility. Now they have it. But wait until they see the price to pay when fans ditch their loyalty in response.

Yes, each fan also gets to make a “decision”—although it isn’t covered in the news or hyped in press conferences. And make no mistake, their cumulative decisions will determine the actual fate of the league, not anything LeBron does in Philly.

If the honchos running the NBA were really smart, they would be worrying about those decisions, and not the last gasp destination of a soon-to-retire baller.

A few days ago, I offered some comments on the crisis at Netflix—describing it as a sign that manipulative “audience capture” strategies in business have stopped working.

I typically put these in-depth culture briefings behind a paywall, but at the last moment I decided to make this one available to all. And I was rewarded when it went viral with a vengeance. Within a few hours, my “audience capture” critique racked up more than five thousand likes and five hundred shares on Substack alone—but it also took off on other platforms.

This brought in many new subscribers. I welcome them aboard, and hope they become active members of our community.

I was especially gratified to get a nod from legendary investor Michael Burry (celebrated in the hit film The Big Short for his anticipation of the 2008 mortgage meltdown). His boost brought an entirely different audience to my Substack, which is mostly about culture and not finance. Even so, there’s a heavy dose of futurism and prognostication at The Honest Broker, so I hope these newcomers will find something of value here.

Even so, this viral article left many important questions unresolved. The biggest one is: What happens next?

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Today I’m offering more detailed predictions. These will tell you not only what these companies should do, but what they must do if they want to avoid stagnation and declining market share.

Of course, that’s no guarantee they will take my advice. In fact, if you just judged matters by the current media and web landscape, you might think there’s no chance they will abandon audience capture. But if they continue down the current path, they will pay a high price for their stubbornness.

First, let me define what I mean by “audience capture”—because some people use this same term differently, and I want to make sure we’re on the same page.

Audience capture strategies focus on locking up a customer base—via network effects, free stuff, loyalty programs, cheap entry-level subscriptions, etc.—and making it hard (or at least a hassle in some way) to leave. After reaching critical mass, the company shifts to squeezing the customer with frequent price increases and other exploitative measures, counting on the fact that many will just put up with it.

As you can see, there’s a world of difference between these two strategies, and the key parameters of the audience capture approach are disturbing.

Even more disturbing, however, is my next claim: Audience capture is rapidly becoming the default approach of the largest companies in the world. So its potential for abuse must be a matter of concern for all of us.

This would have been unthinkable a half century ago. In those days, audience capture was a rarity—found mostly in airline frequent flyer programs and forgotten gimmicks like Blue Chip Stamps. But the Internet really gave impetus to this approach as a default for digital platforms. At it’s most extreme, platforms grew enormously by offering consumers something for free (search results, videos, social media content, etc.), and then gradually shifted focus to milking this user base.

At this final stage, the audience capture company prods users into watching crappy advertising, or making in-app purchases, or agreeing to have their personal information sold to data brokers, or participate in some other exploitative scheme. That’s because, in the world of audience capture, companies always squeeze more and more—trying to gauge how much they can impose on users before they revolt.

Once you see this strategy spelled out, you recognize it everywhere. Many of the worst perpetrators have almost forgotten what it’s like to serve a customer.

I’m giving notice that this approach has gone too far, and that a genuine backlash is underway. That’s why Netflix has seen it’s share price collapse. And the same is true at many other platforms.

So what happens next? Let me spell it out.

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Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Lowry Pressly.

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Lowry Pressly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and a JD from Yale Law School. He is the author of The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life, which was named by The New Yorker as one of the best new books of 2024.

I invited Lowry to join me in Austin, and we sat down to have a conversation about data, surveillance, and the role of privacy in a flourishing human life.

Below are highlights from our conversation. For the full dialogue, check out the video at the top of the page.

A CONVERSATION WITH LOWRY PRESSLY

Jared: When most people think about privacy, it’s purely in terms of apps and websites and tech companies. We even have this nomenclature of privacy settings—how private a person you are is almost measurable by how many of those features you turn on. Is that too narrow an understanding?

Lowry: Without a doubt. The idea of privacy as something important to human beings as such doesn’t emerge in the public consciousness until the middle of the nineteenth century, as a reaction primarily to the photograph camera and the first mass media. The danger today is thinking of privacy through the lens of privacy settings. One, it gives us the wrong idea of what privacy is—deciding the audiences for your information is better described as confidentiality or secrecy. Two, and this is the dangerous one: the camera and the newspaper weren’t part of an economic system whose profit motive was tied to the diminution of privacy.

When we use the technologies of the data economy to think about privacy, we take for granted that what Mark Zuckerberg calls privacy settings track the reality of what privacy is—and not the reality of his business model.

“Not long ago, within my lifetime, it would have been an unbelievable dystopia to portray a world in which video surveillance is more or less everywhere and each person voluntarily carries an individual tracking device.”

Jared: So let’s go back to the camera. Did we invent privacy as a right in response to it, or did it just make salient something we’d ignored?

Lowry: A bit of yes and a bit of no. The word goes back to the 1500s—the privy council, private correspondence. But it isn’t used to describe an interest human beings have just by virtue of being human until the mid-nineteenth century. The big moral panic has to do with cameras: 1888 was George Eastman’s Kodak, which made candid shots possible for the first time. And note the language of candid—it normally means freely expressing oneself, and now we naturally use it for photographs.

One of the first legal cases to try to vindicate a right to privacy was a woman whose picture was taken on stage by a paying member of the audience. The judge said this was a moral violation of privacy—sadly, we have no law to cover it. That’s later taken up in the famous 1890 Warren and Brandeis article. What worried people weren’t illicit exposures but candid ones—taking a moment out of the flux and flow of life as it’s lived and fixing it in a permanent form. There’s a continuum—being looked at, the person taking notes about you, the photograph. The question is, what moves us along it?

Jared: Here’s a case I don’t have strong feelings about. Imagine I’m eating lunch in a park and discover someone at the next bench has been making a charcoal drawing of me. I don’t have as strong an aversion to that. The person sketching is providing an interpretation of your presence rather than just grabbing the moment. Whereas the more factual it becomes—12:01, took a bite; 12:02, picked his nose—the worse it feels.

Lowry: The charcoal drawing says at least as much about the artist as about you. The list isn’t interpretive. And that goes to what really bothered people about the camera. It creates an image that seems to bypass human interpretation—people called it the mirror of nature, nature’s pencil. It makes a claim to objectivity. And there was a belief, which we still have, that a person’s image—particularly the face—expresses what this person is really like. What the camera seemed to do was to speak from your heart for you. The thing that’s harmed, in the Warren and Brandeis article, is inviolate personality—and inviolate doesn’t mean inviolable. It means sacred. This is a line past which people shouldn’t cross.

Jared: Now you should pretty much always assume you’re being recorded. And it goes well past images. There are settings in Google where you can find out what Google thinks all of your interests are. The first time I saw that, a lot of it was so wrong—Google thinks I like snowboarding, and I’ve maybe looked it up once in my life. But I had this sense of disturbance.

Lowry: There’s an error in their dossier.

Jared: But why is there a dossier? My interests change. Who I am changes. But this is a perfect record of everything I’ve ever been briefly interested in. I felt like a line in a bookkeeper’s balance sheet. I feel like I’m being compressed—and compression almost inevitably loses resolution. You know all this about me, but you don’t know me.

Some people would say privacy is an outdated right, that we should embrace the post-privacy world. Are you fighting a losing battle?

Lowry: You do hear people say privacy is dead, but it’s almost always someone who stands to profit from the death of privacy—famously, Mark Zuckerberg. This is a hopeful pitch. I teach a class of first-year Stanford students on privacy, and if any students are going to be post-privacy, it’s these. Invariably, they all value privacy. But the world has changed so radically.

Not long ago, within my lifetime, it would have been an unbelievable dystopia to portray a world in which video surveillance is more or less everywhere and each person voluntarily carries an individual tracking device. Within living memory, people pointed to the GDR—or today, China’s surveillance state—as one of the most dehumanizing violations of human dignity imaginable. We’ve gone so quickly from seeing this as anathema to a free society to just the normal way of doing business. But these kids aren’t as credulous as we were. The problem is structural—you can opt out as an individual, but that leads to a feeling of impotence.

Jared: And even if you opt out, other people keep documenting you. I don’t put my kids’ pictures on the internet, and it’s like a part-time job—a relative posts their picture and says, oh, it’s just for my Facebook friends. No, it’s on the internet now. Delete it. A good historical analogy is East Germany: it was the willingness of people to surveil each other that made the surveillance state possible. So opting out always feels a little futile.

Lowry: This comes from Bentham’s Panopticon, later taken up by Foucault and the GDR authorities: the best way to control people is constant surveillance. That’s impossible. The close second best is having people never be able to be certain that they’re not under surveillance. You will discipline yourself to fit your imagined idea of what the authority wants. One way to do that is an authoritarian state with informants. Another is just to have recording devices—not just video, but metadata—integrated into the fabric of social life.

Jared: There are these new Meta glasses with a red light that’s supposed to show when they’re recording. I saw just this week that for sixty dollars a company will disable the red light but keep the recording on. So you could always be recorded and have no way of knowing.

I bought one of those AI friend pendants as an experiment, to write about why they’re bad. I couldn’t last a day with it. I didn’t realize it always listens. I went to the farmer’s market with my son—we go every weekend, he likes to get a popsicle from one of the stands—and I got this message on my phone: “Oh, popsicle time?” I smashed it with a hammer when I got home. I had invited this presence into my life, and it was observing this intimate moment with my son. I felt almost soiled by the experience.

Lowry: We’ve been talking about being objects of surveillance, but we have just as much to lose when we become the surveillers. Overnight, without realizing it, we all became private detectives.

Jared: We even say stalking as if it’s a joke.

Lowry: In five or ten years it’s gone from one of the creepiest things you can do to a completely normal activity. Here’s an example from having little kids: baby monitors. At first we had the old-style audio monitor. If she woke up crying, we’d go in. Fine. Then we got a video monitor, and I started checking it in idle moments, the way we check our phones. My wife’s cousin had the next step up—an anklet that monitors vitals—and that one you check constantly, and when it falls off, you think maybe your baby’s dying.

Each step that gives me more information about the child, the more information I think I need, and the more anxious I am. One thing we get from privacy, from limits to knowing more, is that those limits are part of the way we produce trust.

Jared: My wife and I don’t share our locations with each other, and I’ve met people who are horrified by this—they think we have something to hide. By enabling the possibility of dishonesty, it gives us an opportunity to be honest with each other. If we were always disclosing our location, there’s no dishonesty—but there’s no honesty either, because there’s no chance to voluntarily reveal.

Lowry: And therefore no trust. Trust isn’t a thing we have or don’t have. It’s something we do. As a kid, you have the experience of being trusted by being able to close your door. That seems very important for the development of a self who thinks of herself as worthy of trust—and therefore as worthy of leading her life in her own way.

In the most forthcoming relationship imaginable—cohabitating spouses, co-parents—there are lots of privacies. The bathroom door, what she’s thinking in a pensive moment, what she’s texting. Imagine seeing those things as secret or hidden instead of private. Trust turns to suspicion, and what had been a sustaining thing falls apart.

Jared: My wife and I never sat down and made these rules, but if I saw a letter from someone I didn’t recognize in the mail, I wouldn’t open it. I might ask about it later, and she’d tell me basically everything in it. And yet I would never ask, can I read it? I see that as a way of showing respect for her.

In a long-term relationship the boundaries between the two persons get blurrier—you start doing life together. But you don’t want to obliterate the distinction and act like I have the right to know everything, because that reduces her as a person. I want to be in a long-term marriage with a fully realized human being, and her privacy is part of her full realization of her life.

Lowry: Say the letter turns out to be totally innocuous, and you’d insisted: show it to me. If I were her, I would feel disrespected, but also invaded. Because you didn’t respect the boundary—that there was a part of my life beyond what you can get at.

Jared: The problem isn’t that it was revealed. It’s that it was hers to reveal. To be human is in part to live together and strive for some kind of unity, but we’re also individuals. Privacy sits at one of those core tensions between social reality and individual reality. And I don’t think all tensions have to be resolved. Sometimes living with them is part of what it means to be human.

Lowry: Tension can be good. Tension is what makes narrative exciting, what makes music move us. We shouldn’t want to get rid of all friction in human life, or we’d end up with a dull, flat, inhuman world.

And the people outside the home get something from privacy too. There’s a door here—I don’t know what’s behind it. I’m surrounded by privacies all day, every day. It’s a human realm of the beyond in my life. That’s a public good that privacy radiates: a sense of depth, of possibility, a sense that the human world will always exceed what is known and quantifiable about it.

Jared: You carried a backpack when you got in my car, and I didn’t even think to ask what’s in it. There could be a weapon in there. There could be a present. There could just be your notes.

Lowry: Great example. Our default about limits to our knowledge is not a set feature of human biology—it’s a cultural product. Our default in the backpack case is privacy. It doesn’t call attention to itself. But it’s not hard to imagine a society in which we treat concealment as hiding: your eyes go to my backpack, and suddenly your mind is thinking, what’s in there? That’s a very different way of going through the world.

Jared: It’s a much more paranoid world. It’s a small act of trust, and we get to do these little acts of trust.

Lowry: And these small acts are productive. I have the experience of being trusted—it habituates me to a sense that I’m trustworthy, I belong in this society. Privacy—understood as privacy, not hiding—is a linchpin of that trust.

Jared: Explain the title of your book: The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life. What is this right to oblivion?

Lowry: I wanted a word for the kind of unknowing that privacy produces. Compare secrecy: the thing behind secrecy is secrets, and a secret is a piece of information. It can be shared—I come to know the information you were keeping. That, not coincidentally, is how we think of privacy in the age of privacy settings. By oblivion I mean a kind of unknowing that is fundamentally opposed to the existence of information—a limit that describes what is knowable, not just what’s known. A secret has to be information to exist. Oblivion cannot be.

And privacy isn’t the only thing that produces this kind of unknowing. The two well-known kinds have both been described historically in terms of oblivion: death and forgetting. Something that’s actually forgotten is beyond your power to recall. The oblivion of death is a barrier beyond which knowledge and perception can’t pass. Because there’s a barrier, we know that there’s a beyond—but we can’t say anything about that realm.

The corresponding kind of unknowing is obliviousness. We use it pejoratively, but think of the backpack—you’re oblivious to what’s in there. We don’t want people staring at our drapes, wondering what’s going on inside. We want them to walk by in blithe ignorance. That’s what we want from privacy: for people to be oblivious to our lives.

One last thing. Oblivion comes from the Latin for forgetting—ob, toward or against, and livio, which the philologists aren’t completely sure about, but the general consensus is it means something smooth. Against or toward a smoothness. I like that because oblivion is an absence of knowledge, a kind of void—but a void we can integrate into our daily lives in myriad unnoticeable ways. And by doing so, we add depth and a sense of potentiality to the human person, and to the social, material world that we build.

Jared: I was thinking about my own children as they get older. The phrase I wanted to use was, they’re going to start hiding things from me. But before they hide things because they’re ashamed, there are just going to be times where they start doing things in private. My impulse as a parent is to not let them do that. And I’m now thinking about what it would be like to rob my kids of their privacy. My son’s two and a half, and already he wants to do things for himself—and it’s a very small step from wanting to do things for yourself to wanting to do things in private.

Lowry: I feel the same anxiety. And that anxiety isn’t a steady-state constant of human psychology—ironically, it’s directly correlated with how empowered we are to know more about them. These magical little rectangles are like cursed gifts from a fairy tale. They give us unbelievable powers, and yet they end up limiting us. In the same way that it would be damaging to a child to never have any sense of privacy—infantilizing — it’s infantilizing of adults to be surveilled that way. It’s a moral insult to treat an adult as if they were a child.

Jared: That’s a great place for us to end. But before we go, we always ask for a book recommendation—something nobody’s reading, but you think everybody should.

