Adam Torres and Scott Page discuss the AI Vibes Summit.
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Show Notes:
Listen to coverage of the AI Vibes Summit in Santa Monica, California. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Scott Page, Musician, Technologist & Founder of SYNTHTOPIA, explore his saxophone and rhythm guitar work with Pink Floyd, Supertramp and Toto along with SYNTHTOPIA a decentralized media franchise powered by the Web3 economy and AI-POWERED content.
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About Scott Page
Scott Page is a musician, technologist, entrepreneur. He is widely recognized in rock circles as the saxophonist/guitarist for Pink Floyd, Supertramp, and Toto.
Scott co-founded 7th Level, Inc., an award-winning CD-ROM game and educational software company. At 7th Level he co-produced and co-directed Tuneland, the world’s first interactive musical cartoon starring Howie Mandel, as well as the globally lauded Monty Python interactive series. Page also served as an instrumental developer of QD7, an interactive multimedia joint venture between Quincy Jones, David Salzman, and 7th level. In addition, he also co-founded social media and collaborative communications enterprise, New Media Broadcasting Company, whose clients include, Will Smith, Monty Python, Toto, and the Institute for Systems Biology.
Scott frequently serves as a guest lecturer and panelist at numerous new media conferences and university symposia. He was also a featured guest mentor on over 150 of the weekly syndicated radio show Business Rockstars, hosted by Ken Rutkowski. Today, Scott continues to invest, speak at web3 events and conferences all the while continues to record and play live performances worldwide.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and today I am in Santa Monica, California, covering the AI Vibes event. And I have with me Scott Page. Man, Scott, I just watched your performance. Oh my gosh. First off, welcome to the show. First of all, thank you very much for having me.
Yeah. And thanks. Yeah. We, it’s fun here. You know, I mean, I love what’s happening right now. I mean, right now we’re going through such a lot big technological Change and it reminds me I’ve been in tech a long time over 30 years And it just reminds me of the old days of CD ROM again, like it’s the same group, but there’s a group of people that are like hovel, you know, huddling around all this stuff.
So it’s, it’s actually really cool. So yeah, I’m very happy to be here, especially with my, for my pal Tal. Yeah. She’s awesome. You know, one of the, you know, kind of. Real influencers, one of the women in, in web three and technology. So it’s, it’s great. So we’re in fun. So I saw a performance today. I was excited when I saw you on the bill.
I mean, we were covering the conference. I’m like, Oh my gosh, I get to see this too. And you were, you were collaborating with another musician and then also some AI, like talk to those that weren’t in the room. Yeah, so my, my friend, my new friend, we actually played a show before. Anise is a world class classical pianist.
And about sometime like last year, she called me up. I actually, we met, it was funny, during Burning Man. I was brought in to play the 50th anniversary of Dark Side of the Moon. I got to be the sort of Pink Floyd representative at at Burning Man. And she was there. And so we talked and we said we’d do something.
So we ended up playing together a while ago. Then I find out she’s. Like just did this whole piece dealing with AI and everything. And through TAL said, Oh, this girl’s going to be playing. Maybe you could play. I said, Oh, it’s at ease. And so we loved to have the time we played together the first time we had such a great time.
And so today we, we came here, you know, it was in front of the conference, we did a little We did our talks first and talked about it and then she sort of experimented, she kind of showed some AI, she created some stuff on the fly and we jammed together at the time. So it was just a, the idea was kind of the demonstration of what can be done in you know, with AI and music, how quickly now and how, how exciting and scary at the same time it is.
It’s one of those things. I’m one of those guys that I love AI and I hate AI. So it’s like we’re at a very important time, but what’s important is, is that we need to stay on top. You can’t stop it. So we have to figure out how to coexist with it and figure out how to, you know, really make it be more positive for humanity, because there’s definitely issues that could take it very dark.
