This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Lately, I have gotten email from a lot of you saying: Can we do a show that’s off the news? Can one show not be on the grim march of events?

So here it is. How do you introduce Brian Eno? Eno has a claim, as much as anyone does, to have invented the genre of ambient music.

Archived clip: So there’s no narrative quality to the music. It just sort of starts, stays pretty much in one place and then ends.

He certainly coined the term, built out the philosophy, sort of has eaten a lot of the music we now listen to.

But he has also done so many other things. He’s produced seminal albums by U2, David Bowie, the Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson and Coldplay. Hell, Eno composed the sound that plays when you boot up Windows 95. Do you remember that one?

A lot of sound we just take for granted. A lot of the way sound is now made, Eno helped bring into existence. A lot of his work on creating generative systems that make music can be seen as a forerunner to much of today’s artificial intelligence systems.

Eno is more than just a sonic technician or tinkerer. He’s this wonderful thinker and philosopher of art and just being a human being, and he’s got this really delightful new book out, “What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory,” as well as a new album with Beatie Wolfe called “Liminal.” I wanted to talk to him about all of it — or at least as much of it as I could.

Ezra Klein: Brian Eno, welcome to the show.

Brian Eno: Hello, Ezra. Nice to meet you.

Your new book is called “What Art Does.” Tell me, what does art do?

Perhaps I should tell you first why I thought that question needed answering. In education in England — and, in fact, probably in most parts of the world — the budgets that always get cut are the arts budgets because there are apparently more important things that we should be teaching people — science, engineering, financial technology, that kind of thing.

Yeah, you should be making short trades.

Exactly.

Are you really alive if you can’t short a stock?

I’ve always thought that art is actually one of the most important things that humans do with their time. In my book, there’s a long list of things that I consider could come under the headline of art.

It includes, of course, obvious things like symphonies and photographs and paintings, but it also includes cardigans and jewelry and makeup and tattoos and all the things that humans do that they don’t have to do.

None of those things have survival benefits in the obvious sense. They’re things we do to do something in our mind, to change our mind in some way.

So what does art do? Why do we like it? I have this phrase in the book that children learn through play and adults play through art, and I think that’s really what it does.

When we look at children and we watch them playing, we don’t think, “Oh, they’re just wasting their time. They should do something more serious.” We realize that when children play, they’re learning. They’re understanding about materials, about social relationships, about their own bodies, their own minds, about where they live — all of those things that are very important to understand.

And they do that infallibly and with a huge appetite. That’s what children like doing, and we understand — all of us understand — that that’s the way they learn things. Art is grown-up play. It’s a way of imagining things and imagining what they would feel like and imagining how they connect to other things that we know about and then feeding that knowledge back into our lives and into our relationships.

I want to zoom in on a word you used there, which is “feel.” One of the central arguments of the book is that art is a way we explore or attune to our feelings.

Mm-hm.

I guess that raises another question. You say — and I agree with this — that feelings have a bad reputation. So, to you, what do feelings do, and why do they matter?

Yes, they have a bad reputation because they’re very hard to quantify and measure. And of course, science wants things that are easily comparable and easily describable in some kind of language of quantity and measure.

Feelings, because they’re subjective, are very difficult to do that with. However, the first response we have to most things is a feeling response, particularly if they’re unfamiliar things.

What’s the first thing that happens when you meet somebody? You kind of form an impression of them quite quickly. You think, “He looks like a decent person. He looks quite friendly. He doesn’t look hostile. I think I could get on with him.” Or “She looks pretty interesting, and I think I’m in love with her.”

Feelings form very quickly, actually, and they form without much volition on our part. They are, in fact, our first antennae, our first judgment of a situation. Our first sense of whether it’s dangerous or friendly or useful or useless is made on the basis of feelings.

Then after that, we backfill with other information we find. We sometimes find that our feelings, the quick response, were incorrect. But surprisingly often, we find that they were actually exactly on the money. “I knew that as soon as I saw her.”

I was thinking, while you were talking, that our modern understanding is that we think feelings lie and we think facts don’t. And I’ve come to believe that that’s a very simplistic way to think about both feelings and facts.

Yes.

What I’m doing to make form into content here while you talk — I have this whole list of questions, and in a rational, coherent, factual way, I know what the next question should be.

What I’m actually doing is watching a feeling that is moving around in my chest while you speak. And there’s a moment when I know that something you said is the next place we should go, and it’s not the thing on my sheet of paper. It’s this whole thing I’m doing right now, in a way.

And maybe it’s wrong, but no great interviews are logical. They just aren’t. We’re working in a medium that does not work that way. Conversation does not work logically.

I do think we’ve degraded our relationship, our attunement, to what we feel. And that’s actually a mistake.

I understand one argument you’re making about art, which feels true to me, is that it’s a way of practicing our attunement to our feelings. I think that opens something interesting here. One thing in the book that connected for me was a quote from a musician friend of yours, Jon Hassell, who asks, “What is it that I really like?” — and says: Being able to answer that is the most important question. Why?

We are being told probably about 10,000 or 12,000 times a day what we ought to like, what other people like, what some people would prefer that we liked. We’re told that in the form of advertising, in the form of political messages, in the form of all of the things that try to persuade us to think or believe one thing rather than another.

Persuasion is the biggest industry in the Western world, actually. And it’s very easy — in that flood, that tsunami of suggestions about what we ought to like — to forget what we actually do like.

I think what he’s doing there, he’s suggesting that the deepest feelings we have are actually the most reliable things that we know about.

One of the things that happen when you are looking at art or listening to art — something connects to you, and you think, “That’s what I really like. That’s what really moves me.”

I think when that happens, you should pay attention to that. You should think, “Why do I really like that? What does that mean that I like that thing? What does that connect me to that’s so important to me?” And we frequently don’t do that because the distraction rate is so high. There are so many things to think about all the time.

This question of “What is it that I really like?” and trying to pay attention to your response to different pieces of art is interesting because it gets at a mystery, to me, about being human, which is why things that are legendarily beautiful works leave me completely cold, even as they have inspired thousands of books and encomiums from others.

And then I’ll hear something, or I’ll see something, and my soul will leap into my throat. I’ve been obsessed this year with an album by an artist named Djrum, and the album is called “Under Tangled Silence.” This one song, “Waxcap,” I just keep listening to and listening to.

Clip: “Waxcap” by Djrum.

When I give my headphones to others, they quite rarely have the experience I am having with that song. In a way, that makes me feel lonelier but also a little bit more unique.

You’re an artist, but you’re also an artist who both creates and helps others create things for mass consumption. How do you think about that difference of attunement in different people? How some people can hear something and it is their favorite thing ever and others will put the same thing on and they hear nothing but noise?

I think the answer to that is that, of course, when we look at any piece of art, we are not looking just at that piece of art; we are looking at this piece of art in terms of our personal history. It’s like you are hearing the latest sentence in a conversation you’ve been having for your whole life.