Lowry: Other than mine, obviously: Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose. This is the most dark-horse book I’ve ever read. The cover is schmaltzy, and it says it’s the story of five Victorian marriages—Carlyle, Mill, Dickens. And her analysis of how these couples led parallel lives, entwined, but living different versions of the same marriage, is one of the most beautifully written, insightful, and profound books on what it means to be a human being with others that I’ve ever read. I think it’s a masterpiece, and it deserves to be much more widely read.

Jared: Well, that sounds great. Lowry Pressly, thanks for joining us.

Lowry: Thank you so much for having me, Jared. It’s been fun.

Today’s culture briefing is free for everyone. Enjoy!

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A few weeks ago, I warned about problems brewing at Netflix (and other streaming platforms). In just the last few days, these problems have gotten worse, much worse—and the situation has reached crisis proportions.

Even more revealing—the crisis is now spreading through the tech world like a wildfire. It’s no exaggeration to say that Netflix dragged down the entire NASDAQ today, after the release of its disappointing quarterly results.

That’s because savvy investors on Wall Street now grasp what’s really going on. They fear that the root cause of Netflix’s woes portends the collapse of the dominant business strategy in tech today.

This is hugely important—and not just for investors or technocrats. All of us will be impacted by how this plays out. And I have a strong hunch that what is bad for Netflix might just be good for you and me.

That’s because Netflix’s failed strategy is audience capture. And you and I are part of the audience it wants to keep in captivity.

More on that below—but let’s start by looking at the damage done to Netflix’s stock. When I warned about it in June, the price had already dropped 45%.

But today, shareholders woke up to this.

After today’s debacle, Netflix will have wiped out the entire last two years of stock price gains.

This is usually where I take a victory lap, and point out that I warned of the danger three weeks ago. But there’s a bigger story here that must be told.

The disappointing earnings call yesterday is just the tip of the iceberg. The company’s reluctance to provide viewership numbers is an even more revealing sign of how bad things really are.

Netflix once bragged regularly about its growing user base. But yesterday they refused to share updated viewership numbers until 2027!

Yet even without those metrics, you can see evidence of a coming corporate collapse—but only if you dig deeply into the numbers.

Last week, for example, we learned that Netflix’s audience is skipping the second season of the platform’s hottest offerings.

That’s scary stuff for Netflix. But it gets worse. The audience is also losing interest in the platform’s brand new series.

The situation is so dire that even Netflix’s biggest new series of the second quarter failed to get renewed. But if the platform can’t count on its new hits, will anything save it?

Netflix doesn’t want to tell us about users canceling their subscriptions. But just go over to Reddit and other platforms where people say what they really think about the company. You will get an earful.

This is typical:

Funny I was talking to my wife about how Netflix has practically nothing left we want to watch and maybe it was time to move on. If this price increase goes through that would be the final straw. I suspect a lot of others are getting close to that limit….

Another frustrated customer didn’t even make a comment—just shared some numbers. But the figures paint a dismal picture.

Netflix got into this mess by pursuing a simple strategy: (1) Reduce the number of new scripted series (which peaked in 2022), but (2) Raise subscription prices.

That is the “audience capture” strategy mentioned above. The idea is that the audience got captured years ago with cheap subscription prices, and now the platform can squeeze them mercilessly—offering less and charging more. Netflix has been pursuing this agenda for several years now.

Ah, but Netflix isn’t the only company building its future on audience capture. It’s getting used at almost every streaming platform. And even companies outside of the media space are practicing variants of it. You see it at Google, Meta, X, Apple, etc.

It’s shocking how many companies have learned this technique. The entire printer and toner business is now built on audience capture. The same is true of the software industry—don’t even get me started on my Microsoft Office subscription fiasco. And, of course, all those customer loyalty programs (variants on the frequent flyer gimmicks that started this craze years ago) are examples of the same stale strategy.

Even the AI world is turning into an audience capture business—both for itself and its customers. This is one of the key reasons for my frequent criticisms of AI slop. It feeds into step one of the strategy outlined above. The companies use AI to reduce the cost of content, thus boosting margins while reducing their dependence on human creators.

Audience capture has always existed, but never to this extent. When I consulted at BCG we called it a milking strategy, where you raised prices and reduced capital investment in a business—which was now your cash cow. You squeeze all the money you can from it, for as long as you can.

But back then we realized that milking only worked in the short term. Eventually you killed the cow. And the risk is the same today with “audience capture”—which is just a new name for that poor old bovine.

Sooner or later, the audience refuses to be held captive. And that’s happening now at Netflix—hence the stock sell-off.

But it’s happening elsewhere too, although few are paying attention. Look at the share price at Spotify or Disney for ther examples.

Did you know that Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire has stopped growing? In the first quarter, Meta saw a decline in users for the first time in the company’s history.

This is not just a coincidence. Meta is the king of audience capture, and when it starts losing that audience, other tech companies ought to pay attention.

You should expect to see more problems of this sort at audience capture corporations. And that’s bad news for the technocracy, because this manipulative strategy is everywhere. If it stops producing results, they will need to take drastic steps.

But their nightmare is our blessing. That’s because the end of audience capture means tech companies will need to return to serving customers, not holding them in bondage.

They aren’t ready to take that step—not now, at least. Pleasing customers is hard work. Milking cows is a simpler business. But they won’t have a choice. The cattle are finally resisting. They might even stampede!

Moo, moo, moo!

I give the leading audience capture companies 12-18 months at most before the worst consequences of their overreach hit their financial statements. And it may happen even faster.

If they were wise, they would start acting now. But whether they fix the root cause of their audience capture mess now or later, the end result will be the same. That captive audience will find itself liberated.

If I’m right, this may represent the biggest shift in the consumer economy of our time. So check back here for updates—because this will be a bumpy rodeo ride for all parties.

I arrived on the planet at the very peak of the Baby Boom. Some 4.3 million children were born that same year—the most ever in US history. But we showed up late in the game, and by the time my cohort reached our teen years, the 1960s and its generational upheavals were mostly over.

There was already a gap. The Boomers invented it—check out the usage of the term generation gap during the course of the 20th century. The rupture happened when I was still a child, so I inherited it along with most of the other things older Boomers gave to America.

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By the same token, my classmates and I played no part in the other riotous events that now define our so-called generation. The year I turned eighteen, the US government even eliminated registration for the draft. So not only did I avoid serving in Vietnam, but was never at risk of deployment. By the same token, there were no big student protests during my college years.

Maybe that’s why I never really felt part of my generation. Nowadays when some young dude mocks me with the jibe “Hey Boomer!”—well, I have to stop and think. “Yeah, I guess I am a Boomer,” I say to myself, “but it doesn’t feel that way.”

Even more to the point: I dislike Boomerism too.

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We judge artists by their greatest hits. But is that fair? Lately I’ve started to question this approach.

Perhaps the truest measure of creative inspiration is a willingness to pursue a vision even at the risk of failure. By this measure, misses are just as important as hits—and maybe an even more revealing gauge of aesthetic boldness. That’s because we never really discover our true potential unless we push it to the breaking point. We go “all in” as they say in poker—even when the odds are against us.

I’ve reached this conclusion, late in life, because of my recent immersion in indie culture. I’m not alone in this—going indie is now the new normal in a creative life. We are living through a collapse in legacy institutions, and this has forced so many of us into the precarious world of freelancing.

Failure is an everyday experience for a freelancer. We pitch projects, and watch the rejections come back to us. But we can’t give up—we need to pay the bills. Even more important, we need to keep our dreams alive.

So every rejection must be followed by a new attempt. Maybe if we’re fortunate, we eventually reach a stage where we can boast about our greatest hits. But that’s late in the game.

It takes a lifetime of misses to create those hits (if they come at all). And those misses tell the real story of our passion, our resilience, our willingness to push our talent to the limit.

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These speculations have led me to return to the work of filmmaker Orson Welles (1915-1985)—who I see as an inspiring role model for indie creators of the digital age. Welles is like many of us today. He lost institutional support from Hollywood studios while still in his twenties. And despite his reputation as the most innovative filmmaker of his generation—for many years his debut movie Citizen Kane won polls as the best film of all time—was forced into a precarious life as a perennial freelancer.

He spent most of his career working on projects that failed. And not because they weren’t good (see the list below)—but for other reasons. Some blame Welles’s prickly personality. Others will fault close-minded Hollywood execs. Or maybe Welles was just cursed with bad luck—problems did seem to follow him wherever he went.

You might say that even his hits were misses. His biggest early success came via a 1938 radio rendition of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which convinced many listeners that extraterrestrials were actually invading America. Welles got plenty of publicity but was threatened with $12 million in lawsuits in the aftermath. He was lucky to escape without criminal charges.

His greatest triumph, Citizen Kane, was also anything but a conventional hit. The major theater chains refused to book it—fearing punishment from newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the thinly-disguised model for Kane. So even at the peak of his career, Welles had a target on his back.

It got worse from there. He couldn’t finish the editing of his second film The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)—because FDR prodded him into going to Brazil as a cultural ambassador during World War II. So Welles was out-of-touch as the studio butchered his remarkable film, and even added a saccharine new ending. It’s testimony to Welles’s greatness that The Magnificent Ambersons is still ranked among the best movies of the era despite the meddling.

After Brazil, everything fell apart for Welles. Hollywood never forgot him, but also never forgave him. He got occasional gigs (although more often as an actor). But this brilliant filmmaker never enjoyed job security or long-term institutional support. He was the permanent indie gadfly—always pitching projects and sometimes actually starting them. But rarely finishing them.

At his death in 1985, Welles left behind at least 19 unfinished projects. Add to that the many others he abandoned in earlier years. And then there are so many Welles concepts that hardly got started at all—but were promising ideas that deserved better. Finally, Welles suffers the added indignity of achieving some commercial successes (on radio or the stage) that are now lost to us—so even these must be counted among his misses, at least from the perspective of posterity.

Below I’ve listed Welles’s ten greatest failures. But I could have easily expanded it to twenty or thirty.

I do this as testimony to Welles’s greatness. From a mercenary perspective, these might be failures, but from an aesthetic standpoint they testify to a creative force that operated at the highest level of intensity for a full lifetime.

Let this offer some solace to the indie creatives of today, who also face so much rejection. Just making the attempt—being the “man in the arena,” as Teddy Roosevelt called it—is a far grander thing than earning a steady paycheck by settling for less.

The Ten Greatest Failures of Orson Welles

The History of Jazz (with Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong)

Welles paid $12,500 to Duke Ellington to create music for a film on the history of jazz. He also planned on hiring Louis Armstrong as a lead actor (he would play himself). Ellington even began work on the score. But during the controversy over The Magnificent Ambersons and his Brazilian project (see below), Welles couldn’t get backing to turn this into a reality.

Judging by the talent alone, this almost certainly would have resulted in the greatest jazz movie of the era, and perhaps of all time.

The Story of Samba

The US government sent Welles to Brazil in 1942 to build goodwill for the war effort, but without any script or clear plan for a movie. But Welles was excited by the samba music he heard and had access to technicolor film. The result was an amazing film—or, rather, it would have been. But the studio eventually dumped 200,000 feet of footage into the ocean, in order to get a tax write-off on the project.

Welles later said that he might have anticipated the great Black Orpheus film of 1959, which helped turned Brazilian music into a global phenomenon, but was waylaid (again) by the close-mindedness of Hollywood execs.

Some footage survives, most of it black-and-white, and is housed at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of it was released in 1993. But this only hints at what Welles might have achieved with studio support.

Around the World

Welles collaborated with Cole Porter on a Broadway musical based on Jules Verne’s famous novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Welles actually got this onstage—but had to spend $350,000 of his own money to make it happen. It failed mostly because of the enormous expense. Welles recreated a multimedia extravaganza which included a live circus onstage and required 38 separate sets.

Bertolt Brecht came backstage after a performance and told Welles that Around the World was the greatest moment in American theater he’d ever seen. But this wasn’t enough to pay the bills. Welles dreamed of turning the Broadway production into a movie, but couldn’t make it happen. So he had to watch from the sidelines as Mike Todd, one of the financial backers of the musical, adapted the same story into a megahit movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1956.

War and Peace

Welles wrote a script for a film adaption of Tolstoy’s epic novel—and all the pieces were falling into place. The cast would include Laurence Olivier, Vivian Leigh, and Ralph Richardson—with Welles playing Pierre. The Soviet Union even expressed a willingness to let Welles use the Red Army for filming battle scenes. But the negotiations with the USSR eventually stalled, and Welles’s screenplay is now lost.

So Welles watched as a bystander (again) when, a few years later, director King Vidor and producer Dino de Laurentis turned War and Peace into a box office hit.

Voodoo Macbeth

This was actually a success onstage, but is now lost to us—so it shows up on our list of misses. Welles believed that the supernatural elements in Shakespeare’s Macbeth could be retold through the prism of the African diaspora, with its syncretic religions and folklore—so he moved the setting from Scotland to the Caribbean. He put this onstage with an African-American cast, and sold out the theater for ten straight weeks in 1936.

Welles was just twenty years old, and already a phenom. But only four minutes of film survive to document this breakout work.

Julius Caesar

As the Macbeth project makes clear, Welles believed that Shakespeare was relevant to every time and place. So while others view Julius Caesar as a story about the Roman empire, he saw it as a cautionary tale of a republic threatened by a fascist leader—and almost a precise analog to the world crisis of the 1930s and 1940s.

Welles envisioned an reworking of Shakespeare’s play in modern dress and filmed in the style of newsreels. He planned on casting Richard Burton in the title role, and even secured financing (from King Farouk of Egypt). But Welles’s project was canceled when MGM announced a Caesar film starring Marlon Brando.

Cowboy Movie Featuring Jesus Christ

While working on Citizen Kane, Welles explored the possibility of making a follow-up movie on the life of Christ, but set in the Wild West. Welles would star and direct, and even got the support of Bishop Fulton Sheen, the most prominent American Catholic of the era. Welles wrote a screenplay and got to the point of scouting shooting locations in Mexico. But the project was shelved, and Welles shifted his attention to The Magnificent Ambersons.

Heart of Darkness

Here’s another example of a failed Welles project that anticipated a later success by another director. He explained the concept to Peter Bogdanovich:

PB: Wasn’t your original Hollywood deal to make Heart of Darkness?

OW: Pretty much….I came to Hollywood and wrote the script, which was going to be a film in the first person: the camera was going to be Marlow, which is ideal for that kind of story, because he’s in the pilot house and he can see himself reflected in the glass through which you see the jungle….I did a very elaborate preparation for that, such as I’ve never done again….We designed every camera setup and everything else—did enormous research in aboriginal, Stone Age cultures in order to reproduce what the story called for. I’m sorry not to have got the chance to do it. The reason we didn’t was because we couldn’t knock $50,000 of the budget.

Welles got to the point of shooting for a single day—proof of concept for the first-person narrative scheme. But the project went no further.

Years later, Francis Ford Coppola relied on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for his classic film Apocalypse Now, considered one of the defining movies of the era. But Welles’s version, like so many other of his most ambitious projects, never happened because of financial constraints.

A Collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov

After the publication of Nabokov’s bold quasi-sci-fi novel Ada or Ardor, Welles reached out to the author about turning it into a film. He even flew out to Paris and had a productive face-to-face meeting with the novelist. But the project went no further. That’s a shame—this book deserves film treatment, and Welles would have brought the right spirit of risk-taking to it

A 1940 Comic Film Starring a Young Lucille Ball

After Heart of Darkness fell through, Welles suggested making a comic farce based on the novel The Smiler with a Knife by Cecil Day-Lewis (father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis). But the studio objected to his casting decision.

Welles explained the problem to Bogdanovich:

There was an actress under contract at RKO then making a picture, called Lucille Ball, who I thought was the greatest female clown around—she could have been just superb in this picture. And they said, ‘What do you want Lucille Ball for? She’s practically washed up in pictures.’ This was thirty years ago—imagine how idiotic they were. They didn’t know what they had. So we didn’t make Smiler with a Knife.

I limited myself to ten projects. But I had to leave out many others—Don Quixote, The Pickwick Papers, Catch-22, King Lear, etc. Even so, the specifics are less important than the larger truth, namely that failure is as much a part of artistic greatness as commercial success. If you don’t encounter it (and repeatedly), you almost certainly aren’t pushing hard enough.

