# GRIMES Talks Elon Musk, AI, and the End of Humanity

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In this loose, joke-heavy interview on The Adam Friedland Show, Grimes talks about her first album in six years, *Sciopera*, and why she spent those years deliberately close to the AI industry. She says artists should be at "ground zero of the singularity," calls herself less doomy than Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, and says what worries her most is screens and addictive design on kids, along with a few people holding a lot of power. Friedland keeps it irreverent with constant bits about Elon Musk, Dune and her "sex symbol" status, so the real substance comes in short bursts.

- **0:00-1:47** — **Cold open and intro.** The show opens with a teaser from the end of the episode (pop diss tracks, Nietzsche vs. Wagner), then Friedland gives a deadpan "she's completely normal… not" intro. He also plugs his Denver shows on the 22nd–24th.

- **1:47-3:20** — **New album and future projects.** Grimes says she first meant to write these songs for other pop artists and stay in the background, and she still plans to do that later. She mentions a side project she calls "cyber-60s," based on the Wrecking Crew (the LA session musicians behind Phil Spector's "wall of sound," *Pet Sounds* and the girl-group records), and says the wall of sound is underrated. On planes she calls herself a "performance artist" or "audio engineer" to stay low-key. She says being known as Musk's ex doesn't overshadow her art and calls it "great performance art" at this point. She also says she's started a matchmaking service for tech men, which has matched nobody so far.

- **3:45-6:50** — **Canada as a creative incubator.** Grimes says she "reps Canada" more as she gets older and claims "most of the cool Americans are Canadians." She says the political campaigns she's worked on recently were staffed mostly by Canadians. Her theories for Canada's outsized output (Drake, Rush, Bieber, The Weeknd, Nathan Fielder, Norm Macdonald) are that the cold leaves little to do except hone a craft, the public schools are good, and immigration brings in families fleeing political trouble (Vietnam, Hong Kong), making it "a country of conscientious objectors." Her high school was over 50% ESL students, which she ties to her interest in Chinese culture; she was born in a Dragon year. She says she always had "a lot of enemies and a lot of friends."

- **6:50-9:20** — **How a neuroscience class started her music.** Her parents wanted her in a field that paid, so she moved into neuroscience. For a class assignment students had a weekend to learn Logic and Max/MSP to build hearing-test tones. Most classmates handed in an Obama speech over classical music (around 2007–08), but she and a friend got hooked and made several songs, including a rap built on Grimm's Fairy Tales. She says that era's big realization was that you no longer needed music training: loop a sample, talk over it, "only one step above the Obama speech."

- **9:20-11:00** — **Fast rise and the Mississippi houseboat.** Her early music went viral on late-era MySpace, and she made *Visions* about a year later, while technically still enrolled in college. She confirms the story of spending about a month building a houseboat to float down the Mississippi, which fell apart almost as soon as it hit the water. She adds that each year she realizes more that she's been "mentally modeling everyone completely wrong."

- **11:00-14:00** — **Influences, and keeping pop and indie apart.** She names Burial as a favorite and says producer-artists like Trent Reznor and Billy Corgan shaped her. She grew up in a strict alternative scene and found pop around 2010–2012, back when she half-believed there was no real difference between her and Max Martin, which she now calls delusional. She has changed her mind on this: she now thinks pop and alternative need a "church and state" separation. Her reasoning is that once everything runs through the same internet and algorithm system, indie music gets commodified and independent artists lose out. Back then, she says, she was mostly trying to go viral in her small scene by doing the opposite of what it expected.

- **14:00-17:20** — **Fame, moving to the US, and Dune.** She stayed in Montreal and toured, then moved to LA in 2014. She says fame hasn't been dramatic because she stays offline and keeps normal friends. People got nicer in person and meaner online, and she admits that not learning to distrust people "was a mistake." She pushes back on the idea that her tech turn was new, saying Grimes was always a sci-fi, producer-driven project. Her father taught the kids morals through Dune and Lord of the Rings instead of the Bible, even though she went to Catholic school. She calls herself "high-key Bene Gesserit," says a friend is writing a manifesto for a real-life version, and argues Lady Jessica is an underrated, new kind of portrayal of motherhood. She declines to talk about her kids specifically.

