Robots Are Stealing our Jobs? A Vocation Case Study

Join us here in Ogden this June for our annual new Christmas conference. This year's theme, the War for Normal, features a great lineup of speakers as well as a whole bunch of fun events to make new friends with like-minded saints. Tickets are more affordable than ever this year with a brand new family pass covering your entire household for one low price. Head to newcrissonempress.com/20206 for tickets and more information. This episode is brought to you by Resistance Candles. High quality wax candles that keep the flame of resistance alive. [Music] In our current series here on Bright Heart on Being Human, we've been talking through four aspects of life where a man or a woman can grow and improve and become more fruitful as a result. It's the physical, the spiritual, the social, and the vocational. And we're rounding the finish line in the series now more than 20 episodes in deep into the fourth and final category of vocation. We do hope it's been helpful for you and it certainly has been for us. There's something about working through topics like this that make you think about your own first principles. Some of our conversations on vocation have done that for me thinking about some of my own vocations. One of those is a little unusual, which is the vocation of songwriter and musician. This is something I've really enjoyed doing all my life, even from a very young age. My parents can vouch for me. Lexi has many years now of experience and can also vouch for me. That I sing a lot and it really should stop, but it doesn't show any signs of slowing down. I've spent decades at this point learning to play the guitar, learning how to write songs, and frankly writing a lot of bad songs along the way. I worked as a musician in church context for many years and in some ways I still do fulfilling the role of music minister at our church, even to this day, along with my normal preaching duties. But for the last five or six years, I've focused some of my time on writing, creating, producing, and releasing original music, music of my own. I get a lot of questions about how this fits into my life in our productive Christian household, how I think about songwriting, and especially lately how music, songwriting, and production factors into my world with the advent of technologies like generative AI, which you know you can type in a prompt and it'll spit out a song for you. And with the convergence of two different things, first our current look here into vocations in this series of Bright Arth, and secondly, the final stages of production on a new album of original songs I've been working on for several years now, it seemed fitting to take a moment and talk about how this aspect of my vocation fits into our productive Christian household, kind of like a case study on vocation, if you will. So in this episode, we'll be talking about just that, about how songwriting and music has fit into our household, the economics of music production, AI and the changing landscape of the industry, and really they're kind of a microcosmic look at something that is affecting many of us, many of our households, AI and what it's going to do to our vocations. And why I believe that it's still a worthwhile use of my time, and our household's resources to make songs worth singing. Welcome back to Bright Arth, everybody. We are awake at flourishing. We are moisturized. Fit flourishing in our lane. I was literally telling myself that like 50 minutes ago trying to get lunch out of like, I'm hydrated. I can do it. I could do it. I could do it. I need to get some creatine. Yeah. Yeah. Babe, hit that creatine because we've got some teeth coming in the household. People can identify. The people they know. They know what it's like when the molar. Is it a molar? I don't. It's one of these. It's a penny tooth. Bang type teeth. Oh. Yeah. Anyways. Penny's been wild in that night. But then she's so sweet. She looks up and she says, Mama. I'm tired. So she's giving you the stick and the carrot, really? And somebody forgot to prep the coffee maker when I was up at three o'clock this morning. It was me three o'clock to make the coffee. Well, Penny was up at three. I tried to go to sleep. Then I take a million years to go to sleep again. So by 430, she was up again. I thought, I'm just, I need to go brew coffee and go feed her again. Then your husband and I realized I was like, oh my gosh. There's no coffee. Wow. Way to go, Brian. It's all right. So one of my vocations is remembering to make the coffee. It's okay. I have. Which I don't always do. That I'm better at that than you are. And that's okay. I need to just take it back over. When I got in your new coffee maker, you were like, I'll just make, I'll just prep the coffee at night for you. And I was like, great. Yeah. But that doesn't happen. Well, I worked out and then I made my special weight loss pizza. It's fine. It erased my mind. It is naturally in the flow of my day, but it's not in the flow of your night. And I'm the early bird. So it matters more to me that the coffee is there. Guys, welcome to this episode of CryHearth. And this will be a good warm up because warm up. I may be talking a little bit more on this one. We're talking a lot about music, which is kind of my wheelhouse. And the reason we're doing this episode, it wasn't in my outline for vocation. But as we have been working through this section with an eye towards really in this vocation section, trying to figure out how to a help men and women think clearly about their vocations, about what it is that God has given them to do as duties. But then also how to improve in them, how to discern your vocation, like especially your vocations as they relate to the economics of the household and like your job for men and the productivity, the economic productivity of the house. And I got thinking about how music for us is kind of an interesting case study, because it fits into sort of the side hustle thing that a lot of you are thinking through, especially the way that we got started with it, at least as more than just I did music for church. And it really was part of my professional life. But also it became something of a side hustle, non-church music at that point, original music. I thought, I'm okay at this. Let me poke away at it. Let me try and make something of this. And it's grown into something that genuinely is a part of our economic life. It's a part of how we pay the bills. And so I thought this would be a good case study actually for people thinking through that. And then additionally, people ask, BrightHearth, Kings Hall, like kind of across the different platforms I'm involved in. People ask a lot of really good questions about music. And I've always tried to find like a good place to talk about it and answer some of those. And actually this, it really fits well into this conversation. And then at the same time, I'm finishing up an album. So it's been really on my mind, the way that I do music, I will do other things for a long time. And then I will pivot and just focus relentlessly on like getting a project to the finish line for a minute. And then I will turn from that. And then I don't do much with it for another eight months other than this. That's just how you do music. That's so, huh? Just music. That's how I do everything. You're not that way with anything else in life. I figure out how to do a new thing. I try to optimize how I do that thing. And then I figure out how to build it into my life. And then move on to some capacity. Yeah, men are like this with their vocations feature. It is a feature. It's neat. It's neat. It's neat. Awesome. Great, excellent, love it. Related to this, Lexi is going to be doing an in the kitchen on how we've approached teaching our children music. And we'll talk about Sulfage and some of the ear training and piano and voice training that we've done with our children. And that is a small podcast we do just for our supporters on Patreon as a thank you for supporting this show. So every week we drop in early and ad-free version of BrightHearth. And then the next day, an episode of in the kitchen. And that's what this one is going to be about that pairs