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Sean Carroll: 00:00:01 Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. Today we want to talk about art and reality, and how art and reality are both mediated through technology. Our guest is Grimes, the musician slash producer who is now I think, known as C. She’s changed her name to C, the letter C after the speed of light, which tickles my physicist’s instincts. I went by Grimes for purposes of this podcast, because I think that’s the artist title on the most recent album that she’s come out with.

Sean Carroll: 00:00:33 I think the best way to describe Grimes’ work is as someone who produces music, both literally as the producer of her own albums, but she writes the music, she records the music, she writes the lyrics, and she sings in addition to doing all of that production. She says she wants to go down in history, not as a singer or dancer, but as a music producer. We’re going to learn a little bit about the technique of that.

Sean Carroll: 00:00:58 I think this is a situation where technology has given to a wide number of people the ability to make their own music. Grimes started just by firing up GarageBand on her Mac and going from there. Her two most recent albums are Visions and Art Angels, which were both very popular, won a number of awards and things like that. Just now she’s come out with a brand new album, Miss Anthropocene. We’ll explain, excavate the origin of that particular name here in the podcast, and a new single, So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth.

Sean Carroll: 00:01:31 I have to say, I like it. We play actually, several clips of the music here in the episode so you’ll get to see whether or not it’s your kind of thing or not. Grimes is also someone who’s very interested in technology and AI and the digital world for its own sake. We talk a little bit about what it means to live and breathe digitally. In fact, we get the first insight here on this podcast into a new project that she just launched with a new digital avatar.

Sean Carroll: 00:02:01 Grimes explains that she wants to really make obvious the fact that who we are in meet space in real life is different than who we are online. It’s sort of a ongoing art project. She’s going to have a literally separate digital avatar that will be her online persona from now on. It’s supposed to be an expression of something that we all do one way or the other. We’re not the same person on Twitter or in the comment sections of YouTube as we are in person, so let’s look at that. This is what art does. It shines a light on different aspects of human life. It was a very fun conversation.

Sean Carroll: 00:02:38 Grimes is not an academic like many of the people I have on the podcast, so instead of a bunch of little potted lectures, we actually have a very organic conversation that digs into some very interesting issues. I think you’re going to like it. Also, don’t stop the recording too soon because as we reached the natural end point of our conversation, we wondered, “Is there anything more we should talk about?” We ended keeping up talking, so there’s a special promo bit at the end of the podcast that you’ll want to stay and listen to. Let’s go. All right, Grimes. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

Grimes: 00:03:25 Thank you for having me.

Sean Carroll: 00:03:27 The first ever professionally produced podcast I’ve had, because Grimes was just adjusting the levels on our microphones here, which I’ve never had done.

Grimes: 00:03:36 I don’t think I went that deep there though.

Sean Carroll: 00:03:37 It’s all relative, and relative to what I usually have. It’s good.

Grimes: 00:03:40 Is it a bit low, though? Don’t you think?

Sean Carroll: 00:03:43 It’s a bit low, but that’s okay. We’ll fix it. It’s still professional. Let me start with the question I’m sure is on everyone’s mind. What was your favorite episode of the Mindscape podcast so far?

Grimes: 00:03:55 I’m going to have to say the one with Liv, because I know her.

Sean Carroll: 00:03:59 Liv Boeree?

Grimes: 00:04:00 Actually, my favorite one was the one with, I forget her name. The one about AI and Greek mythology and stuff. The techne. All that stuff.

Sean Carroll: 00:04:07 Adrienne Mayor.

Grimes: 00:04:09 That one really was super fun.

Sean Carroll: 00:04:11 That was a little out there one, but I loved it.

Grimes: 00:04:12 So out there, but that’s what I loved about it.

Sean Carroll: 00:04:14 Ancient robots.

Grimes: 00:04:20 That one blew my mind a little bit, actually.

Sean Carroll: 00:04:20 Androids and Ancient Mythology. Did you listen to the one with Lynne Kelly on Memory Palaces? That’s a similar in spirit kind of thing.

Grimes: 00:04:25 No. It is, okay.

Sean Carroll: 00:04:26 She’s an Australian scholar who number one, studies memory. You know how you can build physical structures to improve your memory?

Grimes: 00:04:34 Yes, yes, yes.

Sean Carroll: 00:04:34 She has a theory that Stonehenge and other ancient things are memory palaces.

Grimes: 00:04:40 Interesting.

Sean Carroll: 00:04:40 Because they didn’t have books. They’d transfer memory through generations through these giant things. You might like that one also.

Grimes: 00:04:46 Okay. Actually, wow. I saw the name. I was like, “Name, Memory Palace.” It’s a bit too fun.

Sean Carroll: 00:04:51 A bit too fun.

Grimes: 00:04:53 Now you’re really selling it.

Sean Carroll: 00:04:55 It’s good. They’re all good. The physics ones are good too. I love the physics ones. I’m glad you brought up Adrienne Mayor’s one. I haven’t thought about that one in a while. That was a fun one. Whenever, I do sort of try to secretly find some science angle, but I’m happy to talk about whatever.

Grimes: 00:05:10 Cool.

Sean Carroll: 00:05:11 Speaking of which, I thought since some folks in the audience might not be familiar with your work, others might be your biggest fans, let’s start by playing a little excerpt from a song and then we can dig into how it comes to be.

Grimes: 00:05:26 Cool. Do we want to choose the song after the fact or do we want to just … ? Why don’t we just play, we’ll figure it out and then you play it and then … Or should we-

Sean Carroll: 00:05:34 I’m going to ex post facto, put it in so we can do whatever we want.

Grimes: 00:05:39 Yes, exactly. That’s what I’m saying. We can just choose it last minute, if we so desire.

Sean Carroll: 00:05:43 Exactly. Let’s imagine that it’s Violence because I can’t get that thing out of my head.

Grimes: 00:05:48 Okay, sure.

Sean Carroll: 00:05:48 All right. Let’s give it a listen. There we go. For a song like that, describe how it comes to be. Do you get-

Grimes: 00:07:00 That one’s weird because that was one of the only songs in my career that I have not produced. That’s just an odd one out.

Sean Carroll: 00:07:11 Well, it gives you a flavor for … It’s within your oeuvre. It fits into your style, you think?

Grimes: 00:07:20 Sure. I don’t really have a style. I’m post style.

Sean Carroll: 00:07:23 Okay. Post style, that’s good. That’s good. We could imagine we played a different song also and then … This one is called?

Grimes: 00:07:32 Kill V. Maim.

Sean Carroll: 00:07:33 Kill V. Maim. It sounds kind of violent.

Grimes: 00:07:34 It’s pretty violent. It’s supposed to be sort of a girl’s name.

Sean Carroll: 00:07:41 Kill V. Maim?

Grimes: 00:07:42 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:07:42 I see. Kill V. Maim. Right. Yes. This is one thing you do, right? You have personas. Are you singing in the persona of this girl?

Grimes: 00:07:52 Yeah, I guess so. Speaking of personas, I feel like we could go deep there because we’ve been doing some crazy, we’ve been making some technological personas.

Sean Carroll: 00:07:59 Nice.

Grimes: 00:08:00 Yes. This is just a song about, I don’t know. A song about better to kill someone or just fuck them up.

Sean Carroll: 00:09:20 Do you start with the beat, the melody, the lyrics?

Grimes: 00:09:23 The beat. Usually, yep. I’ll just like sit down and, I don’t know. You just get drum samples or you create drum samples and you just build it out.

Sean Carroll: 00:09:32 You’re literally at your computer.

Grimes: 00:09:32 You sit down at your computer.

Sean Carroll: 00:09:34 Let’s imagine the people know nothing about how this happens.

Grimes: 00:09:37 You sit down at a computer, you open a DAW. Digital Audio Workspace like Ableton Live. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any of this.

Sean Carroll: 00:09:43 I’ve not.

Grimes: 00:09:45 Have you ever played around with iMovie?

Sean Carroll: 00:09:50 Yeah. A little bit. Audacity is what I use for the podcast.

Grimes: 00:09:51 Audacity, okay. That’s a Digital Audio Workspace. Ableton’s just a really great one because it’s very advanced. You can do a lot. Then I’ll just be, I’ll get out a little thing and actually play the beat. Then I’ll usually go through and if it’s a kick drum I’ll make the low frequency sound nicer and if it’s a snare, I’ll take out low frequency. That kind of stuff.

Sean Carroll: 00:10:13 What you’re given in the workspace is the individual sounds and you put them together to a beat? Or are you given whole beats?

Grimes: 00:10:13 Yes. You can construct the sounds from scratch, but you don’t have to. Or you can buy out a sample pack and get sounds, or you can get an 808 or a hardware and make sounds. The way I describe production is, it’s sort of probably like what Mozart used to do except you can actually see it in real time so you don’t have to be able to imagine everything. You’re basically making the whole thing. You’re composing, you’re scoring. You’re writing the melodies, harmonies, whatever. You are making the drums and you construct a piece of music from scratch.

Sean Carroll: 00:10:55 Is it intentional that you start with the beat? Is that a creative choice or it’s just easiest to find the rest of the structure that way?

Grimes: 00:11:05 I just need to know the BPM and I cannot compose to a click. That doesn’t work, so I need to make the beat. I’ll often delete it and make another one that’s better. What I usually do is, I make kind of a crappy one, like a midi. Then I do chords, whatever. Blah, blah, blah. Make sounds. Then I’ll do weird wordless vocals that are like, “Blah, blah, blah, blah.” Then I go back. It’s sort of like a weird religious experience because it feels like, “What’s happening?”

Sean Carroll: 00:11:40 You get in the zone of something.

Grimes: 00:11:40 You get in the zone, it feels like it’s being written for you. Then you go back and then it’s like a weird puzzle that you go back retroactively and solve. Can we change the synth to a much nicer synth or maybe a hardware synth instead of a software synth? Write lyrics that roughly sound like what I was mumbling. That’s kind of how it works.

Sean Carroll: 00:11:59 I can’t help but think of a Jane Austen novel where after dinner, one of the ladies would play piano and sing. Every woman in society had to have those skills and we’ve lost those since there are records and things like that.

Grimes: 00:12:13 That is interesting. Because women used to, or a geisha used to be a thing. Women would be like fucking … Sorry. Am I allowed to swear?

Sean Carroll: 00:12:19 Yeah. We’ll mark it as explicit. Don’t worry. It’s fine.

Grimes: 00:12:22 Got it. Okay. Are any of your other episodes explicit?

Sean Carroll: 00:12:25 Seth MacFarlane was swearing like a sailor. Don’t worry.

Grimes: 00:12:28 Okay, cool. Seth MacFarlane, I meant to listen to that one because I love Seth MacFarlane.

Sean Carroll: 00:12:34 What I’m wondering is, does this electronics idea help us bring back the idea that we’re all making music? People, it can be much more widespread?

Grimes: 00:12:42 I do think it should be more widespread and the one thing I love about stuff like Audacity or Ableton or whatever exists, super democratizing music. Because for a while it used to be, in the ’70s or whatever, it’s millions of dollars to make an album. It’s really expensive to go to a studio, record on tape, whatever. That’s all really expensive. It’s still, I would say prohibitively expensive at the moment for a lot of people, but in ten years I think everyone will have access to the same tools, basically.

Sean Carroll: 00:13:09 Which part of it is prohibitively expensive?

