King Gizzard, Spotify, and the Future of Music

I'm Anne Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. This ship has like well and truly sailed. It is totally whack to be able to train the algorithm on artists' work. Totally whack. Like totally cooked. I'm Charlie Wurzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we're going to talk about music, making it, the future of it, and the ways that technology has complicated that future quite a bit. Throughout the last decade, I've been fortunate enough to meet and interview a bunch of musicians across a bunch of genres and levels of fame. And inevitably, the conversation always shifts towards streaming. Now, you're probably familiar with the basic gripes. Streaming has atomized a musician's catalog, prioritizing tracks over albums. The economics stink for the artists. Musicians have to get big, like really almost Taylor Swift big, to make money from the streamers. And in order to get big, musicians now need to play the platform game, the same one that creators and average joes posting anywhere online have to play. Getting put on Spotify or another streamer's curated playlist is crucial, but so is navigating whatever proprietary algorithms the streaming service might be employing to surface music for listeners. And so the result has been this kind of frustration that you are hearing from creators everywhere. It is this feeling of having to shadowbox an algorithm to fight for scraps of attention. and it is here where the conversations tend to get honestly pretty dark. Musicians I've spoken with describe weird things happening. An experimental song from the end of an album that doesn't really sound a ton like them blows up because it got picked up by an algorithm and that makes it so the streamer lumps their band in with a genre that they rarely play in and then it's harder for their best work to get discovered. Artists who have viral success on one track can find themselves trapped in the same sound and they're just chasing the algorithm hoping to sense them. Since then, they describe this pressure to churn out new songs and albums faster and faster every year. And there's this creative confusion that many record labels just don't have an answer for. Here's what one musician told me back in 2024. Quote, nobody knows what matters. And it's just like wandering in the desert. And the streaming climate has only gotten more precarious since then. With Generative AI, it's now possible to create entire complex songs with a text prompt or just by humming into your smartphone. Major record labels like Warner have recently partnered with generative AI music companies like Suno, whose CEO Mikey Shulman said in an interview with The Guardian this year that, quote, I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of time they spend making music. Now, in the interview, he's referring to the tedious bits of engineering work, but he clearly sees that automating the creative process is a good thing. Quote, it was described to me that we are the Ozempic of the music industry. Everybody is on it and nobody wants to talk about it. As it turns out, all that diet music, it's going somewhere. It's flooding onto the streamers. For the last few years across genres, synthetic music has been crowding out human-made music. Chances are, especially if you listen to instrumental music, you've unknowingly streamed some smooth jazz conjured by a bot. In late September, an AI-generated song under the name of Zania Monet became the first to debut on the Billboard radio chart. And there's other issues, too, like impersonation. The website Rest of World reported last fall, for example, that somebody cloned the voice of reggaeton singer Bad Bunny. Perhaps you've heard of him. And created a song that reached the top 100 ranking temporarily on Spotify in Chile. That was before it was removed from the platform. All this now brings us to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. For the uninitiated, King Gizzard is a popular and prolific Australian band known for bending genres, ripping live shows, and for putting up dozens of albums in a short period. In 2017, they released five albums in one year. Now, in July, the group took its music off of Spotify in protest of Spotify CEO Daniel X's decision to lead a nearly $700 million investment in a German company that makes military drones and AI defense tools. Quote, can we put some pressure on these Dr. Evil Tech bros to do better? That's what the band wrote on their posts on Instagram. But as the newsletter Platformer reported last year, some King Gizzard fans noticed that several tracks were still available on Spotify. It wasn't King Gizzard's actual music, but a kind of ringtone, Muzak-style cover of their songs, with similar artwork and information attached. It was only when people clicked on the track that, according to Platformer, it redirected to a different page for a different instrumental cover artist. The fake King Gizzard songs reportedly had more than 10 million streams. When alerted, Spotify got rid of the fake songs, but the debacle illustrates what artists are up against. Staying on the platform can mean having to play this unwinnable game, but leaving has its challenges too, losing discovery and perhaps having to fend off squatters. Okay, here's where I should note that we reached out to Spotify about the King Gizzard situation and AI impersonation in general. And a spokesperson acknowledged that, quote, AI is accelerating problems that already exist across the music industry. including impersonation and fraud. The company shared a series of new policies it announced in September, including, quote, stronger rules requiring artist authorization for vocal imitation and standardized AI disclosure credits developed with industry partners. They continued, bad actors can sometimes exploit gaps to push incorrect content onto artist profiles. We are testing new prevention tactics with distributors, investing more resources into content mismatch review, reducing review