with this episode. So that said, let's talk about music a little bit. And first, why don't we talk about just how this came into our world and how it began. It came to fit into not just like a hobby. And I think everybody should saying everybody should most people at least should try to find some basic music literacy since we're committed to saying as Christian people. I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about even how the genesis of music as a vocation came to be. Because I think this is how it works for most people when they discover some vocation, whether it ends up becoming their whole career or a side hustle or some just part of their life. Do you remember the first time you heard me saying or do music? Do you do you remember what the context of that was? It was probably really cringy. It was probably in youth group probably before we met even. I don't know. You would remember when you were actually doing music for youth group before I would. But I early. I would have been 13. How old were you when you started doing music for youth group? Probably around that 13, 14. I don't remember a time in youth group without you doing music of some sort, I guess. I've printed myself upon you from a youth. Yes. Yes. it just goes deeper and deeper as time unfolds. But you weren't leading. Aren't you playing guitar before you were leading the singing, right? Yeah, I started, I always wanted to play the guitar and foolishly told my parents, like, I don't want piano lessons, I don't want piano lessons, I want to learn guitar. And there wasn't a good guitar teacher so I just taught myself, which means I was really bad for a really long period of time. But the thing that got me to focus on it was, we grew up in that mega church kind of environment. They had the whole youth group model. And I was like, well, if I learned good enough to play the chords, I could be on the youth group band or whatever. Which is why a lot of people don't realize you don't know how to read, well, you know how to read music now a little bit better, but even five years ago, you didn't know how to read music. No, no, I didn't. And I still have to remember. Which always surprises people. I'm still kind of the equivalent of, I will ask my 12 year old sometimes because he's been taking piano lessons for years now. Can you remind me of this thing on the sheet? What does that mean? People ask me for sheet music all the time for stuff and I'm like, you don't understand my brother and Christ. You don't want sheet music for me. Yeah, that's how I got into it. And I was still really bad for a long time. But over the first like five to 10 years of this development, it was just something I did at church. And then I took over leading for the youth group music and then our church wanted to launch a hip service like a cool service. And it was the night service. So at that point, we had like choir first service, contemporary second service, which was kind of like a blend of a band with like a praise team thing. It was lit. It was so awesome. And then they were like, let's do it. And it wasn't a youth service, but it was like let's attract the youth. So they scrounged around the church. They found me in the basement. They're in the youth group and they're like, what about this long haired hippie kid? He can play the guitar. Maybe let's see if he'll lead worship. So I started leading for the night service. And that was essentially they said, we'll give you like 50 bucks every time you lead with an unfathomable amount of money for a 15 or 16 year old or whatever I was at that point. And started doing that. Learned a lot through that because it was like leading, organizing, scheduling, all these different aspects. It wasn't just music. And that was where I put in most of the reps of learning how to do music. It was actually just week after week after week when we started attending refuge at when it was a church plant. I think I was 18. - Yeah, 17 or 18, 17 about to turn 18. - Yeah. And yeah, that's right, wow. - Or maybe not. Maybe you were already right around there. I think you're right. - I was in high school still. 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You read your Bible, review your to-do list, and drink a great cup of coffee. So why would you want bad tasting mass-produced coffee? Lux coffee is a Christian-owned coffee roaster that offers intentionally sourced single origin coffee beans. They believe that convenience is the death of quality. That's why they spend their time roasting small batches of beans to make sure that every cup of coffee tastes delicious. Start your day with coffee that is crafted for the new chrysanthem. You can go to luxcoffee.co and use code NCP15. That's all caps NCP15 for 15% off your hand-crafted coffee. And of course that link is in the description below. And it was planted by a pastor from Idaho and one of our former youth leaders. So that's how we found out about it, this church that I know pastor. It was a Calvary Chapel. And pretty soon we got involved really quickly and I ended up leading worship for their Sundays very quickly. So at that point, I would lead worship for the morning service at the church plant. And I was a custodian at the mega church. So then I would go, 'cause I was like, I got an earn enough money to marry Lexi. So I was working like as many jobs as they would give me everywhere coffee shop stuff. I was leading worship. You weren't teaching guitar lessons too. Teaching guitar lessons to the mentally handicapped. It's not an exaggeration. I don't just mean like my students weren't that good. I mean literally. I know you're gonna make such a good dad when I-- Oh, it was fun. I love that. I actually did, I did peer tutoring in junior high, which was like a student assigned to a mentally handicapped. Student. I think a lot of public schools probably have something. Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. And I really enjoyed it when I wasn't being stabbed by my student, 'cause I-- They did home act first of all. I was trying to teach him how to use a sewing machine, which is like a wildly dangerous piece of equipment in the hands of my mentally handicapped buddies who were awesome, but not good with sewing machines. [LAUGHS] So-- Oh, man. You are literally-- You are so patient. You are the most patient person I know, but this is just a little bit of your character right there. Oh, thanks, babe. So funny. This is a bring back memories. Oh, man. Anyway, yes. So I was teaching guitar lessons to not just the mentally handicapped, but some of the mentally handicapped. And leading worship to and all that stuff, we started. And then I would go lead worship at night. So I would do like morning for the church plan. Castodial duties to switch the sanctuary to this special night service set up that they had with tables and stuff. And then I would lead worship for that as well. Ended up burning the boats going all in on just hate. I had discerned a call to the pastor from like 16. I had thought, this is what the Lord's calling me to do with my life. And so I was-- I realized that the Caveri Chapel church plant, expository preaching, going a little bit like just discovering these things as I went along. But music was always a thing. It was always like the church plant could pay me a little bit. And it became a part of my vocation that it was how we-- like one of the reasons we were able to get married and pay for rent and all the different things that one needs when one gets married. I did that for a long time. Our church ended up as refuge reformed and we grew in all the directions that we did. Ended up being the senior pastor and all that. I've just always still been pretty much the music minister all the way along. So now I conduct from the front. It's not Mike's or anything, but we sing in parts. And we have a pianist and I organize the music and lead some things and teach the church how to sing. And I still conduct the music. But even for years before that, I would lead worship with a guitar at church, sometimes with more instruments and people, sometimes just me and a guitar. But it's always been a part of our life. To the point that when we first as a church started going, we're