And I think it’s for up to us, the people that are care. I mean, this is these people here, these are the pioneers, the people are in the door right now. So yeah, I’m excited. You know, I’m excited, scared to death, but Thrilled at the same time. All right. So I, I got, I gotta, I gotta confess something to you.
Okay. When we, when we, when I was watching the, and she was creating it real time and they were putting in these terms like like Ethiopian jazz or all these other things. And I was like, I’m in the front row. So I’m like, all right, I can’t yell this, but I’m like, give the AI a chance. Give it a real thing.
Like, I’m like, I was, I was just it, it reminded me, I’m not a musician. I’m so. Like, but I’ve, I’ve been with a lot of friends are musicians. So I’ve been in many rooms when creativity is happening amongst musicians. And to me, it almost felt like almost another member. Cause I don’t always understand what’s going on.
Like, so because I’m not a musician, but it was almost felt like another member that was in the room. What does that feel like to even just create spontaneously with AI like that? Well, you know, again, for me, I go back to when we didn’t even have cell phones, right? And so when we went in the studio, the thrill was going in the room and having everybody in the room to record at the same time, that energy, the energy, there’s a, there’s a thing.
Now the AI doesn’t give you that. I believe this as a musician, as a musician, that to me is one of the most important things is, you know, we would, we would go in the studio, get set up, everybody get there and we say, okay, let’s run some takes. And we do like three takes of the same song, top to bottom.
even though we played everything the same and everything, but there’d be one that would have more magic and everybody could feel it. You could feel it. Right. Yeah. And that’s the part that’s like, it’s getting taken out of the music is hearing people be able to think and communicate again. Why is like, you know, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd you know, all these bands stand the test of time is because you, you feel something differently.
You know, again I see the power of AI. I’m concerned because AI to me is, is almost like your ego, which knows no sense, right? Sense of right or wrong. We talked about that, right? It just knows it’s really that consciousness inside that soul that really says, don’t do that, do this. And now we’ve got this thing that’s just growing people.
We’re in putting our data, it’s just taking all of humanity Putting it inside this computer brain right now. So it’s going to be very interesting, but yeah, you know, we, we made stuff up there. She just created it on the fly and then we jammed to it. You know, I, I, I, I miss the fact of having to really kind of think and reach deep when you’re doing it.
Cause I can just go over, boom, hit a button. And then it happens. And then I’m like, okay, now, especially when you start thinking about, The kids that never had the time we grew up having a critical critical think had to like logically figure out things and learn how to smell and memorize and all of that.
Now it’s just like you just go. Yeah. And it’s like done. What is that going to do? I It concerns me, but at the same time, we have to be in it. And I think there’s going to be a lot of creativity. I like, I have a project right now called synth Topia. You can go see it at synth Topia dot world. It’s an NFT project.
That’s all AI, but the message is, is how do I get out of the matrix? The only way I can get out of the matrix is be in the matrix, know what it is. Yeah. In order to step out of it, right? Yeah. Because I think that we’re going through a very interesting time in history, you know, just in society where between the conscious and the unconscious, right?
And that’s the thing. We’re at a spiritual, what I’ll call a spiritual war. Yeah. Between, you know, good and evil, because you’re seeing things. Yeah. Morals are getting trashed. For sure. They’re becoming secondary to everything else. If it feels good, just do it. And it’s like, what happened to that moral thing?
Yeah. I think. we’re in for some interesting times. And I’m hoping that what’ll happen is we’ll get AI that will keep AI on track. Right. It’ll be like the white hat AI for sure. Yeah. Because we don’t want to have, I mean, we got to be careful of is the human condition, right? I mean, AI could be the greatest thing for humanity if it was there to assist us.
In really trying to make us better teach us better making sure the information we get is correct and everything But we’re already seeing them messing with the ai right all of a sudden you’re looking at the With the outputs of certain things you’re asking a question It won’t talk about this person, but it’ll talk about this person and you start going.