In our current cultural crisis, where creators feel abandoned by the leading institutions (and sometimes by the public too), this may provide some consolation—but also much need inspiration. For many of us, the hardest part of chasing our dreams is overcoming the fear of failure. From that perspective, Orson Welles still has much to teach us.

POSTSCRIPT

Let me close with something Welles actually finished.

Below is the trailer for Citizen Kane. Many have seen the movie, and admired its innovations, but this “coming attraction” footage is also a case study in risk-taking.

See how many intentional mistakes and mishaps you can identify—almost as if Welles was making fun of his lack of experience in filmmaking, even as he was showing off his boldness.

Below is my latest roundup of outstanding new videos. I cover a lot of ground here—music, social commentary, film, career advice, furniture, books, even fashion (not usually my strong suit, no pun intended).

Enjoy!

I’ve praised Hohnen Ford before. She deserves stardom, but mainstream media doesn’t know she exists. A few days ago, Ford released this rendition of “Wichita Lineman” (one of the finest American songs).

Her piano conception is understated, but very smart. And I find her vocals deeply affecting.

Here’s a music plagiarism lawsuit just waiting to happen. This melody is getting used over and over by various artists—but somebody must own the rights. Who is it?

Carl Martin, the host of this video, traces the melody back to 2004. But I suspect there are even earlier examples.

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I’ve just discovered the music of Fabrizio, whose debut album comes out this month—and now you need to know about him too. He has a powerful deep baritone voice you won’t forget.

Fabrizio grew up in poverty in Huánuco, Peru, and moved to the US at age fifteen, where he worked the lowest level jobs—busboy in a Mexican restaurant, door-to-door sales, etc. He eventually found himself in Nashville, and is now ready to make his mark on the country music scene.

I am not a fashion influencer—but I know a lot about the power dynamics of men’s attire. That was necessary when I was dealing with CEOs at McKinsey or negotiating deals overseas. There’s a whole science to this subject that’s not well known.

And a major shift is starting to happen right now.

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The first work of classical literature that thrilled me to the depths of my soul was the Odyssey. It made such a big impact that, decades later, I insisted on reading it aloud to my own children, hoping they would feel that same magic.

I was little more than a child back when I discovered Homer—12 or 13 years old, I’d guess. Back then I knew more about comic books than serious literature. But I was outgrowing Spiderman and Superman, and decided to take a chance on Odysseus.

I approached this book with fear and trembling—worried it might be too difficult. But I soon discovered that Homer was the Stan Lee of antiquity. He told adventure stories not much different from the ones peddled by Marvel or DC.

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I’d somehow gotten my hands on a tattered used paperback copy of the Odyssey, in a 1937 prose translation by W.H.D. Rouse—published by Mentor Classics (cover price when new = 60 cents). This is not a respected translation—they will never assign Rouse’s version of Homer at any Ivy League college.

That’s because the legit translators try to convey this epic as poetry. Rouse made no attempt at that. He just turned Homer into everyday language, just like it was a pulp fiction story for the mass market.

That was the right choice, he believed, because (as he wrote in his introduction): “The Odyssey is “the best story ever written….It has been a favorite for three thousand years.” Other translations of this book are, he claimed, “filled with affectations and attempts at a poetic language Homer himself is free from. Homer speaks naturally and we must do the same.”

You can see the difference by comparing Rouse’s rendering of the opening lines with the esteemed Chapman translation from Shakespeare’s era.

Is this the best version of Homer? I won’t go that far—years later I became very fond of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation. But I will insist that Rouse is the superior version for a youngster. And, in many ways, youngsters were Homer’s target audience—you can feel that at every turn in his story.

So this is the first thing about the Odyssey you won’t learn at Harvard—namely that this tale was not intended for Harvard elites. It’s a story for everybody. So it’s an obvious choice for a big-budget Hollywood movie. There was no pretension or elitism in Homer’s approach. In today’s parlance, you would say that he was appealing to a mass audience.

Director Christopher Nolan—whose screen version of the Odyssey makes its debut in London today—relied on the more recent Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In her version, our hero is described, like Shaft, as a complicated man who won’t cop out (when there’s danger all about). Okay, she doesn’t use those exact words, but comes close….

I like this rendering, and can almost hear that Isaac Hayes synth vamp in the background. Wilson is just as straightforward as Rouse—living up to her aspiration to “tell the old story for modern times.”

Yes, I’d love to hear Homer delivered with this music in the background.

And that brings me to my most important point….

If Nolan really wanted to be bold, he would take a far more radical step and reclaim the Odyssey’s original status as a song. In ancient Greece, this work was not a text—for the simple reason that few members of its audience could read. It was performed.

That’s a truth rarely mentioned—and the single most important fact about Homer that is hidden from view nowadays. His work ought to be taught in the Department of Music. But even music scholars have bought into the big lie that Homer is literature, not song.

So, if you track down the most influential books on Homer, you will find that they are all written by classicists or humanists, not experts on music. Even an astute scholar like Walter Ong, who focuses on the aural tradition in his influential book Orality and Literacy, scrupulously avoids discussing music—even though song is the origin of the entire aural tradition he celebrates.

I tried to rectify this in my books Music: A Subversive History and Music to Raise the Dead, where I reclaim Homer as part of our musical heritage. And it’s not just Homer’s epics that originated as music. The same is true of lyric poetry, philosophy, even the legal code—they were all originally sung.

And here’s where I (finally) give some credit to Harvard. We have a good idea of how these epics were sung because, almost a hundred years ago, two Harvard scholars tried to track down the last living epic bards.

These scholars were Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Parry did most of the initial work but, because he died young, much of the credit went to Lord—whose book The Singer of Tales is still the best starting point for learning about the real Homeric tradition. Those two academics deserve the same esteem accorded to Ong, McLuhan, Frye, Derrida, Searle, and other celebrated theorists of narrative and communication.

I first encountered The Singer of Tales as a college student, and was shocked to learn from Lord how much these epic singers resembled jazz musicians. That’s the third important fact about the Odyssey you won’t learn from Hollywood or your college Intro to Humanities course.

In both instances—the epic poet and jazz musician—the performer learns numerous stock phrases of specific metrical length, and often uses these repeatedly in live renditions. For Homer, these are the descriptors that recur in the Odyssey, such as “rosy-fingered Dawn” or “swift-footed Achilles.” Jazz musicians do the same thing, but their building blocks are known as “licks.”

This video—well known in jazz circles—provides fascinating examples of one such lick.

In 1935, Milman and Parry discovered a remarkable singer named Avdo Međedović—who was born in the Ottoman Empire circa 1875, before the days of commercial recordings. He was a true singer of tales, and accompanied himself on a one-string instrument called the gusle.

They captured performances by this amazing individual on film and in recordings and these provide a glimpse of what the Odyssey might have sounded like to its first listeners. I’d ask anyone who wants to grasp the reality of Homer to watch this short video.

This is the actual origin of the epic tradition—not those fancy books on the library shelves.

I wrote about this bard in my online book Music to Raise the Dead:

The gusle is played not for melodic embellishment or even what nowadays we call a bassline, but generates a pulsating rhythmic drone. Međedović’s singing, for its part, sounds like an incantation, and he appears to have fallen into a kind of trance. You can easily imagine listeners falling into a similar trance given the hypnotic and ritualistic nature of the proceedings.

The gusle also served another role for these singers, namely as a mnemonic support. Međedović displayed extraordinary memory skills, far beyond what the Harvard researchers believed was possible—at one point he performed a song for his visitors that went on for seven days. When it was later transcribed, this one song filled up more than 12,000 lines (by coincidence, the same length as Homer’s Odyssey).

A song that lasts for seven days? If that happened now, it would be some kind of stunt or avant-garde demonstration. Yet even in that context, you couldn’t imagine a singer performing 12,000 lines of lyrics from memory.

But precisely this happened in ancient Greece at the dawn of Western culture.

No Hollywood movie can adequately convey this kind of tradition, no matter how many superstars are in the cast or how much money is spent on special effects. What we learn from Avdo Međedović is that works like the Odyssey are ritualistic and trance-inducing. They are propelled by music and driven by rhythm. They cross a border beyond literature, and enter something more transcendent and metaphysical.

You won’t find any of that in a book, because it can’t fit inside a book. It’s too large for books. And if Hollywood could ever figure out how to transfer this type of creative ritual on to a screen, they would change the entire course of cinema. But is there a single director today capable of that degree of boldness?

This birth of literature out of a magical mystery song is our inheritance from the past—and one of incalculable value. We do ourselves a disservice if we don’t find ways of tapping into its primordial energy in the current day.

Where does that happen? That’s a subject for a different day and a different article. But I’ll say for a start that you won’t find it in a library or classroom.

It’s most likely to occur at live music events, especially those that possess ritualistic intensity.

Let’s both go on a quest to discover it—and keep each other posted.

I am an American, born in SoCal, where I learned to go at things as I taught myself, jazzy and free-style. It helped that Los Angeles, during my childhood, existed without any burden of tradition. I could make things up as I went along, almost as if my life were a sax solo.

There wasn’t much money in my home town of Hawthorne, California—but totally absent was old money. There were no established families or fancy neighborhoods. (Although my mom joked about some imaginary divide—when I told her that Norman Mailer wrote about Marilyn Monroe’s impoverished childhood in Hawthorne, she griped: “Marilyn grew up on the good side of town!”)

Everything existed in a jumble at the intersection of working class and middle class. My family, like many others, moved back and forth over that divide. My father worked as a servant almost until age forty, then put aside enough money to open up his own shoe store. By Hawthorne standards, this was a big deal.

The richest guy from Hawthorne back then was a real estate developer named Ernest Hahn (one of the inventors of the shopping mall). Hahn had been a poor immigrant’s son, just like my dad. I got to meet him once—he was friendly and remembered everybody’s name, and their spouse’s and children’s names too.

One of Hahn’s first construction projects was a simple job for my grandfather, who ran a liquor store in Hawthorne at the time and needed some work done on the shop. That was a tiny project, but when Hahn died in 1992, the LA Times called him “one of America’s wealthiest men.” Of course, Hahn had moved out of Hawthorne long before. That made perfect sense—my home town was no place for the super-rich.

But I flourished in that working class environment. I believed that my hometown represented America at its best, without much baggage. When I got a scholarship to Oxford some years later, I was shocked by the intense British class consciousness and its latent hostilities. I felt awkward seeing the college servants, especially the college “scout” assigned the job of cleaning my room (a Sisyphean task, that). I was reminded of my father’s years working as a chauffeur for a rich man. How had I stumbled from one side of the divide to the other?

The United States isn’t really a society without economic classes, but it looks that way from the perspective of Oxford. Christopher Hitchens summed up the British attitude in an anecdote:

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he’s working on these days. ‘My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.’ ‘Oh really, that’s interesting: one didn’t think there was a class system in the United States.’ ‘Nobody does. That’s how it survives.’

I now realize that going overseas was the fastest way for me to understand what it meant to be an American. It’s perhaps amusing or tragic that the people I’ve met in other countries often have a clearer image of Yankees than I do myself.

I’ve always had confusing notions about my identity. My father was Sicilian and my mother Mexican. And there are also Native American and Swedish strands in my convoluted DNA.

So what am I exactly? What is my American identity?

I look white enough and that’s how others view me. But I’ve never really been certain about that—to this day I hate filling out forms that ask for my ethnic identify. It’s even stranger for my children, because my wife’s father is from India, and her mother’s family came from Ireland.

So we are a confusing breed in my household, straddling at least six different ethnic groups from three continents. But there’s at least consolation in the fact that we can celebrate almost every holiday—from St. Patrick’s Day to Cinco de Mayo—with some authenticity.

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By the way, I think this ambiguity is why my Sicilian relatives have such close relationships with Jews—yes, that’s true in real life, and not just Mafia movies. When I tell most people that I’m unsure whether Sicilians really classify as white, they look at me like I’m crazy. But my Jewish friends understand—we both straddle that uncertain territory between insider and outsider.

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When I started researching my book Healing Songs (2006), I had no opinion whatsoever on the therapeutic properties of sound. I didn’t know if healing music was a reality or a scam. I really had no idea.

But I was determined to find out.

I often do that when starting out on a book. Unlike other authors, who write non-fiction books in order to share their opinions, I do the opposite—I use these projects to shape my opinions. My goal is learning, not pontificating. I really don’t have any narrative until I have spent many years studying a subject.

That’s what happened with Healing Songs. I eventually became a true believer in therapeutic sounds. But it happened gradually over the course of researching and writing the book.

That was when I first got obsessively interested in ultrasound. I saw it as the modern medical counterpart of the healing songs made by shamans, drum circles, singing bowls, and the like. They are all part of a continuum.

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Even before starting on the Healing Songs book, I knew that ultrasound was used in breaking up kidney stones and cataracts—but I now began viewing the devices used for this healing (lithotripters, phacoemulsifiers, etc.) as plugged-in musical instruments, not much different from synthesizers and drum machines.

This shocked people. It still does. How dare I refer to medical devices as musical instruments?

(A fun side note: The guy who invented the machine that treats cataracts with ultrasound was a professional jazz saxophonist.)

But we were still in the early stages of the ultrasound revolution back then. Medical researchers have been slow to grasp the power of sound—probably because it’s intangible. But that’s now changing.

I’ve written about this before (see article links below), but I have to do it again today—because so much is happening right now. Every month, some remarkable new property of sonic healing gets validated by research or clinical practice. And the developments of the last few days are especially exciting.

RELATED ARTICLES FROM THE HONEST BROKER:

“Can You Really Treat Cancer with Sound?”

“Doctors Raise a Patient from a Deathlike State with Electronic Music”

“What Can Music Do Today?”

Consider the recent news from MIT, where researchers eliminated 50% of the brain plaque associated with Alzheimer’s. And they did it with 40 Hz soundwaves—no surgery or drugs were necessary. The procedure is completely non-invasive.

And look at this brand new study, which reveals the potential to counter inflammation and reduce joint pain with low-intensity ultrasound. Body tissue magically starts to repair itself—with potential for use in everything from treating arthritis to recovering from injuries.

And check out this article, published just yesterday, which describes a significant improvement in motor skills among Parkinson’s patients—all because of ultrasound.

But I’m especially excited by the recent announcement from San Francisco research lab Midjourney. They have developed a new scanning technology involving ultrasound—and it sounds like science fiction. “We’re building a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies,” the company boasts.

It doesn’t even feel like a medical procedure—more like a visit to the health spa. In fact, that’s what the company will call its diagnostic centers: Spas.

It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what’s happening inside your body.

The goal is for this process to take no more than 60 seconds.

You go into the water, you come out of the water, and you’re done.

The result is “a 3D map of your body, down to a fraction of a millimeter.” But here’s the payoff:

We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs.

I recently underwent both a CT scan and a MRI in preparation for an operation (blessedly successful!)—so I have firsthand experience of scanning today. I know how costly and cumbersome current scanning procedures are—especially because my scans were done with and without contrast (which involves intravenous use of dyes made with rare earth mineral gadolinium).

The bill was three thousand dollars for the MRI and another thousand for the CT scan. I was fortunate to have good insurance coverage, but in addition to costs I had concerns about longterm effects from the dye and scans.

The idea of replacing this with soundwaves in a pool of water is very appealing. But that’s just the first phase of this tech. This new approach is so cheap and easy that people will be able to have weekly or monthly scans—and thus have constantly up-to-date info on the state of their body.

I can imagine future expansion into treatment involving the same gentle technology. Step into the pool of water to get scanned and cured. That’s because these various ultrasound technologies are likely to converge—with diagnostics and therapeutics coming together.

And just think that, until a few days ago, Midjourney was betting its future on AI slop. But it has now discovered a bigger miracle—namely the power of sound. A lot of this magic is based on the ultrasound-on-a-chip tech developed by Butterfly Network, a company that helps expecting couples see the first images of their babies in utero.

Procedures of this sort, even non-invasive ones, still require FDA approval. But Midjourney wants to open its first Spa in San Francisco next year. By 2031, they hope to have 50,000 scanners in use, with the capability of handling a billion scans per month.