supposed to be singing Psalms. Like the Bible apparently says this. And we just discovered that. The way we started doing it was I would set a Psalm to music that fit what we knew how to sing. We didn't know how to sing in parts. Yeah, we couldn't figure it out. And you didn't know how to read music to figure it out. So I was like, okay, a, I'm going to start learning how to read music a little bit. And we'll, we want to get to being able to sing parts. That was a goal. But it took several years. So that's where really my early Psalms settings came out of. I just recorded them for our church so that they could hear them. And then people on Twitter started to find out about them. I had probably 1,000 followers on Twitter at this point. It was like, I wasn't, nobody knew who I was. And bright hearts didn't exist. None of this existed. I started releasing these little EPs. And it was just like, I needed a place where everybody in the church could hear them. And so I discovered a distribution thing that let me put them on Spotify and Apple Music and whatnot. And lo and behold, like people started listening to this EP. I didn't even know what mastering was. Some of you don't know what mastering is either. I released my whole first D.P. unmasked. It is to this day unmastered. So I just did, I did it all. I just recorded it, mixed it, whatever figured out, Googled and YouTube stuff. Enough people started listening to it though that I and our church started to pivot to where we learned parts and we no longer needed me to set them in that style. We don't even sing them anymore. No, not my settings. I have set a few of them to parts and we will maybe learn them, adapted variations. But yeah, so at that point it was kind of like, do I keep doing this? And I had also always written original music, really bad original music that I thought, well, maybe I could try to write some Psalms that are not really for congregational use, but that I just like. And maybe I'll sprinkle in some original songs too. At that point, I released another album like that singing Psalms, let joy resound, still me doing everything mixing, which I'm not that great at. And engineering and all of that. An old buddy reached out to me and he's a producer, full-time producer, the best musician I know. For real. His name is Brandon. He's amazing. You guys should listen to his music, Stomp Town Revival. Stomp Town Revival. Brandon B. He's very CCM in his main stuff. But Stomp Town isn't so much though. Stomp Town's not. I love Stomp Town. Yeah, it's like kind of harmonica and he's just an amazing, he grew up like in a family band. And he's like a, he's like a hobbit. He's like a music hobbit. Because he's like, they're like the Von Trap family. If you ever listen to this brand and I'm, I'm sorry for describing you like a hobbit, you're not that short. No, he's not. But he's just, if you know Brandon, that would probably make sense to you. He has one like, I think he's one a Grammy for working on a Justin Bieber song or something like that. He's won Dove Awards. He's a really good musician. He had been a part of Refuge for some years. He's a very missionary kind of minded guy. So anyway, he reached out and said, Hey man, you know, you know, I produce music if you ever want me to produce something for you. Let me know. But it's his living. So I mean, he's, he's not cheap. So that's when I launched the first even dragons show him praise. I had written a bunch of songs that I really wanted to be in a style that I don't think I could pull off by myself. That I just thought of that. Do you, do you feel like you wouldn't have done that if you hadn't have known Brandon? No, I wouldn't. Would you have not gone out to seek somebody to do that? No, I didn't even know. Like I wouldn't have known the first thing about finding a producer. Okay, I didn't, I've never thought about that. That's cool. That's especially one that I trusted. Yeah. Pay a bunch of money. Yeah. And then also that was like not ashamed to be associated with me. Because the music industry is not very aligned. No, it's true. When I saw radical right wing politics for the first time in, because you had seen Brandon multiple times over the last couple years. But I hadn't gone with you. And when I saw him, because you know, his wife and I are good friends and we had known them back in the day, he said, I really did have to take a little bit to research you guys again before I decided to commit to these projects. But I love that. That made me feel like just really, I really respected his decision. Yeah. Okay. He knows. And Brandon's like he does. Brandon has zero fear of man. He totally. So he's very different from us. Like in terms of the, the doctrine, maybe the Christian culture doctrine stream that he swims in. He's more in the charismatic Calvary Chapel kind of not like kind of hostile all the way. But he, you know, he's just that. But he has like 75 children. Yeah. They were one of the first larger families that we knew. Yeah. At refuge. Yeah. First trying to go all in on like homeschooling. Yeah. So they they love kids like love family. Love the Lord. We love the bees. Yeah. They're great family. So he started, but in order to make it worth it for him, because it's a lot of work. It's a lot of time to produce an album. I had to pay him. Yeah. So I did the fundraiser. I was actually really shocked. We needed to raise $15,000 to just get enough to commit to doing a full album. And we did. I think we raised $16,200 or something at that point. I didn't even know taxes. So I to this day, like I paid taxes on all of that as if it was income. Even though I, it was all an expo business expense because I spent it all in the album. Yeah. I see what you're saying. I didn't know how to do that. Yeah. This is why we have tax people at NCP. But so funny side note. So fun. Probably like $5,000 of taxes I didn't need to pay. So, so I needed a fundraise like that because A, to make music like this with real people, I wanted to pay them what they're worth and not just be begging for discounts and stuff like that or favors and whatnot. And then B, like really good musicians who are studio musicians who have spent decades honing their skills and can really elevate a song like Brandon and some of the other musicians I work with. They are worth what they like it's I want them to be able to feed their family too. Yes. And it legitimately like the album I'm working on right now, I will have spent about $25,000 by the time I'm done and everybody's listening to it on Spotify. To put that in perspective, I would have to have eight million streams on Spotify just to cover that expense. Which is a lot of streams. I think last year on Spotify, I got close to seven or eight million. Streams 6.9 something like that in some words mean 6.9 and 8 million streams. So that's like and I released an album in that period of time. So you can see how the economics is like you need patronage or you need a tour and do live shows. Yeah. Something I'm not going to do. I have seven kids. I'm not going to tour this is a very small part of my life, not a huge part. So the economics require patronage. I can't do it without that. And my most stream song, Old Neptonese Roaring has probably been streamed across every platform, maybe three to four million times. That one. So the economics of music production are really difficult right now. And because of streaming, you make about a third of a cent for every stream on Spotify. A little bit more on Apple, a little bit different on other platforms, but that's kind of the average. And so we just started doing it, funding it through that and it spun up. And now it is a part of like where I could say, it's worth the time, but it also still requires patronage. It's why I do fundraiser. So I'll give you guys info on this album by the end of this episode if you want to help support it. And chip in. I have tier I always try to do tiers of support like a Kickstarter style thing that make it fun and like worthwhile for people supporting it. But to be transparent, my whole goal when I do these is that people would believe enough in the music and say like, I want this to exist. And so I'm willing to support it just because