times, and allowing artists to report mismatches even before release. A spokesperson also countered a claim that you're going to hear later in this episode, which is that Spotify pays worse than other streamers. Quote, every other streaming service pays less than Spotify. Spotify paid out $11 billion to the music industry last year, they said. So that's Spotify's perspective. But what have streamers done to music? And what does it mean to create art and music online in 2026? And how can people stay sane and navigate this ecosystem at the same time? I figured there's no better person to talk to about this than the frontman of King Gizzard himself, Stu McKenzie. Stu joined me recently from Melbourne at 3 a.m. my time to help me understand if we're all, in his words, cooked. Here's my conversation with Stu. But first, quick break. I'm Anne Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. stew welcome to galaxy brain thank you so much for joining me from australia what's up yeah welcome from the other side of the world it's summer there right you're like you're like actually living the dream there instead of the crushing fatigue of winter that we got going it is a dream and it is always summer in Australia. Not really, but it is if you believe it is. It is if you're living in the dream. I want to start out just by asking, we're kind of a similar age. You're an extremely creative and artistic person. What's your relationship to the internet and technology? Is it an engine of creativity for you? Is it a hindrance? Some of your past interviews about recording suggest even some of that that you did was a bit analog in nature. but what is your relationship to the internet technology and all that as an artist? I mean, I'm probably going to give you an answer, which is probably typical of someone who's 35, i.e. me and like people, you know, of our gen in that it's incredible and that it has allowed, yeah, like me to have access to so much music, but also art and culture and everything that was just like not accessible to people of 10 or so years before us and you have to you have to pay that you have to just you know fuck this this shit is amazing you know like i hate my phone i want to fucking throw this shit off a bridge i want to throw it like so every single day at some point i want to throw my phone into a body of water but i also just think it's incredible you know like Lewis thing, what this shit does is amazing. We're talking to each other, you know, on the other side of the world, like pretty fucking seamlessly. That is cool. I've heard in interviews you say, you know, when the band was really starting, it was like, you know, MySpace days. Obviously things look a lot different now And I was wondering if you could trace a little bit of that change for me and how it feels from your perspective evolving as a band and just having the ability to reach people and share your music changing so much like how has that looked and felt to you net positive sort of net negative like where do you where do you where do you come out on that I probably got a perspective on this that I'm not sure a lot of my sort of peers or buddies would have the same one as, to be honest, because for us, you know, the band, I mean, King Gizzard started in this kind of beautiful, low pressure scenario. It started in this way of it being a side project and it worked because it was easy, actually, not easy in a work sense, but easy in a it fit sense. And we did what we wanted to do from the beginning. It was baked into the whole idea of it because people didn't feel pressured to be in this band. And it was this weird side project thing that people weren't supposed to be paying attention to. So it let us kind of just do whatever we want and not worry about it. But I think when, for whatever reason, some people started to support the band and it kind of got to a point where it felt like maybe we should sort of put some more time and effort into this thing. I think we probably quite sensibly realized that that was actually quite a beautiful seed or DNA to what the band was. And I think we've been pretty good at holding onto that. And I say that because I think for the most part, we operate exactly the same as we did even when we had a MySpace. It was kind of just like, we don't engage super deeply with social media. We don't create content. We don't do it. That's tough. we just sort of make albums at the pace we want to and put our music at the pace we want to and we still work with the same people it's the same sort of small small team for the most part and we just have kind of like not stopped doing and i think a lot of the things around us have changed we've tried really hard to stay the same on the inside and i and i know that that is like so lucky and i know that we're very grateful to be able to do that and um it's weird but but i i do truly sort of like feel like we've we've grown as people individually in our own ways and the six of us in the band have grown up while doing this thing but when we're together it's still the same and i'm quite protective of that yeah that's it's it's really lovely and and something that i i think is is really rare but also i think that's like a good vein for this conversation in a way to talk about like how you've gone about protecting that a little bit or how you've gone about using that to your advantage as a band and in this information you know hellscape to some degree or just like you know chaos and so i i'm curious like can you talk to me a little bit about the uh the the bootlegger stuff which to me feels really of the spirit of the internet in in the good way and like what that is exactly and why you decided to start doing that not just like giving the music away but giving people authorization to press their own albums sell copies and things like that yeah explaining um what uh the king gizzard version of of bootlegging is is weirdly hard i think let me give it a go so um so so basically like quite a few years ago we noticed that people