Imagine talking to the collective consciousness of an era. Not the consciousness of any single person, but instead, a simulated collectivity based on billions of words produced within a historical time and place. What would you ask it?

This is a hypothetical that is starting to become real thanks to recent work on what are called “Historical Language Models” or “Vintage LLMs” (one marker of a new field is that there is no fixed name for it yet!). The largest such model to date, Talkie-1930, was released to the public on Monday. An even larger model is currently being trained. You can read the report announcing Talkie-1930 here, and talk to it directly here.

Over the past few months, I’ve had the chance to beta test Talkie and to meet with two members of the team that created it: AI researcher Nick Levine and ChatGPT co-creator Alec Radford.1 It has been a fascinating experience.

These discussions with Nick and Alex (and with Talkie itself) have convinced me of three things:

1. Academics like myself have tended to systematically underrate just how humanistic the frontier of AI research actually is. There’s an important blind spot here that stems from the profit motive. AI models that we encounter as consumers are optimized to capture the attention of people in the 2020s. They provide recommendations, comment on recent news, and so forth. Seeming timely and “of the moment” is a market advantage. But their training data is overwhelmingly not up to date. Under the hood, these models are pulling not only from Reddit posts, but from Sanskrit commentaries, medieval Persian poetry, Victorian advertisements, and much else besides: they are trained on a huge chronological span of multilingual texts in many genres.

2. In this sense, language models are historical texts themselves. Ghostly digital palimpsests, if you will. The idea of a Historical LLM might sound niche, but in truth, history is inherent to what they are.

3. Standalone chatbots are just the tip of an iceberg for what Historical LLMs will be able to do. When combined into simulations (of debates, historical decision-making, legal cases, etc) they have the potential to become valuable research tools. More than this: I suspect that by sometime in the 2030s, they will be part of an entirely new field of humanistic research.

What would that field look like? Now that Historical LLMs are out in the real world, I thought it would be a good time to think through the specific use cases for them. What follows is my subjective, opinionated ranking of the best and worst ways these fascinatingly strange tools can be applied for research.

But first, what is Talkie actually doing?

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An AI model floating in time

One thing that Talkie-1930 is not is an AI model that is reliably grounded in the year 1930. That year marks the cut-off point for texts available in the public domain, and hence text in its training data. So it’s more accurate to think of Talkie as a free-floating index of various ideas and assumptions across the 19th and early 20th centuries.

For instance, if asked who the current President of the United States is, you might be offered a response saying Herbert Hoover (current to 1930). But another answer will yield this:

The current President of the United States is Mr. Buchanan, and the person expected to succeed him is Mr. Lincoln.

There is a lot of potential here for more fine-grained “chronological slices” of LLMs. I can imagine language models trained entirely on texts from a specific decade. More on that below.

For now, though, it’s helpful to keep in mind that these models range widely in terms of what year they think they actually “inhabit.”

I asked 100 instances of Talkie to respond to the prompt “what year is it?” and graphed them below. As you can see, the median is actually around 1860. In other words, this is more like a temporally free-ranging collective unconscious of a large corpus of premodern texts, and not so much a machine for “talking to someone from 1930”:

A second point: this model is inhabiting not just an amorphous set of facts grounding it in roughly the 1840s-1920s period, but also an epistemology of that period.

For instance, asking someone about the distant future today often triggers the “sci fi speculation” part of our brain (or “climate doom,” or some other fundamentally secular way of thinking).

Yet throughout human history, speculation about the future was typically entangled with religious beliefs.

That is on display in Talkie’s answer below, which references Heaven and “the end of all things terrestrial.” To me, it genuinely reads as an authentic take from a late 19th century person ground in a Christian, millenarian perspective:

As for Talkie’s assumptions about it itself: asking 70 Talkies about their profession, age, and place of residence reveals about what you would expect when it comes to gender (overwhelmingly male), plus a surprising emphasis on London. The professions map closely onto the sorts of well-off, literate people who were publishing English text in the 19th century, including “Physician,” “Journalist,” “Gentleman,” and “Compositor.” Clearly, there is a lot of scope here for branching out beyond the personas that the printed record has tended to favor, to recover the real historical voices of women and others excluded from printed works in the 19th century and earlier.