I wrote this little story once about somebody in some postapocalyptic time finding an art museum. The whole place is wrecked, but there’s lots of pictures still around, and they find one picture that obviously hasn’t been finished, which is just a white canvas, which of course, in fact, is Malevich’s “White on White.” It has no meaning to that person who doesn’t share its history.

Part of the value of any piece of work and the power of it is how it sits in the cultural conversation in general and in your cultural conversation in particular. A little difference that is very significant to you may be meaningless to somebody else.

For instance, I’ve always had a rather blind spot for Shakespeare. No English person is ever supposed to admit that, but Shakespeare’s never thrilled me. I find it hard to read and quite unrewarding. When a critic, a writer, picks out a Shakespeare sentence and talks about its significance, they do that because they know the rest of the Shakespeare canon and they know where it sits in there and what value it therefore has. It doesn’t mean anything to me because I don’t know any of those things — and I don’t care about them, in that case, either.

Let me offer a clichéd concern, which is that this is a way that art fails. I think when people think of art now, they don’t first think of music or food on a plate or the way a building looks. They think of something you see in a museum.

I go to a fair number of shows — or try to — and am often left cold, in part, because it feels like there is so much cultural conversation going on.

I’ll read the little placard on the wall next to a piece by an artist working at the peak of their powers, who is being venerated as one of the great artists of our age, and this little placard is telling me what a meditation this is on identity and borders. And I’m looking at it like, “Is it, though?” [Laughs.]

One of the ways art locks people out is by demanding so much literacy in a cultural conversation.

Yes.

It’s one reason music is so interesting.

Well, one of the problems that fine art faces is the problem of its own irrelevance to most people’s lives. Nobody buys a £2 million or a £20 million painting just because they like it. They buy it because there’s a good chance they’ll be able to sell it again at a profit or it secures them a sort of social status that is not easily obtainable otherwise.

So you have to make it seem very important. You have to pretend that it isn’t just an object of commerce. It’s an attempt to build something up by repackaging it in this crust of usually incomprehensible language.

I think some of the worst writing in the world is writing about fine art, and it ought to be much simpler.

One of the reasons you like it is that it doesn’t translate into words. It doesn’t turn into sentences. It hits you in some other place, some other part of your mind.

You did an album in the last couple years with Fred Again, who you’ve been a mentor to and who’s another artist who I really love.

There was a song on that album that became big called “Cmon,” and I remember the first time I heard it. I’ve probably listened to it — it was one of my top listened-to songs that whole year. I want to play a little piece of it, and I want to ask you about it.

Clip: “Cmon” by Fred Again.

We’ve been talking about feelings, and the thing that happened to me when I listened to that song — and every single time I’ve listened to it since, including in that moment — is something about the way you’ve distorted that sample is incredibly physical for me.

I don’t really know why that works, but I think it’s something to do with the sense of near incoherence of the voice. It’s like somebody trying to say something. [Mimics sample.] It’s broken, you know?

It doesn’t come out clearly and straightforwardly, so there’s either a reticence or a feeling that the machine doesn’t work any longer. The machine that is me speaking isn’t quite working. It’s defective in some way.

But the way you describe it there is almost frightening. Whereas, to me, it’s extraordinarily comforting. It’s a feeling I almost never have. There’s very little I can put on that gives me the exact feeling of that song, nor would I be able to describe the feeling.

Yes.

But it is much more like it’s not jarring for me. It’s like a caress.

If you had to name the emotion that that song has, what would you call it? I mean, for me, there’s something melancholy and, like, a nostalgia for a different future or something. A nostalgia for a future that didn’t happen — which isn’t sad. But to me, it’s a very moving song, actually.

I love hearing you say that because I have such a different experience. I find it enormously comforting.

Oh, good. That’s lovely.

There’s something very physical. It’s like having a blanket pulled over you.

I find this interaction so interesting. I had Jeff Tweedy from Wilco on this show years ago, and we were talking about his song “Impossible Germany.” I was asking about the lyrics of it because I’ve always found it to be such a beautiful song about the dislocations of travel.

Clip: “Impossible Germany” by Wilco.

That is not what he was doing with that song at all. It was like a misremembered line from a novel, as I remember his description. The idea that you can create something that — it’s not just that it’s evoking such feelings in me or others but that the feelings are so different from even the ones it gives you.

Yes. When you are making something, it starts to come alive when you start to have feelings that you didn’t expect from it. You think, “Well, I’m going to make this, that, the other.” And as it starts to form, it starts to change. It starts to become something that you hadn’t imagined.

And you can either say, “OK, I don’t want that” — which is what a lot of people do. They shut that down and try to get back to what they’re supposed to be doing.

But I don’t do that. And I think a lot of artists don’t do that. We say, “Oh, I wonder where it’s going. I wonder where it’s taking me.”

You just carry on, and there’s a certain point you reach — either way, you can’t make it any better. You notice that what you are adding is starting to subtract rather than to add, or you’ve hit the deadline to stop. [Laughs.]

A lot of the best things I’ve made have been because I hit the deadline and I couldn’t spend any longer [expletive] them up.

This gets at another interesting distinction. We’ve been talking about the exposure to pieces of art here, if I’m going to try to define it more tightly, and the way that they create a space to be attentive to feelings arising in you that you might not have expected.

Then once you have discovered that it gives you that feeling, it can become a tool to re-evoke it.

Mm-hm. That’s right.

I put on that song “Cmon” to feel a certain way. I put on your series of ambient albums because I know how they will make me feel and I’m trying to shift my emotional landscape in that direction at a certain moment.

I always think this is really interesting, this difference between art as something you pay attention to or music as something you pay attention to and then music as something you use to change the way you pay attention to everything else.

That’s a very nice distinction. I wish I’d thought of that myself.

Well, it’s very built on things you’ve written. But I’d be curious to hear how you think about that.

I think when you are working as an artist, you are always world building. You are creating a world.

It might be a huge world like George Orwell’s “1984” — that’s a whole world completely thought out. And when you read that book, you decide to live in that world for a time, and you decide to experience the feelings of living in a world like that.

Because the wonderful thing about art is that it isn’t dangerous. You can live in that terrible totalitarian world, and then you can shut the book and go and put on a Fred Again song or whatever else you want to do.

I’m always sort of trying to find something that suddenly makes me think, “Oh, there’s a different kind of world. I’ve never been in a world like that before.”

If we go back to the idea of adults playing, I think that’s what we’re doing. Pretending, imagining situations and then figuring out the mechanics of them by imagining them is the clue to everything that makes humans such a powerful — and probably dangerous — species.

Even if you thought art was not valuable for anything else at all, you would have to say that this process of giving our minds a way of imagining futures and virtually living in them, living in them in our imagination, must be a very important thing for human beings.

I hear this so often from artists and in books I’ve read about art, this cultivation of humanity, this cultivation of different futures.