were sort of making i mean what what i would have described at that time as as leg copies of our albums and this was this was at a time where a lot of our early material had only ever been pressed physically one time at the very beginning when we when we released those earlier albums and then quite a few of those first ones we'd never toured outside of australia so we pressed two or three hundred copies and they had all sold to our friends and friends friends basically and then we started to become an internationally touring band and doing all these like blah things that we never thought was supposed to happen to us and then you know all these other people and all over the world were like hey can i get a copy of them one of those records and we're like oh really we're making this other stuff now we just didn't we didn't really prioritize looking backward at all and so i suppose because of that people started bullying their records and then concurrently to that people started taping our shows and that was also just a deeply strange and foreign concept to see that because i didn't grow up with that culture in any way and i i just thought that was super weird yeah but uh but i i started thinking about that a lot and how i kind of just actually thought that was very cool i thought the bootlegging thing was quite because was always very cool because we i i'd never had a problem with people doing that because we didn't like they weren't accessible anyway i was just happy for people to be listening to music and at the beginning it was like why don't we just give them a few albums that they can just do whatever with when we just let them do whatever with a few albums um and that's what we did we also did this album called polygon twinal and which was sort of a prog rock studio album i guess we released five albums in that year and it did start to feel a bit capitalist of us though maybe against some of our core values to continually ask people to buy our shit you know five albums in a year is a lot yeah i get that exactly so the the fourth of the fifth which was polygon to final land uh we just made for free and you know we thought well we should really make this free like really free you know like this is not just a free download like this is this doesn't belong to us like it's like this is free you're free is like it's free you know so it was kind of like you can put in your movie soundtrack you can put it on your you can put But anywhere, whatever you want, you can take it to the pressing plant and make a thousand copies and start a record label. You know, you can do anything. This was back in 2017. You know, looking back after a year of that or something, there was like all these record labels that started up and all this kind of like this sort of like community of people sort of like sprung up around this album. And it did feel like it just felt so beautiful. it felt kind of like creating life and it just it just felt so contrasting to so many of the annoying things about like um being in a band where you have to kind of sustain yourself and you have to be a business oh that's just so annoying yeah play music and it just felt so in line with with all of that but yeah now we do just tons of our music is just bootlegable we just do it do whatever you want and um you can listen to it or download it for free or do normal people stuff or you can do crazy people stuff and like make record labels and shit and and people have right record labels have come out of that right like yeah it's like it's so wild it's amazing yeah so what what i think is interesting about that right is you know i i want to talk to you in a minute about some of the like the spotify stuff some of the you know some of the stuff that is that is been hard and squeezing artists to some degree. And some of that all comes from this idea, right, of you've got to you've got to find and build community in whatever ways that you can, right, get the music out to people, but also have something there. And I feel like what you guys have, whether you stumbled upon it, or whether it's just, you know, the way that your your ethos as a band and as human beings have, you know, decided to be creative and make art is that it seems like you've been able to bypass a little of that commercialization and form that community, which then in turn is like is sustaining, right? Like I think about fish, the dead, you know, the idea of that sort of like the taping community, right? And this idea of like, we're going to play lots of live shows, people are going to go and we encourage that taping, that thing, it gives, as you just said, gives us the ability to, you know, to deliver a different kind of show every night, that creative challenge of improvisation and locking in and all that stuff. But at the same time, too, it creates this ecosystem, right? And the ecosystem can then become as obsessive as you want to be over shows and archives and last time played and first time played and all these different types of things. And it builds the lore. And it kind of like, fosters that community in a way that i think ends up being probably way more generative right than than just like yes like stream stream our album here it is and then here's the next one right yeah that i mean that's my my worst nightmare is to kind of be like constantly trying to push the thing that's not fun no shade to anyone who who wants to operate like that but it doesn't work for me you know it's a personal it's a personal preference i think and i i do feel extremely extremely fortunate to be able to uh you know take the kind of risks and the wild swings we take tons of falls too but we've been able to weather it and i and i know that we are like um yeah i'm very grateful for that it does also you know and and i know like you want to talk about spotify stuff and and everything but it does sort of make me feel like we have a bit of a duty to do stuff like that because king is kind of exists in this weird uh realm of it exists because we kind of took risks