of that. This is making me think about Joseph Piper and leisure the basis of culture and what it says about society when they're willing to be patrons of the arts. Yeah. It gets a mark of a good culture if you are willing to see an artist and just pay their cost of living for them so that they can do. Yeah, just help like it exists. Because I used to feel bad about that before any of this, even just like writing and journalism and I worked for various magazines and made nothing. So true. 35 dollars maybe. But I would always just feel guilty about like the business aspect of things until understanding like no, it is a it's a it's a thing that Christians practice throughout history to put forth money towards true good and beautiful things including writing music, architecture, painting, all of that stuff. So I love the patron model. Yeah. And it's it's been amazing to see the support people really care about the music, people care about the craft of it and care about the time put into it. And and really like I try to optimize my time. We'll talk about this a little bit more in the AI part of the discussion. I do believe in using tools and incorporating other people. I'm not the kind of guy that I have to do everything on a on a project for myself. For to think I it has value or something like that. I've really tried to focus on what am I good at in this process of making music and I and I really like the things I think I'm good at are songwriting. I think I'm good at that. And I think I've gotten better at it. And I it's a skill that I've been able to hone. And I'm pretty good at vocals and like making it sound good enough there. It's not like I'm not the best singer in the world that I'm not the worst singer in the world. But I'm I'm decent there. And then when you get into like engineering, which is the process of actually miking instruments up and making sure that you get the right no phase cancellation all this stuff on down to mixing and mastering. I'm not that good at. So for me, I also can't play the fiddle. I can't play you know 30 instruments. I can only play like four. So that's a limiting factor if I'm producing. So I have no problem bringing other people into that process, but also bringing the people who listen to it in where they can feel like, hey kids, you hear this song right now on Spotify? We helped make that possible. We supported this album. We supported this guy. That's cool, which I think is really cool. And so I I do try to make the kickstarted thing like worth it for people. Right now if you support the album, you get, and everybody who supports it pretty much at any tier gets an instant download of the song that I wrote to fix women. And I hope it does because they really sad. They need it. It's sad. It is kind of a sad song, but hopefully it wakes some people up. Up to at one tier, you can have the guitar that I use to write the album. So there's a lot going on there. But mainly I just hope that people appreciate it enough to support it because they want it to exist. Some people have asked me why I have actually, because I've talked about this other places, shifted more to my last whole album was mainly songs. But I've talked about shifting this next album as original songs, like hearth songs was original songs, seven original songs. I've shifted more to original music with this next album and I'll probably keep doing that and maybe have some songs mixed in here and there. But I'm focusing more on writing original music rather than some settings in church music. And I'm actually doing that on purpose. So I wanted to answer that. Why am I doing that? And the biggest reason is that I think one of the largest holes in Christian culture, art, but beyond art as well, is that we have a hard time and this is true conservatism more broadly as well, political conservatism and right wing politics. We can tend to focus on art and culture as a medium for a didactic message, quite a bit, to where we make the art or the thing as a vehicle to hold the message. So whether it's a political message or even a religious message like we view the thing as like the evangelism of the song is the most important. So it's going to share the gospel or the whatever the verse that's in it is kind of or the political message. I don't think we do as well. What that does a lot of the time, it can make good art. But what it tends to do is it makes the art is the second or third tier thing being thought of. It's still not art for art's sake. Yeah. Yeah. Which is the ideal as art for art's sake. And I would agree. I think art for art's sake is a good thing in the world God made. It's part of being human. And so I really like, left my own devices, what I will write and what I think we need more of are just good songs that yes, are not degenerate because a lot of music is degenerate. It's actually, it's lying because it's beautiful music or it's really well crafted and produced music that is teaching you to call beautiful. What is not beautiful? I, you could correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember when you wrote the hearth songs, you had said like, I really love listening to Tyler Childers, but it's terrible. I can't even listen to it with the kids around. Yeah. Like Tyler Childers musically is really good. But then he's like talking about doing cocaine and gay coal miners. So what do you do with that? It's good art kind of, but it's not all the way through good because it's actually calling beautiful, what is not beautiful. So I just want to write music, especially original music, that someone wouldn't listen to it and think, this guy is evangelizing me. But I am. Yeah. So I'm trying to show you the beauty and the glory of ordinary life of having children. Like we'll talk about the album that I'm working on, but the themes of this album are very much locked in with my world. Like what? Where, where am I? I have young, young children. And like you blink in one of them's 12 all of a sudden. So the album is called Long Days Short Years because that's kind of what it feels like sometimes with like this, you know, like sees up three times last night. You can feel like a long day. And you're like, when is this day? When are we going to get to 7 30 pm so that the children, some of the children can go to sleep and we can like hold hands. Not even all of them. It's not bad. But a couple of, and you feel like a long day, but then you blink and the years are short. So the album touches on some of the songs. There's also a song about Tom Bamba-Doh, but I could do what I want. And Goldberry. But that's the kind of music that I want to write and release because it does, what it does is people listen to music over and over. And rather than having degeneracy encoded in their souls with beautiful music, I would like them to have beauty and glory and the right order of the world that God made, but not necessarily for it to feel like this is church music. Or this is music that was created just to fulfill the role of being a vehicle for a Christian message as an overtly religious act. So and then the other thing is a lot of like Christian artists over the years just to positize and they become total degenerates. Like the Ohelos are a good example of this. You know, they write some really what I think is really good music, really creative songwriting. And then within a couple of years, they're like writing pagan nonsense and they're all apostates and progaine. Oh, Gunderson too. We featured Noah Gunderson's family and deeply rooted years ago. And now here he is degenerate. Yeah. Same thing with a lot of those Christian journalists I worked with though terrible, terrible industry, it's really sad that art has become left coded and left dominated. And I think that's not doesn't have to be the case. Now I will say that in the CCM world, this is going to be controversial, maybe with our audience, maybe not. Some amazing music is happening in the CCM world. Like really good production, really incredibly talented vocalists, really incredibly talented songwriters are involved and they're writing it to be sung in church. And I don't love the style and think it's the best. I think they I think everybody should sing parts because I