I know you’re doing a lot of work on Gaza. I’ve been doing a lot of podcasts on this topic, and as part of that work, I was reading a book by Philippe Sands. This is a book about the Holocaust and the development of the idea of genocide. One of the central characters this book tracks is a man named Hans Frank, who is, under Hitler, the governor of Poland. The worst things in history happen under Hans Frank, and a point Sands makes about him that is very, very, very present in his biography is how cultured a man he was.

Yes, yes, yes.

A beautiful classical pianist. Somebody who, much more so than most people, really did care about art, about literature, about music, about paintings. He got it. At the same time, he was so much more capable of inhumanity and callousness.

Some part of me rebels on this. I often hear novelists and others as if it were an equation with a single output: If you expose yourself to more of these worlds, more Beethoven, more Bach, you’ll become a more civilized person. And yet so much of the most uncivilized parts of our civilizations have been driven by people who were enormously cultured. In fact, that was part of what they believed made them so superior to everybody else.

Yes. Now, you are absolutely right. And in saying that it helps us use our minds in that way, I’m not saying necessarily for good things. It just makes our minds better at imagining, but they can just as easily be imagining terrible things.

One of the great art collectors of the 20th century was Himmler. He had a huge collection, which he’d stolen mostly from Dutch and Low Countries Jews, French Jews. And he was apparently very learned in that area.

But to your point, the ability of something to make a mind work better isn’t the same as the ability of something to make a mind work to good ends. That’s a different problem. That’s a problem of morality, spirituality, something like that.

I’m not going to stay on this topic for very long, because I want this to be a somewhat lighter conversation than this, but after reading Sands’s book, I started reading a biography of Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian and one of the great humanists of the 20th century.

It was, again, so strange. Hans Frank loved Bach, and Buber loved Bach and said that much of who he is as an adult is formed from sitting in concerts, listening to the contradictions inside Bach’s music. And that two people, two souls — I mean, far from our “Is ‘Cmon’ melancholic or comforting?” — that these works of art can take people in such different directions — I’m not blaming Bach for anything that Hans Frank did, but it just speaks to something very, very complex in the feeling faculties and what we bring to them.

That’s a very good way of putting it, I think. We’ve been told somehow that art is this very important thing that is good for you. And I think it is, but I don’t think it’s good for you in that way. I don’t think it necessarily improves you in any moral dimension whatsoever. I think it’s quite possible that, as some people now insist, Picasso was a bit of a [expletive].

He was more than a bit of a [expletive]. I mean, a remarkable artist but a complicated person, to say the least.

Yeah. But it’s funny that we expect that it would be otherwise. It’s because we’ve imputed a moral dimension to art. And all I’m saying is that I think it’s much more biologically functional than we think it is. I don’t think it’s such a spiritual, moral business being an artist.

I’ve always found this very interesting. Did you ever read the Roberto Bolaño book “The Savage of Detectives”?

No.

It’s a beautiful fiction book, and one of the reasons I love it is that it’s about a personality that I’ve always been fascinated by and do not myself have, which is the personality that would give everything, anything to create art — in this case, young poets.

There are people — I mean, you know them, I’ve known some of them — who, for them, art is everything. They put their whole souls, their whole lives into projects that most people would walk by if they were hung on a wall or playing in a store and not give a second thought to.

And then I know other people who see no role or understand no role for art in their life. What, to you, differentiates those people — the people for whom art becomes everything, the most important thing, even when society could not give a damn about what they’re creating and the people who feel no resonance to it?

Have you ever heard of a place in Lausanne, Switzerland, called the Collection de l’Art Brut?

No.

It’s the — I think — greatest museum of outsider art in the world. These are people, none of whom were called artists in their lifetime.

A lot of them were in mental institutions, and they had nothing much else to do, and they painted for their whole lives. Some of them did it completely in secret. Nobody even knew until they died that they had been working as artists for their whole life.

And my feeling about that is that if you can invent a world that you prefer to live in — which is sort of what those artists were doing — then why not stay in it?

If the rest of the world is awkward and you don’t fit into it — it’s got lots of sharp corners — you can make this world where suddenly you are in control of it, you’ve decided the terms of that world. I think a lot of what’s happening when artists are working is that they’re trying to make the world they would prefer to be in.

Now, that sometimes gets dismissed as escapism, but I don’t think it is. And anyway, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with escapism. It’s sometimes a really good idea to escape and to get out of things and think about them from a distance rather than from being in the center of them.

But this is another of the misconceptions about art, that it ought to be difficult to do. I think there are many people who I would call artists who never experience any difficulty with what they’re doing. It’s just what they do.

People who make beautiful cakes, for example. One of my daughters loves doing marzipan decorations on cakes, and they’re beautiful, the things she makes. I’m sure she wouldn’t call that being an artist. But I can’t see what the difference is. You know, why is that not being an artist?

That’s one of the other art world things that, in order to make it valuable to justify the high prices, we’ve got to think of some way to make it seem abnormal, make it seem like something that only abnormal humans can do.

What are you doing with art? When I think of your library, it’s not all creating a world that you would like to live in. You’ve given all these legible motivations for other people. Is your motivation as legible to yourself?

At best, what I’m doing is thinking — I often start something by thinking, “I wish there was a piece of music like this” — whatever “this” means in my mind.

For instance, one of my best-known records is “Music for Airports,” and that came from a very direct experience of sitting in a newly built airport in Germany, near Cologne, and everything about the airport was dazzlingly beautiful. It was a lovely structure, and they had terrible German disco music playing really loud through the whole P.A. system in the airport.

Clip: “German Disco” composed by Aman Sahota.

And I just thought, “Nobody’s thought about this issue of what kind of music belongs in this place.”

We use music in public all the time, but does anybody actually sit down and think seriously about what would be the best kind of music to have in this important place where people are arriving, leaving, going on to important new phases in their lives or going back to loved ones or whatever? It ought to be something a bit more.

I started thinking, “What should it be more of?” And so I started thinking and trying to make a kind of music that I thought would make the airport experience feel important and special.

Clip: “1/1” by Brian Eno.

There were quite a lot of technical considerations, like, obviously it mustn’t interfere with communication. It mustn’t keep stopping and starting. It must not matter if it gets interrupted. And so on and so on. That was a very conscious act of making a work of art.

But most of what I do isn’t really motivated by such high-sounding ideas. Most of the time, I’m fiddling around, and something starts to happen. Something intrigues me, or some feeling starts to happen, and I think, “I like that feeling. How can I bring that forward? How can I make more of it?”

I often don’t know why I’m doing that or how it will end up. I have an archive of about 11,000 unfinished pieces of music. And what I do occasionally is pull one of those out, and suddenly — I haven’t seen it for 15 years —

Eleven thousand unfinished pieces of music? That’s amazing.

Yeah. Some of them are very short.

Let me hold you on “Music for Airports” for a minute, one of my favorite albums, and the second song on that album, “2/1” — the tracks are not so evocatively named, given how evocative they are — is a very important piece of music to me. So I want to play a couple seconds of it.