Meanwhile, another company (Aleph) is rapidly developing brain scanning with ultrasound, and recently released the most detailed vascular image ever of a living human brain. But that’s nothing compared with its greater ambition—namely to create a kind of telepathy via ultrasound.

I’m not joking. Mind reading is really part of their business plan.

We already know that what people see with their eyes can be determined via brain scanning. This suggests the possibility of a form of communication which bypasses our sense organs entirely. “We think our telepathic future is both imminent and wonderful,” the company states on its website.

The MRI community is suspicious of this rapid evolution in ultrasound—and will fight to prove the superiority of its costly (up to $3 million) technology. I’ll leave it to others to weigh the pros and cons. But I do know, from my many years of research into healing music, that outsiders underestimate the power of sound.

In any event, we will soon know more—because these procedures are getting commercialized at a very rapid pace. If you care about therapeutic sounds, there has never been a better time than right now.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for more immediate and mundane uses of ultrasound, let me close with this.

Hey, maybe that Midjourney health spa will also offer the best coffee in town.

I hear stories from readers—some of them sad, but many bring me great joy. Below is a very inspiring email I received earlier this week.

So many of us are trying to live more mindfully. And it’s hard to do nowadays. We rely on technology, but it has turned on us. It’s intrusive and manipulative—isolating its users, while promoting passivity and addictive behavior.

I’m trying to help people live better lives in this hostile environment. That’s the main purpose behind The Honest Broker. When I get an email like this, it makes me feel like it’s not all in vain.

I’m sharing this with permission—but leaving out the author’s name.

Dear Ted,

I am writing to express my gratitude for your work and for being an Honest Broker. In an attempt to illustrate my thanks, I’d like to briefly describe the wonderful effect you have had on my life.

Since discovering your Substack in 2021-2022, I have begun to turn my life around by making significant improvements to my quality of life and, subsequently, the lives of those around me. This is in no small part due to the influence of your books and articles.

The feeling I frequently get when I read your writing is along the lines of “He gets it,” or “Someone finally said it,” and “This needed to be said.” I would describe this to a friend as “Ted is able to express in words things that I feel and know to be true but am unable to describe myself.” Maybe that’s just the mark of a greater intellect or of a talented writer in general. But, to me personally, it is as if I had an understanding friend. This is something I needed and came to me at a time when I felt I had none.

For the past several years you have served as a much needed role model. I greatly admire your world view and relate to your experience as a musician finding your way. In 2022-2023, while reading Music to Raise the Dead, a copy of From Ritual to Romance jumped out at me from the racks at a thrift store. Around the same time, I picked up a copy of The Golden Bough and Battle for the Mind by W. Sargent as well as Solitary Confinement by Christopher Burney. These ideas were swirling about in my head, as I was also drinking heavily as usual, when a line from The Honest Broker jumped out at me. One of your friends had recently gotten sober, and you mentioned that it had been “deserving of your highest praise.” When I read that line, some willingness appeared within me that was not traceable before. At that moment I considered seeking help for my drinking problem.

As I write this, I have been sober for 2 years and 10 months. I have been wanting to write this letter to you for about as long. In lieu of going into more detail, I want to thank you again for your amazing body of work that influenced me, gained my trust, and continues to give me hope.

I have so many questions I would like to ask, but I feel selfish writing them here. I am sure you will continue to inspire myself and others with your writing, and for that I am content.

This serves as eloquent testimony for the real purpose of arts and humanities, and why I’m such a fervent advocate for them. You don’t pursue them to pass tests or drop names at a cocktail party—but to live a wise life, a mindful life, a good life.

There are people everywhere who are doing just that. Their stories aren’t told in the media or made into motion pictures, but they are far better role models than movie stars or pop singers.

Here are some links to provide context for this reader’s letter.

• How to Discover Mindfulness in a Nazi Solitary Confinement Cell

• Music to Raise the Dead

• A 12-Month Immersive Course in Humanities

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This email came from a conservatory-trained pianist at an early stage in her career:

If you can share, I’d be really interested to know: You probably get many requests to participate in various projects—how do you decide which projects to say yes to and which to decline?

My response:

First, I always try to give priority to my ‘big picture’ long term projects—even though they may not bring in any income at the time. This can cause a lot of pain and suffering in the short term, and external circumstances can force our hands at times. But if we don’t fight for our long term goals, who will?

For a while, I had a rule that I would always spent at least one day per week on projects that were my own choice, not something anyone hired me to do. Over time I shifted even more of my focus and energy to my pet projects. (Nowadays I turn down almost everything that doesn’t fit with my own objectives—but I didn’t get to that degree of autonomy overnight.) We all need to be able to pay our bills, so sometimes there are limits on our ability to manage your own daily schedule.

But you should spent a significant amount of time thinking about where you want to be in 5, 10, 20 years. And then make sure you are taking steps in that direction.

There were long periods in my life when I had very little control over my schedule. But even in those difficult days, I found some time every week to chase my dreams. That might mean pursuing them on weekends or late at night, but I refused to give up on them. Many of those dreams did became realities—but only because I never abandoned them, and kept building my pathway to them week after week.

Probably the key difference between me and most other writers is: (1) I go to great lengths to avoid projects ‘assigned’ to me by other people, maybe almost to an extreme, (2) I am always thinking about what I want to do as part of my long term vocational plan, and (3) I make decisions that others tell me are stupid, because I’m willing to walk away from a significant short term opportunity. But I know I need to do this if I hope to achieve the higher goals I’ve set for myself.

I hope this helps.

This next question came from an esteemed music writer: He wanted to know how I had “defied the odds” in my relationship with Stan Getz, who is frequently portrayed as an irritable and irascible individual—and he mentions that he had heard this from many sources, including Getz’s ex-wife Monica.

Here’s my response.

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Last November I suggested that 2026 would witness a tech backlash of unprecedented intensity. And it’s now happening with a vengeance. Silicon Valley is getting skewered everywhere, and to a degree inconceivable just a short while ago.

Just yesterday, The Economist finally grasped how rapidly tech antipathy is mounting—and made AI backlash its cover story.

The latest survey numbers are devastating. Every demographic group is now opposed to AI—especially young people, previously the most enthusiastic supporters of new tech.

I’ll have some scary stories to share below, but let’s start with a more lighthearted angle. Comedians Harris Alterman and Dave Ross, for example, recently took their parodies of Silicon Valley marketing out into the real world—via a series of make-believe marketing campaigns.

I share a few examples here with permission.

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The first poster is absurd. But it’s also an accurate depiction of the circular accounting behind the AI boom.

AI is also the target here.

Here’s my favorite. And it’s all the funnier if you’ve walked around San Francisco recently and seen meaningless slogans of this sort plastered all over the city.

I’ll share one more. It captures the marked inanity of the current moment, when tech companies are in a race to monetize the impoverishment of their own workforce—and the population at large.

This mockery of tech is even showing up in traditional comedy settings—for example Saturday Night Live.

Not every pushback to encroaching tech is quite so gentle.

Consider the case of “Mr. Daniels,” a 25-year-old man from England. He knows that AI will rob every music file on the web for training—so he decided to poison the data.

How did he do it? According to Tuned Into Tech, it happens like this:

He took his entire music library of 2,000 records, stripped out the original vocals, and replaced every single one of them with the voice of Homer Simpson. Then he uploaded all of them to Soulseek. He didn’t change the metadata, the file names, the artist tags, the album information. They all stayed exactly the same.

A listener might not notice at first. Some of these songs have long intros, and those are unchanged. But as soon as the singing begins, Homer Simpson takes over. When AI tries to steal this for training, it gets fooled—and contaminates its own data set.

So somewhere deep in a training algorithm’s data set is the audio of Homer Simpson which the AI will assume sounds like [for example] Madonna, Rihanna, or maybe even Sean Paul. The model doesn’t know the idfferennce. It just ingests the data and treats that like the truth.

And that is exactly what Mr. Daniels is hoping for.

He wants “to introduce noise, chaos” into the bots that are putting human musicians out of work.

“Mr. Daniels” is not an isolated example. Musician Benn Jordan has also been “poison-pilling” music files in hopes of disrupting AI.

In recent months, he has watched in horror as “tech companies started raising millions of venture capital dollars and scraping my music without my consent.” They now use his own work to generate “shittier music with it that is inadvertently associated with my name—and then attempting to resell that in the same economy in which I make money from my music.”

As a result, he has stopped releasing music. But he hasn’t walked away from the battle—instead Jordan has developed “a type of encoding that not only makes a music file more or less untrainable by generative AI companies, but actually has the ability to decrease the quality and efficiency of their entire data set.”

“Unethical generative AI companies have made artists feel incredibly powerless for quite some time now,” he adds, “but all of that is about to change.”

He describe his poison pill program in this recent video.

Other music lovers are fighting back in even more extravagant ways.

Consider the protesters who hired two planes to fly over an AI music conference in Santa Monica—displaying huge banners—one read “STEALING MUSIC IS BAD KARMA” and the other said “SAY NO TO SUNO.”

The protest is the work of the Human Artistry Campaign—a coalition advocating the responsible use of AI. “AI can never replace human expression and artistry,” the organization declares on its website. But they aren’t trying to shut down the technology; they just want AI music companies to operate fairly. So HAC’s demands are reasonable: essentially transparency, trustworthiness, and respect for artists’ rights.

Still other critics of AI are building practical tools that music fans can use to counter slop. Deezer, for example, just announced the launch of an AI detector that will identify bot tracks on your streaming playlists. They claim it is 99.8% accurate.

Other opponents of AI have set up shop on YouTube, where they expose the abuses of the technology, and denounce the people responsible. There’s some irony in this situation—because YouTube is owned by Alphabet, which is the single biggest investor in AI computing capacity.

But indie creators help pay the bills at Alphabet. So the company is in the uncomfortable position of relying on the same people they are threatening with their AI investments—who are now outspoken in their opposition to AI.

In fact, the most popular music commentators on YouTube are almost uniformly opposed to AI. Check out, for a start, Rick Beato, Adam Neely, Anthony Fantano, Steve Terreberry, and Danny Sapko.

Fantano, for example, recently released a video entitled “AI Music Is Evil”—you can’t say he is mincing his words. Beato’s take is just as straightforward; his video is called “I’m Sick of This AI Crap.” Adam Neely’s recent interview with Alex O’Connor is uploaded as “AI Music Is Not Music.”

Hey guys, what do you really think?

Terreberry provides the ultimate example of AI hallucination. In a moment of frustration, he asks an AI generator to build a song around his lyrics—but his “lyrics” are just random letters:

izuxfbkafdabguizdaluidhgzxfuk….

Even so, the bot will not refuse, and actually builds a terrible song from this prompt. It’s so stupid that it went viral.

And it’s not just music pundits who hate AI. Fans are just as angry. If you doubt it, read the comments these YouTubers get from their millions of subscribers. Surveys back this up. Depending on your source, somewhere between 60% and 88% of consumers express a preference for human-made music.

A recent study from Luminate tries to measure this growing hostility to slop. Their data shows that, once again, younger people are the most incensed. Over the course of just six month, support for AI music among Gen Alpha and GenX fell ten percent!

If you take all this into consideration, it’s easy to predict how this story will end. AI has lost the battle for public acceptance. With each passing month, tech companies are more hated. The probability of Mark Zuckerberg or some other tech billionaire turning this around is almost zero.

Of course, the slop purveyors won’t just go away. But they will be forced to push their tech secretly, behind the scenes, avoiding transparency at all costs. They now know that the best way to force AI into the mainstream is by disguising it as a human creation—so expect to see more scandals like the Velvet Sundown fiasco and the great fake jazz music crisis.

But what will they actually achieve by relying on deception to such a degree? It will only make people all the angrier.

So you should expect the tech backlash to escalate further. In the very near future, AI supporters will represent less than ten percent of the populace—roughly the size of a crazy cult. That’s why this story will end unhappily for Silicon Valley. It’s just a matter of time.

Here’s the share price of Spotify during the last 12 months—it’s a debacle.

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Spotify insiders probably saw this coming. In the months leading up to the all-time high, they sold a massive number of shares. CEO Daniel Ek (now Executive Chairman of the company) sold relentlessly—to a degree I’ve never seen before from a corporate leader.

Here’s a summary via Music Business Worldwide.

I note that Spotify hit its all-time high on June 26, 2025. It’s down a staggering 40% since that time. So Ek looks very smart indeed.

Read more

Today I’m sharing one of the “big” essays that define my life’s work as a critic—a piece I’ve worked on for years. I’m publishing it here in its entirety for the first time.

It’s my response to the debunking and ridicule frequently targeted at the concept of authenticity in music, which modern critics often dismiss as a kind of marketing gimmick or ideological construction.

Unlike them, I take authenticity seriously—as something we crave for a good reason. Some performers possess it, while others do not.

This is not a small thing. And if we don’t come to grips with this hidden source of power in songs, we will never understand where our music comes from or what it can mean for us today.

At a later date, I may release this as a short book—or part of a collection of my essential writings. But here I’m making it available to everyone.

Because of its length, the text might get cut off by some email providers. But you can access it in its entirety by clicking on the headline and reading it online.

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Authenticity in Music

By Ted Gioia

I

After my father died, I took on the melancholy responsibility of organizing the objects he left behind. I dreaded the moment, but it proved to be a much simpler job than I expected.

Dad, as it turned out, owned almost nothing.

The closet in his bedroom, where he stored most of his personal possessions, was tiny—especially in comparison with the huge walk-in storage areas (really more rooms than actual closets) of my home. Yet even this small space he failed to fill.

Living in an unprecedented age of conspicuous consumption, Dad barely lived up to the status of entry-level consumer. The only expensive heirloom I inherited from him, a gold watch, was actually a gift he had received from me a few years before his death—I can’t recall a single lavish expenditure he made on himself during his 84 years on this planet.

The way I look at it, I ended up giving myself this gold watch. It’s somehow fitting that the pricey gift came back to me as his heir—almost as if Dad couldn’t keep something so ostentatious. It wasn’t the right style for such a simple man. But having it returned in this way gave me no joy, as you can imagine.

I’ve now owned this fancy watch for more years than my father did. But I don’t wear it—somehow I’m shamed by the thought of doing so when I contrast my own possession-filled life with his austere one. I will give that family heirloom to my oldest son (who was named after my father) in a few years’ time. Maybe he will make better use of it than I have or Dad ever did. I hope he does.

In any event, that timepiece isn’t the most important thing I inherited from Dad. Not even close.

In fact, when I recall my father’s simplicity, I don’t think of any of these matters first. Instead there was something intangible in his character, hard to describe, that stood out even more sharply, a certain translucent quality to his actions and demeanor. This was where his true simplicity resided, not in his half-filled closet.

At first glance, it almost seemed like a character defect, because it was most easily defined by the long list of skills my father lacked. The most obvious was Dad’s complete and total incapacity for irony. He couldn’t make an ironic comment if his life depended on it. Nor did he ever show awareness of the irony others used, no matter how thickly they laid it on. In the kingdom of words, he lived on the surface level—he said what he felt, and felt what he said—refusing to take even the most cursory peek at submerged meanings that might reside in the basement.

This would have been noteworthy under any circumstances, but especially in the context of our household. My siblings and I gave an ironic twist to everything that came our way, and Mom joined in happily in this wry banter. Like my Father, she had grown up in poverty and never attended college, but had a sharp wit and enjoyed the equalizing power of irony.

Our social betters were knocked down a few rungs by the sly twists we imparted to our critiques. Elites weren’t quite so elite after one of our rejoinders hit the mark—rarely delivered to their face, but imagined in vivid detail in the course of our sharp repartee around the dinner table. My father may have presided, in some symbolic manner, as head of the household at these repasts, but in reality it seemed as if he was an oblivious onlooker at a performance he never quite comprehended.

Ah, but irony rarely shows up alone at any conversation. It usually is accompanied by its close associates sarcasm, smugness, and cynicism. And somehow my father had managed to avoid these bad boys as well. I look back on all my various interactions with him over the years, and can’t recall even a single sarcastic or smug remark. In his universe, things were what they were, and it would never have occurred to him to reframe his narrative (as we might say nowadays) with these potent tools that serve as both protective layers and assault weapons for the rest of us.