think it's great. I think it's optimal. That's why we do it. It allows men to be men and women to be women and it's just beautiful. It's us singing. It's like performance, it's like us singing together because it is. But that said, there are some really amazing musicians in that world. So are you saying you're not like down with CCM as a whole, but you would more so say that music needs to be put in its place in songs that we put back in their place. Like doctrinally a lot of it is not that great. Doctrinally some of it is actually phenomenal. But what I would rather those musicians be doing are simply be Christians and make really, really excellent music. Yeah. Because I mean, like there was one song, I can't remember what it's called down in the river. It's not the one you're thinking of the down in the river to pray. But it's this lady and she's really quirky. I keep she keeps popping up on like Instagram, reals and stuff. She dresses. It's modest. It's like you can tell it's Christian right from the beginning, but she dresses in a way that I cannot explain. But I think four year old Lexi would approve. She's very eclectic. Okay. Like very eclectic. She has a phenomenal voice. It's like, I find it. What's the, you don't remember her name or the name of the song or anything? No, I just hum a little bit of it. Okay. It's very CCM in a way, but it's really excellent production and all that. But I just thought to the best of my ability, I can't compete with those guys. I mean, those are multi million dollar productions. I'm talking about a $25,000 album. Those are like one million dollar albums. People don't realize this. So I think original music is really important. And I think it's very important for right wing and Christian people to make good poetry, good writing, good music, good everything. And for it to be true and to celebrate true things, but not just truths about God. Truth's also about family. Children. I think that's where people get off all across the board with art is they think the only truth that exists is just like statements about God. Like there are other. And that's it. And God is the one who made it such that there are other things. Yes. And my album I have a song that's like about a husband burying his wife. Yeah. It's a sad one. It's really sad. It didn't happen to me. I'm writing it first person as if I'm experiencing this. But I did. It's just a it's a song. There's a song like I said about Tom Bommadill. There's a song I wrote to fix women. And it's about a woman. So good art, good writing, I think, can tap into and show ugliness as ugly as a ugly and beautiful things as beautiful. That's what I'm trying to do with my music. What about AI? Well, let's talk a little bit more about the album. The album was like folk. It's got a lot of banjo, a lot of fiddle, a lot of acoustic guitar, but it's kind of like a modern folk take inspired by some country stuff that I like to listen to, but I am not country. So I'm not going to try to sound country because it would be performative and cultural appropriation. But I do really like turnpike troubadours and more country infused stuff. So it's inspired by some of that, but it's not that. Wives, you know your husband would fight for your family without hesitation. But every night needs armor, and in today's world, that means ballistic protection made for the modern defender. Armored Republic makes real armor for real men, law-abiding citizens, fathers, husbands, protectors. Visit armoredrepublic.com, that's armoredrepublic.com or text Join All Caps Join to 88027 and help your husband stand strong. [Music] Hey there friends, let me tell you about Grey Toad Tallow. 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Combining nurse-driven coaching, personalized testing, and practical, database care to help women restore balance in hormones, gut health, fertility and weight. Plus, she can do all of that remotely via telemedicine. Visit liveoakintegrativehealth.com/harth to book your discovery call today. Listeners of the show will receive a special rate. [Music] The album has eight songs, eight original songs, and I hope you like it. So, I'll say that. I'll talk about how you can support it before the end of this episode. But what about AI? There's like a battle raging right now. Not just in the Christian world, but in the world about AI. Like, where does it fit? Is it legitimate? Is it illegitimate? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it neutral? And the way that I think about AI is through the lens of my existing doctrine of technology. Like, through the lens of my existing principles that I think are true from scripture and nature about technology. Which is that technology is, I won't say that it's neutral, but I will say that it's a tool. Tools are not neutral. People think tools are neutral because of statements like, well, a gun is a tool and a gun can be used for murder or to defend justice. Great. So it's neutral. Well, not really because it shapes a tool shapes the person using it. So it's not neutral in the sense of it's just a totally blank slate sort of thing. The tool itself, the way that it works shapes how you, it shapes the user. So social media as a tool shapes people. The vehicle and medium of communication shapes the way that people communicate and therefore shapes them. Now you can say true things on social media and false things on social media. But in that sense, it is a tool that can be used for good or evil. But the tool itself is shaping the user. So when we went from wheelbarrow, from buckets in lines of people carrying materials from a mine to where they needed to go, to wheelbarrows, to dump trucks, to trains, etc. That changed the people that were involved in that process. And it changed what the process was doing to them as they made the thing. So I am perfectly fine with technology being leveraged in good ways for good ends while we're being cognizant of what the tool is doing to us. So I've said something. It turned out to be controversial maybe a couple weeks ago as we record this. I said, like, you're a immediate reaction to here to finding out that a song was AI generated should be visceral discussed. Okay. I'm proud of you then. I was like, I was worried. I was worried there. I was like, oh. The whole album say I generated. No, it's not. AI is not involved in it at all. So why did I say that? What do I mean? What do I don't mean? Well, I mean that when you discover that somebody is especially somebody claiming to be a musician songwriter, etc. went to Suno or some of these programs and prompted generate me an emo song about this and that in this style. Check. And then it generates that. And then they say, well, I don't like the hook. Can you change it? And they interact with a little bit. They shape it. And there's human stuff going on. Like they're actually architecting it to an extent. But it's just spitting out. Nobody played an instrument. Nobody's sang into a microphone. In fact, there's not a human being. The voice you're hearing is not a human being. It's an algorithmic imitation of a human being. And you're doing all that. Is that a sin? No. I don't think it's a sin. Is it music the same way that we have conceived of music for a long time? I also don't think it is. No. Is the person making it a musician? No. I don't think they are a musician. I would agree. Now, are there ways in which AI can be involved in this technology? Can be involved in production of what I think is good, great music even. I'm curious your thought. And the answer is yes. This is already going to happen. Like the blurring of the line, people that don't produce music don't understand the blurring of the line in technology like already. So if you produce music in any DAW, which is like the program that you interact with the recorded files of music today in the 60s, 70s, it was tape recorded to magnetic tape. And then you would splice it together and run it through consoles and record it to other tape. And now it would be the masters. And then that could be pressed a vinyl or later cassette or CD or whatever. If you're producing music in a DAW, you have all sorts of tools, compression, EQ, all sorts of things, pitch, timing, whatever. You