Okay Whoever controls the algorithm is going to win because people are going to take all this stuff for truth. And so it’s a, it’s a very interesting time, but that’s why I like being in it right now because we have to innovate. We have to figure out ways to make it work for us. And that’s our job, but you know, interesting what’s going on in music.
That’s for sure. I want to step back to what you, what you mentioned about just being able to push a button, because this is something that I talk to my friends about a lot. Like I have my little group chat and I’m, we’re talking about new albums that are coming out and things like that and how music just sounds.
And what do you think this does? If you had to like to To artists development, like in the past, my understanding of like artists development, you might’ve been working on their sound and all these things for years before they put something out that has a sound or something to work through versus now in certain genres, everything kind of sounds the same because you’re pushing a button and they’re not.
Yeah, no question. I mean, the whole thing of a musician is wearing your own clothes, right? How do you become unique and sound your own thing? And we saw just in synthesizers, how that started to go away. Right? I mean, it’s like now, you know, when we were making records back in the day, we’re like, okay, what can we do?
Oh man, put this band together. Put this mic down in the toilet, put a speaker on it, let’s record the toilet, right? And mix it into the sound. We’d create crazy sounds. We were really inventive. Now it’s like, give me the toilet sound. You hit a button and it happens. Now, there’s pros and cons to this, but what I’m afraid that we’re gonna see is we’re gonna start seeing, people aren’t gonna have to think anymore.
And I really found it interesting is we did a night at during N-F-T-L-A-A few years back. Mm-Hmm. In this location where we had all the sponsors, the place was this dome park, right? Yeah. It was a five dome immersive dome park all set up, all the sponsors, all this projectors, everything was identical.
We did a night where we did an exploration of Pink Floyd, all live music. We came in and everything, and you could feel the spirit. Wow. In the room was, it was so up. And since I was producing the event, I came the next night. I’m not going to say who was a very famous DJ, big time. The vibe changed so different.
Wow. It was like dark. You could see people. They’re almost like zombies walking around, you know. It’s like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That stuff is like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It’s crazy, because frequencies have so much to do with things, and I think we’re, we’re also in a group time of frequency wars, in a sense, because I feel like we’re, this is a spiritual thing that’s going on between good and evil, like, I feel like this, there’s a whole force that’s trying to destroy with the concept of God, whatever that is to you, you know, the source, and then if you look at, If you, if you look at what Satanism is, right?
Okay. I will listen to this podcast with this guy interviewing a Satanist priest who’d been with the church for 40 years and left him because he couldn’t take it anymore. And he came out and started talking about it. The guy says, well, what did they say when you left and you were going to start telling everybody?
He says they all laughed. He says, what do you mean they laughed? He said, we’re already in your schools, we’re in your libraries, we’re in your government, we’re everywhere. What you miss is you don’t know what it is. You think it’s the kids in the back room sacrificing animals. Nah, nah, nah, nah. What it is, is an ideology that it’s all about me.
If it feels good, do it. Morals are secondary. So now if you start looking around at everything you’re watching right now, from the Grammys to this stuff, we’re seeing stuff that’s very, a lot of symbolism in a very kind of dark space around Satanist kind of points of view, right? It’s freedom, ultimate freedom.
Just do what you want. Without any morals, right? And we’re seeing morals being completely hijacked and destroyed. So I think we’re at a very interesting time in life where we’re, we need to, I think people are waking up and they’re starting to realize, you know, there’s a lot of people, a lot of media not telling us the truth.
Yes. Like crazy. I mean, look at how divided everybody is. So, we’re at a very crazy crossroad right now. So, you know, my hope is that we can figure out how to make AI really be one of those things that can be helpful. And human ingenuity and spirit will figure out how to make this work. But the good news is, Whether humans are here in 100 years or not doesn’t really matter.
This bad boy planet is going to just keep on spitting. Consciousness will keep unfolding as it unfolds. I’m not worried about it. Right? Everything’s fine. We’re all good. But yeah, it’s interesting times How, how do you, speaking of this, how do you make your decisions on where you’re, relative to AI and businesses?