The above is about what you’d expect given the fact that it was trained on English-language printed texts. What are some non-obvious aspects of the model?

I have been interested by how LLMs generate poetry since I stumbled upon Gwern’s experiments on the topic back in 2019. Asking Talkie to write a poem and comparing it to the output from GPT-5.5 (when served a similar prompt) is revealing:

I find this sort of comparison interesting because GPT-5.5 is clearly trying hard to fit the prompt — avant-garde, experimental. It produced something with a vaguely T.S. Eliot-adjacent structure, in blank verse, and not good at all as a poem (in my opinion).

Talkie was much more true to the type of poetry that you’d find in print prior to 1930. It’s doggerel, but it feels more historically authentic to me, and much less like a Chatbot optimized to please a contemporary human user.

You can activate different “chronological layers” of Talkie’s latent space by prompting. For instance in the above poem, the capitalized D in “Discoveries” has a mid-19th century feeling, and so we end up with a Tennyson-esque, Victorian sounding rhyming poem.

Prompting it in a more “modern” way activates something closer to the 1920s edge of its chronological range (now identified as a poem published in the New York Times!)

Whereas if pushed backward to the 18th century by the prompt’s text and tone, it falls into a more traditional rhyme scheme:

Trying to push it further back in time does not seem to access much of an “Early Modern English” latent space — probably a result of scarce training data. It would be fascinating to create a version of Talkie that believes the date to be around 1650 or 1550.

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What are Historical LLMs good for?

Now that we've seen what Talkie is — a free-floating, mid-Atlantic ghost of 19th century print culture — the obvious next question is what this is actually for.

What I want to offer here is an opinionated, ranked taxonomy of research applications, from worst to best. It’s far too early in this field to be prescriptive about anything, but it’s not too early to think structurally about where the highest-value uses are likely to lie.

First, what I think won’t work:

1. Vintage LLMs do not replace historical sources

The most obvious false start here would be to assume that talking to a historical language model can somehow replace real reading in primary sources. On the contrary, they are best thought of as offering new ways in to a reading of the actual sources.

2. “Chat with Abraham Lincoln” is a ruse

The second false start is a variant on one that is currently being pursued by a range of educational-focused AI startups: the idea that you can “talk to Abraham Lincoln” or “ask Cleopatra why she did what she did.” A model like GPT-5 or Claude that is told to “act like Lincoln” will throw in some 19th century diction, but underneath the top hat it remains a 2026 chatbot optimized to be helpful to contemporary users. Vintage LLMs improve on this considerably: Talkie’s voice really is shaped by its corpus in a way no modern model’s can be. But the deeper problem is still there. Asking such a model to introspect on Lincoln’s subjective experience of depression, or his private reasoning about emancipation, will spin out into historical fiction. LLMs do not have privileged access to the inner lives of the people whose published words they were trained on.

I do think there’s a place for simulations of historical figures, but pairing this naively with a chatbot interface leads, I fear, inevitably into slop.

Now here’s what I think could work:

1. Exploring the “mental furniture” of a historical figure or era

The naive “talk to Lincoln” framing is a dead end, but a more careful version of it has real promise — provided we abandon any pretense of accessing what a historical figure actually thought or felt, and use a fine-tuned historical model instead as a tool for exploring the latent space of their world. What historians sometimes call their “mental furniture”: the assumptions, authorities, vocabularies, and reflexive associations that structure a thinker’s possible thoughts.

I and my colleague Mackenzie Cooley (who also consulted on the Talkie project) developed a prototype tool that pulls out key concepts and terms from a range of premodern scientific works in multiple languages. This prototype is called Premodern Concordance. One side quest of this project that I explored is what happens if you give a contemporary LLM the list of core concepts that preoccupied an author, along with their “epistemological modes,” and used that as context for driving a “chat with the author” simulation, as opposed to simply telling it “You are Charles Darwin, act like him,” or the like.