can mess with tons of different things. It will be so hard to tell the difference between where AI stops and digital alteration begins already in some tools. This is true. I don't have any that I'm aware of in my I use very little production tools like this because I don't mix them. I don't produce my own music anymore. I generally send raw recordings of things to my producer that are I don't even put compression on them. I just send them to him and then he's mixing them. But you know, there are going to be on every one of those tools, there are going to be AI integrations that are like, let me look at this file. And we're in the past, the digital algorithm that was emulating this great 1970s compression console. Now it's using AI to do some of that. The difference though is that I am a musician still played music. He still played keys and he played a guitar and he's saying a song and he wrote a song and he put it in there. I think that can be great. I think that AI can be a great tool and maybe I will use it for this. I have not. I have never generated an AI song to my memory like at all, even once. What I think you could do as a musician is use it to produce a demo that helps you explain something to a musician or a producer. So like when I'm one of the hardest things about producing music with other musicians is that they're not in your head. So if I tell a fiddle player, I literally do this a lot of the time. I'll be like, can you do this? You just, if you heard that, that was the fiddle line from Psalm 112, from my setting of Psalm 112. That's where it came from. I wrote that on the guitar, but it's harder to play on the guitar with the right phrasing from what a fiddle can do. I sang it. I literally sat there and I over the track. I sang. And I would send that to him and like there's some limitation to that. I could see using an AI to very quickly iterate ideas like that because you can sing to an AI now. You can sing. I think Suno has its own dog and you could go. This is the fiddle part I want. Zidlibap and do that. And then it would it would generate a fiddle and help you iterate. And then you could change it really, really quickly until you're ready to then go to the fiddle player and say, here's kind of what I'm looking to do. But even then some of the magic comes from the fiddle player saying, what about this? Yeah, because they are a fiddle player. They being a creative Indian of themselves. Yeah. Yeah. So I wouldn't even I also wouldn't just want to like prompt songs and then have them reverse engineered note for note because there is something glorious that's happening in that process of music creation. And actual putting it together. So I think there I have just for fun. Like to just see what it could do. I've done stuff like this. Hey, Grock, because I I use Grock for any AI stuff I use because for like LLM stuff because I have Twitter premium. So it's like included. And I have I've said I've said, Hey, I'm writing a song about this. This is the first verse. What would you write for a second verse? And then it'll be like, great question. Here's a second verse. And they it's tear it's not good. It is cheesy. It's the nonsensical. But the thing is, even if it could get to the point where it could write a really good verse, I still wouldn't want it to. Because I like writing music. I want the song to be a song I wrote. And the thing is, like, take this song in the album about America. I wrote a song about America, different regions of America. I'm writing it not just for Mass appeal, but like, I want it to capture what I think of in these different places. Yeah. The Rocky Mountains, something Northwest. You think about a musician has a body that is their tool that they're using for all of these different mediums. And so that musician also has a soul. A.I. is also a tool like the musician's body is a tool, but there's no soul there. So there's no embodied experience. And that's part of what the arts are is teaching. We're training our affections for something. It's an embodied, not disembodied experience, which is why if all we were was these, you know, bodies are going to, or souls that are going to go up into the sky, then narcissism would be true, but it's not. So I think that's part of why there's such like a lame sauce, part of the A.I. juice in art is because there's not a soul there to have experience that themselves. So it does come across as cheesy. Yeah. It is predicting in a way that it gets rewarded in the algorithm, in the neural network. However you want to describe it, it gets rewarded for picking the most likely next word or its note or next sound wave. And it's just doing that. It doesn't have a soul. It's not really thinking. A.I. cannot be conscious. It literally cannot have consciousness. People who are telling you it can are, they don't understand what consciousness is. Even when I went on Tim Poole and talked about A.I. with that Russian fellow, they just, they're people mistake the imitation of consciousness for consciousness and the imitation of thought for thought. It's really not though. It's not even the Che, Sir ol's Chinese room experiment. I think debunks the idea of computers as having consciousness. It doesn't. It's following rules. It's generally imitating consciousness. And so there's something that's happening where to me, an optimal use of a tool is that a tool properly used, it gives you more time for leisure as Joseph P.P.er defines it. It gives you more time for that school lay, more time to ponder and meditate and think beautiful thoughts and pursue truth and create works of art and culture, even ones that have no use of efficiency, a painting doesn't really have much efficient use. You look at it. Definitely. Yeah. It doesn't do anything for you. You could say, but actually it does do things for you. It has the illusion of not doing anything for you because the things that are doing are different than a washing machine or something along those lines. So to me, when we get into the relationship between creative endeavors like art, as well as the telling of truth, like in writing or books or things like that, we need to be very careful that we're not seeding our, what makes that work beautiful and glorious and good and helpful and grows us, not give that away to a machine that's imitating consciousness and doesn't actually have it. That's true. I didn't think about it from that perspective. If you are an artist of any kind using AI, you're curtailing the virtue process that it's growing in you by just having to do the work of getting a completed piece done. Yeah. It's like people talk about how writers talk about. AI is really, it's massively changed the way that I write because it's broken through writer's block and it helps me get through that hardest first starting point in writing where I'm saying I'm writing about this. I can just start talking with the AI and it will give me ideas and it will give me all this stuff. And while that can be helpful, I've had that experience many times talking to people. Yeah, that's what I was just going to say. Yeah. And you break through the writer's block and you get going, but you have to be aware of what just happened. The algorithmic prediction trained on the totality of its training data is the thing that gave you the starting point and shaped the very foundations of the project you're working on. So now from the starting parameters, you've allowed that training data set and that particular AI model to steer you to a starting point direction. And now you're starting from there within those parameters and you feel like writer's block has been removed and maybe it has. Maybe it genuinely did help you and you do something true and great with that. And I'm not trying to make absolute, I think to with when you start talking about tools, it's hard to make absolute statements, period about a lot of things. But I just at least want you to be aware of the what just happened. What was that training data? Was it read it? Because a lot of them are read it like a huge bulk of the training data is read it. Or it's so you don't realize that it's not having like new actual thoughts. It is predicting the next word that most probably