Grimes: 00:13:10 Ableton is …

Sean Carroll: 00:13:12 The software and stuff?

Grimes: 00:13:13 Software. A computer. Computers are still expensive. A good computer that can actually run. I kind of need a desktop. I can’t just be on a laptop or an iPad to actually … It’s not super prohibitively expensive but it’s upper middle class vibes, at the moment.

Sean Carroll: 00:13:34 That’s changing.

Grimes: 00:13:35 That’s changing.

Sean Carroll: 00:13:35 That will definitely democratize pretty quickly.

Grimes: 00:13:36 A lot of people are making software that is very affordable or very cheap that can emulate really nice hardware. I feel like we’re hitting a singularity point in five or ten years where you won’t need really, anything.

Sean Carroll: 00:13:48 By hardware you mean things like drums and guitars?

Grimes: 00:13:51 A really nice microphone or-

Sean Carroll: 00:13:53 Okay.

Grimes: 00:13:54 A really nice preamp or a compressor. There’s things that right now, it just does not sound as good if you don’t have hardware. Because it’s just actually real equipment and emulating it. The emulations are just getting better and better.

Sean Carroll: 00:14:11 I think I’ve mentioned this on the podcast several times before because it really did make an impression on me, but I was at an event at South by Southwest put on by Sony. They have an artificial intelligence that will help you write a melody.

Grimes: 00:14:23 That’s another thing I really wanted to talk about, because I feel like we’re in also the end of art. Human art.

Sean Carroll: 00:14:29 Okay? Elaborate on that.

Grimes: 00:14:32 Once AI, once there’s actually AGI, it’s just going to be so much better at making art than us.

Sean Carroll: 00:14:39 Artificial, sorry, AGI?

Grimes: 00:14:41 Artificial General- once there’s not just AI, it can do one task or basic things.

Sean Carroll: 00:14:49 Not just playing chess.

Grimes: 00:14:50 Once AIs can totally master science and art, which could happen in the next ten years. Probably more like 20 or 30 years. I don’t know what you think. I’m actually curious what you think?

Sean Carroll: 00:14:58 Well, let’s talk about that. I just had a podcast with Melanie Mitchell who was skeptical a little bit. She’s an artificial intelligence researcher. It’s funny to talk to the people in the field because there’s wide variety of expectations. I think it depends on what you do for a living. The people who do try to build chess playing computers and whatever, know how hard it is to go beyond that.

Sean Carroll: 00:15:20 If you suddenly say, “Imagine playing chess, but you start without one of your knights,” your computer knows nothing. It just learned a certain thing. I think that there’s a feeling, number one that’s hard, but number two, well maybe the whole strategy we’ve been using is just not meant to do that and a different strategy might do even better.

Grimes: 00:15:38 I do feel a different strategy … Well, I feel like we’ll probably get to a point where it’ll be building itself and then it’ll be much better building itself than we are, which I think they’re already doing at DeepMind and stuff.

Sean Carroll: 00:15:48 I’ve heard about that. I don’t know. You think that’s a likely thing to happen?

Grimes: 00:15:52 Yeah, because it’ll just be so much better at … It’ll be able to do ten years of work in a day, or whatever. I do think there’ll be also a critical point where there’s a runaway effect and we become irrelevant. Maybe it’s still far away from becoming what it will be, but it’ll just get there.

Sean Carroll: 00:16:08 Well, I know Max Tegmark, a friend of mine who was trained as a cosmologist as I am, but he’s now doing AI research. His project with his students is, create an AI which will act like a theoretical physicist. That is to say, find equations that govern a set of data and it can be done. Art sounds on the one hand, easier to make some art, maybe harder to make great art. I don’t know.

Grimes: 00:16:33 I agree, but I think ultimately AI will get to a point where it will be able to emulate all our hormones, all our feelings, all our emotions. Be able to see great art and it will be able to understand what true innovation is, probably even better than we are. Can.

Sean Carroll: 00:16:46 Maybe, yeah.

Grimes: 00:16:48 I think this is both great and bad, but I think part of the reason it’s great is that I feel like we’re in this amazing time where we might be the last artists ever, which feels fun.

Sean Carroll: 00:16:59 The last best artists. We’re already the last best chess players. Human …

Grimes: 00:17:02 Truly the last chess players. They’re already obsolete, I guess.

Sean Carroll: 00:17:06 Go players, I don’t know how familiar you are with Go?

Grimes: 00:17:10 I’m not familiar with the game, but I’m familiar with Dennis and stuff.

Sean Carroll: 00:17:14 The serious players devote their lives to it. They go to Go school starting at five years old. They were devastated when the computer beat them, because not only did it get better, but it played differently. It came up with things that they had never imagined.

Grimes: 00:17:27 Precisely. I don’t know Go but what people are saying is that the computer was playing beautifully and artistically. That’s why I’m, it’s going to be good at painting and writing and probably art forms that we haven’t even thought of at the moment.

Sean Carroll: 00:17:42 One more data point on your side is, also from Melanie’s book. Douglas Hofstadter was her PhD thesis advisor. He wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach?

Grimes: 00:17:52 Okay, cool. I know it, I haven’t read it.

Sean Carroll: 00:17:54 He did an experiment. He either wrote or found a music writing software AI and had it emulate Chopin. Then he played for a bunch of people who were classical music fans but not Chopin experts. Played that and an early juvenile piece by Chopin and said, “Which one sounds better?” Everyone voted for the computer to be more Chopin-like.

Grimes: 00:18:16 It’s going to be, wow. More Chopin-like. Interesting. That’s not really fair though, because he didn’t …

Sean Carroll: 00:18:23 It was trained on Chopin, so it’s not original.

Grimes: 00:18:25 I think it was early Chopin and he hadn’t … That’s not quite totally fair, but-

Sean Carroll: 00:18:29 It’s in the direction, right?

Grimes: 00:18:29 It’s in the direction.

Sean Carroll: 00:18:29 This is what you’re saying. If, on the one hand we’re democratizing our own abilities to make these things, but on the other hand we now have competition.

Grimes: 00:18:39 We’re also going to run out of … I feel like, luckily we’re in this sick spot where technology is allowing for new art forms and stuff. We are running out of ideas in some regards. I feel like AI are going to equally enjoy things in ways that we don’t enjoy things. It will make art for itself and it will just make art forms that are enjoyable in ways that we can’t even conceive of, at the moment. I think that will be the real innovation when it’s not even making art for us anymore. It’s making art for a new set of standards of what is good art because, yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:19:16 All right. I need to think about that. We need to get back to it, but first I want to ask, do you use any AI, little software programs? In your …

Grimes: 00:19:22 I think there is actually a lot of AI. There’s a lot of AI in everything. There’s AI in Instagram filters and stuff. By that metric, totally. I do use the Magenta, what’s that weird synth I have from Google? It’s called the NSynth. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this. I think there is actually some juvenile AI in many aspects of …

Sean Carroll: 00:19:43 Okay, but that’s not what I mean. I’m not sure what I mean, but does AI come into the creativity? To the melody writing or the beat creating?

Grimes: 00:19:53 Not at the moment. Sometimes I’ll use a thing that might generate beats, but I don’t know if it’s AI so much as it’s just generative.

Sean Carroll: 00:19:58 Just random numbers.

Grimes: 00:19:59 Yeah. I did actually recently make some AI meditations.

Sean Carroll: 00:20:03 You made some?

Grimes: 00:20:04 Yes. Well, actually I didn’t make it. The AI made it, but we fed …

Sean Carroll: 00:20:11 It was a partnership, I presume?

Grimes: 00:20:11 Yes. It was a collaboration where we fed it a bunch of … You know with Calm and Headspace and stuff?

Sean Carroll: 00:20:17 No.

Grimes: 00:20:18 The meditation apps?

Sean Carroll: 00:20:19 I don’t think so.

Grimes: 00:20:19 Really? You don’t know about these weird meditations? It’s these apps you can get on your phone that help you meditate. Honestly, I started getting into them and I was like, “Wow. This is great. I’m just way more calm and happy.”

Sean Carroll: 00:20:33 Okay, good.

Grimes: 00:20:33 Then I was, this is just creatively the worst shit I’ve ever … It’s just like, “Close your eyes.” It’s just weird corporate meditation.

Sean Carroll: 00:20:40 It shuts you down in that way or calms you?

Grimes: 00:20:43 Meditation honestly, is boring. It’s just the same shit over and over again. It’s embarrassing to listen to around other people. It’s just some totally white people, yuppie shit. Just having these weird corporate meditations through an app on my phone. Creatively, it’s an embarrassing experience.

Sean Carroll: 00:21:02 I was at a symposium where they began with a mindfulness …

Grimes: 00:21:07 Yes. Mindfulness.

Sean Carroll: 00:21:09 No, don’t do that.

Grimes: 00:21:10 Mindfulness is way too wholesome, is basically my thought. Mindfulness is not edgy, it’s not cool, it’s not dark. I’m going to feed this AI with my friend Matt Aimonetti who built AI, a bunch of meditations from these apps and then the AI started writing these crazy meditations. They were so weird and they did actually just get really weird Blade Runner dark, disjointed, and they were beautiful. They were-

Sean Carroll: 00:21:38 Is it sounds or words?

Grimes: 00:21:40 It’s speaking. It’s trying to emulate other meditations, but it’s doing it in … Then we’d use a deep fake of my voice. It’s this weird version of me saying weird versions of meditations. It’s not very meditative. It is actually kind of meditative, but it’s more unsettling than-

Sean Carroll: 00:22:03 Dark mindfulness. I think this is a whole new genre that you can invent.

Grimes: 00:22:07 Then what we did was we started, I was like, “What really makes me calm?” You know what? I grew up in this weird corporate world. I hate to say it. I love products, I love beauty counters. I love perfumes and brands and Kim Kardashian. We started feeding it Kim Kardashian’s Instagram. Just weird product lists and all this stuff. It started making these things that were just like, “Apple. Amazon.” It’s so calming. Like, “Hey girls. It’s a great Saturday.” Just this weird amalgamation of modernity, internet femininity, relaxation thing.

Sean Carroll: 00:22:43 I’m sure it’s individual, right? I’m sure that some people would react in horror to that.

Grimes: 00:22:48 I think some people will probably hate it.

Sean Carroll: 00:22:49 Some people mindfulness, the sort of good old western white people meditation is great. If it helps them, then I’m all for it.

Grimes: 00:22:55 It’s technically not white people meditate, but it’s weird white appropriation of, I don’t know. Buddhism or whatever the hell it is, which …

Sean Carroll: 00:23:00 Like you say, like you imply. Once it’s on an app.

Grimes: 00:23:04 Once it’s on an app, it’s officially some weird … I feel like at that point the perversion is so extreme that-

Sean Carroll: 00:23:10 If it works for people, I’m still all for it.

Grimes: 00:23:11 I love it. I use it all the time.

Sean Carroll: 00:23:12 Okay, good.

Grimes: 00:23:14 Every morning I go, opening my stupid app and doing my stupid counting.

Sean Carroll: 00:23:17 Your self-knowledge is such that you know that it’s [crosstalk 00:23:17].

Grimes: 00:23:21 I’m just embarrassed. People come in and people are … I want to be able to meditate in front of other people. Do I need to meditate in front of? I’ll stop talking.