the whole time it's it hasn't been sort of despite that it's kind of been because of that and i think we just luckily and beautifully placed to just be ourselves and i kind of feel like we have a duty to do that in in some ways because i know that it i actually know that in so many ways it is easier for us to do it than for other people and so you know with something like spotify like we it doesn pay the bills anyway for the most part we kind of like a touring band and we make records that people buy irl like yeah i don't know we we sort of just exist in our own sort of like uh world over to the side yeah right so so let's let's just talk about the spotify stuff since we're there and so last summer you all made a decision to remove the music it it sounds like spotify ceo daniel x leading the investing of this military drone company was the i guess like the last straw you mentioned earlier just there that you know this wasn't something that's necessarily paying the bills can you walk me through the decision in terms of what else in your experience with the platform led to this it's a pretty evil corporation for the most part and and to be fair so a few of the other streaming services as well it's oh god fuck it's it's actually kind of easy to hate spotify to be honest as an artist like they pay way worse than almost all the others to begin with and they're the biggest so they're kind of setting the standards in so many ways i feel like all my mates were already saying fuck spotify constantly anyway you know before we did it And before all of the military investing stuff came up as well, it does sort of feel like making music is, maybe this goes without saying, or maybe I'm just going to say it, it's such a vulnerable thing to do. it's actually like really hard to make music with other people i mean again maybe that doesn't go without saying but it's it's hard sort of like emotionally and it's hard sort of in a way of um it's hard to motivate yourself and it's it's it is it's just this vulnerable sort of like weird i don't know sort of thing that you we we and other musicians constantly put yourselves out there in this weird world to do because we believe in it i guess a lot of the things sort of happening around spotify started to feel like it it honestly just made me and and and the others feel like not going to work right and i love work yeah like work to me isn't this work this bad word work is awesome like work is great i want to go to work yeah i want to make stuff and all this shit made me not want to go to work and you know had a lot of conversations with a lot of other musicians who I love and admire and some of my other mates left Spotify and I just thought oh man that's I don't know for some reason it wasn't something that I really thought of being possible it also sounds you just you spend so much time thinking about music and working on the music and Spotify is the platform that most people listen to it on and then a few of my few of our mates left and I just thought oh i didn't even really think about that option i've been having this conversation for a couple years with with a number of artists and musicians uh especially and i was talking kind of like to prepare for this to to another musician who's honestly done really well for themselves very very popular and mentioned that the spotify stuff especially the algorithmic discovery stuff had just ground them down so much creatively like basically had said like I use the same terms of work, right? Like I consider this to be work. I consider like when I got to get through, I'm problem solving, right? It's not all fun and games. It's like my job sometimes. And like, I'm not afraid to like, grind through it and do that. And then there was this feeling recently that like, they weren't able to stop, which was like, I'm going through all this, I'm like preparing this beautiful meal, right? And I have this like, total worry that this thing that I have no control over is just going to stop people from coming to my restaurant. Right. Even if they like the food all the time, like they're just going to forget that the restaurant exists. Right. For some kind of weird reason. And this idea also that like songwriting is for them this craft, this thing that they love to do. Right. And that it's become sort of it's gone from the skill game to this slot machine game. Right. And like really good, if you're thinking about like casino mentality, like really good blackjack players don't want to spend time at the slots because the slots are stupid and they're arbitrary. Right. And that's how it felt fighting for people's attention. It was a really interesting feeling, though, that it's got that similar thing of like, it's just making it's just making coming to work feel juiceless or bad. Yeah. And I and it's interesting to hear you say that because I do think there are a lot of analogous sort of. I mean, they're dead, you know, it's happening kind of in so many industries at the moment in different ways. And I feel like I can kind of talk about it from sort of my perspective of being a musician. I feel like I have conflicting ideas about it. I feel like I almost opened my mouth to say something and I stopped myself because it kind of, it's hard for me to form a fully thought out opinion on a lot of this stuff because it's still happening. And again, with technology, there are certain elements of like a lot of the AI or generative things that I look at and I'm like, fuck, that is so cool. Like that is fucking amazing that that shit is possible. To democratize some of this, to give people some of the tools, some of the ability to say like, I see this, I feel this. And I want to, I want to make this for myself. Right. That is like going back to the first principles of all of this stuff. the way that humans did it before it was professionalized. And yet, if you do reduce it to, hey, man, like, I want to do this. And I can do it now because I can like, write out a prompt and push a button. That's fine on a creative, like