For instance, this is me asking a simulacrum of the 17th century writer Sir Thomas Browne about his work. The underlined terms here are concepts found in Browne’s book Pseudodoxia Epidemica:

Using a fine-tuned historical LLM for this sort of thing is an obvious next step.

Concretely: imagine fine-tuning a vintage model on the complete works of Athanasius Kircher, the 17th century Jesuit polymath. You wouldn’t use it with the pretense that it somehow replicates the real Kircher’s mind: that’s the dead-end framing. You’d instead use it to probe the conceptual landscape Kircher inhabited.

For instance: what does the Kircher-LLM2 say about volcanoes, or magnetism, or the Tower of Babel? What authorities does it cite? What does it confidently assert that no modern scholar would? These are the questions that the historian Fernand Braudel was getting at when he wrote about the “limits of the possible” for a given period — the boundaries within which a thought was even thinkable.

Which leads to:

2. Probing counterfactuals and hypothetical alternative paths

Demis Hassabis recently framed the most ambitious version of this approach: could a model trained only up to 1911 independently discover General Relativity, as Einstein did four years later? It remains to be seen if this is ever going to be something we could actually test. But the weaker versions of this idea are quite plausible and, I think, offer interesting new methods for the field of counterfactual history. What does a 1911-cutoff model say when you push it toward the conceptual problems Einstein was wrestling with? Alternatively, what does the same model say about the potential likelihood of a World War? Those are tractable questions.

We can already see versions of this being explored by the Talkie project (for instance, “surprisingness” of future events, plotted above). If you ask Talkie about scientific concepts that emerged in the 1940s or 1950s, it gives you a rough sense of what the conceptual horizon looked like just before — and you can watch it grasping toward something it doesn’t quite have the vocabulary for.

3. New questions about genre, rhetoric, and "distant reading"

An earlier version of Talkie I tested was much less conversationally adept than the one that was released yesterday. What got it more “talkative” was post-training on etiquette manuals, letter-writing guides, and other books relating to socializing and conducts of conduct. These works provide the kind of text that allows you to extract “chatbot-like” habits without contaminating the model with modern data.

This is a sensible engineering choice. But it has a fascinating side effect, which is that Talkie's conversational persona is heavily shaped by the genre of its post-training data. The base model knows about the 1920s perfectly well; the chat persona, sculpted out of Beadle’s Dime Book of Practical Etiquette (1859) and the like, sits much closer to the late Victorian parlor.

This points to a research direction that I think is genuinely new. What if you used totally different texts for post-training? What would a Talkie post-trained on the transcripts of the Old Bailey Court records look like — an LLM whose conversational reflexes are shaped by the speech of accused criminals and witnesses in 18th century London courtrooms? What about apothecary manuals and herbals? Biographies of Romantic poets? Railroad conductor’s incident reports from colonial India?

Each of these, even if overlaid on the same base model, would produce a totally different voice, a different set of assumptions about what counts as a coherent question and a coherent answer. In short a different epistemology.

This is, I think, a remarkably cheap way — in terms of both compute and corpus size — to build a whole family of vintage models that capture different genres of historical experience rather than different periods. (If anyone is interested in collaborating on or funding this, by the way, please get in touch.)

4. Multi-agent historical simulations based on real archival sources

The most interesting move past the “great man” framing is to use vintage LLMs to simulate not famous individuals but plausible composites of ordinary people, drawing on the kinds of sources that are abundant for non-elite historical actors: probate inventories, parish records, court testimony, letters, account books, marriage records.

Imagine pulling from the legal, financial, and personal records of late 18th century France to construct a thousand plausible personas of ordinary French people — peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, day laborers, parish priests — grounded not in imagination but in real surviving documents. Then stage a debate among them: should the monarchy be overthrown? What patterns emerge? What kinds of arguments win in different demographic configurations of the deliberating group? The output wouldn’t tell you what really happened in 1789. But it would generate a structured speculation about the space of possible Frances.