fits in a sentence. Yeah. Based on training data and the way that it's programmed. So when it comes to music, I do think people will do really interesting things with AI and some of it will probably be really cool even and maybe people will come up with ways that integrate AI in the same way that like other technologies have affected the way we do create music or many other things. I think that's true. And so on that level, I'm trying right now not to like make the most all encompassing absolute statements without taking a minute and letting it develop and thinking about it. But what I am deeply suspicious of is people who think that generative AI technology, take it, you know, take it with music, apply to something like music generation is even the same thing or in the same category as people writing, producing and recording music. And it's just like that technology that we have a compressor that's digital. It's not. Generative AI by its nature is generative. It is making the thing. It's generating it. You're prompting it and that is a skill. It's actually hard to prompt things really well. But it's a different thing. It's a different category. Something different is happening and that is going to create different virtues and character and different things in the people doing it. The other thing it's going to do is it wildly cheapens everything. Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh. Yes. Now, technologically in a similar way to what the printing press did, the printing press wildly lessened the value of every single written word. Because before a copy of the of the Bible would cost you to equivalent, I don't know, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 dollars because it was a monk who spent like six months. So it was a full time job for six months to make one copy of the Bible. Now you can print 10,000 copies of the Bible in 48 hours or just quicker with the right technology. Did that lessen the value of each printed word in a sense? Yes. So even that doesn't by itself tell you that it's terrible or evil or should never be used. But we do have to be aware of what's going to happen. Just in the music industry, what's going to happen is that right now a lot of people are going to start flooding streaming platforms with AI music, generating music. It was total slop. They did absolutely nothing. It's just crap. Oh my gosh. I just. And then people are going to listen to it and not be able to tell the difference at first because they're boomers and they don't understand. But pretty soon and already in some cases, just because it won't be possible to tell the difference as it gets better. Okay. Streaming platforms are going to look at that and saying, why should I let them do that? Yep. And pay them even the point zero zero three cents per stream when we could just generate it. In fact, what's going to happen very soon as compute power goes up is that you're going to be able to go on Spotify and say generate me a playlist of indie folk, mood, mood music that is instrumental for studying. And it will generate hundreds of songs for you. And no one will ever listen to them, but you and they will pay nobody royalties for that. It's economic. The economic incentives are going to shape how the technology is used. I have so much to say. I listened to a painter and an art critic. Both I would say like not they're definitely not like postmodern at all. Like they think that's all crap. So I valued their opinion on this talking about this for a while. And what you said about cheapening things. I mean, they were just talking about one guy. They both followed this artist and just it was like a new and up and coming artist who was fabulous. The one painter said I just wanted to completely give up on any of my paintings after watching him. And then he happened to like see and passing in one of his stories on Instagram that he generated all of his compositions with AI. He painted them himself, but the compositions were all AI. And so I mean, I have watched multiple painters who will go just show like I could spend a whole day on a composition, finally get, you know, tone the canvas, get the composition on the canvas and then realize that doesn't work. That's a whole day's worth of work gone. That you're just having to go through process of elimination. What works best in my eye? After having spent all of the time studying the principles of art underneath it, the value of three where light hits best, the shadow, what we do with all of that, all of those are hours that that brain and that person and that soul spent to be able to then contrive a beautiful scene on their own. But if you have an artist who can go in and use AI to get some good compositions, that's immediately cheapening it because there's like, I don't know, 48 hours taken out of that, years of training of studying art principles taken out of that because AI suddenly can do it for you. So that was interesting to see their perspective on it and they kind of came to the conclusion that though they would never do it and they don't like it, they think all artists should be required to say when and where they're using AI as part of their creative process in general. Yeah, it's, it's, there's so many things that are just like that. It won't happen. Yeah. And it will become so embedded in ubiquitous that nobody will even think twice about it in 10 years. Well, and you can even go, I mean, I've heard artists on both ends of the spectrum on limited palette versus buying all of your colors. Like I, I value knowing the skill set myself. So I'm trying to work with as limited as a palette as I can because it is so hard to mix colors. But even that is a technology that some people are opting to just say, okay, I just buy all my colors at the store. Yeah. At what point do you freeze technological advancement? Yes. The point is that there's no principle that would say, at least no moral principle that I think that would say you must freeze technology at this year and everything before that was moral and everything after that was immoral. Yeah. It's just not how it, what we need to be thinking about, that's what I keep driving it to like, what is it doing to you? What is the tool doing to you? Be aware of that. Think deeply about it. And don't lie. Don't be like generative AI music that's, that's, they like develop Instagram accounts for them with a fake person that is like singing the songs and whatnot. Don't do that. I think that's fake and gay. This AI is going to have the effect of boosting real people doing real things in person. More, which is awesome. I'm, I'm generally positive about that. Even though I can't tour and do music that much as a musician, I think that's a good turn of events. It's a fun concert I do every year at the new Christian impressed thing. It's so much fun. Something different happens there. Then in my produced music and it is worse music in an, in to some extent, it's not polished. It's not perfect. It's not like I can't do two texts. You like after multiple days of talking. Yeah, it's like worse music. Well, I have my voice for this concert. Who knows? Exactly. But it's also better because people, they're listening to it. They can see, oh, he actually is a real person. I can play this on the guitar. It's a real song. He actually wrote this. So for now, I don't, even for a project like the Westminster shorter catacism songs, which would be really easy to just give over to AI. I think I could do like finish it in about a week. I'm not going to do it because I happen to enjoy. I think it's still worth doing it with real instruments and real people involved. And I like the results. I think they're different. I've heard a lot of AI music. I haven't been impressed by much of it. A lot of what it does is it lets people who are like one of the selecting processes that has selected for greatness and a thing is that let's say that you were not that great of a vocalist, but you are a really good songwriter. Bob Dylan is a kind of like this. Great is a strong word. I mean, like he because of a songwriting could make it, but now people can make like million dollar polish. They think at least I don't think it's really that music, but they're not