I rarely thought about all this back in those days—in our early home life, we tend to accept the quirks and quiddities of parents as basic facts of the natural world—but if someone had asked me point blank during my teen years, I would have admitted that these huge gaps in my father’s toolkit were serious deficiencies. Not only was he defenseless, at least from a verbal standpoint, in a hostile world, but he was also missing out on much of the fun.

I’m not so sure anymore. Nowadays I often envy my father’s obliviousness to the ironic postures of the rest of his family. It’s almost as if he had been born with immunity to a disorder that was infecting everyone else. Thinking back to those times I am reminded of that charged family moment in Hamlet when the protagonist’s mother asks why he seems so upset—and he responds “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems.”

There are certain people incapable of adopting the roles and postures prevalent in their time and place. They are, not seem. It’s not that they have renounced the advantages of ironic distance; rather they don’t know how to make the trek there—in the case of my father, he sometimes appeared unaware that there was even a journey that might be made.

I think about these things more often nowadays, and oddly enough in the context of considering music and the arts, and especially that fraught term authenticity that keeps on recurring in our discussions of artists. I’ve come to wonder whether the true benchmark of the authentic isn’t precisely this same kind of obliviousness my father demonstrated again and again. The musicians who strike me as most authentic never realized that inauthenticity was even a choice—they wouldn’t know how to arrive at that destination, even if you gave them a map and GPS coordinates.

Discovering this kind of authenticity is a gift, but it’s an unusual kind of gift—defined as much by what you relinquish, not what you gain. Most people in the music world find about it from some old blues singer or an antiquated folk song or in so-called world music from far, far away.

In my case, I learned about authenticity at home, and from the best possible teacher. Even now, so many years after his death, I’m still learning from Dad’s example. And if I could somehow manage to pass it down on to my children, it would be worth a whole lot more than a gold watch.

I say this in full awareness of the contentiousness and backlash arising from almost any assertion of authenticity, especially in the arts—but in other spheres of life as well. There’s been so much debunking of authenticity in recent years that it’s remarkable that anyone is still willing to use it as a term of praise. Sometimes words in the critic’s lexicon become tainted, defeating the very purpose for which they are applied. The situation is so dire that I might even claim that we are facing an “authenticity crisis” in the arts—especially now with the rapid rise of AI. But even making that statement would spur a meta-backlash against the implicit assumption that there’s any legitimate concern over such a debased concept. After all, why defend authenticity if it doesn’t really exist?

In this regard, authenticity is coming to resemble its kindred word ‘sincerity’, which now implies the exact opposite of its dictionary definition. As Lionel Trilling points out, in his magisterial Harvard lectures published as Sincerity and Authenticity, the term “has an effect that negates its literal intention—‘I sincerely believe’ has less weight than ‘I believe’; in the subscription of a letter, ‘Your sincerely’ means virtually the opposite of ‘Yours’. “ [Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, (London: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 6.]

There’s an humorous quote, well known among actors, circulated in many variants and attributed over the years to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx: “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That pretty sums up the prevailing elite view of sincerity and authenticity in the creative world—where they are dismissed as poses played out in public as part of the show, without deeper significance.

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.

So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

II

Music plays a surprisingly large role in the history of the divided self, and has repeatedly been highlighted by the most influential thinkers as intimately connected with inauthenticity. In fact, the entire history of Western philosophy begins with a firm conviction that music has a direct cause-and-effect linkage with our psyches and souls, such that the wrong songs degrade both individual behavior and social well-being.

This view not only figures prominently in Plato and Aristotle, but even has roots back with the pre-Socratics, especially Pythagoras who holds a double position as an originator of Western philosophical thought and inventor of musical tuning systems. What an odd coupling of skills! At first glance, it makes no sense that a famous tuner of musical instruments would also figure as the most esteemed source, in his day, of theories about the meaning of life, but for Pythagoras and his successors in the ancient world this connection was an obvious one. The good life was constantly endangered by the wrong choice of playlist—and even your life could fall out of tune.

For these thinkers, music is capable of both positive and negative effects in character formation. But for most of them, the dangers of song took on far greater significance than the healthy attributes. This is obviously true in history of religious thought—a whole book would be necessary to convey even the basic variations of this aversion to sinful songs—but it’s just as true in the highest circles of European intellectual life. Take Nietzsche, for example. When he set up his influential opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysian, with the former representing control and order and the latter embodying chaos and disruption, he associated the Dionysian explicitly with the power of music.

By the same token, when Diderot wanted to cast light on the disintegration and deliberate falsity of the new personality types of his day, he picked a musician as a case study. In fact, much of this work, Rameau’s Nephew, is devoted to a grotesque mock opera in which the title character plays all the parts simultaneously—showcasing what it means to have no authentic core to one’s personality.

When this strange manuscript was finally published, two decades after Diderot’s death, more than a few readers must have seen it as a comic trifle—but the deepest thinkers of the day grasped its significance in delineating a distinctly modern character. Goethe, Hegel, Marx and others responded with enthusiasm to its disturbing portrait. Hegel refers to it repeatedly in his Phenomenology of Spirit, and even sees in the apparent buffoonery of Rameau’s nephew the positive seeds of the unfolding future. Yet at the same time, he describes this fractured personality as “the madness of the musician” who grasps the painful truth that his moment in history requires “the perversion of every Notion and reality, the universal deception of itself and others; and the shamelessness which gives utterance to this deception is just for that reason the greatest truth.” [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 317]

Music can do all that?

Are songs really to blame for the divided personality? Is there something in music that, in its very essence, tends to inauthenticity? If so, we may be forced to abandon our quest of authentic music from the very outset—that would be like searching for the proverbial lead balloon or praising the much ballyhooed ‘deafening silence.’ Authentic music would be little more than an oxymoron, an amusing subject to speculate about, but never found in practice.

Yet even when you put aside the philosophy books, and talk to casual music fans you find the same conviction. There’s a widespread belief that great musicians are unbalanced, or even crazy. In fact, music is one of the few spheres of human endeavor in which the word insane is used as a term of highest praise.

I’ve even heard musicians grumble that they are punished by fans if they lead a balanced and controlled—or what Nietzsche might call an Apollonian—life. They can never match the mystique captured by their peers who spend time in prison, rehab, mental institutions and other places of confinement for those whose edginess has gone beyond the edge.

Even the most casual words we use in reference to music imply its causal connection with inauthenticity. We talk of a musician “playing” an instrument—the very same word we use for actors who “play” a role. The inescapable notion embedded in this terminology is that the very moment when the performance begins, artists are already separated from their true, authentic selves.

There are only three professions in which work is literally play. In acting, sports and music, we never use the verb work. You play football, you don’t work it. You play guitar, you don’t work those six strings. You play a role, you if someone said you worked at it, that would imply a failure to bring it to life. What a marvelous thing to consider: the notion that work gets transformed into play. You could never imagine other professions gaining this same distinction. No coal miner would ever claim to play the mine. The very notion is ludicrous. Yet the same conceptual shift that turns work into play for these three vocations also imparts a sense of unreality and pretense to them. Life on the stage is not real life. It is, in fact, staged—another example where the words we use points to our subconscious attitudes.

This is much more than a matter of words and etymologies. I’ve seen even the most rudimentary techniques of music turned into a pathway to inauthenticity. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, the livelihood of almost every professional musician in town depended on adaptability to the wide range of commercial opportunities at hand. There might be better music cities than LA, but could any other town match the range of music gigs: on any given day you might get enlisted for Hollywood film soundtracks, commercial jingles for advertising, TV theme songs, pop and rock record sessions, symphony orchestras, jazz jam sessions, along with the usual fare of weddings, bar mitzvahs, school dances, cruise ships, and other casual bookings. Authenticity wasn’t called for in this ecosystem—in fact, it was a definite handicap. You weren’t supposed to have deeply-held musical values; what you monetized was your flexibility and versatility.

I was never very happy with the aspect of my home town’s musical culture. But I’ve seen it spread throughout the entire world in the intervening years. The main culprit is the ever-expanding scope of music education, with thousands of guitarists, keyboardists, vocalists, horn players, drummers and other performers now getting degrees each year from institutions that instill this same kind of versatility in their graduates. Almost the first thing that comes out of the mouth of a music educator in the current day is some mantra about mastering a wide range of performance styles. Today I will teach you the Afro-Cuban montuno. Tomorrow we start on Baroque counterpoint. And from a purely commercial and professional perspective, who can deny the value? Who wants to stand up for ignorance? Who wants to take the side of inflexibility?

Yet there is always a cost when you sacrifice your own artistic personality for the demands of the marketplace. The word we most often use to describe that lost quality is authenticity.

III

Given these constraints, does any music deserve the label of authentic? Certainly there’s plenty of talk about the subject. I did a Google search on authentic music, and the search engine responded with more than 300 million results. But maybe that hyperactive chatter measures only our yearning for this authenticity, not its actual existence. After all, the things we talk about the most are often what we lack, not what we’ve got.

It’s especially unsettling that authenticity seems to disappear the moment we try to measure it alongside the inauthentic. It’s the Schrödinger’s cat of the music world. In fact modern physics might even help us in grasping the paradox here. One of the unnerving precepts of quantum mechanics is the discovery that phenomenon are changed by the very process of being observed. That’s the curse of authenticity—as soon as it gets noticed and praised for its gritty realness, it starts to look like a pose.

As a result, music critics have grown into expert debunkers of authenticity. As soon as they hear the word, they rush to point out its falsity. A whole sub-genre of music history research has been devoted to this subject, resulting in books with names like Fakesong and Faking It. (And what are we to make of the fact that even musicians themselves refer to the song compendiums they take to gigs as “fake books”—does any other mode of creative expression so openly embrace the notion of phoniness?)

Yet the quest for what’s real and uncompromised continues unabated. The resulting tension is never resolved. In fact, it often seems as if the genres most proud of their hard-won authenticity are also the most mired in arguments over which artists are poseurs and phonies. Go check out the message boards where fans of punk, metal, hip-hop, and jazz congregate and measure the anxiety level for yourself.

A long list of culprits have been identified as the source of our authenticity crisis in music. Money ranks high on the list, as will be no surprise—isn’t it guilty of corrupting everything it touches? Record labels and their minions get plenty of blame too, for meddling and manipulation, which (so we are told) distort the whole artistic enterprise of music-making. But there’s something even worse than these usual suspects, although I am reluctant to tell you what it is. But it comes up so often in exposés of authenticity in the arts, that I can’t, in good faith, skip over it.

And what is that ultimate source of debasement and corruption?

Alas, it’s you and me. The audience. We are the root of the problem, at least according to those at the forefront of debunking authenticity. Our cherished musicians may appear authentic and answerable only to their deeply-held inner values, but in reality they all play to the crowd, working to please an audience. Every performance is a construct, impure and compromised from the outset.

I recall a debate with a prominent music writer who held this view—and he kept repeating that “all music is created with an audience in mind.” This was, he believed, as obvious as saying water is wet or fire is hot. And at first glance, this opinion appears true, or at least plausible. But it isn’t, not in the least. And the confusion over this matter of the so-called audience may be the single biggest reason why our arguments over authenticity never seem to get anywhere.

The truth of the matter is that most music throughout human history has existed without any concern over the audience. The concept of an audience only emerged gradually during the history of music-making, and even when it finally entered the discourse, it was frequently an object of scorn and derision. Until very recently, music flourished all over the world in happy ignorance of this all-powerful audience.

In most communities, until very recently, everyone participated in the musical culture. They were not an ‘audience’, under any reasonable definition of the term; rather they were embedded in the music as a constitutive part of performance. In fact, there are entire categories of music that not only thrive without an audience, but are degraded when treated as entertainment for outsiders.

Consider a parent singing a lullaby to a baby or musical laments at a graveside—these are closed systems for participants only. By the same token, I spent years researching and writing a book on work songs, and dealt with thousands of musical performances in the course of it—but few of them had any relationship whatsoever to what we might call an audience. The authenticity of these performances can hardly be questioned. The singers, like my father at our dinner table conversations, are incapable of assuming a posture or stance. They have a direct, unambiguous connection to their songs that resists inauthenticity—for the simple reason that this music exists outside the dynamic of performer and audience.

These kinds of embedded songs are far more common than you might think, especially if you judged matters on the basis of what you read in reviews or books on music history and aesthetics. If you’ve taken a class on music appreciation, you might even assume that all compositions exist as links between a composer and a “listening audience.” But if you left the classroom behind, and walked into a church and saw the whole congregation joined together in song, you would struggle to identify the audience.

If everybody performs, who is left to serve that much more diminished role of passive listener? God, perhaps? And there are many other situations in which it’s impossible to draw the line between performer and audience. If I am dancing at a wedding reception, aren’t I participant? If I sing “Happy Birthday” at a party or stand for the national anthem at a sporting event, aren’t I now an embedded part of music-making? In these settings, I have become part of the ritual, as is the music itself—and the ritual sets the rules, not the audience. Here again, the authenticity of such performances are almost never called into question.

The same is true of the person singing in the shower or along with car radio during the daily commute or dancing alone to some favorite song in the privacy of a home or bedroom. There’s usually no audience in these settings—unless you shower in groups or car pool with some very tolerant fellow-workers. Your singing in the shower may be good or bad, soft or loud, but its authenticity cannot be compromised by the audience.

If you study these matters in the context of the full history of human music-making you reach the inevitable, but perhaps surprising, conclusion that songs in most times and places have flourished without any need for the audience. By the same token, the authenticity of the music is hard to undermine. In many settings, the participants have no conception of an inauthentic alternative to their music. It is what it is.

IV

At this point, you may be willing to grant that authenticity in music does exist. But I suspect that many of you remain skeptical that this has much bearing on what actual musicians do in the current day. After all, the life of a professional performer has nothing in common with the average person singing out-of-tune radio hits in the shower, and even less to do with traditional work songs or medieval peasant dances. You might even be tempted to stop reading right now, convinced that nothing I am saying has any relevance to the music you care about.

But before you shut the door on me, I want to make sure you grasp the significance of what we lose when we walk away from the concept of authenticity. It is much more than a musical or aesthetic concept. Every aspect of our lives, from the most intimate to the most public, now operates under the shadow of inauthenticity—especially with the rise of AI. In fact, I believe that authenticity will soon become a widely-accepted measuring rod of the good life—a life liberated from the manipulations of tech-enabled simulacrums.

Our very notion of personal identity, in the modern world, is undergirded by the demands of authenticity. It is the first and primary choice that serves as the foundation for all the other choices we make. Whether we decide to commit ourselves to God or mammon, mother nature or a political cause, a philosophy of life or some specialized code of conduct—and even if we narrow our scope of interest to just our family or our solitary and self-centered day-to-day needs—the rightness or wrongness of our life mission rests on its perceived authenticity. We might have extraordinary success, as validated by external measures, but if this is not accompanied by a deep-seated sense of authenticity, our achievements feels hollow.

So if you are so quick to decide that no one can even pluck a guitar string with authenticity, what hope is there for the rest of us in our fraught, complex lives? If something as simple as a song can’t reach this bare threshold of rightness, forced instead into degrading compromises with external norms and expectations, what can we possibly expect from our vocations, our relationships, and our aspirations for a holistic, integrated life?

In short, if authenticity is a fraud, this has implications that go far beyond our playlists.

By the same token, we do well to dig into the deeper significations and real world implications of this modern concept of authenticity. Perhaps if we understand how people successfully apply it to their moral or social or personal lives, we might grasp its true dimensions as an aesthetic mandate. Given the stakes here, this is clearly worth our time and energy. To some extent, exploring the path to authenticity is the best possible use of our time.

That is, assuming a path actually exists. Our lives often feel so constrained, so much at the mercy of circumstances and contexts beyond our control, that we can easily despair of rising to the demands of an authentic life. Even if we can identify the core components of such an integrated, fulfilled existence, what chance do we have of achieving it? Like that hypothetical guitarist struggling to please a fickle audience, we constantly feel forced to adapt to standards others impose us—our boss or teacher, our parents, our friends and romantic partners, our neighbors, and all those others who actively prevent us from defining ourselves in our own terms.