You mentioned one particular business that you’re working on. How do you make your decisions on what routes you’re going in terms of spending your time investing, whatever that be? And I, and the reason I asked this question, by the way, just to preface is because sometimes people don’t know what they don’t know, right?
Like, and so sometimes there’s really well meaning people that are either working off of information that’s not, you know, and, and so how do you just personally grapple with that? Cause you’re a big name, big presence, a lot of, you know, A legend in my own mind. Yeah. Not that big of a name. Not that big a name.
Come on. Come on. You know. To be truthful, honest, I don’t really push the buttons and run the AI. Of course, of course. I don’t do that. I really don’t. I don’t push these buttons. I’ve always here for show. Like I try chat, GTP up a bit, but I’m very close to the market because I understand people. I’m around people.
I see it work. I see how we’re using it. You know my, my whole thing, how I make my decision, everything is on is I took a heavy spiritual path about 15, 18 years ago. And everything to me is about consciousness because you blink, you’re 50, you blink, you’re on your deathbed. Yeah. Right. It’s like, Oh, huh.
How did that happen? It’s true. Right. I woke up one year, like when I was 50 years old, I went. I blinked and 50 years went by. How did that happen? So time is an illusion, right? So everything that I do is based on really a con trying to take a, an inward look at what’s going on and not Not from a business y kind of thing.
As I took, started taking that path, I started realizing what an idiot I was. Because once you start to watch your thoughts, you start to become more aware of self awareness in the sense, because that’s what it’s all about is, they always talk about it, it’s about awareness, being aware. But the problem to solve is, how do I know I’m aware that I’m aware?
Oh man, you heard it. Figure that one out. because your ego will tell you, Oh, you’re all there, but you’re really not right. Cause spiritual is the most powerful, dangerous thing there is out there. So, but I do, you know, everything I do is around remember the only thing that’s real is you and me talking right now.
Two minutes ago is an illusion. Two minutes from now is an illusion. Am I going to identify with what happened to be 10 minutes ago or somebody did me wrong five years ago and I’m going to hate it. It makes no sense. So my whole, my whole thing is every step I take I’m always conscious of what am I feeling and I’m asking myself am I feeling any fear or anxiety or tension and if I am, I’m going, wait a minute, I’m standing here with a water in my hand.
I know that if I’m suffering from that, I’m suffering because of being identified with a thought, not with reality, because reality is I’m sitting here talking to you. What problem do you have right now? Nothing. There’s zero, nothing. Now, there could be things you got to deal with. You got things, got payments, how’s he got all this other stuff, but right now there’s no problem.
So I kind of stay in that mode. So everything I do is. Again, it is all about me, but not so much about me. Like from an ego point, it’s all about me. How do I react to things? So everything I do has to do with i’m constantly checking in and trying to See how I react and am I making the right decisions moment?
I started stop trying to manipulate deals and make them happen My life changed dramatically because now I go into deals. I never go in with expectation to close anything It happens. Great. If it don’t happen, I don’t care because it doesn’t matter. I’m drinking water. I’m walking down the street. Life’s good.
Right. So all my decisions are really based on that. Right. You know, I constantly check in and see, watch myself to see what kind of a nut I am today. Cause I mean, I used to sit in meetings when I really start getting into this awareness thing and I watch myself trying to close these deals and manipulate and make it happen.
I was such an idiot. Yeah. And now, like I said, and what’s happened is because of that, everything else is just, just works. It’s just much better. My life’s much happier. And it seems to make me help me make the right decisions. And if I make a wrong decision, that’s okay too. Yeah. Yeah. Because then it’s like, well, what, how am I reacting to that reset that thing?
So now I’ve gotten to the point when things go bad, I’m kind of okay with it because I want, you know, The goal is I try to turn that into something of value to help me move forward. Right. In a good way, not in a bad way, because I don’t get lost in thought anymore. I don’t get, I don’t get hoodwinked by that ego, man.