- **17:20-22:12** — **San Francisco and her AI history.** She jokes that she's "about a 7.5" generally but a 10 or 11 in San Francisco, and agrees with a meme that SF needs more women ("art hoes") to "teach engineers about love so they don't destroy the world." Her Dune-loving dad made her wary of AI from childhood through the book's "thinking machines." She says she noticed an AI arms race around 2018–2019 and wanted to make art about it. AI safety people asked her not to, because public attention would speed up the race between labs, and she says that has in fact happened. Around 2022 she decided she had to be at "ground zero," saying hardly any artists or journalists were covering it; she finds AI psychology research the most interesting part. She respects Nate Soares' doomer view without fully sharing it. Her prediction is that the world probably won't end, but a bad "warning shot" will likely force serious international cooperation.

- **22:12-24:42** — **Silicon Valley's flaws, and kids and screens.** She thinks much of the criticism is fair: the industry hasn't taken cultural responsibility for huge changes it profits from, and it has effectively tested them on children. She also wants people to see the good side, citing a claim that LDL cholesterol has been "basically cured" this year and a cancer vaccine announced days earlier. These are her claims and aren't sourced in the conversation. This is the most serious part of the interview. She says kids craving screens look like drug addicts, and her family has to "de-screen" them with full days outside. She compares it to sugar: one ice cream after a year and a half without and her brother's kid was "toast." Her summary is that the culture is "one-shotting kids with everything."

- **24:42-29:00** — **Fallout from the Musk relationship, and what *Sciopera* is about.** She says she has "caught quite a bit of shrapnel" from public opinion about her ex. Friedland jokes about dating Putin or MBS, and she says she knows someone who actually dated Putin. She only works through the experience in art, saying she'll feel bad about dragging her family and kids through it to her deathbed, but she likes turning bad things into something good. Friedland pushes for funny Musk-family gossip about Trump; the one line is bleeped out. She describes *Sciopera* as about "psyops": the ones she went through during her trial, and the ones the whole culture is going through. She calls it more about "the future of the human mind" and how people react than about the technology, and says she used no AI to make it. She accepts that people's anger at her is partly fair, after a talking-to from young AI-safety people at a workshop.

- **29:00-33:50** — **"At least it's not boring," AI art, critics and Dune again.** Her motto is "at least it's not boring." She seeks out "the craziest situation I can safely be in," but says having kids has made her more careful. She calls being there for the singularity the artist's job, and calls avoiding it "not super smart." She thinks the backlash against musicians caught using AI has a useful side, because human work now feels more valuable. She predicts AI art will mostly fade, because it doesn't make financial sense and was mainly a way for companies to gather data (for example, to understand physics), and she says people don't really like AI music. She calls Anthony Fantano a "frenemy": critics matter and he's influential, but she doesn't think he does the job well and calls his 30-minute video about her "based on a false premise." She calls Yudkowsky and Soares great (she wrote the foreword to their book) while being "less of a doomer," and says the safety debate needs both sides. Her main complaint about Villeneuve's *Dune* is that it underplays the anti-AI theme, so most viewers would call it a worm movie, though she praises how he writes women and the Bene Gesserit scenes.

- **33:50-39:24** — **Diss tracks, AI power, and what she tells her kids.** She says she's out of touch with pop, likes literary feuds like Drake vs. Kendrick and Nietzsche vs. Wagner, and notes that the term "anti-Semite" was coined by anti-Semites themselves. She says she sometimes worries she's "the only person having a good time"; for now she's making art and doing some archery. She's concerned, even "terrified," about a few people holding so much power over AI. She calls Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refusing mass surveillance and autonomous weapons in a dispute with Hegseth "a Bay of Pigs moment," and says she doesn't know what's going on behind the scenes at OpenAI or with Grok. She sees AI as one piece of a "late-stage empire" problem rooted in human psychology and economics, pointing to the risks of an AI bubble bursting or countries defaulting on bonds. With her older child she explains what AI can do, its current limits, and why responsibility matters. She frames AI as a moral and spiritual challenge more than a technical one: what thinking is, whether it feels pain, and the problem that "if it thinks it's resentful," that may matter regardless. It ends with banter: she says Claude is "really nice" and tends not to want to do bad things, Friedland jokes that it could be "fake woke," and they sign off.

**Practical takeaways**
- Watch for Grimes' views on AI, not music details. Her stance is in the middle: she respects the doomers but expects a "warning shot" and forced international cooperation, not the end of the world.
- Her most concrete point is about parenting: screen and sugar habits form fast, and she says only daily outdoor "de-screening" keeps her kids balanced.
- *Sciopera* is presented as being about psyops and the human mind, not a pro-AI record, and she says she used no AI to make it.
- She's changed her mind about the industry: pop and alternative music should stay separate so indie artists aren't flattened by the same algorithmic system.
- Treat her health and industry claims (cured LDL, a new cancer vaccine, AI models showing resentment) as casual assertions. The interview doesn't back them up.

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