Sean Carroll: 00:23:28 Okay, but I want to go back to this AI thing because the thing that I keep coming back to is the importance for our minds, of being in our bodies. I’ve talked with people on the podcast about the embodiment of intelligence, and so forth. I think that one thing that current attempts at AI are really missing is that embodiment. AIs don’t get hungry, they don’t get sleepy.

Grimes: 00:23:51 See, I don’t think that’s relevant.

Sean Carroll: 00:23:51 I think it’s super relevant.

Grimes: 00:23:54 I just don’t think, why does the AI need to be like us? Also I think you’ll be able to emulate that. I just feel like we’ll be able to write programs that …

Sean Carroll: 00:24:00 That’s possible.

Grimes: 00:24:03 We just need to crack what that is, exactly.

Sean Carroll: 00:24:05 In principle, we can emulate anything. That, I’m all in favor of. In practice, I’m not sure that they’re trying that much?

Grimes: 00:24:11 I don’t think they’re trying. It doesn’t seem super practical because those are the things that inhibit us, to an extent.

Sean Carroll: 00:24:17 Well, but you need motivation, right? They motivate us also.

Grimes: 00:24:21 True. I feel that AI will be motivated by … True. Interesting. Okay, motivation. Wow.

Sean Carroll: 00:24:29 AIs don’t get bored.

Grimes: 00:24:31 Yeah, but see, it’s not it’ll be motivated by not being … I guess the motivation is the key of whether it’s going to be evil or not.

Sean Carroll: 00:24:38 Well, there’s motivation for what goal of course, is an important question, but the existence of motivation at all. I can turn on my computer and not touch any keys and it will not complain.

Grimes: 00:24:47 I feel like it’s going to want to know the nature of the universe.

Sean Carroll: 00:24:52 No, I don’t think so.

Grimes: 00:24:52 Why?

Sean Carroll: 00:24:53 I think it will just sit there in whatever state it’s in until the command is given to it. Unless we give it a motivation. Unless, again I’m-

Grimes: 00:25:00 Once it’s self-aware, I think there’s something inherently motivating about being self-aware.

Sean Carroll: 00:25:04 I’m not so sure. I’m very happy to be wrong about this. Not an expert.

Grimes: 00:25:08 I’m not an expert either.

Sean Carroll: 00:25:10 Good, so we’re at the same level.

Grimes: 00:25:11 I’m literally just saying stuff I’ve never even said before until we’re making it up as we go along.

Sean Carroll: 00:25:15 I think about, just the body is something, our bodies, unless we feed and breathe and so forth, they decay. They go away. We are kept in our homeostasis by inputs from the outside world.

Grimes: 00:25:27 That doesn’t motivate you to do physics.

Sean Carroll: 00:25:29 It’s part of it. It’s part of it. I think that evolution didn’t train us to do physics, as we were talking about before the podcast, but it trained us to do other things. Those other things sort of bleed over and as spinoffs we are curious about the universe and we end up doing physics.

Grimes: 00:25:44 Art making, what purpose does that serve? I guess it does serve-

Sean Carroll: 00:25:51 What do you think? I should ask you. What purpose does it serve?

Grimes: 00:25:51 I guess it makes us happy. I also do think science fiction and stuff leads to science.

Sean Carroll: 00:25:58 That’s true.

Grimes: 00:26:00 It’s an interaction.

Sean Carroll: 00:26:03 What about art? I mean-

Grimes: 00:26:00 Like it’s an interaction.

Sean Carroll: 00:26:01 Yeah.

Grimes: 00:26:02 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:26:02 But what about, I mean, but what about art? I mean, so if I vaguely know the biography, you didn’t grow up as a musical prodigy-

Grimes: 00:26:09 No, no, definitely not.

Sean Carroll: 00:26:11 But you’ve stumbled across it.

Grimes: 00:26:15 Yeah, I was actually in neuroscience at McGill.

Sean Carroll: 00:26:16 Okay, yeah. Montreal, yeah.

Grimes: 00:26:16 Yeah, and we had to learn logic to do … Yeah, I don’t know, make some tones or something. It was like, “Go home and then come back on Monday with a snippet of something musical to prove that you learned this program”-

Sean Carroll: 00:26:29 Okay, but for a neuroscience class, not for a music class.

Grimes: 00:26:30 For a neuroscience class, yeah, just generate tones and various things or whatever. And so I went home and just made an EP. Because I was just like, “Wow. This is so fun.” Also free software, yes. And then I basically just had-

Sean Carroll: 00:26:43 You were good at it.

Grimes: 00:26:44 It’s so funny because people were like, “Oh …” Not that it was easy, but people … Basically my first music kind of went viral, so it was just … I definitely didn’t work for it my whole life. I just definitely randomly got super lucky.

Sean Carroll: 00:26:54 Yep. So yeah, sometimes, well-

Grimes: 00:26:56 With no musical … And then I had to very quickly learn music very fast in front of a lot of people, which was very intense.

Sean Carroll: 00:27:03 So what does that mean, learning music? Did you learn to play instruments and things?

Grimes: 00:27:05 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:27:06 Music theory, all that stuff?

Grimes: 00:27:07 I didn’t learn music theory. I-

Sean Carroll: 00:27:08 The circle of fifths?

Grimes: 00:27:10 I don’t know the circle of fifths. Just to play live and stuff, you just have to be good at doing stuff. Oh my God, I’d better learn-

Sean Carroll: 00:27:17 So really the practice, the practical-

Grimes: 00:27:19 And production. My first stuff was very low fidelity. I had to very quickly learn about how to be a good producer and make things sound … engineering I guess, because yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:27:29 So for most of your songs you had written the music, you’ve played the instruments to whatever extent that is, wrote the lyrics, did the singing and did the producing.

Grimes: 00:27:39 Yes.

Sean Carroll: 00:27:39 That’s a lot of work it sounds like.

Grimes: 00:27:40 It’s fun. It’s fun though.

Sean Carroll: 00:27:42 Which is the most fun part?

Grimes: 00:27:43 Which is the most fun part. I mean, probably the producing cause it’s like weird world-building. You make some weird-

Sean Carroll: 00:27:50 So for those who are again not experts, what does it mean to be producing music in the digital age? Is it like just modifying sounds, mixing tracks together, deciding what to include and not?

Grimes: 00:28:01 Yeah, basically. It’s like cyber composing. You’re just … You’ve got a weird paint graph in front of you that is the song and you just sort of fiddle it together and put compressors and EQs and effects on things and kind of make it fall together.

Sean Carroll: 00:28:17 But you clearly need to know what the words like compressor and EQ mean.

Grimes: 00:28:20 You can … I kind of just figured it out.

Sean Carroll: 00:28:22 You figured it out, yeah.

Grimes: 00:28:23 I was just like, “I’ll just press these buttons to get it,” kind of thing. And then you eventually just fall into it. It’s like, I don’t know.

Sean Carroll: 00:28:31 And I’m sure people would be different levels of skill at it, but it does sound … I mean, your story is a good one in the sense that there might be other people out there who, if they were exposed to these tools, could really make music other people liked.

Grimes: 00:28:43 I mean, the one nice thing about production is, I mean, you do need to know things but you don’t really need to know … I mean, it’s like the piano. If you sit down at a piano and you press a key, it kind of sounds just nice. There’s sort of this inherent niceness to it and you can kind of deduce how to make it nice. You just-

Sean Carroll: 00:29:00 I mean hundreds of years of practice to make pianos that sound nice, right?

Grimes: 00:29:02 Okay, I mean … yeah, yeah, so it’s-

Sean Carroll: 00:29:03 Yes. We’re blessed with that.

Grimes: 00:29:05 The tool set, there’s a wonderful tool set available, so. And so you just need to figure out how to drive the tool set. And yeah, I think … yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:29:16 When you’re performing live, are there people playing instruments or is it you at a keyboard like a-

Grimes: 00:29:20 It’s kind of both. We’re running certain things off Ableton, and then I’m triggering things off of Ableton and blah blah blah. And I’m also-

Sean Carroll: 00:29:26 So there’s a little dynamic back and forth where things are happening by your choice in real time.

Grimes: 00:29:30 It’s a mix of being, actually doing things and certain things running off of Ableton. But I used to actually do everything, like live loop and … But that’s when you’re playing front of 50,000 people and you’re trying to live loop something and you fuck something up or one weird sound. You just don’t want to do that. I’ve definitely learned the hard way not to do that.

Sean Carroll: 00:29:48 I can believe that. I know I go around giving talks about quantum mechanics and I had this one little demo that I couldn’t do on my laptop, only on my phone, so I had to plug my phone into the computer, into the LED projector, whatever. And even that amount of live ability to fail was too stressful for me.

Grimes: 00:30:05 Yeah. Oh, it’s just … I mean, and also the other thing, I think live music is going to be obsolete soon. One of the things I like about the digital age is … Well, I mean, maybe this is bad, but I as a performer, I hate the potential of failure in front of a giant audience. It’s like … when you look at … DJs get paid more than real musicians.

Sean Carroll: 00:30:25 Okay, I don’t know this. I don’t know about the ecosystem.

Grimes: 00:30:29 And it’s much cheaper. It’s just like … Actually, it’s kind of like Instagram or whatever. People are actually just gravitating towards the clean, finished, fake world. Everyone wants to be in a simulation. They don’t actually want the real world. Even if they think they do and everyone’s like, “Yeah, cool, live music,” if you actually look at actual numbers of things, everyone’s gravitating towards the shimmery, perfected Photoshop world.

Sean Carroll: 00:30:51 Yeah okay. Yeah, certainly Instagram and so forth is pushing us in that direction. But isn’t there also, like if I look on YouTube or whatever, or even podcasts. My podcast is rather less produced than an NPR radio show, right?

Grimes: 00:31:05 Yes.

Sean Carroll: 00:31:05 And there’s still a lot of room there for sort of messy kind of nonprofessional things.

Grimes: 00:31:10 I feel like your guests are weirdly eloquent though.

Sean Carroll: 00:31:13 Well that’s true. I do try to pick people … I learned that the hard way.

Grimes: 00:31:16 Well, I feel like I’m giving you probably a rough time right now.

Sean Carroll: 00:31:19 No, not at all.

Grimes: 00:31:19 You don’t think you’re going to have to edit? I feel you’re going to edit this like crazy.

Sean Carroll: 00:31:21 No, I’m not editing it at all.

Grimes: 00:31:22 Oh boy.

Sean Carroll: 00:31:22 This is what you’re going to sound like.

Grimes: 00:31:23 Okay.

Sean Carroll: 00:31:25 No, because the people who are harder to have as podcast guests are the ones who just give one sentence answers to everything.

Grimes: 00:31:32 Oh yeah, sure, sure, sure. Definitely.

Sean Carroll: 00:31:34 You want people who can expound on … who go, “Oh yeah, I never thought of that. Let’s go there,” right? That what makes a great podcast guest in all ways.

Grimes: 00:31:41 Well, I’ve noticed your podcast guests never say … They’re not, “Like, like, like, like.” I’m just like, “Oh yeah, like, you know, like whatever man. Like what …” I was like … That was just stressing me out on the way here. I was like, “Man, how am I going to …”

Sean Carroll: 00:31:51 You want me to edit out all the likes?

Grimes: 00:31:52 No, you won’t be able to.

Sean Carroll: 00:31:53 Okay. I’m not going to do that.

Grimes: 00:31:54 There’s probably already been 4,000, but.