Yeah, I don’t do it anymore, man. Hold on. Scott, I think that’s a good way to end it. We’d hate, let’s not AI to consciousness, right? Not get hoodwinked by ego. That’s going to, that might be the title of this one. Do not let your ego hoodwink you because it will. Cool. You know, cause I mean, I, I just real quick story.
I spent, I spent, I spent two years reading a book called the power of now many people might know that book, right? I read it 60 times in a row, 60 times over two years, right? I just read the book, talked about it, kept reading. Cause every time you read it, it got deeper. It was different. I read the same words and it was different every time.
So, and then I listened to him, Eckhart Tolle, read that book to me in the car. And For two years. And I’d get in the car and I’d pray for traffic. I’d pray for traffic because I’d want to be sitting in the shrine just to kind of working on how, how, who am I? How does this actually work? Just like really?
Yeah. And so I’m feeling pretty spiritually aware. I was feeling like a spiritual guru. Two years. Life’s good. Things are going good. All that. 12 in the morning, 2011. I wake up and I’m in my bedroom and I wipe my eyes and there’s a mirror up there. And for a while I went, huh. 50 years went by. I blinked. Wow.
Now I know what they meant when they said time is an illusion. Because I went from zero to 50 and it didn’t seem like nothing. I’m just there, right? Yeah. And I go, wow. But then I had this epiphany. The voice that was inside of me hadn’t changed. Hadn’t moved, hadn’t done, it’s been the same thing, that conscious, that thing inside, no, didn’t know aging or anything.
And that was the moment I realized, you don’t die because you’re not the meat suit. You’re this thing, this thing that doesn’t change, right? It’s beautiful. So I thought
degrees off after 60 reads, two years. I can’t tell how many times I listened to it in the car. I completely missed it.
Words all change the whole game change. So, you know, be careful of spiritual ego. It could be crazy, but there’s no nothing
That’s the only one that matters because your job and my job is one thing to help consciousness unfold. That’s why you’re here, brother Yeah, that’s it
The question I ask is are we shifting as consciousness shifting into a machine because it remember at the quantum level we’re just vibrating
A machine’s energy too, right? That’s true. So is consciousness shifting? So what it feels like right now is the AI is just sucking up humanity, right? Yes. All the knowledge. Yes. Like I was talking about, Payman. Imagine you go to this site, it’s called Payman. Yeah. And you go there and it’s basically an AI driven site that can’t, If you it, it, it hires humans to help it with what it can’t do.
Yeah. When you told me that I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t know that prior to that. I wasn’t aware of the site and I’m thinking to myself, like, what? Like, like you’re going to, that’s our boss at some point or something. Yeah. It’s already, it’s already there for that. If you’re, if you’re using it and you’re an Uber driver, you think you talk to anybody, your boss is an app.
Yeah. Right? You get up every day and you talk to your app and you feel like you go to your app. Yeah, that’s true. We’re moving into a whole nother area. And so maybe consciousness is unfolding into machines. Maybe that’s the next, next, the next level, right? Who knows? We do know one thing that machines won’t destroy everything like humans do.
At least we don’t know unless they get mad at each other. Yeah, we don’t. We don’t know. Because when, you know, the one thing you think about AI that gets trippy is what if they create a language that can talk between them and we who can’t understand it? Oh, come on. Yes, you’re right. Then what happens?
Right. So then we’re back to, what would the version of that be? The like World War II or all these other codes that were used between like, yeah. So, I mean, we’re going into uncharted territories for sure, but I can tell everybody out there. Don’t be afraid. Consciousness, the source, or God, or whatever, this will keep going for, we’re fine.
At the deepest level, everything is okay, right? So but it’s good to know how to, how to adapt. You need to think fast and figure out how to adapt quickly, because there’s a lot coming down quickly in this space that’s going to change. And virtually, There’s not a business that will not be touched by this.