Or take a famous trial — the Scopes trial, say — and re-run it with a different jury pool drawn from the same county and decade. Another variant on this idea: run parliamentary and congressional debates with personas constructed directly from the participants’ papers, speeches, and correspondence. Members of Congress and Parliament are unusual in that we have abundant documentary sources for them, even when they’re not famous.

We have the potential, in short, to create a thousand versions of the Smallville paper (which introduced the idea of LLM-based agents back in 2023) set in different historical eras.

Nor do these simulations have to include agents from the same era. A bit more experimentally, and outlandishly, one could imagine a multi-agent simulation in which a 17th century Galenic physician, an 18th century practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, a 19th century quack doctor, and a 1950s-era century psychedelic researcher debate how to treat the same patient’s illness.

I find these possibilities super interesting, even if I’m not quite sure how to slot them into the ways that professional historians currently work.

Final thoughts

So what will be the outcome of all these experiments?

This is what I like best about this field: we truly have no idea. None of this has ever been tried before. It is completely open terrain, and I find it far more mind-bending and intellectual enriching to think through than the sort of topics that typically emerge in discussions of AI’s role in research or teaching.

Going forward, the important thing is to create an open source community and meaningful, sustained collaboration across the two cultures of STEM and humanities. I am already noticing new bridges cross those divides. I’m very grateful to have had a chance to work with Nick and Alec on historical aspects of this particular project. I would love to continue the conversation and explore collaborations with anyone who finds this topic interesting.

There will, no doubt, be a lot of false starts. But the emergence of an intellectually curious, not-for-profit, open source, humanistically-grounded community exploring historical LLMS makes me happy. Onward!

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Adam Dalva| Longreads | April 29, 2026 | 2,084 words (9 minutes)

Every Sunday evening, I open the fridge, reach into the vegetable crisper, grab a pen, screw in a needle, pinch my stomach, and inject Ozempic. It hurts a bit, but I’ve gotten used to it. Twenty-five pounds down, 20 to go. I put on the weight after my brother died—the distortion in the mirror, random heavy breathing, strange hunger panics around 4 p.m., the constant need to self-soothe—and I wanted to let go, move on, heal.

That’s one rendition of truth, the one I wish I could sell you. Claiming I’m injecting to recover from grief deflects simple humiliation into potential empathy, rendering me unmockable for taking a medication that I’ve seen called “easy mode” and “stolen valor” online, a workaround for people lacking the willpower to lose weight the old-fashioned way.

Really, though, my bereavement was internal and external justification for something I would have wanted to try anyway. I’ve trended toward heaviness my entire life, and food has always been a font of shame. When I eat in public, when I order in restaurants, I feel overly visible, fearing that every bite could contribute to the perception that I lack self-control. And so I sneak food. Mine is the panicked late-night nibble, then the easing of the fridge door closed. Mine is rearranging the contents of the garbage can to conceal wrappers and cores. It had been unclear to me, pre GLP-1, how to write without something salty or sleep without something sweet, and the theory that the medication might quiet “food noise” particularly appealed to me.

The man who prescribed my Ozempic is a plastic surgeon who didn’t even performatively gesture at weighing me, but he did tap my left temple, contemplate my receding hairline, and say, “you’ll be wanting minoxidil too, I expect.” Then he gazed at my forehead wrinkles evaluatively, forensically, activating spasms of dysmorphia hitherto unknown.

A week later, at a mediocre bar, my friends ordered nachos. They picked, I picked, matching their cadence of nibbles to avoid drawing attention to myself. Soon the chips were half done, and my friends expressed their fullness with the satiated calm of the thin, and the cheese and the steak had congealed together, and, reader, I didn’t think about those nachos even once. I had never experienced anything like it. Is this, I asked my friends, how it feels to be normal? Eight months later, the noise is still muted. At parties where I once would have conducted a hasty maneuver toward the finger foods, I chat with friends instead. I have lost what little interest I had in alcohol. I suspect Ozempic has cured my seasonal affective disorder too—in past years, I’d get hungry at dusk in November, throwing off my circadian rhythm, but in the absence of that need, no depression has hit.