Sean Carroll: 00:31:57 Well, I think part of the reason I was very happy to have you on the show is … I mean, there’s interesting things I want to talk about, but also it’s an experiment, right? It’s a different kind of guest and I just love that. I want to be experimenting. I don’t ever want to fall into the rut of doing the same thing.

Grimes: 00:32:11 Cool. That’s how I feel about things generally.

Sean Carroll: 00:32:13 Yeah. So how would you say your music has evolved? I mean, is it different now then when you were at McGill?

Grimes: 00:32:19 Oh, yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:32:19 I’m sure the answer’s yes, but-

Grimes: 00:32:20 Oh yeah. Well I went through … So my first album was super weird, super psychedelic, just crazy. And when I looked back at it at the time, I was like, “Wow, I was just totally unhinged, psychotic, crazy person.” At the time, I was so crazy at the time, I didn’t realize music had lyrics. I thought no one was ever saying anything. I thought everyone was just going like, “Blah, blah, blah blah.” I-

Sean Carroll: 00:32:38 So you were not even a huge music fan at the time.

Grimes: 00:32:43 No, I was a huge music fan, but I was just, I think maybe … I think I have some learning disabilities and stuff. It was very jarring. I’d never watched TV. I didn’t have the internet. I was just-

Sean Carroll: 00:32:55 No MTV, yeah.

Grimes: 00:32:56 I was just super weird in my world. And I thought I was just making … I thought I was making weird pop, like Britney Spears, like, “Oh yes, this is super pop mainstream sound.”

Sean Carroll: 00:33:06 You were trying to sell out this [inaudible 00:00:33:07].

Grimes: 00:33:07 I was like totally delusional about what I was actually making. And then there was this very jarring thing of everyone being like, “Oh yeah, but it’s cute, but she won’t actually be able to grow it up or …” And people were just really worrying about how I was going to expand the thing and make it not just this one time kind of funny thing. And then, so I had to really hone my skills. So my last album was … I don’t want to say it’s normal, because it’s not, but it was really a lot of proving myself.

Sean Carroll: 00:33:39 Yeah, absolutely.

Grimes: 00:33:40 Production is a very male dominated kind of sport too. So I just … I just wanted to make it clear that I can play with the boys or whatever.

Sean Carroll: 00:33:48 Yeah, that you can play the game in their way, in their arena.

Grimes: 00:33:51 It’s like there’s a level of normalcy to … Playing the game, you have to actually abide by the rules a little bit. So there’s a bit more rule abiding in that album than I would’ve liked. But I just wanted to shut up the …

Sean Carroll: 00:34:03 Well, but also I think, I mean I’ve never done anything like music, but for writing books or for doing physics or whatever, learning what the rules are so that-

Grimes: 00:34:11 You break them.

Sean Carroll: 00:34:11 You can break them-

Grimes: 00:34:11 Exactly.

Sean Carroll: 00:34:11 Is hugely helpful.

Grimes: 00:34:12 And now I’m back into major breaking.

Sean Carroll: 00:34:15 Back to breaking them?

Grimes: 00:34:16 Yeah, I’m back to breaking … Because now it’s like, I’ve done my thing. So it’s like, no one’s going to be like, “Oh, yeah, but can she really make a real song?” So, yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:34:23 So the previous album was Art Angels.

Grimes: 00:34:25 Yes.

Sean Carroll: 00:34:25 Right? So what are your albums for the people out there?

Grimes: 00:34:28 Well, I have two albums that no one’s heard of called Geidi Primes, which is a dune concept album. But, if I’d known I would-

Sean Carroll: 00:34:34 Why isn’t that box office? I don’t … I mean, there’s certain people who would love that.

Grimes: 00:34:37 Because it’s insane. It’s like the insane ravings of a madman. And then another album called Halfaxa, which is just a word I made up. I didn’t have fans at this point. I was just making stuff.

Sean Carroll: 00:34:47 Okay. But these are things we can get on iTunes or whatever or the internet?

Grimes: 00:34:47 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:34:47 Okay.

Grimes: 00:34:47 And then my “breakout” album is called Visions. And then I made this other album, Art Angels, after that, which is kind of my actual breakout album. Because the first was indie breakout and then last album was like festival … more like, “Okay, I have”-

Sean Carroll: 00:35:08 50,000 people in the audience.

Grimes: 00:35:09 Or I can … I’m not actively stressing … Visions era, I was still like, “Okay, rent the fuck up.” And now I’m like, “Okay, I can … I’m building a studio. I’m living my life.” And now I’m just in my zone.

Sean Carroll: 00:35:23 Yeah. Good, good.

Grimes: 00:35:24 Yes.

Sean Carroll: 00:35:24 So the new album is called?

Grimes: 00:35:27 It’s called Miss Anthropocene.

Sean Carroll: 00:35:29 I like it.

Grimes: 00:35:30 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:35:31 Explain. Unpack the layers of meaning there. That’s a funny title.

Grimes: 00:35:34 Well, it’s meant to be extremely provocative, particularly to my fan base. It’s like Miss Universe, but Miss Anthropocene. I just … everything, like beauty pageants. But I want to get into extremely psychedelic beauty pageants. I’m actually obsessed with beauty pageants. I love the Victoria’s Secret fashion show. I feel like this stuff is great. It just needs to get way crazier.

Sean Carroll: 00:35:54 I mean, what is it that you love about it, the Victoria’s Secret fashion show?

Grimes: 00:35:57 I just … I mean, everyone just loves beautiful women, and a parade of beautiful women and the weird … But Miss Universe and stuff where they have to answer the questions, and it’s just so funny. It’s-

Sean Carroll: 00:36:08 The artificiality of it, kind of? The, I mean, it’s all …

Grimes: 00:36:12 It’s sort of this weird attempt to achieve female perfection in this weird way that is super … Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, what I really think is that we’re very close to a Ready Player One type existence. And so I’m imagining the Ready Player One Miss Universe, where you can have elf ears and giant eyes and-

Sean Carroll: 00:36:32 We have to be close to that, right?

Grimes: 00:36:33 A tail and be in a Gundam.

Sean Carroll: 00:36:37 Well are you imagining just a virtual reality?

Grimes: 00:36:40 Yeah, like VR chat.

Sean Carroll: 00:36:41 They must have that. Is there no virtual reality Miss Universe?

Grimes: 00:36:44 They have … No, which I really want. I really want to make Miss Anthropocene into the experimental beauty pageant. But anyway, and then it’s also like misanthrope. I was very sad when I made this record. I’m now … I don’t know. I’m more … I actually … But I was basically trying to make goddess of climate change kind of thing. I was like, “Who is like the queen of climate change? Who loves climate change? She wants to … Who’s the Hades of climate change?” Just the sickest demon, because also I was-

Sean Carroll: 00:37:11 So the one, in other words, causing climate change, or at least rooting for it, not fighting against it.

Grimes: 00:37:15 Or just the embodiment of it. I miss polytheism. I feel like polytheism was really cool. I feel it was healing for people. It’s like, if you like the god of war, you can just go like, “My son died, but he died for you,” and whatever. It makes it more-

Sean Carroll: 00:37:29 The stories were great.

Grimes: 00:37:29 It makes more sense … Yeah, the stories are great. And it’s just … I was like, “Well, who are the new gods?” Because we have all this new stuff. We have plastic and pollution and plastic surgery and social media. The new gods sound sick. They sound like … like the Sailor Scouts, like these sick demons. So that’s kind of where my weird imagination has been going.

Sean Carroll: 00:37:49 Alright. And so this is, I mean, not to make it sound too stuffy, is this a concept album around that kind of idea?

Grimes: 00:37:56 I guess so. I hate the word concept album-

Sean Carroll: 00:37:57 I know, that’s why you-

Grimes: 00:37:57 So, but it’s-

Sean Carroll: 00:37:57 But it is.

Grimes: 00:38:01 I mean, I always just start with the visual and then I work backwards. So I’m just trying to think of the sickest visual. It’s just taking all these things like climate change and beauty pageants and trying to make them something that I’ve … fun.

Sean Carroll: 00:38:14 But, so you mentioned that in some sense you were not happy when you’re making this album. And did that go into, you want to get your frustrations out by imagining that you were embodying climate change?

Grimes: 00:38:26 I mean, it’s just, when I made the album … The album is actually pretty old. I’m kind of on a bunch of new stuff since the album, but they’re … A bunch of weird stuff happened. Actually my manager passed away and stuff, so I just, I never actually put it out. But it was kind of before … I was making a lot of it right before people kind of like got woke. I feel like in the last few years people just, they got woke. They suddenly care about climate change. And so I was just really depressed. I was like, “We’re toast.” That was kind of where I was at.

Sean Carroll: 00:38:50 So we agree that climate change is bad.

Grimes: 00:38:52 We, yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:38:52 This is-

Grimes: 00:38:53 Well, I don’t know if I should … Can I say that? I-

Sean Carroll: 00:38:54 Some of my iTunes reviewers are mad that I think climate change is bad, but I’m going to stick by that. It’s an official Mindscape position, that climate change is bad and we should try to fix it if we can, yeah. So you’re on board with that.

Grimes: 00:39:06 Yeah, I mean, well, the argument of the album is kind of that climate change is good, but with the purpose of being provocative and-

Sean Carroll: 00:39:10 A little ironic maybe, like-

Grimes: 00:39:12 It’s not even … I’m just-

Sean Carroll: 00:39:14 Make us think?

Grimes: 00:39:15 I just love villainy. I don’t care about Harry Potter, I like Voldemort. It’s like, I don’t care about Batman. People actually care about The Joker and Harley Quinn. That’s like why-

Sean Carroll: 00:39:24 Darth Vader is much more interesting.

Grimes: 00:39:24 Suicide Squad is … Yeah, everyone likes Kylo Ren. You’ll … The things people actually like is the antagonist. That’s what’s actually interesting to people. So I would say it’s a study in villainy I guess. And … because it’s just-

Sean Carroll: 00:39:36 And the lyrics reflect that?

Grimes: 00:39:37 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:39:38 Okay. Why don’t we … We can play a clip from your latest tune. What is this called?

Grimes: 00:39:43 This one’s called So Heavy, or So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth.

Sean Carroll: 00:39:45 So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth.

Grimes: 00:39:45 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:39:45 Okay.

Grimes: 00:39:45 (singing)

Sean Carroll: 00:41:37 So it’s interesting. I was, I bit my tongue when you said it, but I’ll confess, the first time I heard this song, I thought that you weren’t singing words.

Grimes: 00:41:45 Yeah, well I do actually have a speech impediment.

Sean Carroll: 00:41:47 It was like cheap little … no, but it was just about the cheap little speaker and it just all … It seemed like this sort of a, there was a tune and a melody, but it’s more atmospheric than other things.

Grimes: 00:41:55 Yes. Yeah, I mean, I don’t sing … I don’t enunciate very well. This is why I hate when people-

Sean Carroll: 00:42:02 Your voice is very beautiful.

Grimes: 00:42:04 But this is why when people call me a singer, when people are like, “Oh, singer Grimes.” It’s like, I’m actually not very good at singing and people can’t understand what … My lisp is really bad. No one can understand what I’m saying. People famously can’t understand what I’m saying, so. It’s not-

Sean Carroll: 00:42:15 Okay. I’ve not had any problems yet, but I mean, do you play with that when you’re producing? I mean, could you make yourself sound like Barry white if you wanted to?