Clip: “2/1” by Brian Eno.

What does it sound like to you? When you were saying that you wanted music that matched what you felt that experience should be — it should be more something — “2/1” on there, what is it more of, to you?

I think it’s more contemplative. I think it makes you relax into the situation that you are in, whatever that happens to be — presumably in an airport, in this case — rather than try to pretend that you are not in that place.

My nightmarish form of music is getting on an airplane and hearing a piece of music [distorts voice] coming through like this because they haven’t got the machine to work properly.

You have two thoughts, then. You have a thought that they’re playing music because they want to stop us thinking about the possibility we might crash. And second, they can’t even get the bloody player to work properly, so we are going to crash.

You can use music as a mask, which is what is normally done in public situations, as a way of covering up the noise. Or you can use music that invites the noise to sound like it’s part of it.

With all of that kind of music, what I call ambient music, I don’t want there to be an edge to the music. I want it so that you don’t know whether some of the things you are hearing are in the world around you or are part of the music. I want it not to have a sharp boundary. I want it to fade out into the rest of the world’s noises around you.

I always think about that as being on an album called “Music for Airports” because that is both very discordant and, as I thought about it more, exactly correct.

That is, to me, one of the holiest pieces of music I have ever heard. And in a way, it gets to something true about airports, which is that this is a place where human beings go to fly, where they’re forced into — I mean, I feel this when I get on planes — a confrontation with their own mortality.

Yep.

There’s never a time when I’m in a plane that is having turbulence during takeoff when I don’t think — in a way I usually do not think in my day — “I could die.”

Yes.

There are all these people, they’re going to places that are, in many cases, incredibly important to them, and the airport is this extraordinary combination of a place that is so banal — lines, and you’re waiting in line for food that is mediocre, at best, and you’re late, and your plane is late, and you’re annoyed.

And then it’s also the absolute most remarkable place that a human being can possibly find themselves — something that, for most of human history, was completely unimaginable. “2/1” on “Music for Airports,” to me, is such a perfect song because it’s more true about the airport than my experience of the airport is.

[Laughs.] That’s a nice way of putting it. I wanted to make flying feel like a more spiritual experience, if I had to put it into a sentence with a controversial word in it. And by that I mean I used to be very frightened of flying, and of course, I had to do it at that time in my career.

But I thought: What if you could make a kind of music that made you less worried about the idea of dying? What if you could make a piece of music that made your life seem less the center of your attention? If you could see yourself as just being one atom in a universe of complicated molecules, would that make things feel better?

In a way, it was intended to take the stress off yourself — not by pretending you weren’t flying, like, “Let’s make it just sound like a disco or a nightclub” or something like that, which is what most of the music tries to do. Let’s not do that. Let’s say we are having an unusual experience, and let’s experience it as a beautiful experience.

Your liner notes for “Music for Airports” are very famous, and I know you’ve been asked about it a million times, so I don’t want to stay here too long, but you do talk about wanting that music to cultivate different modes of attention, and that’s been very influential — this idea that music is a cultivator of different forms of attention, not all of them an attention that is spent on the music.

I guess in the decades since then, how do you think the relationship between music and attention has changed? Do you see it as a success of what you were trying to do? Do you see it as a nightmarish world that you accidentally summoned into existence? What is your relationship to it?

I think what’s happened is that it’s changed in both directions. I think people are ready to accord music a level of attention that they never have done in the past.

For instance, when you go to these extremely long concerts, sometimes 10 hours long, where you are basically listening to three sine tones for a very long time. That’s a level of attention that people never really thought of giving until at least the middle of the 20th century and later. So there’s that.

And then, on the other hand, you have TikTok or very short pieces of music like that right at the other end of the scale.

I think, in culture — this is a general rule — that every single standard, every single metric has increased in both directions. We now have extremely long pieces of music and extremely short ones. We have extremely loud bands and very, very, very quiet ones.

It’s as if we’ve taken every dimension in which music can exist and tried to expand it and say, “What would happen at the edges? Now let’s make a new edge.”

I also was thinking about that in terms of the movement toward music that is saying, “We are going to cultivate this form of attention or feeling for you.”

The rise of the Spotify — on every streaming network now — the playlists, like, “Here’s your happy beats playlist,” “Here’s your beast mode at the gym playlist for when you really need to be pumped up,” “Here’s your melancholy rainy day playlist,” “Here’s studying at a coffee shop,” which is different, of course, from your studying at the library playlist.

“Here’s your ambient playlist, your ambient essentials.” And now we’re seeing this move into these playlists being, in some ways, generated. I don’t know how much of it’s happening now, but clearly we’re moving toward A.I. generating a bunch of these songs at functionally no cost — mass-produced, mood-altering music.

Music as Xanax. Music as Adderall. Music as mood alteration, done not as a relationship between the artist and the listener but as if you had hired the music to perform a service — and to do so quite unobtrusively.

Some of that music is good, and some of it is bad, obviously. How do you feel about that?

You are right in your previous question you asked: Did I feel any responsibility for that? And I do, actually. [Laughs.] I was very excited about the idea of generative music. I invented the phrase, I believe. I was very excited by the idea of making music like a seed. A seed is something that has a genetic message in it, and every manifestation of it will be a little bit different, depending on where you plant it and what time of year it grew and so on and so on.

So, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if you had music like that?”

There’s a very simple example of that: wind chimes. A wind chime is a simple enough machine. Let’s say you’ve got five chimes. Each one is a particular pitch. It’s not going to change. It’s only that pitch.

But how and when they strike depends on the wind. So it’s semirandom. You can’t really say that you composed that particular performance, though you can say that you built the system from which that performance emanated. A wind chime is basically a simple piece of generative music.

So it shifts — and I know you’ve talked a bit about wishing you could sell people not the album but the system behind it — it shifts the artistic act into the creation of the conditions that will create the artistic product.

Yes, that’s right. So two things become important: What is the structure of rules, the possibilities that the system has, the limitations that it has? And what are the materials you put into it?

If you make a wind chime out of glass, for instance, or out of bamboo rods or out of metal, they’re all going to be slightly different results. But each one is a package of possibilities. You are not specifically saying which possibilities you want to happen, but you are conditioning which group of possibilities can happen.

I thought that was a nice area for music to be in because if you think about it, up until the turn of the 20th century, you could never have the same musical experience twice. There was no way that you could precisely repeat a musical experience.

As soon as records came along, you could do that. You could hear exactly the same performance of exactly the same song over and over and over and over, and that became how most of us listened to music.

You know, unless we happen to be born into a musical family or a church group or something like that, most of the music we heard was repetition. So what I thought was: I wonder if you could use the technology of repetition to make music that constantly changes.

My first clue to that was when I first got hold of a tape recorder. I’d wanted a tape recorder my whole childhood. I just thought the idea of being able to catch a piece of sound and make it physical was the most magical thing I could think of.