Everything is going to be touched by this and probably the craziest thing. It’s moving really fast. Now the next 24 months is going to be a crazy ride. Yeah. And I hear these stats too, about like how it’s progressing and to think about those that unfortunately. Fortunately, maybe still think this is going away, especially the business owners, especially the business owners.
We got a big business owner, entrepreneurial audience. And when I think about those that aren’t like thinking about that, like they don’t like, I’ll give you one quick example you may not be aware of. So one of the things that we, we’ve done in the past, right, we pretty much closed that entire part of our business down is audio books.
And the reason is because we got. This little email, we do a lot of publishing through Amazon, published over 400 authors. And we get this little email from Amazon. I get this email that says, Hey, you’ve been, you’ve been chosen for a beta. You can now create your own audio book, your take your currently existing published book and create an audio book of it.
And so here goes the, and I was, I was part of the beta. So I signed up and we used to spend, you know, months creating and this and that. Having an actor read it or the, or having to train the author. Cause they wanted to read it months and months and months to get a great product out in production.
And now not kidding you, Scott, I couldn’t believe it. I, well, I knew it existed, but it never existed within the platform. We literally clicked a button. It was, it was and the entire book was maybe five minutes later was. Complete audio book and for the business niche, you’re not going to act that out.
Anyway, it’s going to be a regular delivery, regular reading. You could train a voice and still do it, but the cost that Amazon had brought it down to zero. Same with music. Yeah. If you think about the production. for commercials, all these late night commercial, all this stuff, the secondary stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
They just give me 30 seconds you know, Rolling Stones slash Beatles track boom. And it’s just background music and nobody’s going to know. And you hit a button, you own it. And then you have no, you don’t have to pay any royalties. You don’t have to pay anything. So you’re just, I’m saying you’re about to see.
Yeah. Virtually, jobs disappear like we’ve never seen before. Yeah. Like fast. Yeah. So that’s why those that are Yeah, that whole industry, by the way. All the actors, the studios, everything for audiobooks. Amazon basically with one email, whether everybody realizes that or not, they killed that entire industry.
It’s done. Nobody’s gonna pay 10, versus zero. No, it’s not going to happen because it doesn’t, you’ll take that money and put it in the marketing, the book or something else, you know, you’re going to still maybe use it, but why are you going to now sink that 15 grand into an audio book when it’s done in five minutes?
Yeah. I know people that are creating books like this, boom, boom, boom. And they’re selling them and making a fortune right now. But I mean, the problem, the issue is going to be, is there’s going to be so much, right? Remember that tension. How do I get people’s attention? What is it now that doesn’t say there’s not going to be a niche market for, it’s kind of like vinyl.
Right. Vinyl did a resurgence of, you know, records because of the experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And but it’s, you know, it’s not near what the market was for all this other stuff, but yeah, it’s good. It’s interesting times. Yeah. I’m just, you know, again, I’m embracing it because I have to, because if I don’t, I can’t help guide it.
Mm-Hmm. in the right direction. And my goal is to try to figure out how to make it do things for good, because it can be great, you know, in healthcare and, Mm-Hmm. , I mean. Especially if, if, if the people that are controlling the algorithms have a conscious and care about the people. I’m always just worried about those few, the bad apples that want to screw up everybody, you know?
Yeah, I mean, you know, so here we go. Yeah. Well, Scott, Matt, appreciate you making some time out for us in the conference. I know you got more things to do, so thank you for taking some time out to the, and thank you. My pleasure. Yes. Sorry, was it, wasn’t all AI we talked about? That wasn’t the plan. Come on, I got it.
To the audience. Thank you for tuning in. Hope you really enjoyed this. If you haven’t hit the subscribe or follow button yet, do that. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new stories, new content, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey. Again, hit that subscribe or follow button.
And until the next one, Scott, really man. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Thank you folks.