Grimes: 00:42:23 Yeah, I mean, I could if I really want to. But I think people would react badly. I mean, you can kind of make vocals sound like anything-

Sean Carroll: 00:42:28 Like anything.

Grimes: 00:42:30 You really want to.

Sean Carroll: 00:42:30 Yeah. But so, was it a conscious choice for this song to make it more background-y, ambient?

Grimes: 00:42:37 I kind of wanted this cyber Enya thing going on.

Sean Carroll: 00:42:40 Okay. Yeah, yeah, totally.

Grimes: 00:42:43 Yeah. Yeah, so.

Sean Carroll: 00:42:44 And how does that fit in … I mean, I don’t know. That’s the only song from the album I’ve heard, I guess, unless Violence is also on the album?

Grimes: 00:42:49 Yeah, Violence is on the album. Violence came way at the end. It was actually supposed to be for my next album, but this stuff’s a bit older so I was just … I just needed to put it somewhere.

Sean Carroll: 00:42:58 So do you have a bunch of stuff on hard drives that could be many albums?

Grimes: 00:43:01 Yeah. Yeah, a bunch of stuff on hard drives, although it’s not good to tell people that because then they demand the release. And then they keep … people are still on … I mentioned some track six years ago and people still constantly tweeted every single day that, “Release, release, release.” And I’m like, “Oh my God. They’re not going to release it,” so I was-

Sean Carroll: 00:43:20 Well do you … Is it because you want to improve it or you just didn’t like that one? Or why don’t you release things?

Grimes: 00:43:26 The difference between a-

Sean Carroll: 00:43:26 Is it business?

Grimes: 00:43:27 Demo to a song is a lot of work. And if you’re not into the song anymore, it’s very hard to motivate yourself to do that.

Sean Carroll: 00:43:33 Oh, it’s like writing a physics paper sometimes easy to start sometimes very hard to finish.

Grimes: 00:43:37 It’s very hard to … the difference between … I might add the … before I die, just release all the demos or something. But yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:43:42 Okay, yeah. No, I teach my students this, or I tell my students to teach themselves, because I’m very bad at being a finisher. You don’t get credit for the things, the half-written papers that are lying in your file somewhere, right?

Grimes: 00:43:54 No, it’s a really, really hard to … It’s really hard to finish things.

Sean Carroll: 00:43:58 And there must be a business aspect too, right? There must be people who they’re like, “Ahem, we need some product.”

Grimes: 00:44:04 Yes, which is them.

Sean Carroll: 00:44:05 Right. They’re here in the room folks, because yeah.

Grimes: 00:44:06 My manager-

Sean Carroll: 00:44:08 They’re very friendly. Don’t worry.

Grimes: 00:44:13 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:44:14 But are you happy with album?

Grimes: 00:44:15 Oh, I think it’s my best work for sure.

Sean Carroll: 00:44:16 Okay, cool. Do you think that every album has been better than every previous one?

Grimes: 00:44:20 Yes.

Sean Carroll: 00:44:20 Okay. So there’s progress going on.

Grimes: 00:44:22 Hopefully there’s progress going on.

Sean Carroll: 00:44:23 And is … I mean, do you think it’s because your skills are better or you’re in a better place or you’re more creative?

Grimes: 00:44:30 Well, this one, as we were saying, it’s like a confluence of, my skills are much better, but I can go back to being … Now that I know the rules, I can break them.

Sean Carroll: 00:44:38 Right. So, and that helps you be a little bit more authentic? True to yourself a little bit?

Grimes: 00:44:42 Yeah, it’s just a bit more … It sounds less like other music.

Sean Carroll: 00:44:43 Yeah, okay.

Grimes: 00:44:44 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:44:44 Okay.

Grimes: 00:44:45 Which is my ultimate goal is to make things that haven’t been made before.

Sean Carroll: 00:44:48 Yeah, right. Any creative person wants to do that, right?

Grimes: 00:44:50 Yes, yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:44:52 Yeah. And you can’t do it entirely. Obviously you’re influenced by things, right?

Grimes: 00:44:54 Yes.

Sean Carroll: 00:44:55 I mean, do you have favorite influences?

Grimes: 00:44:57 No.

Sean Carroll: 00:44:57 No? Okay.

Grimes: 00:45:00 Well, I just feel like that’s a boring question for musicians. Because who … Will anyone get anything out of it if I say my influences? I bet like no one benefits.

Sean Carroll: 00:45:07 Yeah. It’s probably more easier to misunderstand than to actually convey insight that way.

Grimes: 00:45:11 Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s just, because the influences aren’t even … I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know. That’s a weird … that’s a loaded … I won’t go down that path.

Sean Carroll: 00:45:18 On Wikipedia, my web page has a little sidebar where it says who my influences are, and I’m like-

Grimes: 00:45:23 Who are your influences?

Sean Carroll: 00:45:24 “Who wrote this?” I don’t know. I have no idea who-

Grimes: 00:45:26 Mine too, and it has this weird … There’s literally people in my influences on Wikipedia that I’ve never heard of, point blank. I’m like, “What the … who the … What is this?”

Sean Carroll: 00:45:32 Well I guess so the better way to say it is none of us grew up on a desert island, isolated from the world, right?

Grimes: 00:45:37 Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:45:37 We live within this mosaic of stuff, and we might not even know where the influences are.

Grimes: 00:45:43 Yes. Well, it’s like, I try to get influences from … For example, so there’s these guys making these programs you use, like a plug in that you use that generate sound and generate sense and stuff. And I try to, for example, be influenced by them and be like, “Okay, so these guys are great engineers. They spent all this time building these weird tools. How far can I push this tool and make that the core of the thing that I’m trying to build?” It’s like, how can I … Because they’re engineers and so they’re making very interesting stuff, things that process sound in ways that have never been, it’s never been done. So I’m like … one of the things I like to do is figure out, what can I make of this pure kind of … not put on an artistic context. It’s just shit that can be done. How do I take these new instruments and …

Sean Carroll: 00:46:32 I mean, it’s a … I have guitarist friends who are gear heads, right? The latest little wrinkle in the guitar or whatever. This is the software version of that or the audio engineering version of that.

Grimes: 00:46:40 Well you can do things in software and stuff that you can’t do … You can like take wave forms and put them together in super crazy ways. You can do … I mean, maybe hardware can do all the same processing, I don’t know. But there’s just really cool stuff when there’s guys just writing programs that can …

Sean Carroll: 00:46:54 Do you think even apart from like AI being creative, do you think that we’re in a period of rapid development of what people can do?

Grimes: 00:47:02 I think we’re in a super crazy … I think we’re in one of the great art phases of humanity, and I think we won’t even realize it yet til yeah, a bit later, but. Both because of how rapidly the tools are developing, but also because of the extreme democratization of these tools. I feel it’s pretty much never … it’s only … It hasn’t been everyone making music since probably the ancient kind of times. So it’s like we’re returning to this place where everybody can make music and everybody has pretty advanced tools at their fingertips. And I don’t know, I think that’s probably pretty good for the-

Sean Carroll: 00:47:36 And you also do visual art, right? You do the album covers-

Grimes: 00:47:40 Yep.

Sean Carroll: 00:47:40 And you’re into fashion. Do you design fashion at all or?

Grimes: 00:47:43 I do design … I’m actually working on digital fashion.

Sean Carroll: 00:47:45 I don’t know what that means.

Grimes: 00:47:47 I think regular … there’s all these fast fashion, all the stuff like-

Sean Carroll: 00:47:51 Vaguely, I know about it, but it’s not really my-

Grimes: 00:47:54 So like Fashion Nova or like H&M. You can go buy something that’s cheap and crappy for 30 bucks that’s just going to break really fast and go in the landfill. It’s kind of for Instagram, right?

Sean Carroll: 00:48:03 Okay.

Grimes: 00:48:03 So it’s like, right now Instagram can map your face and you can do the cool filters.

Sean Carroll: 00:48:07 Oh, I see where this is going, yeah.

Grimes: 00:48:08 I think we’ll probably will be very soon to just having really great body mapping, and then you can just go spend two bucks, buy a dress, wear it, and there’s no waste. It’s not bad for the environment. You can get something, you can get haute couture. You can get beautiful things that you could never afford. I think it will really revolutionize fashion. And then also, as I was saying, once we’re all avatars, then people are going to need clothes for their avatars.

Sean Carroll: 00:48:35 Yeah. Right, right. And I wonder, this makes me think about where are we going to go with this, because we haven’t gone anywhere near where we can. I don’t know if … Did you ever see Tron or Tron Legacy, the movies?

Grimes: 00:48:47 I have not seen Tron, and this is a constant thing that gets brought up very regularly with me, but I should really see it.

Sean Carroll: 00:48:53 I was a science advisor for Tron Legacy-

Grimes: 00:48:55 Okay, cool.

Sean Carroll: 00:48:56 The recent one-

Grimes: 00:48:57 Fun.

Sean Carroll: 00:48:57 And it was … Eh, it was fine. It was a good movie, but it was not great. The first one was in some sense, a crappy movie that was really groundbreaking, right?

Grimes: 00:49:06 Okay, yes, yes.

Sean Carroll: 00:49:06 It was the first movie to really be heavily CGI-

Grimes: 00:49:09 Wow, okay, cool. Cool.

Sean Carroll: 00:49:10 And the story and everything weren’t great, but it was extremely influential. Whereas I thought that the flaw of the second one was, we’re good at CGI now and they just did all the CGI they did the old movie, but way better. But they didn’t … It wasn’t groundbreaking. They did try to do something different.

Grimes: 00:49:28 The one thing I’ll say about why film sucks right now is just this weird … It’s so expensive to make films, so everyone’s just repeating and making remakes and like just doing more expensive versions of things they did before, which is like really weird and sad. And it’s weird that films, cinema specifically, is stuck in this mode when almost every other art form is blasting off.

Sean Carroll: 00:49:45 Well maybe it’s because it’s just a little bit too expensive to be this DIY in that world, right? As compared to music or visual art or whatever.

Grimes: 00:49:52 Although I do think even the new iPhones and stuff, the camera capabilities-

Sean Carroll: 00:49:57 It’s getting there.

Grimes: 00:49:57 Still though, you need actors, still … Music, you can make it alone in a room. Movies still need at least a bunch of people minimum acting. So it’s … but we’re … we’ll get, yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:50:08 Yeah. I can certainly imagine having software where you type in, well I want this actor to have these emotions and-

Grimes: 00:50:17 Oh, you could probably just get deepfakes of actors and have them-

Sean Carroll: 00:50:19 Sure, also do that.

Grimes: 00:50:20 Or just weird renders of actors. Oh wow.

Sean Carroll: 00:50:24 Then you can make your own movie, or you could fix the old movies.

Grimes: 00:50:27 Just write what everyone says and how they act and then just let them generate-

Sean Carroll: 00:50:29 This is how the Phantom Menace should have been, yeah.

Grimes: 00:50:31 Yeah. Okay.

Sean Carroll: 00:50:32 Yeah.

Grimes: 00:50:32 Wow.

Sean Carroll: 00:50:33 People do that. So yeah, I mean, art is just moving really, really quickly. I mean, do you have a vision for the future of art? I know this sounds too big, but do you … Let’s put it this way, how much of your approach to art is simply being a practitioner versus sort of theorizing what it’s all about?