Given all this, it should hardly surprise us to learn that authenticity has not always been accepted as a legitimate or even conceivable goal. Until the 18^th century, the notion that individuals ought to define the terms and conditions of their participation in the world around them would have been viewed as laughable, if not demonic or subversive. And when the concept of authenticity did emerge, it first only encompassed a small number of elites. It gained credibility in the context of formal philosophies, as articulated and expanded over a period of decades by Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, Marx (especially in his early years), Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and others. But the notion was limited to those who paid attention to matters of theory; it had not yet entered the sphere of practice.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) deserves our particular attention. In his account of the history of authenticity, philosopher Charles Taylor focuses on a decisive moment in Western culture when this concept became “crucially important.” That happened when Herder “put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human. Each person has his or her own ‘measure’ is his way of putting it. This idea has entered very deep into modern consciousness. It is also new. Before the late eighteenth century no one thought that the differences between human beings had this kind of moral significance.” [Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p, 28.)

This is of especial interest to us because Herder was also the father of folk music—the very same genre of singing that is most weighted down with expectations of authenticity in the current day. In an earlier day, historians and other leading thinkers tried to define a nation’s character and destiny on the basis of its military conquests or royal decrees or famous works of literature and art, but Herder had a different approach. He praised the Volk (or folk) and especially their songs, poems, dances and folklore as the most authentic expression of a nation. Forget the king and nobility and look instead to the peasants—they are the true repositories of a nation’s treasures. Under the impetus of this new way of thinking, the folk song gained unprecedented respectability. Campaigns to preserve and promote it took on a sense of urgency, infused with a national pride hitherto unknown in the field of vernacular music.

Can it be mere coincidence that the philosophical origins of modern authenticity can be traced back to the same roots as the song collecting movement? Not at all. In fact, one of the defining characteristic of authenticity, as it emerged during this period, is its peculiar insistence that the artist is a role model for all of us.

This view emerged with enormous power around the year 1800—and turned musicians into more than just heroes and celebrities. They were now also visionaries who had grasped the essence of human potential and creative expression. They not only entertained us with their songs, but set the example for what an authentic life might look like. “With Herder, and the expressivist understanding of human life,” explains Charles Taylor, “ the relation becomes very intimate. Artistic creation becomes the paradigm mode in which people can come to self-definition. The artist in some ways becomes the paradigm case of the human being, as agent of original self-definition.” [Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 61-62.]

More than two hundred years have elapsed since this attitudinal shift, but not much has changed. Musicians come and go, but the leading stars always serve as guiding lights for lifestyle definition, even when their own lives are marked by disorder and self-destruction. In fact, the self-destruction is often seen as the ultimate proof of authenticity—the badge of honor that sets apart a Sid Vicious or Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix from their peers. Entire generations and demographic groups have come to define themselves by their particular preferences in disruptive music—over time we have seen the rise and fall of beatniks, punks, hippies, headbangers, and other identity groups, each arriving on the scene with their own modern spin on Herder’s mandate.

So the authenticity crisis in music is actually inseparable from the authenticity crisis in society at large. We can’t judge one without the other. And that puts music critics who debunk authenticity in a very strange and uncomfortable position. For a start, what validates the standpoint from which they do the debunking? What kind of life are they leading, if authenticity is a myth? What gives their words authority? And what are they saying about the rest of us, our hopes and dreams and values, if even the songs we sing are degraded and compromised beyond redemption?

If you believe these critics, everything starts to fall apart. When they actually confront an authentic life, they are forced to adopt one of these responses—always delivered in a tone of smug superiority:

1. The quest for authenticity—or “finding yourself” in the popular parlance—is just a ruse by a lazy new generation, many of whom will probably end up unemployed and living in their parents’ basement; or

2. Authenticity is a pose, adopted by hipsters, and thus the very opposite of what it claims to be, as fake as a TV wrestling match; or

3. The much-vaunted individualism of authenticity is simply a mask for scamps and reprobates, who break the rules we all need to follow, whether religious, moral, legal, social, etc.; or

4. Those who claim they are pursuing authentic life are reactionaries caught up in the past, or

5. Revolutionaries deluded by an impossible future, or

6. Idealists deceived by some utopian dream, or

7. Misfits who will never thrive anywhere;

8. And so on and so forth.

Is there any way of aligning ourselves with an authentic life in the face of these critics and their litany of objections? Once again, I turn to philosopher Charles Taylor, who has long been a guide for me, starting decades before he began winning million dollar prizes. In recent years Taylor has received the Templeton Prize ($1.5 million), the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy ($1 million), the Kyoto Prize (100 million yen, roughly another million dollars), and the John W. Kluge Prize (sharing the $1.5 million payout with co-winner Jürgen Habermas)—perhaps an ironic grand slam giving Taylor’s prominence as a critic of materialistic and profit-maximizing approaches to life. But when I first encountered Taylor, almost forty years ago, I was a student of philosophy at Oxford and he was a young professor, best known at the time for his expertise in Hegel and dialectical materialism.

I was impressed by his writings and lecture style back then, but perhaps even more by his private guidance of a classmate going through a personal crisis of meaning, who turned to Professor Taylor for life advice. She related much of what he said in their conversations back to me, and I was struck even then by his depth of wisdom, a kind of inspired discernment that isn’t as frequently found among academic philosophers as you might assume. I couldn’t predict back then that he would evolve into the most persuasive interpreter of authenticity of our times, but certainly he was already laying the groundwork for it at that juncture.

And how does Taylor reclaim the tarnished honor of authenticity from its many detractors? First of all, he makes the obvious—yet very powerful—point that even the most hostile critics of various authenticity movements, say Allan Bloom or Christopher Lasch or whatever pundit-du-jour shows up on a TV talk show this week, actually lead their own lives in pursuit of the same ideal they denounce in others.

“It is hard to find anyone we would consider as being in the mainstream of Western societies who, faced with their own life choices, about a career or relationships, gives no weight at all to something they would identify as fulfillment, or self-development, or realizing their potential.” [Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 75.] So even the critics of various authenticity movements need to have one of their own—and can hardly function without it.

Taylor goes on to map out the degrees of freedom we have in pursuing this goal, recognizing both the obstacles to the quest, yet also reminding us that individuals aren’t entirely powerless to overcome them. We witness this daily as we observe others—some more advanced on the way, others lagging far behind—and also ourselves. If we are in the slightest bit self-aware, we recognize our own progress, or stumbling, on this path. Once we cut through the overheated rhetoric of the critics, we inevitably conclude that authenticity is a valid ideal; that we can talk about it rationally and with a shared understanding of many of its ramifications; and that these explorations and discussions make a difference in our lives.

I won’t try to summarize the various ways Taylor supports these conclusions, but I do want to dwell on what I believe is the most significant aspect of his analysis of the quest for authenticity—one that will also help us when we return to our assessment of music (and needless to say, of great value for other reasons too).

The single biggest obstacle to authenticity, Taylor argues, is a grand misunderstanding that isolates this quest from the world around us. The concept of authenticity has gotten hopelessly muddled with notions of extreme individualism and self-actualization that dominate so much of our public discourse. We are left with the mistaken view that authenticity requires us to resist all pressures from outside, that somehow we are called upon to define our own meanings in isolation from what others say and do and think. When pushed to an extreme, this misguided view of authenticity begins to resemble a manual for narcissism or self-centered behavior—making the quest impossible to achieve.

“No one acquires the languages needed for self-definition on their own,” Taylor reminds us. [Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p.33.] In a healthy relationship with a loved one, our partner becomes embedded in our authentic life. By the same token, this integrated and fulfilled way of existing is responsive to the local community, the broader society, and the natural world. We don’t acquiesce willy-nilly to every demand made of us, but neither do we fetishize some solipsistic ideal in which we flourish while everything around us goes to hell in a hand-basket. Part of our journey to fullness is a reaching out, a cherishing, a nurturing of reciprocity and respect.

That last word is worth emphasizing. We hear much about the need for respect in the current day. If fulfillment could only be achieved in isolation from society, that would hardly be the case. If my process of self-realization took place as a solitary, egotistical pursuit, I wouldn’t waste time fretting over what my neighbors think about it. But in the real world, we are connected, and not just via email and text messaging. We can hardly make the healthy, constructive connections necessary to our advancement and maturation in a hostile, adversarial environment. We do well to remember this, not just for our own benefit, but as we deal with others who also seek to find the good life.

When viewed in this broader, more contextualized manner, the path to authenticity doesn’t get easy, by any means, but at least there is a path. We can see, with greater or less clarity, how we might embark upon it and what milestones we should look for along the way. We also come to view the much-discussed obstacles and enemies to this lifelong enterprise—whether money or technology or career demands—with more nuance. We see that, with persistence and vision on our part, they can be enlisted in our project of self-definition.

I know this brief summary does not do full justice to the concept of the authentic life, or to the contributions of those who strive to define it in our times. But I hope that I have, at a minimum, reclaimed the word from naysayers who insist is has no relevance or validity in the current day. I hate to interrupt the discussion at this point—perhaps at the very juncture when you were ready to jump on the authenticity bandwagon and apply it to your own day-to-day problems. But we must move on. This is, after all, an essay on music.

V.

Now let’s return to the considerations of authenticity in music, and see whether we can make any sense of this concept—so often ridiculed that critics hesitate even to speak its name.

I want to mount a rehabilitation effort here, in other words construct a case for authenticity as a valid and useful concept in music. Perhaps even the most useful concept in assessing certain songs and artists. But before proceeding, I need to acknowledge two particular obstacles that add to the degree of difficulty of a task already dauntingly hard. I don’t believe either of them prevents us from embracing authenticity as an aesthetic criterion, but they both ought to be recognized.

First, we need to accept upfront that authenticity can never be measured with scientific precision. You can’t put a musician’s authenticity on the scale and weigh it, like they do with boxers before a big match. It would be delightful if you could—just imagine measuring Bob Dylan’s authenticity against Woody Guthrie’s, or John Lennon’s against Mick Jagger’s. But that will never happen. Authenticity is not susceptible to empirical metrics. None of our five senses can grasp it directly. In the truest sense of the term, authenticity is metaphysical.

But this hardly seems a sufficient reason to abandon the concept. I note that virtually all of the key motivating factors in the human psyche are also metaphysical. You can’t see or touch or measure love—or hope, faith, friendship, trust, compassion, integrity and a host of other defining qualities of the good life. Even justice, often represented as a weighing scale, cannot itself be weighed on a scale.

Yet each of these qualities can still be assessed and even measured to some degree, just not directly. I know my spouse loves me more than does the postal worker who delivers my mail, even if I can’t assign comparative numbers or weights to their affections. We constantly rely on indirect evidence to gauge the presence (or absence) of metaphysical attributes. Sure, you can decide to lead your life without believing in any of these things, but you would be relegating yourself to a shallow, flattened existence that would be a kind of empiricist’s hell on earth.

So I am happy to proceed with the notion that authenticity in the arts must be measured indirectly, and I encourage you to do the same. And I do so for the best possible reason—namely that there is no alternative. It is in the nature of authenticity to exist as an inner quality, residing in our hearts and souls, not something you can buy off a shelf in convenience store or order in the mail from Amazon. And, frankly, you shouldn’t want it any other way.

But there’s a second obstacle facing us, and this one is more troubling. I’m speaking about the annoyingly close relationship between music and inauthenticity. As we have already seen, musicians more than almost anyone else, seem destined to fail in their quest for authenticity. True, we have encountered situations where authenticity was implicit in a performance, embedded into the circumstances in which it takes place—at a peasant wedding in a traditional society, for example, or at various rituals and ceremonies. But these situations are not typical of the contemporary music business, which is built on concerts and recordings, where authenticity is constantly at risk or, even in the best case, at doubt.

In these latter settings, the powerful relationship between the artist and the social context—that guarantor of authenticity in more traditional contexts—is broken by the intervention of a third force, namely the audience, those fickle consumers of entertainment who present a temptation to any artist to deviate from the true path. In the parlance of popular culture, musicians are thus rewarded for selling out.

But we learned something important during our previous detour into the philosophy of authenticity. We discovered that the artist’s connection to an audience, typically viewed as fraught with a risk of inauthenticity, is not inherently a bad thing. Just as the authentic life for you as an individual requires connecting to other people—family, community, society—in proper and judicious ways, in a similar manner the authentic path for a performer in the current day is bound inextricably with the audience.

We may have some idealized notion that the artist who stops giving concerts, say Glenn Gould or the Beatles in their later days, operates at some purer level than those who play for the crowd, but we have each us of experienced other situations in which audience and artist operate together to create a transcendent experience that could not have happened without them coming together. These two forces, in a dynamic process of give-and-take, define jointly the priorities and values at stake, and create the context in which legitimacy lives or dies. In other words, authentic music isn’t limited to sacred ritual or the distant past, but can also take place at Carnegie Hall or a techno rave or stadium rock concert, provided the right conditions are met.

But what are these conditions? As a member of the audience, what do we require of an authentic artist? And, just as important, what responsibilities do we carry on our own shoulders in this process? In fact, this may be the most neglected part of the equation—we place the burden of authenticity on the artist, but we as listeners are inextricably part of the problem, or solution as the case may be. Nobody would sell out if there weren’t buyers.

Let’s start with the artist. What do we look for when judging a musician as authentic? A whole galaxy of attitudes and practice are involved here, but many of them can be organized under the larger concepts of commitment, reverence, and dedication. This shows up, for example, in the formative experiences that happened long before the record contract and concert tour. I get irritated when I see musicians play styles of music they haven’t mastered, and even highly-trained performers are sometimes guilty of this indiscretion—usually seeking what we call audience expansion or crossover sales. But I am gratified in the same degree when I hear an exponent of African drumming who spent twenty years learning the craft, or a Brazilian bossa nova guitarist who studied under the best in Rio, or a blues musician who came up working juke joints in Mississippi. They aren’t just faking it—a term that probably originated among musicians, no?—instead they put in the time and energy necessary to dig deeply and authentically into their craft.

You may claim that you are a jazz singer, but if you spent the last thirty years touring with your stadium rock band, don’t be surprised if I call you out as a poseur. You may act like you’re killing it as a DJ, but if you just bought your equipment and got your first gig last month, I’m probably not buying it. If you want to play Bach, but can’t tell the difference between an acciaccatura and an appoggiatura, don’t expect a standing ovation from me.

But there’s a different kind of commitment that takes place on stage, in the very process of performing. And this facet of authenticity is very important to us as listeners. This kind of commitment is no different from those we count on in everyday life. When someone makes a commitment to us in other settings, we ask ourselves: Can I trust this person? Will they deliver what they promise? Are they honest and credible? In an odd sort of way, we are making a judgment on the other party’s inner life. Do they mean what they say? Even if we are dealing with something hard-headed and pragmatic, for example a business contract or legal commitment, we still assess these metaphysical and psychological factors. But, of course, we are all the more reliant on them in matters of artistic commitment, where we have no contract to fall back on, and are clearly dealing with something intangible—namely, the emotions and experiences going into a song. We want to feel safe in trusting what the artists communicate to us.

This is one reason why fans are obsessed with all those gossipy tales and rumors about musicians’ private lives. It’s hardly a coincidence that this obsession first appeared in Western culture when singers started singing about their private lives, back in the time of the troubadours. Scholars nowadays tend to doubt the reliability of the so-called vidas, which recount the romantic and heroic exploits of the medieval singer-songwriters. I’m less skeptical than most of the academics, but even if the stories are mostly built on falsehoods, the very fact that listeners of this era wanted to know what singers did when they weren’t performing suggests that our concern with authenticity was shared by audiences almost a thousand years ago.

We don’t demand rigorous honesty here—we understand that a singer is allowed a certain degree of artistic license in crafting a song. Lyrics can fudge the details, changing names and circumstances. Emotional currents can be amplified or refined as they get turned into musical expressions. Even so, we want to feel that this music is not a pose or contrivance. The inputs into the performance, like the ingredients in those natural foods touted at the farmer’s market, ought to be real ones—something that is organic, growing out of the deep roots of the inner life, and not a contrived substitute. If there were a polygraph test for artistic expression, we would want our favorite musicians to pass without the needle dipping into the dangerous red zone, where falsifiers and con artists do their dirty work.