I had this obsession with the fact that you could play it backward, and I just wanted to hear what things would be like if they were played backward.

Discovering that, first of all, you can capture sound and make it physical — that was something new for the 20th century. But then I thought: If you can make it physical, can’t you also make it mutate in certain ways? Can’t you make it so the physical medium, for instance, is not reliable? It will play slightly differently each time.

And so my first experiments in that direction were — I had a collection of broken tape recorders, which I just got from junk shops or thrift stores, as you might say. I would try to break them a little bit more but so that they would still play things.

So a tape playing through it would change into something else. It would have a lot of distortion, or it would run unevenly [distorts voice] like this, you know?

I discovered that if I connected two tape recorders and put one tape through one and coming out through the other so that the playback head is separated by several feet from the record head, you get a very late echo.

Clip: “Discreet Music” by Brian Eno.

And then you can build up those. You can work on top of those. I mean, I discovered this in the ’60s. So did Terry Riley and a few other people.

I had two tape recorders for a while so I could try this out. Then I could build up these huge orchestras of music live, on my own. That became an obsession — to try to make a recorded music that somehow changed every time. I finally achieved it in the 1990s, and I’m still doing it now.

You draw this distinction when working with generative systems, where you say you don’t want be an architect; you want to be a gardener. What’s the difference?

The conception of an architect is somebody who thinks about an end result in great detail. The archetype is Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed everything down to the teaspoons in his houses. The whole thing kind of pre-exists in the architect’s mind and then is brought into being by builders.

What a gardener does is put some seeds in the soil and then watch how they develop. “Oh, these ones over here are doing better than those ones over there. So next year I’ll plant them differently.”

You know that if you are making a garden, you are only starting something. One of Stewart Brand’s books, “How Buildings Learn” — it’s a great book — in that, he says, you never finish a building. You only start it.

I think that’s what I mean by “generative music." You start the piece, but it finishes itself. It carries on finishing itself for the rest of time.

You helped create this idea of generative music, and now we have launched into this world of generative A.I.

The way you are using the term “generative” and what it is describing when we’re saying “generative A.I.,” which are things like ChatGPT and these large language models — is it the same word for you? Are the two “generative”s equal?

I think they mean the same thing. Now, of course, as a set of techniques, mine is much, much, much cruder and simpler and much more analog than the techniques that are generally being used in L.L.M.s.

And of course, the other big difference is that mine are not owned by mad billionaires. I think that’s an important difference.

In fact, with all the discussion about A.I., to me, the single most important question is: Who should be in control of it? And we’ve seen in this century what happens when billionaires control new technologies — social media, I’m talking about.

We’ve seen that you get completely unpredicted and quite disastrous results sometimes. The collapse of democracy in most of our countries, I think, is very traceable to social media and to the misunderstanding that underwrote it. “Oh, let’s make this amazing new medium where everyone can communicate with each other. Oh, but we’ve got to make a lot of money from doing it.”

In a way, the big mistake was when the algorithm became maximized engagement, which means maximized profits, of course. If maximized engagement is what you’re going for, then you end up with what we have now: an internet that flourishes on anger and nastiness.

I’m not saying everything is like that on the internet, but what seems to have happened in the race for profits is we’ve managed to sidestep the friction that normally comes with things being born into the world. Friction is very important. Friction gives you a little time to see what’s happening.

It makes something ease into your life more slowly so you can start to correct it as it’s easing in. I always say it’s like we’ve invented an amazing new type of car that can travel at 750 miles an hour, but we haven’t put any brakes in it because brakes slow down the profits, basically.

There’s this question of who controls it and then also this question of who profits from it.

One of the things I find very morally complicated to think about with generative A.I. is that it is generative, and the seed of it — and more than the seed of it, the substance of it — is the sum total of knowledge that human beings have made in a way that is legible to the crawling software developed by the A.I. companies.

And you can see that it’s really about that because, in fact, these companies are mostly neck and neck with each other for how good their systems are. It’s not like one of them came up with an algorithm that no other human being could come up with. They’re sort of going back and forth because they have the same training data, which is us.

Yes. [Laughs.]

On one level, that’s like everything else: Scientists are coming up with scientific discoveries built on every scientific discovery before them. You have a lovely bit in your book about all the human genius over many years that goes into getting you to work in the morning.

Yes.

There’s nothing new about creations just being a marginal step forward, built on the shoulders of us all. And yet I can never escape this feeling with the A.I. systems that there is something about the scale of the use here that should change who profits from it.

The fact that they have absorbed everything I have ever written for the internet and fed it into the machine, I kind of think somebody should send me a royalty check. [Laughs.] It doesn’t have to be a big one. And it maybe shouldn’t go to me; it should go to society.

Something about it feels — I don’t want to call it theft. It isn’t theft, but nor is it just standing on the shoulders. There’s something here that feels like it needs new ways of thinking about it because, for just a couple of these companies to profit off the transformation of everything we’ve all ever done —

This is the question I’m asking myself. Should it be that we automatically have a system that says, “This is a social good, all this knowledge. It’s a socially produced good, and therefore its usage should reward society”? That’s quite hard to meter. It’s hard to put a meter on it.

I think it has to be written into the whole machinery itself so that nobody has to make a decision. For example, it wouldn’t be a bad idea if everything that was generated in that way, 50 percent of all the profits from it immediately go back to society in some way.

It would be saying, “We are not claiming to be the geniuses here. We’re claiming to be the people who know how to corral it all, how to put it together, how to make it available to you. But thank you for all the stuff you’ve written, Ezra and Brian and everybody else. And with your permission, we’ll redistribute this to society.”

It’s so obvious to me that that should be the way. But of course, that is not the American way at all. That sounds like socialism of some kind.

Or at least taxation. That seems true to me, too. At the moment, these companies are not making such big profits that even doing something like that would be that meaningful to the Treasury. They’re sucking in much more venture capital than they are producing revenue, in general.

But in the future, if it is what they think it will be, if it is what they’re promising their venture capitalists it will be — I mean, I guess you just solve that through the tax system. But it seems like you need a way of thinking about it that’s a little bit clearer than the ways we have.

And it’s funny, if you go into the writings of a lot of them — Sam Altman and others from a couple of years ago — they’re talking about this. This is a thing they imagine.

Altman has ideas for what’s functionally a universal basic wealth grant coming out of taxing the A.I. companies. But I’m sort of with you on this. I think it deserves a different conceptual category that is not merely the category of taxation, that is more something of sharing. It is not confiscatory taxation; it is a reflection of the nature of these systems.

Yeah.

My view of them is they actually should be able to crawl the sum total of human knowledge, at least what people are willing to make accessible to them. But part of that is that there’s a contract between those companies and the rest of us that we both know what we’re doing here and we’re in this together.

Yes, especially if you’re trying to inspire confidence in them, you want people to willingly participate in them rather than having it forced upon them.

Do you know this word that I came up with years ago, “scenius”?

Yes.