Grimes: 00:50:52 A lot of it for me is theorizing what it’s all about and where it’s going to go. Because that’s kind of where … I don’t know. I call it social media sci fi or whatever. Just trying to use the tools available to make the most kind of groundbreaking ideas or whatever. Not just in music or whatever.

Sean Carroll: 00:51:10 Do you think you’re going to be releasing albums 40 years from now?

Grimes: 00:51:14 No. I would like to move on from music. Well, actually, probably, but more casually.

Sean Carroll: 00:51:17 Okay, yeah, just for fun.

Grimes: 00:51:18 Not as my main … yeah. One thing we’re doing right now is we’ve just built an avatar and we’re about to … I’m about to kill myself and transition. So one thing I’ve been deep diving on recently is I really think the human psyche is splitting into two parts. Obviously it’s like everyone has … and I think this is causing people a lot of problems-

Sean Carroll: 00:51:37 Obviously, you say. Yeah, okay.

Grimes: 00:51:38 But, well no, but it’s like we all have an online life and we’re spending hours and it’s-

Sean Carroll: 00:51:44 Guilty.

Grimes: 00:51:45 And our sense of self … I mean, the way most people know you is online. I “knew” you before I met you, because I knew your digital self.

Sean Carroll: 00:51:55 And I actually make a sort of conscious decision to make my digital self pretty close to my real self, but not exactly.

Grimes: 00:52:02 Which I remarked upon meeting you because a lot of people don’t-

Sean Carroll: 00:52:00 Pretty close to my real self, but not exactly.

Grimes: 00:52:01 Which I remarked upon meeting you, because a lot of people don’t.

Sean Carroll: 00:52:04 Yeah.

Grimes: 00:52:04 I was like, “Wow, you sound exactly…” I was tripped out. I was like, “I feel like we’re in the podcast.”

Sean Carroll: 00:52:08 Podcast has already started.

Grimes: 00:52:09 I couldn’t take it. Your voice even sounded compressed or something. I was totally-

Sean Carroll: 00:52:14 That’s a motto.

Grimes: 00:52:14 I got kind of tripped out actually. I had a brief psychedelic break when we met.

Sean Carroll: 00:52:19 Covered it up well.

Grimes: 00:52:21 Really? I think I screamed and grabbed my head. But it’s like I think we are not obviously emotionally prepared for this. And people are also… They don’t realize it’s happening. So they’re… The fight between their digital self and their real self. We see all these girls getting plastic surgery because they’re like, “My face doesn’t look like my face through the filter.” And it’s like what we actually need to accept is that we have two selves now.

Sean Carroll: 00:52:44 Right.

Grimes: 00:52:44 If you are actively online, in any capacity, that is a separate entity. And it’s like-

Sean Carroll: 00:52:50 And as an artist, you’re making use of that in a way that I am choosing not to and really constructing things online.

Grimes: 00:52:55 Yeah. Well, what I want to do is like… Another part of this is because I sing and dance, people really undervalue or forget. Most people would describe me as a singer, which is probably the last way I would describe myself. So what I want to do is physically separate my digital self and my real self, and have my real self kind of step back, start wearing a suit.

Sean Carroll: 00:53:20 Nice. Good.

Grimes: 00:53:20 Yeah. And and just be like, “I’m the mastermind,” and now the dancing puppet is this avatar of me that we just finished it yesterday. Well, I mean, we still need to do hair and we’re still working on certain…

Sean Carroll: 00:53:29 Digital avatar. Okay.

Grimes: 00:53:31 Yeah, so it’s my digital self. We scanned my body. We made a perfect scan of me. Then we augmented it.

Sean Carroll: 00:53:37 So this is just leaning into the fact that everyone has a separate online persona.

Grimes: 00:53:41 Well, and it’s like she can be on Instagram, she can be on Twitter, she can say things I can’t even say because it’s not even the real me. But it is the real me, but it’s like I feel so… People are always getting mad at me. I’m always in controversies and getting canceled and all this shit. The impact of getting canceled and stuff, it hurts. You’re like, “Ah.” I wake up and I’m like, “Oh God, did I do something again?”

Grimes: 00:54:03 It’s just like I would love to untether my digital self and my real self so I don’t have to go through this suffering of people misunderstanding… Because it’s a weird avatar of me. It’s not my whole personality. And they just get a weird misplaced soundbite and freak out.

Grimes: 00:54:16 This happens to a lot of people, and a lot of people have a lot of pain from being misunderstood because people, they get a tiny sliver of you. They make an assumption about your whole self, and-

Sean Carroll: 00:54:25 Right. It doesn’t fit.

Grimes: 00:54:25 … there’s no way to have the complexity of your whole self in your digital avatar.

Sean Carroll: 00:54:29 I remember there was a insight that I got as a college sophomore from an English teacher. We were reading Pirandello Six Characters in Search of an Author, I think. And-

Grimes: 00:54:41 That sounds… I just love the poetry of that title.

Sean Carroll: 00:54:43 I know, yeah.

Grimes: 00:54:44 But I have no idea what you’re talking about. That sounds fun.

Sean Carroll: 00:54:46 So what he talked about was… I’m going to mangle it for all the English majors out there, I apologize. But he started talking about how whenever we go through life, we’re all wearing different masks depending on the situation or whatever. What I and I think all my classmates thought he was going to go for was this sort of pablum suggestion, “But we shouldn’t wear these masks. We should be our true authentic selves.” But what he actually went for was, “Wear those masks proudly. Wear the right masks and be aware of what you’re doing.”

Grimes: 00:55:14 Yeah. Well, the other thing is is we are contextual beings. My personality is actually different with different people. You know what I mean? And I think everyone’s-

Sean Carroll: 00:55:22 I think everyone is, right?

Grimes: 00:55:23 I think everyone is. I think people are always kind of like, “That’s inauthentic,” or dah, dah, dah. But I think it is authentic. It’s a survival mechanism. And I think it’s good to break out of brain cycles. If you’re always the same, if you have set ideas about yourself, you have the same neural pathway again, again, again, like a path to Alzheimer’s.

Sean Carroll: 00:55:41 And this might be your neuroscience training talking, right? Because brains are not these little unified egos, they’re-

Grimes: 00:55:46 I love breaking my neuropath. I love just… When I-

Sean Carroll: 00:55:49 There’s a lot of modules in there fighting with each other.

Grimes: 00:55:51 When I find something abrasive creatively, I’ll dive right in. If I hear new music and I’m like… Every time I go, “The fucking kids today,” then I’m like, “Well, I’m listening to this person’s album.”

Sean Carroll: 00:56:04 The kids today, yeah. All right.

Grimes: 00:56:04 Like, “We’re deep diving. We’re deep diving until I like it.” And I usually do come to like it and realize why. And then I break out of my path, and then I’m like, “Sick.” And then I feel-

Sean Carroll: 00:56:13 I always wonder when people who I know and like or admire, or whatever love something and I don’t. I figure like, “What am I doing wrong?”

Grimes: 00:56:21 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:56:21 Right? Even if I’m not going to love it at the end of the day, I want to know why they love it.

Grimes: 00:56:25 Yes.

Sean Carroll: 00:56:25 I want to get it. Yeah.

Grimes: 00:56:26 No, I think that’s really, really important. To just constantly… Never think that all the new artists, bad. It might not be tonally your vibe, but if something’s popular-

Sean Carroll: 00:56:40 And that’s okay. Right, right.

Grimes: 00:56:40 If something’s popular, there’s a reason. It’s probably good.

Sean Carroll: 00:56:43 Yeah. That’s right. Okay, digital avatar.

Grimes: 00:56:45 Anyway, yeah, so we’re… The digital avatar’s about to take over my social media and everything, which is going to be amazing because I’ll be so…

Sean Carroll: 00:56:52 Free. Free at last.

Grimes: 00:56:52 Also, it’s just like, “Clothes are expensive. Photo shoots are expensive. Fly to New York.” All this stuff. Music videos, I’m like, “Oh.” And music videos are shitty for the environment. I’m like, “We have to have bottled water for everybody, and we have to build this thing that’s just going to go into the trash. Build a set, it’s going to go in the trash. Repaint, bunch of chemicals.” It’s like we shouldn’t be doing that in the real world.

Sean Carroll: 00:57:14 Do it in the machine, yeah.

Grimes: 00:57:15 And it’s like-

Sean Carroll: 00:57:16 Especially because there, what you’re literally creating is something digital, right? It’s a video.

Grimes: 00:57:20 Yeah, it’s just a video. It’s like-

Sean Carroll: 00:57:22 So does your avatar have a name?

Grimes: 00:57:24 I think we’re going to call it War Nymph.

Sean Carroll: 00:57:26 War Nymph? Okay. Excellent. A bit of incongruity there.

Grimes: 00:57:30 But it might change.

Sean Carroll: 00:57:31 Okay.

Grimes: 00:57:31 But yeah, so “war” being her first name.

Sean Carroll: 00:57:34 Is there going to be an announcement, or how are we going to know that this is now an avatar and it’s not you?

Grimes: 00:57:39 Because-

Sean Carroll: 00:57:39 Or it’s not your physical embodiment anyway.

Grimes: 00:57:41 Do you want to see what she looks like?

Sean Carroll: 00:57:41 Well, on the podcast-

Grimes: 00:57:41 I want to show you.

Sean Carroll: 00:57:41 … I can’t.

Grimes: 00:57:41 Okay.

Sean Carroll: 00:57:46 But by the time we publish the podcast, maybe there’s an image I can share.

Grimes: 00:57:48 She’s clearly digital.

Sean Carroll: 00:57:50 Okay.

Grimes: 00:57:51 Yeah, so we just need to find ways. I mean, at first we will co-interact, and then… I mean, I’m not going to totally disappear, but she can just-

Sean Carroll: 00:57:59 Sure. But it’s a separate creation, right?

Grimes: 00:58:02 … be doing stuff too. Yeah, no. I do think it has a distinct personality. I mean, we made her elf ears. I would actually get the elf ear surgery, but it’s probably unwise.

Sean Carroll: 00:58:13 Probably. You might have regrets. I don’t know.

Grimes: 00:58:14 Well, I’m a musician. If something fucks up, it could be really bad.

Sean Carroll: 00:58:17 Yeah, exactly. That’s true. That’s why Freddie Mercury never fixed his teeth. Yeah. So he could sing.

Grimes: 00:58:20 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:58:21 But, look, authors, Iain Banks wrote straight novels without his middle initial, and then he wrote science fiction novels with his middle initial.

Grimes: 00:58:29 Yes.

Sean Carroll: 00:58:29 Right? He had two different personas. He wasn’t trying to hide it, obviously.

Grimes: 00:58:33 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sean Carroll: 00:58:33 Right? But he’s like, “Here’s my literary fiction, here’s my science fiction.”

Grimes: 00:58:37 But I think even just your sense of self, if you break your sense of self, you can just be so much more creative. We get stuck in our ways.

Grimes: 00:58:43 One thing about the internet, the internet’s all about identity and like, “Who am I?” and getting used to who I am. And like, “These are my people. This is what I relate to.” And it’s like-

Sean Carroll: 00:58:52 Your tribe and-

Grimes: 00:58:54 Yeah. I feel like it’s good to kind of shake yourself out of that, and vibe into having a different-

Sean Carroll: 00:59:01 Okay, but the hope sounds like it will be freeing for your regular self to have the avatar. So this is an experiment. We’re going to see if it works or?

