Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno

The New York Times app has all this stuff that you may not have seen. The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections. I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling. I go to games always.

Doing the mini, doing the wordle. I loved how much content it exposed me to. Things that I never would have thought to turn to a news app for. This app is essential.

The New York Times app. All of the times, all in one place. Download it now at nytimes.com slash app. I want to share one of my favorite episodes in recent memory with a musician and artist and legend, Brian Eno.

We spoke in 2025 about his book, What Art Does, and what art and creativity mean in the age of AI. The conversation remains a breath of fresh air, so I hope you, at this particular moment, enjoy it. I've got an email from a lot of you lately saying, can we do a show just off the news?

Can one show not be in the grim march of events? So here it is. How do you intro Brian Eno? Eno has a claim, as much as anyone does, to have invented the genre of ambient music.

So there's no narrative quality to the music. It just sort of starts, stays pretty much in one place and then ends. He certainly coined the term, built out the philosophy, sort of has eaten a lot of the music we now listen to. But also he's just done so many other things.

He's produced seminal albums by U2. David Bowie. The Talking Heads. Laurie Anderson.

Listen to the drum scene In our sleep Coldplay Hell, Eno composed the sound

that plays when you boot up Windows 95. Do you remember that one? A lot of sound we just take for granted. A lot of the way sound is now made.

Eno helped bring that into existence. A lot of his work on creating generative systems that make music can be seen as a forerunner to much of today's AI systems. And Eno is more than just a sonic technician or tinkerer.

He's this wonderful thinker and philosopher of art and just being a human being. and he's got this really delightful new book out What Art Does an unfinished theory

as well as a new album with B.D. Wolf called Liminal I wanted to talk to him about all of it or at least as much of it as I could

as always my email Ezra Klein show at NYTimes.com

Brian Nino, welcome to the show. Hello, Ezra. Nice to meet you. So, your new book is called What Art Does. And I guess, tell me, what does art do?

Well, perhaps I should tell you first why I thought that question needed answering. because in education in England, and in fact, I think probably in most parts of the world, the budgets that always get cut are the arts budgets

because there are apparently more important things that we should be teaching people. Science, engineering, financial technology, that kind of thing.

Yeah, you should be making short trades. Exactly, exactly. Are you really alive if you can't short a stock? So I've always thought that art is actually one of the most important things that humans

do with their time. In my book, there's a long list of things that I consider could come under the headline of art. And it includes, of course, obvious things like symphonies and photographs and paintings. But it includes cardigans and jewelry and makeup and tattoos and all the things that humans do that they don't have to do. None of those things have survival

benefits in the obvious sense. They're things we do to do something in our mind, to change our mind in some way. So what does art do? Why do we like it? I have this phrase in the book that children learn through play and adults play through art. And I think that's really what it does. when we look at children and we watch them playing, we don't think, oh, they're just

wasting their time. They should do something more serious. We realize that when children play, they're learning. They're understanding about materials, about social relationships, about their own bodies, their own minds, about where they live, all of those things that are very important to understand. And they do that infallibly and with a huge appetite. That's what

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

I want to zoom in on a word you use there, which is feel. One of the central arguments of the book is that art is a way we explore or attune to our feelings. And I guess that raises another question. You say, and I agree with this, that feelings have a bad reputation.

So to you, what do feelings do and why do they matter? Yes, so they have a bad reputation because they're very hard to quantify and measure. And of course, science wants things that are easily comparable and easily describable in some kind of language of quantity and measure.

Feelings, because they're subjective, are very difficult to do that with. However, the first response we have to most things is a feeling response, particularly if they're unfamiliar things. What's the first thing that happens when you meet somebody?

You kind of form an impression of them quite quickly. You think, he looks like a decent person. He looks quite friendly. He doesn't look hostile.

well, I think I could get on with him. Or she looks pretty interesting and I think I'm in love with her. Feelings form very quickly, actually, and they form without really much volition on our part. And they are, in fact, our first antennae, our first judgment of a situation, our first sense of whether it's dangerous or friendly or useful or useless is made on the basis of feelings.

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