good at writing. They're not going to phrasing so they don't hear how clunky their lyrics are. They don't hear how that didn't work. But the AI forced it to work. It made the song. But if you had produced that with people who had experience, the producer would have said that line is really clunky. That doesn't really scan. That doesn't make sense. You're emphasizing the syllable in that word in a really weird way to make it fit, to make it scan. That all matters. When you hear a really good song, you don't know that all of that mattered because you just hear a good song. You're not distracted by it. But there was craft that went into all of that. Now even if AI could make better music than anybody else in the whole world writing and producing, I still think making music is one of those things people should do. And be able to do. And we shouldn't let robots steal it from us. It's the same reason I should learn to make bread and not let the grocery store make it for me. Yeah, there is a value there. There's a Christian principle there that you lose if you just. Yeah, I think it's a glory. And it doesn't mean that anybody who buys bread is sinning. No. That's not actually the level of the discussion we're having right now. We're talking about glories. We're talking about shaping you. We're talking about things that are happening to you. So in those are good things that you should embrace. So we're out of time for this episode. I don't know if anybody on Brightheart cares about what we just said. I do. I think it's interesting. It's a part of our world. This whole vocation thing. All of the thoughts that we're expressing here are just one little part of how we've thought about this one aspect of the productive Christian household we're involved in. And it's not just to us a thing to make money with or some other. It's a part of the character of our household. Like when my children. I would love. It would absolutely delight me if one of my great-grandchildren cared about my music. I have no illusions that they will. By that time, it'll probably be forgotten. But if one of my songs. They were like. My great-grandfather made this song. And they still listen to it and they're like, he did it with a guitar. An ancient technology. Now we just have our whatever. I don't know what the world will be like, but I hope they'll care about it. Either way, it will become a part of our family's culture. As all of your. If you're a plumber or musician, it becomes a part of what makes your family your family. And so when you're thinking about vocation, that's one of the things that you're thinking about. It's like, who are we as a people? So I can't leave the episode without at least inviting you to help make it a reality. Like I said, I do spend a lot making projects like this happen. They're not cheap, easy-quick. I do this the hard way. And I do that on purpose. I do that on purpose because I think there's a glory there. And I think it shows in the final thing in ways that it wouldn't if we did it the easy way. But I can't keep doing it if I don't have people supporting it through patronage. I just. I can't. It would be. Or at least I would be diminished significantly. I could probably wait until the albums had been streamed 10 or 15 million times enough to then. It would make it quite a bit different and reduce the amount that I could accomplish. So if you want to help make this next album possible and you can hear a pre-release master of one of the songs, the song I wrote to fix women with all the tears, you can chip in at BrianSovey.com/ShortYears. And it's. Some of the tears are actually. They're less just like you giving money that you get nothing back. But some of them are functioning kind of like a pre-order of the vinyl, which is I think vinyl is really fun. It's like this analog, it's digital, it's real press to vinyl. We have a vinyl. They're fun thing you do. So you will actually get a copy of the vinyl record and other stuff at the $50 tier, which is not that much more than what it would just cost you to buy the vinyl anyway. So if you're planning on buying the vinyl, having these pre-sale and kickstarted stuff helps me offset all these costs ahead of time instead of them being trickling in over the next year. I will sign a number of copies of the vinyl at certain tiers. I have some funny ones at certain. I'm going to make a t-shirt design that will never be made again just for supporters at certain tiers as well. I'm going to make a special VIP seating area at the live concert in June that will be kind of funny in ways. So you don't actually have to accept that if you don't want to be the object of me forcing everybody to look at you and say, look at these great patrons of the arts. And I'm going to get you some kind of patron of the art badge that everybody can know that you are a man of taste. You are a patron. You're like the Medici's. You're a patron of the arts. That's literally who I was thinking of. That's so funny because they had their own seats. Yeah, they're on seats. They're on really in the back of the. To be clear, I would never do this for any like ecclesiastical thing. This is a music concert. It's a fun thing. It's not the tracks. Oh, yeah. not a service. It's not even like worship music. It's just our stuff I like to do. I'm going to do a post concert hangout. So after the concert, there will be a kind of a small hangout for certain patrons of that support the album that I'll invite you to probably in my office, depending on how many people there are my recording studio or the basement of the church. It will be fun. At the. Is this just assuming the patrons are coming to the conference? Yeah, you have to be there. The second highest here, I will give you semi exclusive rights to the title Brian's top guy. And I will also tire shoes for you one time upon request. And that is true. I will do that. You have airfare and lodging on included, but I will do that. And then at the highest here, basically if someone is an oil baron and they really do want to support like fund 80% of the album single handedly, I'll give you all the other stuff, but then you actually get exclusive rights to the title Brian is your top guy. And then you will get the actual Taylor 517 acoustic, which is like a $3,000 guitar, by the way, that I use to write the album. And I've I've performed with it. I have written several pieces of me like most of this album and some of the last one too. I wrote on this guitar with a certificate of authenticity. I really do mean this. If you want to support it at that level, I will give you that guitar as a thank you, because that shows that you really care about it. And you will take care of it. And either hang it up somewhere in a place, fun or play it yourself. And so that's the fundraiser. It's Brian survey.com slash short years. And there you go there. There is a video that Evan, oh, we didn't even talk about the cover Evan, Evan Brandt who works for New Christian and press. He's he's a great artist himself when it comes to photography and videography. And other things. He shot the album cover with our family. We it's the first album cover that's like actual photography and included in it. I made all the previous ones completely myself. But even that I use some AI stuff on a couple of them. I won't do that again. I thought about it more. And do you remember when you made my AI thing for my sub stack? And I was so mad. I was so disappointed. Yeah. That was funny. So good. Evan shot the album cover features Winifred, our little Winifred. And the symbol is in my help. You'll get the symbolism. But think about the album thing like that. You'll get it. And then we also shot a promo video for it that you can see at Brian's Hover.com/shortyears. Anyway, that's the that's the episode. So we hope you guys enjoy the music. And then it blesses you. And that this was an interesting at least on some level peak into one of my vocations and how I think about it and then adapting in a world of robots trying to steal people's jobs, man. But thanks for listening guys. We'll catch you next time on Briarth. If you like our podcasts, we think you'll love our books. 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