OK. So, that was an attempt to try to understand that. I had been studying early 20th-century painting in Russia.

There was a 20-year period when there was an amazing amount of innovation going on — Suprematism, Constructivism, Rayonism, all these different isms appearing, and I discovered that the scene was very complex.

It wasn’t just that there were a few brilliant artists like Kandinsky and Rodchenko and Tatlin and so on. It turned out that some of the very important people were the collectors, who would specifically target certain artists and say, “I want to keep this person alive. I’m going to support this person.”

Or they would go to Paris and buy pictures that they brought back to St. Petersburg and Moscow to show to painters there and say, “Look, this is what’s going on in Paris now.”

Then there were the people who ran the salons who would invite artists to meet up with each other and talk — the cafe owner at the cafe that everybody used to hang out in, who was quite conscious that they had a part to play in the scene and they would let people not pay for their meals and put it on the tab. I thought there was a whole scene here that was fertile, that was operational. There was a whole support system.

I had gotten sick of hearing this word “genius” being used all the time because it never seemed to me like it was just one person who was doing everything. So I came up with this word “scenius,” which is “scene” with an “ius” on the end. That seemed, to me, to much better understand the ecology of systems like that.

And I think that’s what it is. It’s an ecosystem. And we still don’t understand ecosystems. It’s still not intuitive to most of us to understand how a thing like an ecosystem works — how there are lots and lots of nodes and they’re collected in very complicated ways and if you move one of the nodes to a different place, everything else in the system has to shift.

Anyone who’s become interested in the environment has started to become aware of how complex natural systems are. But human society is a natural system, as well. And the society of knowledge that we all share is a natural system.

I’m not an anti-A.I. person. I use ChatGPT a lot. I am fascinated. I do feel some fear, but I feel a tremendous amount of wonder around these technologies.

I find that watching it formulate a response that in some ways reads more human than the responses most humans give me to most things does generate a form of awe in me.

One thing that frightens me — as somebody who came up on the internet and understands, I think fairly well, how knowledge production works on the internet — is that they’re breaking the fundamental social contract of the internet.

Even take something like Google — the value of Google is that there is so much that other people have created that is valuable and Google connects you to it. But it does connect you to it, and now ChatGPT or Anthropic or whoever inhales the internet, and it’s all right there, and I never go to the underlying sites.

The creation of all this data, which was incentivized by ways people were able to not just monetize but also have their work discovered. When I started a blog, with no intent of a job or a profit from it — I was a college student — just the idea that anybody would ever find their way to me and read something I did and care about it was such a tremendous incentive to create.

But there is something very problematic about this. A huge amount of the internet and the intellectual commons we are now built on is traffic moving around the internet, people moving around the internet, and then the advertising that comes from that, the whatever that comes from that, keeping that whole ecosystem healthy.

And these A.I. systems, by nature, you go to the system, and then for most people, it stops there. Even Google search is trying to become more like that.

The whole thing they’re built on, they’re going to destroy, or at least substantially degrade.

That’s right. When I was a kid, I liked watercolor painting a lot. And I used to notice that after a day of painting, the water that I was dipping my brush into, which was, of course, a mixture of all the colors I’d touched that day, was always the same color. I called it munge, a sort of purply, browny — horrible color, basically.

And whenever I’ve tried creating things on ChatGPT — I haven’t done that much of it, actually — but I work very hard to get my prompts right and to filter what I’m saying to it and to try to urge it into something interesting.

But the color of munge covers all of it.

It’s so overdigested, and of course, it’s quoting things, it’s using things, on the basis of how frequently they have appeared. I don’t know whether you’ve ever tried making anything artistic using ChatGPT or any of the other programs. It has a very interesting progression when you’re doing it.

The first thing you make, you think, “Bloody hell, that’s pretty amazing.” And then after half an hour or so, you think, “I’m so bored.” I remember that thing that Samuel Johnson said about — I can’t remember what it was about now — but he said it’s a little bit like watching a dog walk on its hind legs.

You’re not interested in how it walks but just that it can. You are sort of impressed by the fact that it can do something that is really quite like a human being, but then you find out that it’s like a quite dull human being. And it kind of doesn’t get more exciting unless you can trick it into some sort of aberration — which is what I’ve been trying to do.

I’ve been amazed, on the one hand, at how good it is, but then I also have the exact experience of — I love your description of it as munge. I think it goes back to something we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, which is the information and possibility that is encoded in factual knowledge. And then the more amorphous forms of intelligence and intuition that are encoded in feelings.

I have experimented a lot with using different forms of A.I. as help in this show, and they are helpful for things that are very specific, but they are never helpful for the actual work of creating the conversation.

What’s absent in the output is, I think, what we’re talking about. I could not give you a description of how this conversation is structured. It is just structured by me having intuitive reactions to what is happening with it and then moving with those reactions.

And ChatGPT is structured as a probabilistic output of what the entire internet would’ve done.

Yes.

And so it’s not even that it always lacks surprise, but it always has a very visible internal logic. Then over time, that internal logic becomes overpoweringly annoying.

[Laughs.]

Someone who works at these companies said, “I keep my diary in it, and that’s very interesting. You should try that.” Without giving too much personal information, I did that. And the first couple of responses, I was amazed at how psychologically insightful they were, how supportive they were. I mean, it was better than what human beings in my life gave me.

Then on Response 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 20, it was the same [expletive] feelings. It was the same glazing and sycophancy and the same kinds of insights.

You couldn’t look at the response and say there’s anything wrong with it, but there is something human beings are attuned to in the way we do not travel a perfectly logical or well-structured path. We’re not supposed to. It’s not how our intelligence works. And it is funny — you do begin to feel the divergence there.

As humans, we like a certain amount of predictability, but only a certain amount. We don’t want it exactly the same each time. We rely on our interest being taken by deviation we didn’t expect.

The sycophancy is the thing that really drives me mad, when it says, “Good question, Brian. That’s a really good question.”

“That’s not just an insight; that’s a revelation.” It’s always the “That’s not an X; it’s a Y” formulation.

First of all, if you’re going to do work with A.I. at all — as my friend Danny Hillis says — you have to start off by saying, “Please, don’t flatter me.”

You’ve done so much of your work in collaboration but also in collaboration with machines. It is something you are known for. What makes you good at creating healthy collaborations between humans and technologies? And what, for you, typifies a healthy collaboration — as opposed to outsourcing, an unhealthy form of the diminishment of the human beings behind it?

I have a few mental tricks that I use, which I think are just naturally part of me. One of them is that when I’m faced with a piece of technology that can do something, I immediately don’t want to know about what it can do. I want to know what it can do that the makers didn’t imagine it would ever be used to do.

And with the type of technology that I work with, musical technology, that’s a very rich, open territory. And it’s rich and open because not that many people explore it.

They have something that says, “This will make your mixers sound louder,” and they use it to make mixers sound louder. Well, you know, I don’t blame them. That’s what it says on the box. But you will also find out that it can do something else nobody had ever thought of doing with music before.