When we turn to the private lives of our most cherished artists—as we invariably do, given our almost instinctive sense that this is relevant to their artistry—we often find confirmation of this unflinching honesty. For example, I have turned again and again to Joni Mitchell’s album Blue since my high school years, because it resonates with precisely this kind of authenticity. And I’m sure I’m not alone in this regard. When NPR ranked the 150 best albums made by women, Blue took the top spot, and the listing cited its origins in “the private places where love and art is made.” And when I turn to Mitchell’s own comments on the album’s genesis, I find this revealing statement: “At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world.” [David Yaffe, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017), p. 148.]

Some artists achieve this direct connection between inner life and external expression almost without consciously deciding upon it. They remind me of my father in those family conversations mentioned earlier, where he had no recourse to the postures or poses adopted by the rest of us, for the simple fact that he was incapable of them. Others, in contrast, need to reach this directness after many stopping points along the way. In the community of musicians, these are sometimes the most gifted of them all. Their very ability to assimilate and emulate the styles of others puts up obstacles to self-discovery. This is the source of that seemingly paradoxical adage attributed to Miles Davis: “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.” In either case, the journey may differ, but the destination is the same—you come back to who you really are.

Perhaps the concept of authenticity seems most suited to prickly jazz improvisers or moody singer-songwriter albums. But I hear it in many other kinds of music. I feel it reverberating in the grunge rock of Kurt Cobain, the Afrobeat sounds of Fela Kuti, the haunting blues of Son House. I also encounter it in the piano performances of Glenn Gould, even though he is playing music written by long-dead composers—a peculiar proof of the transitive principle of music (a subject for a different essay, I’m afraid), which allows performers to channel these qualities from sources outside their own psyches. A musician can serve as an authentic interpreter of another’s song, but when that happens it’s much more than just an external mimicking of notes and tones, but requires an inner assimilation at a profound level.

But this process is hardly as mysterious as it sounds. As listeners we often experience this deep and powerful resonance with music we can’t claim as our own in any legal or intellectual property sense—we certainly didn’t compose it—yet it corresponds with such raw honesty to our own feelings, that we can say with complete truthfulness: This is my song. This music expresses my inner world more accurately than any words I could summon.

When I studied the history and sociology of the love song, I frequently encountered that phenomenon in romantic relationships. When a couple plans a marriage they often tell the DJ at the reception: You must play this track—it’s our song. That sense of authenticity is almost the equivalent of what the performer or songwriter must feel. Even if the logical and epistemological rules that govern verbal expressions have no bearing in the realm of music, we still feel that songs can serve as a kind of truth statement.

When I consider these varied examples, I am tempted to say that authenticity is hiding in the grooves of these recordings, but that would be very misleading: It’s not hiding at all, but confronts the listener with raw, bristling power almost from the very first note. The integrity and legitimacy of this music can be overwhelming. No, I can’t prove that any of this is authentic music with logical syllogism and laboratory experiments. But I can hear it unmistakably in the performances, and I suspect you can too.

I used the term reverence above, and that’s not a word we hear much nowadays—and especially not in the context of art and pop culture. An attitude of reverence is often inseparable from these feelings of authenticity, and the overtones of a sacred quality, typically implicit when we speak of reverence, are not inapt. The deejay wouldn’t dare tell the couple that they chose the wrong song as their romantic anthem, or suggest the substitution of a better track for the first dance at the reception. That would be a violation of this sacred quality.

Some of my readers will be uncomfortable with my use of the term reverence as an aesthetic concept. Many will feel that, far from serving as a positive force in artistic creation, it’s actually a constraint or weakness. They see reverence as incompatible with the rule-breaking and iconoclasm of the innovator. In fact, I recall a dinner conversation with Stan Getz when he boasted that irreverence was one of the four essential attributes for a great jazz artist (the other three, in his opinion, were individuality, taste, and courage). Yet Getz’s own life, his formative experiences and musical values, make clear that the rule-breaking that he labeled as irreverence coexisted with a deeper kind of reverence that underpinned everything he did. In our conversation, he confirmed the anecdote—I thought it might have been an exaggeration—that Getz left the Stan Kenton orchestra because the bandleader had made an insulting comment about saxophonist Lester Young, who was Getz’s hero and role model. So clearly Stan had some things he revered so much that he would walk away from a pay check and steady gig. In many other settings, he stuck to his guns, standing up for his core musical values, felt at such a deep level that he might not even have been able to put them into words.

That’s the kind of reverence I’m referring to here. There’s nothing complacent about it, and often comes at a heavy cost. And such reverence is hardly a hindrance to innovation. To some degree, it’s an essential attribute for an innovator, whether in music or other matters.

If my descriptions of an authentic musical performance sound as if they borrow from the language of sacred ritual, that’s not a coincidence. Anthropologist Victor Turner showed us long ago that the same considerations cut across these two spheres, and his perspectives have been applied to a wide range of genres and performance contexts, including rock concerts, raves, New Age music, even the staid symphony concerts at the philharmonic. And just as in a sacred or religious observance, everyone involved in these performance settings—not just musicians but also audience members and ancillary individuals (ushers, ticket takers, etc.) are expected to contribute to the efficacy of the ritual.

The experienced attendee at the symphonic performance knows not to applaud between movements, but the jazz connoisseur will clap even while the music is still being played, but only at the proper junctures defined by the ritual (after the sax solo, for example, and not before it). The very existence and persistence of these behavior patterns, which abide for decades and across generations, testify both to our concern that music be performed in the right (or authentic) way, and also to our recognition that even the casual music fan plays a part in this quest for authenticity.

VI

I have to say, at this final juncture, that I simply don’t accept the frequently-stated opinion that members of the audience have no responsibility to the music. “I paid for my ticket, so buzz off buster—I have the right to stare into my phone screen during the whole concert.” “Screw copyrights—I’ll download whatever songs I want from wherever I can get them.” “I brought my client to the jazz club to close the deal, and it’s your tough luck if you don’t want to hear me talking through the entire set.”

The reasons for this should be obvious. The music world is an ecosystem and habitat no different from what we encounter in a rain forest or nature preserve, and thus everything that happens, even at a granular level of detail, is interconnected. And like the rain forest, the ecosystem that supports musical performances is quite fragile. When I look back at the most exhilarating musical performances of my youth, I rarely spend much time thinking about the nightclubs or concert halls where they took place, but if I consider the matter I realize that around 90% of these venues eventually went broke and disappeared from the face of the Earth. And if changing times have done great damage to live music, it has wreaked even more havoc with recordings, which have almost completely disappeared into the virtual world, taking with them many musician’s ability to earn a decent living.

No, it doesn’t take much to degrade or even destroy a thriving music scene. And now AI is adding to the problem—not just displacing musicians, but stealing from their own work (in the form of training data) when they do it.

But this isn’t the place to dwell on the economics or technology of the music world, or the cultural trends that cause venues and record labels to come and go. Instead, I want to focus solely on the audience’s responsibility in the sphere of musical authenticity. How do we, as listeners and consumers, impact this variable? If authenticity, as I have already mentioned, is embedded in the hearts and souls of the performers, do we really have any influence on it at all?

Of course we do.

The artist is no different from the rest of us. You can either listen to your inner voice and stay true to your convictions and values, or you can conform to external expectations. For certain blessed individuals, these two forces overlap perfectly: What the world demands of us is precisely what we want to give it. But everyone of is familiar with those inevitable situations where a hard choice must be made. In creative endeavors, the gap between these alternative can be described as the difference between entertainment and art. The entertainer, almost by definition, gives the audience exactly what it wants. That’s what it means to be an entertainer, and those who do it well are amply rewarded. But art doesn’t always work that way. It frequently conflicts with the expectations of the crowd, challenges their preconceptions and takes them outside their comfort zone.

So this choice faced by the artist is mirrored by the exact same choice we need to make as consumers of culture. We can demand entertainment, which is almost always an experience that matches familiar entertainments from the past.. We want a new Star Wars film that resembles previous Star Wars films. And the same is true of James Bond, Spiderman, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the nostalgia-generating aging rock star tour, etc.

Yet there’s a strange paradox here. I’ve talked to many individuals who perpetuate this cycle at the heart of pop culture—the people who support the brand franchise economy—and even they hunger for something that will take them outside this endless cycle of crowd-pleasing entertainments. They understand that the very experiences that the entertainment industry avoids—those challenging, mind-expanding moments outside our comfort zone—are far more potent and satisfying than the repetition of a stale formula.

The cycle resembles what clinical studies tell us about addiction: the stimulus loses it power when it is replicated so frequently, but the individual caught in the cycle merely holds on to it all the more fervently. To some extent, this is the same double bind that haunts popular culture, which can’t really renounce the ‘popular’ part of its agenda—after all, that’s what give pop culture its pop. But we all know in our heart-of-hearts that this closed loop succumbs, sooner or later, to the law of diminishing returns.

The reason why I focus so much on authenticity—an issue many dismiss as too theoretical, too academic, perhaps even irrelevant—is because it provide the exit point from this doom loop.

What does this mean in practical terms? First and foremost, we need to be willing to make that essential first step in any authentic artistic experience—namely, we must be willing to go to where the artist is, rather than force the artist to adapt to our expectations. We open ourselves up, rather than close ourselves down. We broaden our horizons, and perhaps even find that our comfort zones are larger than we previously realized. Instead of seeking the familiar formulas, we allow ourselves to be beguiled by the artist’s inner truth.

An audience that brings these qualities to a musical performance may experience disappointment, perhaps even repeated disappointment—that’s always a risk when you put yourself in a new situation—but this is a small price to pay for the long-term benefits of living in this kind of porous, adaptive, open-to-the-world manner. The most powerful cultural experiences almost always hit us in unexpected ways, and our only way of tapping into their transformative power is by taking the plunge.

I could make a long list of other habits and attitudes exhibited by authentic listeners. But once you understand the broader principle—the willingness to adapt to the art rather than force the art to adapt to you—they are no mystery. You can figure them out for yourself: the types of artistic experiences you cultivate, the ways you align the time and money you invest in music with these values, the emotional and psychological outlooks you bring to the listening experience. In fact, much of the fun and excitement of this whole process is your finding it out for yourself, rather than reading a “to do” list from me. You will inevitably learn things I could never have told you.

We seem to have arrived at the end point of these considerations on authenticity in music. My goal, at the outset, was to take this concept—so often the target of mockery and smug debunking—and reclaim it for our every day use. And I did so for the simple reason that this aspect of our musical culture is too important to treat in a cavalier manner. If I have made any progress at all in this reclamation project, I can perhaps move on, and leave it to each of you to expand and apply what we have learned.

But it’s perhaps worth adding one final point, even though it is too large for a postscript. Yet it is also too important to leave unsaid. So it must fit into the constrained dimensions of a closing paragraph.

Almost everything dealt with here has a bearing on our experiences and relationships outside of music. Good listening and responsive participation are not merely aesthetic concepts. It may well be that the practice of authenticity comes to us more easily (and with less threat to the defenses in our psyches) via song, where our obligations to the performer are comparatively modest and defined. But if we succeed there, what’s to stop us from applying this same mindset, this same willingness to go outside our narrowly-defined selves into the expansive world of others, in all spheres of our lives? That a rich concept for consideration, beyond the scope of this essay, but perhaps all the richer when left for each of us to pursue in our own individual sequels.

Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Zena Hitz.

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Zena Hitz is a tutor at St. John’s College, a Great Books school. She is also the founder of the Catherine Project, a free program allowing participants from around to world to participate in reading groups of the great books. She is also the author of the wonderful book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.

Zena sat down with me while visiting Austin to discuss the joys of the intellectual life, the state of the modern university, and how she is bringing humanities education to thousand of people through the Catherine Project.

Below are highlights from our conversation. For the entire dialogue, check out the video at the top of the page.

A CONVERSATION WITH ZENA HITZ

JARED: Zena Hitz, thank you for joining me.

ZENA: Thanks so much, Jared. It’s great to be here.

JARED: I wanted to talk to you because I was first exposed to your work through Lost in Thought, and then after I read Lost in Thought, I found out about the Catherine Project, and I’ve now participated in one Catherine Project group.

ZENA: Very good, very good.

JARED: You started this thing, the Catherine Project. Could you start by telling us what it is, and also how you got started?

ZENA: I had a kind of longing back from when I was straight out of grad school and started teaching undergrads intro to philosophy and stuff like that. A lot of the job of teaching philosophy at a public university is teaching people who don’t want to learn. So I developed this preoccupation with: what would it be like if you tried to find the people who only want to learn? Suppose you could just filter for the desire to learn.

My first idea was to have an open ancient Greek study group in Baltimore, which is where I was living at the time. We were going to read the Iliad, and this wonderful librarian helped us out, and a couple people turned up. They were grad students at Hopkins or whatever. So it turned out to be my friends. It was very small, and I realized I didn’t know how to reach people in an ordinary city who would want to do something like this. So there was a contact problem. How do I find these people?

But I was still haunted by the dream, and it sat in the back of my mind for, I don’t know, probably 20 years, 15 years. And then, as I talked about in Lost in Thought, I went through all kinds of transitions and tried to figure out what to do with my life, and finally settled on going back to St. John’s to teach. So I went back in 2015, and then in 2020, of course, we had emergency online COVID classes, which anyone who was teaching at the time knows was absolutely miserable. Just the worst kind of teaching you can imagine. Because it was unexpected, and these people were in their parents’ basement, and I was teaching a class called junior math, which was Newton’s Principia, one of the hardest books I know, and we just couldn’t do it.

JARED: That was a very St. John’s sentence.

ZENA: I have a lot of St. John’s sentences. I’m a Johnny born and bred, so that’s the way it is. But we couldn’t do it, because reading something that difficult requires having an in-person community to talk to people and get help and stuff like that. So we kept trying. We put in a college try, but it was really painful. Anyway, that’s a little bit beside the point.

The point is, I was really upset about being online. I wanted to just send everyone home and give them a chance, maybe, to fix their grade, but we had to do it. And I was very frightened. I thought, once universities figure out that they can have classes online, they’re never going to go back, because it’s so cheap. Administrators are just like that. They just want stuff that’s cheap. They don’t care about educational quality. So I was very angry, and that sometimes can be very productive.

I thought, if I were stuck on this forever, what would be the best way to learn? What would be the best way to teach? I thought, maybe it’s a bit like an Oxford tutorial situation, where people went away and read off screen and then had face-to-face conversations in person — or by Zoom, in this case. Small groups on Zoom are better than medium-sized groups, and medium-sized groups are better than large groups. The larger the group, the worse it is; the smaller it is, the closer it is to real human interaction.

So that was one thing I was doing back there. And then the book came out at the same time. Lost in Thought came out, and Lost in Thought made this argument that the life of the mind is for everybody. And I say this a lot, and it’s true: that was really a sentimental idea I had. Like, maybe if I have a Greek reading group in Baltimore, old Greek guys will show up and want to read Greek with me. I didn’t really know it was true, but I wanted it to be true. And then I started getting all of these emails from people who wanted to lead a life of the mind, who wanted to read the great books, and they would ask me what they should do. And I didn’t have a good answer for that question, and that haunted me.

So somehow these two things percolated, and eventually I thought, well, look, let’s just have open online Zoom classes on great books, and it’ll be totally open. Anyone can go. We’ll make it free. We’ll run on volunteer labor. I’ll tap into my academic network, get some professors, and I’ll get some former students to lead informal reading groups. And so that was the Catherine Project. It began — it was sort of born and bred on Twitter. So it was through Twitter that I got to know people who might be interested in something like that, and this was the golden age of Twitter, when everyone was on it because it was COVID, and the algorithms exposed you to all kinds of people.