explosion scale, right? It's not fine, probably, in the sense of like, I want to use your guys's style of music. And I want to like, fit it into a spotify playlist and then you know just like right off the back of you guys no longer having your music on spotify right because like that's an example of something that's happened to you guys right you have like people who are kind of like totally agree and it is something that i've talked about as well and i think by the the where i landed what was we are don't like it does feel like we are fucking doomed when that shit happens it's it's like what do you do about that this ship has like well and truly sailed i mean and it's it is totally whack to be able to train the algorithm on artists work totally whack like totally cooked totally fucking horrible and it's just i can't believe that that has just happened and it's like whoops oh i didn't mean to do that oh shit okay oh well that happened now let's just move on what that's crazy that's why it feels like we're doomed can you describe for me like how how it happened how you how you found out about this because like essentially right what happened was you guys took the music off of spotify and people were just like coming in with like ringtone style stuff is that how it went down i don't know how how people are making this this shit and it's like honestly when i listen to these like King Gizzard sort of AI artist songs, they're insanely funny to me because it's so dark and so twisted and so strange. And it's so weird that it's happening to us. All I can do is laugh. It's insanely funny, but in the most twisted and dark way, it's just my reaction is to laugh, but it's very dark and very weird and very 2026. But basically what, yeah, to anyone that doesn't know, we took our music off Spotify and then tons of music has just been, it's probably there now. Like stuff has been taken down, more songs come up. And I suppose because our artist page must still exist or maybe you can still search for it, I don't know. But it means that if someone is looking for King Gizzard, it's very easy for them to find this stuff. And actually, there is a very weird problem where you can actually upload music as impersonating another artist and go onto their official profile very easily. That's a whole other thing. It's super easy to impersonate another artist and end up on their official profile. And this has happened to tons of artists. Have you talked to Spotify about this at all? Yeah, quite a few times. And they are always just like, oh, whoops, we'll take it down. And they do take it down. But there's more up there before you know it. And it's looking at us. This is happening to tons of artists. It's a story, actually. I think it's just exacerbated this whole thing because it's left a hole. When I'm talking about these AI King Gizzard tracks, they are on our profile. Like, it's King Gizzard. it's not like someone else it's like us right that's the weird thing but it's not us it's just i don't fucking know it's just yeah it's weird but what's so interesting is you you all leaving spotify it sounds a little bit like you know it hasn't been that hard for you guys is that is that correct i suppose so like i would want to preface it with you know i i don't see us as necessarily being a model for other people to follow because I know that we've just got a very unusual path and I'm very proud of that I don't want to sit here and say everybody should leave Spotify and if people want to do that that's cool but like I'm not here to pontificate on anything actually that's not my vibe but for us we have had nothing but quite beautiful press around that and about around leading Spotify and I think quite a lot of people have discovered our music because with all of this the hardest thing the hardest part about leading Spotify is making your music inaccessible to so many people who listen to music only on Spotify And that doesn't feel good. I don't want to do that. Nothing about that is what I like about what we're doing. But it felt like the right price. And that's okay. And I am proud of doing it. But it does feel like people have kind of taken notice of what we're doing as well. It's, yeah, it's cool. I want to end with, you know, it's easy to get bummed out about some of this stuff when you're talking about technology and art and all that. Is there stuff that makes you feel optimistic about, you know, maybe not even you can just speak for yourself and not for like, you know, like the world and art and creativity. but like for you going forward like do you feel some of this technology some of this some some of this stuff some of just like the explosion of information that you can access that that's going to be generative for you as you continue to evolve as an artist i remember like when um like a few years ago now and i'm sure there are many people listening to this who have had who had a similar experience when chat gpt first came in and a few people like you should try this thing it's like pretty freaky and i was like okay cool and i started just writing in just the most batshit prompts like you are a grain of dust traveling through the uh fucking cosmos explain to me what you say along the way like i don't know like stuff like that that just felt so new and there was a time when i was like wow this feels so inspiring like i feel like this is actually doing something new i'm sure this is what it felt like when someone first used it thesaurus to help write like to help write poetry or something like imagine if you'd never used a thesaurus and then you just picked up one and you're like whoa this is gonna make my writing so much easier i mean like the game has changed yeah right like that's i was thinking about a lot of things like that like all those things we kind of take for granted that were new technology at some point but i don't feel very interested in that now there's an interesting uh interview that brianino did earlier i guess last year talking about this kind of stuff and