That was an example of using something that was meant to do a particular job — record something and play it back later on — to build something new in real time. That’s to do with technology.

To do with people, the first thing I think about when I look at a band is, let’s say, there are five people in that band. How many possible duets is that? How many possible trios? How many possible quartets? How many solos? Five, obviously. And how many with everybody? One.

It very often happens that that space has not been explored properly by the band. People haven’t thought, “What about if only three of us play in this?” And then another, slightly different configuration of three plays.

It’s a very simple thing, but it suddenly unlocks a set of possibilities that probably hadn’t been explored before. What happens if we only have a vocalist, drums and bass? None of the other instruments that usually fill in the harmonic information in between.

There are lots of tricks like that, but there are ways of looking at the system as it stands and thinking, “What hasn’t been done yet with this system? What might excite people?”

Music grows out of excitement, and if you aren’t feeling excitement, then you try to create it in some way. If the situation isn’t turning you on, then you try to change it until it does turn you on because when you are excited, you are at your most alert, I think, and when you are at your most alert, you are most likely to spot the little thing that is going to turn into the big thing.

I think it’s often a very important question where the agency resides in something. We always say we use social media — but, no, social media uses us.

And over time, if you watch anybody on it for long enough, you watch them become the social media that’s using them. They begin to bow to its incentives, to its habits, to its form.

What I think is so interesting about the set of possibilities in a band — initially, it’s a bunch of musicians playing in a band. Eventually, the band — through its habits, through what’s expected of it — is playing the musicians. And I think this is very true with technologies.

When you talk about you discovering — or Terry Riley discovering — what you can do with two tape recorders, you are playing the tape recorders.

This is probably not always true, but when you think about a lot of the digital possibilities people have had in the last couple of decades, like Ableton and other things, it’s still people playing the synthesizer, playing the music library.

I think the fear that a lot of us have about generative A.I. is that we’re not going to be playing it but that it’s going to be playing us — often because we prefer it to play us.

You can use A.I. to help you write a better essay, but a lot of people just want the A.I. to write the essay.

The whole essay.

Yeah. That space between “Are you playing the technology, or is the technology playing you?” is a very tricky one. I think that one of my more dystopic versions of our A.I. future, my kids’ future in A.I., is a world in which they’ve given up a lot of their own agency because it seems a little bit ridiculous to take it.

That could always have been true. I mean, there’s a million technologies that I have — I’m happy I have Google Maps. I have a bad sense of direction, and I’m not trying to make it better. But there is some line where you are acting upon the world versus the world is just acting through you that I think is going to be very hard to police.

Yes. I think what bothers me, which is exactly part of what you’re saying, is the possibility of not making a mistake at all, of making things that always come with this professional finished gloss of what a real pop song looks like or what a real picture looks like. And I think that’s lethal.

I have an architect friend called Rem Koolhaas. He’s a Dutch architect, and he uses this phrase, “the premature sheen.” In his architectural practice, when they first got computers and computers were first good enough to do proper renderings of things, he said everything looked amazing at first.

You could construct a building in half an hour on the computer, and you’d have this amazing-looking thing, but, he said, “It didn’t help us make good buildings. It helped us make things that looked like they might be good buildings.”

I went to visit him one day when they were working on a big new complex for some place in Texas, and they were using matchboxes and pens and packets of tissues. It was completely analog, and there was no sense at all that this had any relationship to what the final product would be, in terms of how it looked.

It meant that what you were thinking about was: How does it work? What do we want it to be like to be in that place? You started asking the important questions again, not: What kind of facing should we have on the building or what color should the stone be?

When I see people fiddling around with synthesizers — this has always been a problem with synthesizers — they always come with a bank of sounds ready-made for people who don’t want to learn how to program them, which, it turns out, is most people.

I remember talking to Yamaha once, which had just produced the most successful synthesizer of all time, which was the DX7. And I said, “You should really make these a little bit easier to program.”

And they said, “Well, we don’t bother because nobody tries to change them anyway. We often get them back for repair, and we can tell if somebody has tried to change the programming, and nobody’s ever done it. They’ve just used the presets.”

That seems, to me, a kind of mental laziness that I really don’t think fits well with making new things.

I think that’s strangely a little bit inspiring as a principle.

You’ve worked, corresponded, known so many just fascinating people and people I admire that I wonder, if you’d be up for me reading a few names. Not a lightning round. You can answer at whatever length you would like, but you just tell me something, an inspiration or insight that you took from that person. Are you up for it?

Sure. Yes.

Let me start with the composer John Cage.

I think the thing that really impressed me about Cage was not his music — which I didn’t particularly care for after the 1940s — but his idea that being a composer was a practice in the sense of a religious or a spiritual or a philosophical practice.

I thought: That’s the kind of artist I want to be. I want to have a practice. I want there to be resonances into other parts of my thinking. I don’t want it to just be something that I do on the weekends and then forget about.

So, Cage, with his book “Silence,” was very important for me. That came along at just the right time for me.

David Bowie.

One of the most committed artists I’ve ever worked with, in the sense that he really thought about what he was doing.

Just to tell you a short story: I remember being in the studio with him. He was doing a vocal on one of the songs. I can’t remember the song, but he does the vocal, and he comes back into the control room, and listening back to it, he says, “It’s a bit lumberjack, isn’t it?”

I knew exactly what he meant, and he said, “I think the guy should sound a little bit more nervous, like he’s working in an office and he hasn’t been there very long and doesn’t quite know how you are supposed to behave in the office.”

Then he goes back out and does this other vocal, and suddenly you hear the transition from this confident, strong, hairy, macho guy to somebody who’s a little bit timid and doesn’t quite know whether he should be saying the things he’s saying. Seeing him fine-tune that was very impressive.

Steve Reich.

Well, Steve Reich was a very important part of my listening, because he made a piece called “It’s Gonna Rain” that opened a door for me.

Clip: “It’s Gonna Rain, Pt. 1” by Steve Reich.

The door it opened was not just to do with the way in which he made it, which was itself very impressive — using an absolute minimum of material, 0.8 seconds of material, I think it was.

That piece works by making your brain behave in a certain way. You are not an inactive listener. All of his work, I think, depends on making your brain perform and watch itself performing in a certain way.

So I suddenly thought then, “Oh, the composer isn’t just Steve Reich. It’s Steve Reich and my brain that’s making this composition what it is.”

And that thought never left me, that you actually are engaging the technology of the listener’s brain to complete the piece. They’re not passive.

Listening to his music completely changed my relationship with music. It’s like power-washing your own mind.

Yeah, that’s good. [Laughs.]

To really sit through it — it’s as psychedelic as any drug out there. It’s so rhythmic, and it forces your brain to adjust to it in a way that feels like when you come out the other end of it, some sort of reprogramming has happened.

Certainly. That definitely happened with me. I can definitely say from the moment I heard “It’s Gonna Rain,” music was a different thing.