So anyway, we started out with about 45 students. We had these things called tutorials—small groups, like three. We started with groups of three students and one professor. We had five of those, and they read—well, we had an early divide between people who wanted to read fast and people who wanted to read slow. So some of them just read the Iliad and the Odyssey, some read the Iliad, the Odyssey, some Greek tragedy, and some Plato. And we had two reading groups meant just for people in those tutorials—one was on Aristophanes and one was on Kafka, The Trial.

So we had these 45 people, and November 2020 comes around, and the Kafka group wanted a few more people because they wanted to read Kierkegaard, Either/Or. And it’s November, I was teaching full time, and I was just like, put something on Twitter: who’s up for reading Either/Or on Saturday nights? Like 100, 120, 130 replies. So I was like, uh oh, I have to do something about this. I can’t reject 125 people—they wanted like three people for their group. So at that point we pulled in a bunch of reading group leaders, and then for a long time the Catherine Project became mainly these peer-led reading groups. Some people had PhDs, some had master’s degrees, some were just really good people who had gone through great books programs as undergraduates, facilitating these open conversations about great books in small groups.

So at the end of spring 2021, I was totally out of steam. I was dead. And I applied to Emergent Ventures, which is Tyler Cowen’s group, for a grant. I had no expectation of getting it, because I’d spoken to Tyler a year earlier when I was just getting started, and he had put me through the ringer — the hardest set of questions anyone had ever asked me about the business plan, and how big was it going to grow, and how are we going to fund it, what was going to be the source of revenue. And I couldn’t answer any of those questions. I just had this romantic idea that if you opened up the doors, people would come. Anyway, Tyler, after a year, gave me the grant based on what we had done, without a budget.

We’re now enrolling 1,600 human beings per semester. One of the things that helped with that last spurt of growth is that we had started with these tutorials, with the reading groups that were supplemental, but we were worried that the list of reading groups was actually really intimidating for anyone who wanted to come into the reading for the first time. This is a huge list of books, many of which I had never heard of. We always wanted to be a way for people without much experience with us to find their way into reading and thinking and having conversations. So we instituted—this is the end of the second year—we’re now teaching the fourth unit of what’s called our core program.

It’s basically just a set of readings that we think are basic, that are a good introduction to the life of the mind, that we think will serve people well in the future. So that’s become a big component of what we do. We still run a trillion reading groups. Anyway, that’s the story of the Catherine Project.

JARED: I loved the experience with the Catherine Project, because the facilitator was a graduate student in Germany, and then we had a few other people in various parts of Europe, a couple of undergrads, and then just a few people who I had no idea what their academic background was, but they were joining from their lunch break, essentially, at their desk job. I loved how open the conversations were. I never felt the sense that anyone there didn’t feel like they could participate. And there was just this idea of taking what everyone said really seriously. I found it to be this really amazing experience.

ZENA: It’s a collaborative conversation. Experts don’t teach our courses. And although in the core program they tend to be people who are experts in something, they’re not necessarily experts in what they’re teaching. But they have more experience.

JARED: Let’s talk about that idea you said was a romantic or sentimental idea—that the life of the mind is for everyone. I’m actually writing a book about this too; we’ll talk about that later, off camera. I firmly believe this. One of the things my experience in the Catherine Project showed me is that people from very different walks of life, people studying very different things—I’m pretty sure some of the undergrads were not even humanities majors—and yet they were able to just sit with this text.

The Catherine Project also doesn’t require an educational background to apply, right?

ZENA: The only rule is that you’re 16. And there is an application—a statement of interest, we call it. But we’re really just trying to make sure people know exactly what they’re doing.

JARED: Most people who participate—do you think they have graduate degrees?

ZENA: I think we are still drawing a pretty broad range. Some pretty young people, people in high school or college, people just out of college, retired people. There’s a big chunk of people who are in their 30s and 40s who work in, say, tech, or have worked in tech, or in STEM, engineering. And they’ve realized, having been on a really intense career path, that they’re missing something. So we get a lot of people like that.

JARED: What are those things that you don’t do but wish you could, in some perfect world where the Catherine Project has infinite money and infinite resources?

ZENA: One of the things I’m thinking about now is the collapse of specialized research training in the humanities. Lots and lots of graduate programs at the moment are shuttered. They’re not admitting new students, and it may just be a freeze for a time, but it’s hard to see that it’s not the beginning of a shift. I think it was going on for a while anyway, but then the cuts in the science funding that the Trump administration put in last year shook up the administrators, and one gets the sense that they were funding graduate humanities programs with some of the excess money from the sciences that’s been cut.

Part of what I try to do when I’m thinking about things like this is to think not about what would be good for one person or another, but what’s the whole ecology of humanistic learning. What are all the things that need to be in place for humanistic learning to be part of what we do as a culture or as a community? And it seems to me we do need people who are working at a deep and serious level on the books, or on basic humanistic topics. So I’ve been trying to think about ways in which—and I think it’s very compatible with the Catherine Project, it just needs some kind of residential or brick-and-mortar context—but I wonder whether there’s a real appetite among many of our members, and especially our staff, Jordan and Ashley, to do in-depth work.

It’s incredibly refreshing to read a great book, and to be reading them all the time, when you’ve had to leave grad school, you’ve left academia—or even as a supplement to what you’re doing in your highly specialized academia. But it all seems to be supported by people who’ve sat with books for a long time and have really chewed through them and thought things through and have a sense of what’s knowable and what’s not knowable. So the idea would be to have something like a residential library where people could come and study and have visiting faculty who could mentor people. That’s the dream.

JARED: In a way, the core of the Catherine Project—what you’re doing now—is this foundational work. We’re going to give you this foundation in the great books, and also teach you the joys and pleasures of reading widely, but then if you want to, you narrow. Which is kind of the dream of humanistic education too: we all get this broad foundation, we all feel immersed in this tradition, and then you don’t write a dissertation on why the great books are great—you write a dissertation on some subset of some small problem about Homer’s Odyssey, and you’re going into archival research, or doing work on histories of languages, or reception history, all this stuff you’re not going to get in your life-of-the-mind seminar.

ZENA: There’s a lot of thinking that can be done about the books that is just a matter of reading it carefully, learning the original language, reading around it so you know what it’s responding to and what responded to it, reading the commentaries. That already gets you a lot of really interesting angles on a book that you don’t get when you just read it for class, which means two hours a week.

So yeah, I’d like to foster that. Like the Catherine Project, I’ve always tried to be open about what, if it’s successful, it will contribute. So one thought is, when all the institutions die—in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, when we’re all eating out of trash cans and warming ourselves by fires in the open and there’s broken TV sets everywhere. I don’t know where these images come from; they’re probably from Mad Max. So when all of that is there, there will be a Catherine Project. We’ll still be reading books and talking about them in this post-apocalyptic landscape.

But that’s just preserving something that might die. In a way, it would be better if, instead of that, it provoked some reform on the part of the institutions. One of the things it has shown—and programs like it do show, and this I know is something Jennifer Frey has also been arguing—is that there’s been a kind of myth that people don’t want to study this stuff anymore, and I think it’s really obviously not true. People really, really want to study it, and they choose not to major in it in part because the administrators, and often the faculty, are telling them that it’s a waste of time. And if you’re trying to make your way in the world, and the people who hold the power and the keys to the future are telling you it’s a waste of time, then you better listen to them, because they’re going to be able to help you into the next stage, whatever it is.

So this Catherine grad program, or whatever it is, has a similar structure. Maybe it will take the place of these graduate programs that are likely to close, especially for people who aren’t necessarily going to become academics but who wanted to get to the next level. Or maybe it will become the university of the future.

JARED: One of the things I like to think about a lot—but I’m curious to hear what you think—is just the concept of an autodidact. What is an autodidact for you?

ZENA: An autodidact is obviously someone who teaches themselves, who’s self-taught. I tend to think about it in terms of examples. Probably my favorite example is Malcolm X. Obviously, a highly intelligent person, growing up in a society where it was extremely difficult for a black man to have a job that suited his abilities. And he ends up in prison for theft when he’s pretty young, and at that time they have prison libraries—which I think they don’t anymore, of that kind. So they don’t have prison libraries stuffed with classics; they have prison libraries with a few out-of-date copies of, like, Business 101, or self-help stuff like that. So anyway, he read the entire prison library—vast swathes of the prison library—and just became a different person. I think of that as being an autodidact.

I think you don’t need to be alone to be an autodidact. So another example: there’s this wonderful book I’ve promoted for years called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose. He describes these groups of workers would get together and educate themselves. They’d pick an evening, they’d pick something to read—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Descartes—they’d study astronomy or math or science or literature, Shakespeare, classics. And they would teach themselves.

JARED: There’s some way that everyone’s actually an autodidact. I call myself one—I have a PhD, but I call myself an autodidact, because after I left my PhD, I realized there were all these gaps in my education, and I was never going to be able to take a seminar on them, so I just read it. I understand I’m stretching the term a little bit here.

ZENA: I think everyone is an autodidact, because you don’t really learn seriously unless you’re teaching yourself. An expert can tell you something, but you still have to decide whether it’s true, even though you don’t actually have the basis, the expertise, to judge it. There’s no learning without the participation of the learner.

That’s why calling attention to autodidacticism, or nurturing it as the Catherine Project does, is really important—as a reminder of what actually is core to any kind of education. A human being is not just a passive sponge for content that’s somehow been verified somewhere else. In order for us to learn well and live well, we have to find within ourselves the questions and the desires to learn, and we have to find ways to inquire and think about things. We can help one another, and experts can help us too, but in the end, it’s really what you do. That’s the nature of learning. There is no substitute for the act of thinking.

JARED: I was reading Aristotle’s Politics, which I hadn’t read before. I love the Nicomachean Ethics, and at some point it became shameful that I hadn’t read the Politics. And I tried to distill down the propositions you could definitely attribute to Aristotle from that book, and there aren’t that many.

ZENA: No, it’s a very hard book.

JARED: And then you wonder, why would you read it? Because Aristotle’s actually giving you the opportunity to think through these principles he’s floated for you, and then see how it worked out, and how it played out in history. And then you have to actually decide if any of those propositions or principles are true, if you agree with them. I think Aristotle is a great model for this. He really makes you think for yourself while reading him.

ZENA: Yes. And you wouldn’t get that if you just attended a lecture and then said, this was Aristotle’s political theory, and the professor handed you a list of propositions.

I think it’s true that even if you were totally persuaded of every Aristotelian principle, you would still have to figure out how to see all those cases, and to see what’s going on around you in light of those cases. And that is really not a simple task. That’s a serious kind of training.

And there’s no substitute for it. And why would you expect there to be? Why would you expect there to be an algorithm for how to make elections in the United States work better? That just doesn’t make any sense. You have to look at the way things are, you have to look at the kinds of problems we’ve had in the past, you have to look at the constraints there are on what’s possible. And then you have to try some things out. And maybe there is no right answer for something on that largest scale, and you can only fix the voting procedures in, you know, Texas or something. But we’ve really—I’ve gotten pretty deep into a view of human thinking and agency that’s really dangerously false. And that’s definitely part of what I feel like I’ve been working against.

JARED: And also, when you’re coming to a book like the Politics, Aristotle gives you all these cases from Greek history, and you need to think through them. But you shouldn’t limit yourself to only those cases.

ZENA: Yes.

JARED: We have thousands of years of political history post-Aristotle to draw on as well.

ZENA: Yes.

JARED: And I think if you could talk to Aristotle while reading the book, he would say, ‘Why aren’t you writing about the US in the 1960s as well, when you’re talking about the Politics?’ I was reading it on my Substack—I run a sort of informal book club on my newsletter—and some people are like, why would I care about those examples so much? And it’s like, well, okay, we’ll talk through all those examples if you want, and we probably should, but we have a thousand other examples we could talk about. If we think we can learn something through the act of reading Aristotle, it requires this very active process.

ZENA: Yes. It’s something that was in the air in the culture even relatively recently. There’s a beautiful piece by George Kennan, who is one of the great 20th-century diplomats and a beautiful writer—Kennan’s diaries are fabulous stuff to read. But he has a little essay on education for statesmanship. He was thinking about things like working for the State Department, or being a political person, and he’s like, look, there’s not a technique—you have to learn everything there is to know about history, literature, human nature. That’s what you’re dealing with; you’re working with real life. And so as much as you can learn about how things work, have worked in the past, work in this particular place—that’s all going to be material for you to make judgments. But there’s not going to be any substitute for making that judgment. So, yeah, we used to know this, and we’ve forgotten.

JARED: I had this experience when I left academia. I finished my PhD, and I just felt like I was leaving academia behind, so I kind of felt like they’d rejected me, too. And then I started thinking, what’s the point of philosophy? I had been initiated into this guild structure, where you study with a master, you produce your work, and I had been given the stamp, and then I hadn’t gone and gotten a job, so I was no longer part of it. And so now thinking is for those people, philosophy is for those people. And I now see the trajectory of the last five years of my life as reminding myself, and then wanting to remind other people, that I was completely wrong—that philosophy was just as much mine when I left academia, and in fact it was mine before I got the PhD too, and that it’s true for all of you as well.

ZENA: Yes. And that’s also a case of mistaking university constraints, which are totally contingent, for the real thing. There’s no reason for us to think this way, and there’s no reason to think that there’s only one way of using a degree, or that an institution has to be closed to people who aren’t in this special guild.

JARED: But there were material circumstances that made it harder for me to see that at first. As soon as you lose your university email, you lose access to journals—or it becomes a lot harder to access journals. You’re emailing friends, can you send me these articles, and sometimes they do it, sometimes it takes a few days. It can feel, from the outside, like knowledge is very heavily gatekept. Because things like journals, or books that cost two hundred dollars to buy your own copy, you can get at any university library—you just feel like you’re kept out from that.

ZENA: This has really gotten dramatically worse since all those library materials went online. In a way, of course, the online research library is an incredible resource—you can find stuff much more easily, there’s all kinds of databases and indexes that are much easier to use than the old big paper ones I was trained on, because I’m just old enough to have done that. But they have really locked up all of the specialized research, to the point where I don’t have regular access.

It’s a scandal that science is gatekept like that. You ought to be able to learn about a scientific topic by reading the original papers. They should not be kept behind these incredibly expensive subscription services. It’s only making the whole process less accountable, less transparent, and it undermines people’s trust. And it reinforces this idea that somehow an ordinary person can’t understand this stuff.

But I would like to see different kinds of platforms for the presentation of this kind of research that are open access, or minimal access. I don’t know what would have to happen for that to take place, but I wish people who had the resources and the abilities and the understanding would start doing that. That’s for sure.

JARED: All right. I want to be mindful of your time. So I have a question I always end on, which is, if you have a book recommendation for our listeners.

ZENA: Yes, I was wondering about that. I think what I’d like to recommend is the book—or the books—I was most excited about most recently, which was, last summer I read these Robert Caro books about Lyndon Johnson. These are very popular books, lots of people know they’re good, because there’s so many of them and they’re so long—they’re daunting in some way—but they are incredibly well written. They tell the whole story of 20th-century America through Texas, where we are right now. And it’s a particularly interesting view of Texas, and kinds of characters that we think of as being what makes Texas Texas, and not just Lyndon Johnson, who has his own sordid, very complex mixture of very, very bad qualities and very, very good qualities. And you’re never let off the hook, because the writing is so good. And there it is.

I was talking about this last night to a friend of mine, who I was recommending them to—because that’s basically what I do whenever I see someone, I’m like, you should read Lyndon Johnson. And then every now and then, once every three months, I meet someone who’s actually read them, and we just talk about them for hours. What is it that holds a human being together? What’s the nature of political power, political ambition? How does a person maintain any kind of integrity in that kind of context? How do these very beautifully noble motivations coexist with this really venal self-absorption?

So I think Lyndon Johnson is a fascinating figure, and a lot of the people in there are fascinating, and they’re absolutely masterpieces of books. I think there’s reason to think they are the great books of today. So I recommend them really highly—and yeah, it’s a bit like a continuation of Aristotle’s Politics. You’re reading through the casework, the cases, all of the things that happened in the 20th century in the Senate and the presidency, trying to think about what worked and what didn’t.

JARED: Awesome. Zena Hitz, thanks for joining us.

ZENA: Thanks so much, Jared. It’s a pleasure talking to you.

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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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