you know brianino is someone who's created so much you know generative music and and so much like ambient out there and like and you know push the boundaries of of this electronic music and stuff and he was talking about playing around with chat GPT. And this idea that that when you first start using it, there is that like, that feeling of like, whoa, like this did something different. And then he was saying the more times he started to do it, like the less interesting it got to him. And he had this great word for it, which is like, he used to do watercolor painting. And when he would put the brush in the water between the different things, remember what colors he was using when the water at the end of the thing would be this weird sort of maroonish purple and he called it he called it munch was the color and he was like that's chat gpt the output is munch like no matter what i do it always kind of comes back to this like kind of drab sort of soulless mix of all the stuff and i thought that was kind of like a perfect summation of maybe why it's that kind of stuff is is not that interesting to you right now maybe and yeah that's a very very funny take and i definitely relate to that i'm not sure i ever got really went really really really deep or i really kind of like got to know chat gpt's personality but i do i do know that it has a personality and i do know that it's a good percentage of the world is using that to me as an artist is not interesting, you know, to be, to engage with right now, at least not in the kind of music that we're making. And that moment that I was talking about when I first did, did use Chappet Gpt and it kind of did blow my mind. It actually felt niche at that time. It felt, it felt like something that my parents, for instance, wouldn't have known about. It was at that point, whatever that point was. A lot of it does come back to kind of what I was saying earlier and just, I just want to do what makes me want to go to work and what makes me kind of excited to just like get out of bed and race into my studio and make music like that's that's or what makes me want to pick up the phone and call one of the other guys in the band say beat your studio like nine o'clock in the morning like let's go kind of got these ideas like I just want to put myself in in in that headspace I wonder if this is like when the drum machine came out or I wonder whether it is not like that at all you know when the drum machine came out and people thought oh i miss real drummers oh i miss real drummers with all their beautiful feel and all their imperfections and you know i could tell the difference between this drummer and that drummer just by hearing them on record and all those things are true and then so much amazing music came out of that and a ton of this wall since is is is um drum machines i think it's all a cycle right like that that's the only way that i can keep it all in my head because i think it's i think we all as like humans tend to do that like it's so over we're so back it's so over we're so back kind of thing all you know like the uh and and instead of being completely doom and gloom about it or or dismissing it as nothing right i think it's it's it's a part of this cycle i think they're like as with something like a drum machine you get to do different things and manipulate it in all these different capacities and kind of push the bounds of something right and there's a lot of creativity and interesting like wall breaking there and at the same time too i think like you you you sacrifice you pay the price of like a little bit of that humanity or a little bit of that, you know, spice of life type thing. And then people, if you go too far in one direction, eventually, I think people start yearning for the other thing. What I find really inspiring about what you guys have charted out for yourselves is that it feels like there's a real focus on the humanity part of it on the on the human element on the on the just like the drive for the new thing, the creative push. And I think that that is what a lot of people are craving more and more these days. Yeah, that's interesting. And I appreciate that. I think we have done in our career in a lot of ways, we have not been very tactical about anything. And we have made decisions from the gut. We definitely have just tried to prioritize doing things in real life with real people and and that's yeah the obvious stuff like playing shows and and and stuff like that but also just like meeting people and talking to people and just being a real person like i would i would pride myself on being pretty ordinary in a lot of ways and i think that's cool you know i think that's cool i i i as an ordinary person i i totally agree oh man i i so appreciate this conversation and you know the the grounding it in the in the you know the humanity and the real personness of all that i think i think we need more of that so so i appreciate all of this and and the insights and all the time man cheers charlie yep i am yeah i'm grateful for chats and the uh reflection and the inwardness and the uh yeah it's just it's good to talk about this stuff before we uh go insane that's that's the whole point of this podcast talk about it before we go insane not not so we don't go insane but just before we do it you know so we understand why yeah uh thanks again man i appreciate it cheers charlie thanks mate That's it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Stu McKenzie of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe to the Atlantic's YouTube channel or on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of the other journalists, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com slash listener. That's theatlantic.com slash listener. Thanks so much, and I'll see you on the internet. This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Rene Klar and edited by Dave Shaw. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Rob Smersiak. Claudine Ebade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.