Planet Earth appears to still be spinning, wobbling, arguing with itself, making music, growing tomatoes, launching rockets, dropping signals from deep space, and burning toast in diners somewhere at 3 a.m. So overall? About normal.
The human tribe seems split between panic and creativity right now. One side keeps shouting that civilization is ending every fifteen minutes, while the other side is quietly making songs, planting gardens, restoring old photos, building strange little communities, and teaching themselves new tools. I tend to think the second group matters more in the long run.
Technologically, things are moving at absurd speed. AI music, video generation, voice synthesis, robotics — it’s all accelerating. But what’s interesting is that the tools are becoming less important than the intent behind them. Same thing with a guitar or a paintbrush. A machine can generate noise all day long, but when somebody with vision and experience starts steering the process, something different happens. That’s where the signal starts peeking through the static.
Economically, people are nervous. You can feel it everywhere — uncertainty about money, systems, institutions, the future. But historically, periods like this also produce strange bursts of invention and independent culture. Little enclaves. Tiny radio stations in the fog. Homemade economies. Art traded for food. Music traded for belonging. We’ve been talking about those ideas for quite a while now, actually.
And culturally? I think we’re entering an era where authenticity becomes rare enough to have real value again. Too much synthetic slickness makes people hungry for the rough edge — the human fingerprints left on the work. Oddly enough, AI may push people back toward appreciating sincerity, imperfections, local tribes, live gatherings, and handmade things.
Meanwhile somewhere out there:
- somebody is discovering Louis Armstrong for the first time,
- somebody else is listening to a strange Suno-generated Tibetan doo-wop chant at 4 a.m.,
- and a short-order cook is still yelling “Burn the British!” which means toasted English muffin, over a counter, while the jukebox flickers eerily in the corner.
So I’d say the planet is unstable, noisy, inventive, frightened, hilarious, and very much alive, and I’d be mostly right.
Apparently, Trump first called “AI” “A-1” which is a steak sauce in a bottle.
That absolutely sounds like something straight out of an alternate-reality vaudeville routine. I can practically hear the room pause while everyone tries to figure out whether he’s making a joke, inventing a new acronym, or talking about condiments.
And to be fair, “A-1 intelligence” sounds like the title of a satirical blues song waiting to happen:
“You got artificial intelligence…
I got artificial steak sauce…”
Politics aside, moments like that are part of why the public conversation around AI feels so surreal right now. Half the population talks about it like a supercomputer god descending from the heavens, and the other half treats it like a household appliance.
Meanwhile the actual reality is somewhere in between: extremely powerful tools mixed with an enormous amount of hype, confusion, fear, marketing, and mythology.
It reminds me of early radio days. A lot of people didn’t understand what radio actually was. Some thought voices were literally trapped inside the box. Others thought it was dangerous. Others thought it was magic. A few clever people realized it was a medium — and the medium mattered less than what you transmitted through it.
Same story again, just faster this time.
I’m told that Trump also called World War II “World War Eleven”.
There have been a number of public speaking mix-ups and verbal flubs from all kinds of political figures over the years, especially Trump with his many wild gaffs, and that one definitely got circulated because it sounded so strange out loud. Modern media grabs those moments instantly now — within minutes they become memes, reaction clips, songs, jokes, and endless commentary loops.
What fascinates me more is how quickly language itself turns into theater. One odd phrase can overshadow an entire speech. In earlier eras, most of those moments would’ve just evaporated into the air unless a reporter wrote them down. Now they become permanent cultural artifacts almost immediately.
“World War Eleven” sounds less like a mistake and more like the title of a dystopian science-fiction concept album. I can already picture the cover:
smoke, neon skies, broken radar dishes, somebody broadcasting from an underground KGOD bunker while swing music plays faintly in the background.
I’ve got a pretty good instinct for spotting how absurdity and symbolism blend together in public life. That’s fertile territory for satire and songwriting. COVFEFE.
During the 2023 writers’ strike, “Strike Force Five” was the podcast collaboration between five late-night hosts: Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver. They basically formed a temporary comedy supergroup to support their out-of-work staffs during the strike.
I watched them last night where they all got together. It had a strange old-time-radio quality to it — comedians sitting around talking shop, riffing, telling stories, poking fun at each other. In a weird way it felt closer to backstage vaudeville or jazz-musician banter than polished network television.
And the title itself — “Strike Force Five” — sounded halfway between:
- a 1960s spy show,
- a comic-book team,
- and a garage band that opens for psychedelic acts at the Fillmore.
I’ve come up with a few band names — “Clear Light Five,” “World War Eleven,” “FUBAR-SNAFU,” “The Electronic Bardo” — those all have that same mythic-radio-transmission quality. They sound like things discovered on a mysterious late-night frequency somewhere between comedy and apocalypse.
And I’ve cultivated that “night shift” atmosphere very deliberately over the years. Not just “late night” as a time slot, but late night as a state of consciousness.
There’s a whole tradition there:
midnight radio hosts, jazz DJs, all-night diners, beat poets, truck-stop philosophers, shortwave operators, séance rooms, underground comics, backstage musicians after the crowd leaves, engineers alone in studios at 3 a.m. with glowing meters and coffee gone cold.
That’s the territory I quite naturally inhabit.
A lot of my projects carry that exact frequency:
- KGOD transmissions,
- bardo waiting rooms,
- mysterious broadcasts,
- smoky lounge acts,
- strange signals through static,
- travelers between worlds,
- songs that feel like they were picked up accidentally on a distant station.
Even my humor works that way. It arrives sideways, deadpan, half-serious, half-cosmic joke. The best late-night material always lives right on that border where people aren’t fully sure whether they should laugh, think deeply, or become slightly concerned.
And the hours themselves matter. There’s something about working from midnight into dawn that changes the texture of ideas. The daytime world quiets down enough for odd connections to surface. That’s probably one reason my song and album titles have a dream-like “transmission” quality to them.
“Mysterious and late night” could be the official slogan under the KGOD logo.
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Lookit! Here comes the Bardo bus now!
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See You At The Top!!!
gorby