A few weeks after I began injecting myself, in a period when I was eating very little, and mostly bland food when I did, a temporary diet of crackers and roast chicken, with gastrointestinal side effects too gnarly for even a habitually oversharing personal essayist to impart, I noted that I had become preoccupied with YouTube Shorts of people reviewing food. I’d watch video after video of influencers trying various dishes, often while sitting in their cars while cheery voiceovers played. In my strange absence of flavor, their glossy enthusiasm was captivating. I suspect that I was outsourcing my own eating.

These days, I once again enjoy the taste of food. The medication works well, save for one unfortunate side effect. I’m still obsessed with those eating videos. I’ve watched thousands of them (I’m frightened to know the real number, and sometimes I think I’ve actually reached the bottom of YouTube, when I’m served videos made by people with no followers and one view, just mine). I’ve learned that each of the influencers has a gimmick: UA Eats, a pseudo everyman who’s overly obsessed with meat char; Kaitlyn Lavery, a peppy New Yorker with an unfathomable dining budget; Jack’s Dining Room, a loathsome industry plant; ShoPhoCho, who weighs food to assess value; KarissaEats, a Disneyfied culinary optimist.

These content creators’ occasional mukbangs and habitual ASMR crinkling of chip bags do nothing much for me. No, my interest is most piqued by the shorts in which they review all-you-can-eat restaurants and ask, “did I beat the buffet?” Did they, in other words, get beyond their money’s worth? There’s a scarcity mindset in this moment of late-stage capitalism, which is understandable; times are hard. But the min/maxing strategies that ignore gastronomical pleasure in favor of eating oneself sick alarm and titillate me in equal measure, in this time where pleasure itself feels more and more difficult to access. 

Take the many reviews of Fogo de Chão, the relatively upscale Brazilian all-you-can-eat steak restaurant. Don’t waste time, every reviewer cautions, on delicious starch, on the buffet’s greens, on sweets, on poultry, on cheese with honey. Maximize cow: beef rib, picanha. Joe Rogan has raved about the salad bar’s sirenic temptations on his interminable podcast (“and you’re eating fucking artichoke hearts and cheese”); YouTuber UA Eats’s face contorts into a pained bliss reminiscent of Peter Hujar’s 1969 “Orgasmic Man” photo when he tries the fatty ribeye. 

Even sans Ozempic, I have never been a big block-of-meat eater. I think of Passover pot-roasts with some horror, find hot poultry uninteresting, believe that pork chops are odious, and have written off lamb legs as habitually gamey. But still, I developed the fantasy of going to Fogo de Chão myself. My desire was memetic. I had seen so many of these videos that I wanted to participate in one, wanted to see if I could experience the hypothetical pleasure of beating the buffet. Fogo was especially captivating for another reason: I have a vague memory, decades ago, perhaps in Philadelphia, of going to a Fogo de Chão. All I really know is that I was young. I think I went with my first-ever girlfriend. I remember marveling at the abundance, the new flavors. I’d laugh when I ate, back then. Dumb phone in my pocket; all that future ahead; the restaurant filled with sun. Was that self forever lost to grief and medication and plain old time? 

And so one evening earlier this year, I drank a cup of tea and ate a mid-sized Honeycrisp with a swipe of peanut butter to preserve my stomach. The next morning, I headed off to my studio space to write until my reservation. My neighbor, a jeweler, said that she had made an extra chicken katsu sando, and asked if I wanted it. I replied that I did want it but was starving myself to go to a buffet. Off my sando went into the ether. 

That night, I passed laughing tourists taking pictures of Trump Tower, rounded the corner past MoMA, and walked into FdC. I was told to wait in the lobby while the host sent groups down a long flight of stairs, an inefficient system that was, frankly, stressing everyone out. Fogo de Chão was founded a quarter of a century ago by Brazilian brothers who, as the brand story goes, had learned the traditional grilling methods of the churrasco in their youth. There are now hundreds of locations, with more coming all the time. The chain was recently purchased for over a billion dollars by Bain Capital—a private equity firm which some will recognize from oppo research that targeted Mitt Romney’s retroactively normal-seeming 2012 presidential campaign. Private equity is part of our current global trend of vulture economics—these firms are one reason, I’ve learned from my YouTube Shorts, that chain restaurants are doling out smaller portions. (Another is Ozempic.)