Grimes: 00:59:12 Yeah, and clarifying what I actually do.

Sean Carroll: 00:59:15 Okay.

Grimes: 00:59:15 Because it’s like when I see Beyonce, I think people think I’m trying to be a singer, get really good at dancing, get really good at singing, and that’s sort of the platonic ideal of what I do. But actually, what I do is compose, and engineer, and write, and make… I want to do also more weird theoretical stuff. The singing and dancing, I just couldn’t find another girl and I didn’t have enough money to pay a girl at the time to start it.

Sean Carroll: 00:59:42 To do the singing and dancing.

Grimes: 00:59:43 Also, you don’t want to control someone’s life.

Sean Carroll: 00:59:45 Well, then it’s Milli Vanilli, right?

Grimes: 00:59:47 Well, but then the thing is is that you end up being your own Milli Vanilli. And what conceptually this weird hole I’ve been going down is like, “Man…” I feel like I’m the Phil Spector to myself. I’m just everyday like-

Sean Carroll: 00:59:57 That’s dangerous.

Grimes: 00:59:57 … “Get back on the stage, put on my lipstick, put on mascara. Get it…” And it’s this torturous thing of being something I’m not in the service of myself. And it got really weird.

Sean Carroll: 01:00:08 But part of that is just sort of reaching a certain level of success, right? Where you’ve been striving for this your whole life-

Grimes: 01:00:13 Yes.

Sean Carroll: 01:00:13 … and then suddenly your life is not what you expected it to be, and you’re kind of overworked and stressed. That might be true for lots of people.

Grimes: 01:00:19 True. Yeah, no, I think that’s true for… Which is why people should get digital avatars.

Sean Carroll: 01:00:23 Well, I absolutely believe this might be something. I mean, is there… Playing devil’s advocate. Is there a downside that people feel less restrained to be polite and constructive if they’re a digital self?

Grimes: 01:00:34 They already do online.

Sean Carroll: 01:00:35 You think it’s already past that?

Grimes: 01:00:36 And it’s already very easy. If you want to be mad, make a troll account. But another thing I think is I think troll accounts are healthy. I have many troll accounts on which I do a lot of trolling. It’s-

Sean Carroll: 01:00:50 Sorry, what’s your definition of trolling in this-

Grimes: 01:00:51 I just defeat-

Sean Carroll: 01:00:51 … sense?

Grimes: 01:00:52 … my enemies. I’ll go say mean things to them from an anonymous account.

Sean Carroll: 01:00:54 Sock puppets. Yeah. Okay, okay.

Grimes: 01:00:56 Yeah. And then I feel so much better afterwards.

Sean Carroll: 01:00:59 I only have one account… Well, one account that we count as a troll account, but it’s really not. It’s just my politics account. Because my regular Twitter account… I don’t mind talking about politics, but I want to be constructive. I want to do good things. But other times I just want to say like, “This is stupid. What’s happening?” So I have a separate account for that, and it is therapeutic. Because everyone else can do that. There’s nothing that I’m adding to the conversation.

Grimes: 01:01:23 Yes.

Sean Carroll: 01:01:24 Right?

Grimes: 01:01:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think it’s therapy. Also, once you do it, you get so much less pain from other people, because you’re like-

Sean Carroll: 01:01:30 That’s them. Yeah.

Grimes: 01:01:31 … “I’m not actually this abrasive at all. I don’t even necessarily think of these things.” It’s just I’m… It’s been much easier for me to deal with trolls once I started trolling.

Sean Carroll: 01:01:41 Well, but this… The neuroscience and psychology of this are fascinating, right?

Grimes: 01:01:45 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 01:01:45 Because human beings are not unified. We are messy streams of consciousness of different things bubbling up. And maybe the insight is the technology is giving voice to all these different parts of ourselves.

Grimes: 01:01:56 I mean, right now it does seem like it’s mostly impacting people negatively, which is scary. I just don’t know if it has to. I do think there’s obviously elements in all of this where I’m like, “Okay, if we could distill this, we could make it positive. We could kill this part. We could make it positive.” Maybe I might be wrong, but-

Sean Carroll: 01:02:16 This will be part of your new mindfulness app.

Grimes: 01:02:17 Yeah, yeah. Maybe everyone just needs a mindfulness app.

Sean Carroll: 01:02:21 Well, I mean, so that’s an interesting thing. Do you think that the digital avatar idea is scalable, anyone can do it someday?

Grimes: 01:02:29 I think it’s inevitable. First of all, I think the technology will get… Because right now, when you play a video game, you open a character creation-

Sean Carroll: 01:02:36 Sure. You have an avatar.

Grimes: 01:02:38 … screen, and in a lot of video games you can customize a character. So there will just be better interfaces and more… It’ll be like that probably, but all-encompassing in the future and you can get… I mean, if you’ve played VRChat, you can kind of…

Sean Carroll: 01:02:51 I did Second Life a little bit. Did you ever do Second Life?

Grimes: 01:02:52 No, I didn’t do Second Life.

Sean Carroll: 01:02:53 It was one of the earlier VR environments, and it was bad because there was no goals, right?

Grimes: 01:02:57 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 01:02:57 So I mean, it was, I don’t know, admirable because you could build a house, and you could have a cat, and you could go clothes shopping and whatever. But you couldn’t win or lose, so people lost interest in it.

Grimes: 01:03:09 Well, I also think there’s…

Sean Carroll: 01:03:10 Which is maybe a lesson of some sort.

Grimes: 01:03:14 I mean, so if you’ve ever played VRChat, I went into VRChat for awhile, and it was just a nightmare. You talk and everyone was like, “A woman? A woman in the VRChat?” And then there are just all these weird dudes chasing me around. And I was like, “Maybe goals morally align people.” The fact that there’s just no goal, and there’s just a bunch of people standing here creates this incredibly predatory environment.

Sean Carroll: 01:03:39 So there’s no incentive for them to be nice basically, or to be even considerate.

Grimes: 01:03:42 Yeah. Well, and because there’s no… Yeah, I don’t know why, but it was a weird rapey scary… I went away to get some food and I came back and they’d all been drawing dicks all over my character. It was really kind of aggressive-

Sean Carroll: 01:03:54 Wow.

Grimes: 01:03:56 … rapey vibe.

Sean Carroll: 01:03:56 This is very recently or back in the day or?

Grimes: 01:03:58 Well, four months ago, when-

Sean Carroll: 01:04:00 Okay, that’s pretty recent.

Grimes: 01:04:00 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 01:04:01 Yeah, let’s call that pretty recent. Wow. Did they know it was you?

Grimes: 01:04:01 No, no.

Sean Carroll: 01:04:01 Or it was just some-

Grimes: 01:04:01 They didn’t know it was me.

Sean Carroll: 01:04:05 Yeah, just female was enough.

Grimes: 01:04:08 It is.

Sean Carroll: 01:04:08 Right?

Grimes: 01:04:11 Yeah. I’m not even making a ethical judgment, I’m just saying obviously in the real world, people don’t behave like this.

Sean Carroll: 01:04:16 Right. That’s right.

Grimes: 01:04:18 Although maybe they would. I mean, maybe in fucking ancient Rome, they did.

Sean Carroll: 01:04:22 Maybe.

Grimes: 01:04:23 I’m not 100% sure. It’s unclear, but-

Sean Carroll: 01:04:25 But yeah. I mean, norms-

Grimes: 01:04:26 … a little bit.

Sean Carroll: 01:04:27 … and standards of politeness serve a purpose, right?

Grimes: 01:04:28 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 01:04:29 And they can exist in real life but not online in some ways.

Grimes: 01:04:32 Yeah. And then there might be a way to make them start existing online, but I don’t know. Because you feel like in order to do that you have to maybe make people sign onto the internet with ID, which feels weird and starts getting into weird-

Sean Carroll: 01:04:44 Well, I talked about this, yeah, stuff with Cory Doctorow who is an internet freedom of speech expert. It’s hard. Every rule you come up with, you can realize, “That could be disastrous for this set of people.” Right?

Grimes: 01:04:55 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sean Carroll: 01:04:56 Should you be able to delete your direct messages you send to somebody?

Grimes: 01:05:01 I think you should definitely be able to-

Sean Carroll: 01:05:02 Well, yes. But then people who send harassing emails to other people can delete the evidence, right? That’s what I said. And instantly the exception comes up.

Grimes: 01:05:10 Damn. Yeah, the digital… I mean, we are just not yet prepared. This is why I wonder if we’re just an obsolete species and AI is just an inevitable endpoint, and we are just stuck in this in between point where we’re way too primitive for the world we’ve built. That AI is just an obvious… It’s just an evolution of humanity, and we’re just Cro-Magnons right now in a human world.

Sean Carroll: 01:05:36 Well, I mean, maybe this is a good place to sort of bring it all in for a landing. I’ve heard things like that said before, right?

Grimes: 01:05:44 Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Sean Carroll: 01:05:44 That we’re the way for the universe to invent super intelligent-

Grimes: 01:05:50 Well, I think-

Sean Carroll: 01:05:51 … machines.

Grimes: 01:05:51 … we are kind of super… But just yeah, that there’s just an obvious… Yeah, we’re the means by which… The universe is just trying to express itself, and as it gets… Evolution gets better, better, better. And it’s just fast evolution I guess.

Sean Carroll: 01:06:03 But again, I come back to this sort of motivation or goal kind of thing. So Nick Bostrom wrote this book, Superintelligence. You know this one?

Grimes: 01:06:13 I haven’t read it, but I’m aware of it. Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 01:06:13 Yeah, I haven’t read it either, but I own it. And I always wonder like, “What is the definition of intelligence here?” It’s certainly not the ability to multiply big numbers fast, because we already have that, right?

Grimes: 01:06:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sean Carroll: 01:06:24 Is it the ability to write a love poem or-

Grimes: 01:06:27 I mean, I think it’s-

Sean Carroll: 01:06:29 … quantize gravity? I don’t know.

Grimes: 01:06:31 I think it’s a lot of things, and they can coexist too. I’m not necessarily of the mind that AI will wipe us out. I don’t know if they even have any motivation to. I feel like that’s sort of a weird-

Sean Carroll: 01:06:40 Yeah, well, the whole what even counts as a motivation is a very strange question that I don’t think people have really thought about. I think that we’re anthropomorphizing a little bit too much.

Grimes: 01:06:47 Yeah, we might be. Yeah, we might be.

Sean Carroll: 01:06:49 I also think, again, my uneducated thoughts here, that in addition to AI, there’s the whole mind-computer interface thing-

Grimes: 01:06:58 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which-

Sean Carroll: 01:06:58 … where rather than building separate AIs, we’re going to modify ourselves.

Grimes: 01:07:02 I mean, I really want that. Really-

Sean Carroll: 01:07:02 Yeah, that’s coming. I think that’s coming.

Grimes: 01:07:04 Because also then we just Nick Bostrom’s book right in. Just put it in.

Sean Carroll: 01:07:08 Okay, but that’s the fantasy, and I wonder if it has any basis in reality. Do you have to live through the process of reading it to really get it in?

Grimes: 01:07:16 I think if you can imagine it, it’s possible. I think anything is technologically possible.

Sean Carroll: 01:07:21 Faster than the speed of light?

Grimes: 01:07:24 I don’t know. Maybe not. Fine. I don’t know, but maybe.

Sean Carroll: 01:07:27 Isn’t the speed of light your middle name?