Laurie Anderson.

Oh, such a sweet friend. Probably the hardest-working artist I know. She absolutely never stops, and she is always working on half a dozen projects in 10 different parts of the world.

I think she’s the only person I know who can fly all night, not sleep, come straight into a meeting and be absolutely there. She’s a remarkably low-maintenance person. She’s always there and always sharp.

And Stewart Brand.

Well, all these people you are naming are people who had a huge impact on me.

Stewart was in the Army just after Korea. He was in the Army, and I don’t think he was ever ashamed of being in the Army. I think he enjoyed it. And he left the Army and became a hippie — one of the foundational hippies, around Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and that group of people. He’s always been a very big thinker and a very long-term thinker.

And one of his earliest thoughts was that if people on Earth could see a picture of Earth from the moon, it would change our consciousness of Earth.

A thought he had sitting on a roof while on acid, if I remember the story correctly.

Yes, that’s absolutely true. Acid does produce good results in some people. Not in me, unfortunately. [Laughs.]

So Stewart gave birth to this idea that if we could show the world from the outside, if we realized what an amazing, extraordinary, unique gift that was — this tiny, little planet teeming with life, swimming around in a dead universe, as far as we know.

We still don’t know that there’s any other life in the universe, which is phenomenal, if you think about it. We still don’t know. We might be the only life in the universe. I think about that nearly every day. I think it’s the most sobering thought. I think that should be shouted from the rooftops every day.

That’s my version of seeing the whole Earth from space — getting people to understand that we might be the only life. It might all be on this one place, and bloody hell, shouldn’t we look after it a bit better, then?

Then those things make me constantly think and constantly be grateful for the fact that I’m alive. I remember reading this comment from a New York taxi driver. He’s driving, and he turns to the customer and says, “Oh, life. I’m so glad I got in.” [Laughs.]

I just love the idea that it’s like an amazing show at a theater and you managed to get a ticket to see it. I appreciate that kind of gratitude.

That is lovely.

And then, always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

This was a very hard question. Three is not very many books, and I thought quite hard about them.

One of the books is called “Printing and the Mind of Man.” It was the catalog of an exhibition that was at the British Museum in 1963. It was about the history of printing, but actually the book is about the most important books in the Western canon and the impact that they had when they were released. It starts with the Gutenberg Bible.

It’s such a fascinating book because you really start to understand where the big, fundamental ideas that made Western culture came from. It doesn’t have any Arabic books or any Indian books or any Chinese books. It’s really about the last 500 years in Western culture. And it’s probably the most fascinating book about intellectual history that I’ve ever read.

And it’s a very beautiful book because it was put together by a great printer who used lots of beautiful types and so on. It’s a wonderful book.

The second book I’m going to suggest is a book by the architect Christopher Alexander called “A Pattern Language.” It’s really a book about habitat, about what makes spaces welcoming and fruitful or hostile and barren.

It’s the most beautiful book. It talks about things at the biggest scale possible — a countrywide, nationwide scale — down to the scale of the molding of a banister or something like that and tries to understand why some of those things work and why they don’t. It’s such a lovely book to read.

Over the course of my life, I’ve bought, I would say, 60 copies of that book because I always give it to anyone who is about to renovate a house or about to build a house. That’s my second one. It’s a great read, and you would love it.

My third one is “Naples ’44” by Norman Lewis. Norman Lewis was a British intelligence officer who was sent to Naples when the Germans had been beaten out of there. He was sent there to find out whether there were nascent fascist groups still working in Naples.

He kept a diary, and this is the most fabulous diary you’ll ever read. It’s just hilariously funny, deeply moving and totally confusing, and you realize that Naples was, like, another planet.

It’s like reading sci-fi, some of it, the strangeness of that little world of Naples, with its intertwining of deep religiosity, deep criminality, deep love of the senses, incredible attention to food, weird decaying aristocracies, all woven in with crooks and priests and so on.

So there’s three books, and I just want to suggest one other thing, which is a subscription to The London Review of Books. Probably the best intellectual reading in the English language, I think. It’s amazing. It comes out every two weeks, and if you’re interested in books, The London Review of Books, for me, beats The New York Review of Books or The Times Literary Supplement or any of those things.

I’ve loved these recommendations so much, and I didn’t offer this to you before, so maybe it’s too hard, given all that will flood into your mind, but how about three albums? Three albums that have influenced you that form part of your base layers.

OK, I can respond to that.

One that really made a huge impression on me was a Folkways record called “The Rural Folk Blues.” They were sort of field recordings. Some of them were actually records that had been made. But they all dated from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, and they were Black American music.

Clip: “Come Go Home With Me” by Lightnin’ Hopkins.

I’d been listening to a lot of Black American music because of where I grew up, in Suffolk, which had a lot of American air bases, but it was pop music, doo-wop and stuff like that, and I loved it.

When I heard those recordings, I thought, “This is the soil that that stuff grew out of.” And I loved it. It was such, such rich soil.

I think the second one that I have to name, because it remains as one of the most moving records to me, is the Velvet Underground’s self-titled third album, which had the song “Pale Blue Eyes.”

Clip: “Pale Blue Eyes” by the Velvet Underground.

Beautiful, beautiful record. Beautifully controversial in many ways. In fact, probably without that record, I wouldn’t have been a pop musician. I don’t know what I would’ve done. I’d probably have been an art teacher or something. But that record made me think, “This is something I could do.” And I think it made a lot of other people think that. I know so many musicians who say, “That was the record that really made things happen for me.”

Now I’ve got to do No. 3. That means I’ve only got one choice left. [Laughs.] This is very difficult.

So much of the music that has really affected me is religious music, which is funny because I’m sort of an atheist. But the thing about religious music that is so special is that it’s made by people for reasons other than “I want to pull a chick,” “I want to make a lot of money” or “I want to dance.” Now, all of those things are fine. I have no problem with them. But the majority of popular music comes out of those kinds of feelings.

I am very moved by the old conception of beauty that when we recognize beauty, it is recognizing a nearness to God.

I take that. Even an atheist like me would say it depends how big the word “God” is for you, and if it’s big enough, I can accommodate ideas like that.

So I’m going to choose a gospel record, and it’s a strange one. It’s the Consolers. The Consolers were a couple, Sullivan and Iola Pugh. I asked myself the question after going to this museum that I mentioned, in Lausanne, the museum of outsider art. I thought, “What’s outsider music?”

And then I thought, “Well, actually the whole of pop music is really outsider music, in that it didn’t come out of academies or institutions. It’s just people doing stuff together.”

And I think as outsider artists, the Consolers, Sullivan and Iola, stand absolutely unmatched.

Clip: “Lord, Bring Me Down” by the Consolers.

Brian Eno, truly, what a pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you so much. It’s lovely to talk to you, Ezra.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker, Kate Sinclair and Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sophie Abramowitz, Geeta Dayal, Jack Hamilton and Victor Szabo.

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