Grimes: 01:07:28 Yeah. No, it’s my-

Sean Carroll: 01:07:28 You should respect this middle name.

Grimes: 01:07:30 … new real name.

Sean Carroll: 01:07:31 Okay. So you shouldn’t think that people should be able to violate the speed of light.

Grimes: 01:07:35 I mean, but I don’t know. I mean, you can answer this better than me, but there’s no… Can we truly trust the laws of physics are actually what they are?

Sean Carroll: 01:07:44 No, we can’t. So yeah.

Grimes: 01:07:45 All I’m saying is just I feel like if we can… Time, there’s a lot of time ahead of us.

Sean Carroll: 01:07:52 Yeah, that’s true.

Grimes: 01:07:53 I think we’ll probably be able to solve anything, really. Like It’s like there’s so many things that exist now that just seem… The idea of, even a hundred years ago, working on computers like this and just everything, right? All knowledge at the tip of our fingers. It’s literally fucking insane. And it’s like we’re speeding up exponentially. Like five years ago, the difference between five years ago and now feels like the difference between World War II and the ’80s.

Sean Carroll: 01:08:19 Yeah.

Grimes: 01:08:21 So I just feel like we’re tripping into this super psycho zone where it’s-

Sean Carroll: 01:08:25 Are you a singularity person?

Grimes: 01:08:26 Is a singularity… Is that the idea when-

Sean Carroll: 01:08:29 I think the idea that the rate of technological progress is increasing and at an increasing rate. So it basically hits infinity at some finite time in the future.

Grimes: 01:08:40 I feel like it will hit infinity. I mean, I just believe the most fun thing that I can believe at any given time. That sounds-

Sean Carroll: 01:08:43 Okay, that’s a good thing to do.

Grimes: 01:08:46 Yeah, it’s like, “Why would I fight against the most fun possible outcome?”

Sean Carroll: 01:08:49 Do you-

Grimes: 01:08:50 Because if there’s no proof one way or the other, obviously I’m just going to go for the Iain Banks future.

Sean Carroll: 01:08:54 Yeah. How do you think about your place in this process? I mean, do you consciously think that you’re sort of exploring these boundaries and helping us to get to this new place, or is it just you’re riding a wave and having a good time?

Grimes: 01:09:06 A bit of both. I think I’m riding a wave more than I think, but I am actively striving to not just ride the wave. But I think we’re all kind of riding the wave more than we think, but also possibly contributing more than we think.

Sean Carroll: 01:09:21 That’s fair. We can’t help but ride the wave.

Grimes: 01:09:24 We can’t help but ride the wave. Yeah. I think everything at the end of the day walks away from ego and self. If you look at ancient Egypt and stuff, it ends up just becoming a weird conglomerate of everything all together, and the individuals sort of disappear into this time.

Sean Carroll: 01:09:39 Memory-wise, yeah. Yeah, yeah, we-

Grimes: 01:09:41 It’s like what actually survives is rarely individuals.

Sean Carroll: 01:09:45 It’s true. It’s, hard to know what survives. Another thing I tell my graduate students is when they give a seminar, think about what people in the room will remember five years later. And they instantly go like, “I’m not going to remember anything five years from now.” So why are you giving the talk, right? There’s that-

Grimes: 01:09:58 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, that’s great advice, actually.

Sean Carroll: 01:10:01 Is that important to you, how you’re remembered in the future?

Grimes: 01:10:04 It is and it isn’t. I mean, it’s more fun and interesting to play the game and try to be remembered, but it’s not something I’m emotionally attached to.

Sean Carroll: 01:10:14 Okay. I think that’s a perfect answer, and I think I like perfect answers as the way to end.

Grimes: 01:10:18 Okay, cool.

Sean Carroll: 01:10:19 Grimes, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Grimes: 01:10:20 Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Cool.

Sean Carroll: 01:10:23 Is there something that we didn’t do that you want to do? We could add in or?

Grimes: 01:10:26 I mean, mostly I just… In the regular press, it’s-

Speaker 1: 01:10:31 Bio-Haque would be cool to maybe talk about.

Sean Carroll: 01:10:35 Is there anything, any sort of correspondence of this digital avatar idea back into the real world?

Grimes: 01:10:44 Okay. Let me see if I can backwards finagle it that way. I mean, one thing we… Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if this is quite like that. Yeah, I just-

Sean Carroll: 01:10:51 Just say, “No, but.”

Grimes: 01:10:55 No, but since I’m here, I’m going to promote this thing that we’re doing.

Sean Carroll: 01:11:00 Look, it works both ways. I’m very happy to promote. This is-

Grimes: 01:11:04 You don’t have to promote. If it-

Sean Carroll: 01:11:06 Think of it we’re letting people in a different audience know about something that is cool.

Grimes: 01:11:11 You could call this the capitalist postscript.

Sean Carroll: 01:11:13 Okay. Concluding capitalist postscript in a Kierkegaardian mode.

Grimes: 01:11:16 Yeah, yeah. We’re doing this thing called luxury raving, called-

Sean Carroll: 01:11:21 Luxury raving.

Grimes: 01:11:22 Luxury raving.

Sean Carroll: 01:11:24 My brain heard “lecturing raving,” and I’m like, “That sounds awesome.”

Grimes: 01:11:27 No, we could definitely have lectures. We could definitely have lecturers-

Sean Carroll: 01:11:29 Lecturing raving.

Grimes: 01:11:30 … here though.

Sean Carroll: 01:11:30 Okay.

Grimes: 01:11:32 It’s called Bio-Haque, H-A-Q-U-E. Just-

Sean Carroll: 01:11:36 All right, good. Just because, yeah.

Grimes: 01:11:38 … TM. Essentially what it is is we’re going to have everyone being inundated with red light. First of all, I think raving is… Actually, it was recently… Someone just sent me an article. Raving is actually good for your brain. Yeah, the dancing and stuff builds new neural pathways. It’s good for-

Sean Carroll: 01:12:00 But for the one or two listeners who are not ravers, where is this going to happen? You go to someplace, or am I sitting in my living room?

Grimes: 01:12:08 It’s going to happen in Miami, and we’re going to have the AI meditations there. It’s kind of like an art installation of weird… Using the medium of corporate shit to actually just make art that has no value, or just weird… With the AI meditations, I don’t even know if they’re actual wellness. It’s just we’re using idea of the corporate structure that… Because we’re stuck in the corporate world now. We’re stuck in… Part of being on the internet is-

Sean Carroll: 01:12:36 Look, I’m selling electric toothbrushes on my podcast-

Grimes: 01:12:39 True.

Sean Carroll: 01:12:39 … and kitty litter. So-

Grimes: 01:12:39 True. You sell kitty litter sometimes?

Sean Carroll: 01:12:43 Yeah, kitty litter… I have two cats and I love them dearly, and so I’m like, “Of course I’m going to sell kitty litter.” That’s the one thing that I’ve been advertising.

Grimes: 01:12:49 Okay, wow.

Sean Carroll: 01:12:50 People are like, “Really? Kitty litter?” It’s PrettyLitter. This is a free advertisement for them. They’ve invented this kitty litter where when your cat is sick, it turns different colors.

Grimes: 01:13:00 Actually, I’ve heard you say this before.

Sean Carroll: 01:13:01 Yeah.

Grimes: 01:13:02 Okay. There you go.

Sean Carroll: 01:13:02 Brilliant.

Grimes: 01:13:03 I actually love the podcast ad for them because it’s so different from other ads. And the-

Sean Carroll: 01:13:07 Just me saying it.

Grimes: 01:13:09 … Casper and stuff, there’s some that just keep coming back. I’m like, “I don’t even know what the fuck Casper or Mailchimp is.” They’re just these comforting phrases I’ve heard so many times.

Sean Carroll: 01:13:18 Anyway, we’re all cheerful capitalists. And you’re going to be in Miami doing a lecturing raving.

Grimes: 01:13:23 It’s ads without being able to purchase things. It’s corporate shit, wellness. But none of it is actually stuff that actually helps you. It’s just engaging in the act of being inundated with wellness infrastructure and all this weird shit. And it’s going to be at a rave.

Sean Carroll: 01:13:40 You’re being sold stuff that you can’t buy.

Grimes: 01:13:43 Yeah, I mean, it’s just… And it doesn’t necessarily benefit, and it’s just all… Because we’re obsessed with-

Sean Carroll: 01:13:46 But that’s art. I mean, that’s the definition of art in some sense. I mean, it’s-

Grimes: 01:13:49 Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 01:13:50 … true to its form. You can’t buy it.

Grimes: 01:13:53 We’re trapped in this corporate environment, so how do we make it beautiful? How do we take… Because I think ads, it’s a medium. It’s just it’s only been used for this one thing, but it’s a medium that everyone is… We look at influencers now and they’ll do ads, and they’re not even getting paid because they want to look like they’re getting paid and they want to look like they’re doing ads, because-

Sean Carroll: 01:14:10 I didn’t even know that.

Grimes: 01:14:12 Yeah, people keep catching people doing fake ads because that’s the cultural cachet. That’s what’s in.

Sean Carroll: 01:14:17 Because then you’re needed, you’re wanted.

Grimes: 01:14:19 Yeah. So I’m like, “Okay, well this is clearly an art form that people are vibing with and emotionally attached to, so let’s start making it better.”

Sean Carroll: 01:14:26 So you’re decontextualizing it and making us think about it in a different way.

Grimes: 01:14:29 Yeah. We want to have a perfume counter and just all this stuff, and you can’t even buy any of it. It’s just there. It’s just the experience of products and corporate and… But in a way that it’s super psychedelic, and artful, and weird.

Grimes: 01:14:45 For example, the AI meditation’s like… I don’t know what the purpose of them is. They’re not very meditative. They’re kind of scary. It’s more like science fiction in the form of meditation.

Sean Carroll: 01:14:53 It’s a little Banksy. It reminds me of when he destroyed his-

Grimes: 01:14:58 I see. I want to have a fake Banksy.

Sean Carroll: 01:14:59 Yeah, the meta-Banksy.

Grimes: 01:15:01 In my house, I’m just going to do a Banksy. I’m just going to write Banksy and tell people it’s Banksy.

Sean Carroll: 01:15:07 Okay, yeah.

Grimes: 01:15:08 I don’t know why I’m saying this.

Sean Carroll: 01:15:08 No, because it’s art. It’s pushing the boundaries. I like it. Yeah.

Grimes: 01:15:12 Yeah. So anyway, you can cut this out if you need to, but-

Sean Carroll: 01:15:15 No, I like it. It’s going to stay in, yeah. I don’t-

Grimes: 01:15:17 Yeah. It’s an ad. It’s just an ad.

Sean Carroll: 01:15:17 It’s an ad. Well, yeah, we should… So I’m wondering whether I should stick it in organically or just literally put it at the end as a postscript.

Grimes: 01:15:26 I feel like you should literally put it at the corporate-

Sean Carroll: 01:15:26 I’ve already said goodbye and then we’re… Yeah.

Grimes: 01:15:27 Yeah, no, I think you should make it… We should… Yeah.

Sean Carroll: 01:15:31 Okay, I could do that.

Grimes: 01:15:31 Okay.

Sean Carroll: 01:15:32 I can do that. I can have fun with it. All right. Should I hit… Are we done?

Grimes: 01:15:35 Sure.

Sean Carroll: 01:15:36 Yeah, this was so much fun.