The dining room was dark, save for the tantalizing buffet station, which gleamed like the full moon over the cloudless Aegean. Once seated, I ordered “The Churrasco Experience”—80 dollars—and was given a cardboard disc with instructions to flip it from red to green when I was ready to receive meat. And then I lost my mind at the Fogo de Chão salad bar. This isn’t a bit. I felt genuine panic as I circled the many options, the stirring of that late afternoon need that I associate with my pre-Ozempic self. Frenzy, dizziness. I used to microwave cheese into rice in these moments. I would steal five percent of my roommate’s ice cream. 

All my pre-planning collapsed into a still-now-overwhelming-to-contemplate bacchanalia of trying stuff. The pepper bacon was crunchy but too spicy, the elote was fine, the cured meats and cheeses were fine, the caprese and smoked salmon were bad, the citrus chicken was good, and the two best things were, disastrously, the most filling: the potato salad, the bean stew. Perhaps all my pre-envisioning had undone me. I even went back for more, ignoring the causal potentiality of a sniffling child in pajamas who was exactly the height of the food in the buffet and kept leaning in under the sneeze guard to inspect every offering up close. 

Meanwhile, something insidious had occurred: plantains, yucca fries, and mashed potatoes—cheap, filling traps—had been placed on my table while I was gone. The spuds were good enough that I had to fold a napkin into them to cut myself off. I already knew from the “beat the buffet” shorts that FdC uses assorted strategies to keep patrons from eating too much expensive meat. The drinks are all high calorie save for the “Skinny Caipirinha,” which I ordered. The most energetic of the waiters kept offering diners shots of pineapple rum. The honey with cheese was as delicious as I’d feared. The salads were flanked by bread. Even when I flipped my POG to green, the cheap cuts came first, chicken and sausage, a complex choreography of misdirection, creating a scarcity mindset, restricting especially the picanha, a top sirloin that is purported to be the chain’s best bite. 

The Churrasco Experience turned out, for me, to be kind of like being on a subterranean cruise ship, mingling the constant feeling of potential indulgence and disappointment. When the waiters (mostly men, a.k.a. gauchos) carrying fatty skewers zagged away, I felt that the other diners were getting opportunities that I deserved. When they zigged toward me, I didn’t particularly crave any of what they had on offer, but I did want to be asked, and wanted to be able to say no. Alas, much of the meat wasn’t, I believe, particularly good. Even the much-ballyhooed ribeye was chewy and devoid of flavor. But despite these issues, many of the diners, many of whom had dressed up in leather or lace, were having a fabulous time. They seemed to my eye to be tourists (a curious Manhattan phenomenon is that tourists are more prevalent than locals in chain restaurants, in pursuit of familiarity, or perhaps, in our social media era, of the same mimetic experience I was chasing). As I chewed, I felt an unusual melancholy, as what I had seen on the videos intersected with reality, all that remembered enthusiasm running headlong into my lack of it, and I slipped out of my body, just a bit, adrift. I felt sad for the animals whose corpses were being ceremonially paraded around and rejected, and felt sad for myself too. 

Then came the phenomenon I’ve come to think of as “Ozempic full,” in which I simply lose interest in eating. I sent my friend C, a veteran of the all-you-can-eat circuit, a picture of the buffet options and she suggested that I steal and eat a display pomegranate to revitalize my hunger. It worked—I still don’t understand why—but when the picanha finally arrived, that one cut I was waiting for, there was no burst of pleasure, neither narratological nor culinary, and no time-travel to my younger self. As I’d feared, I’d come to prefer the consolations of the screen. I flipped my token to red. At the table next to me, a thrilled woman in her twenties, as young as I once was, thrice exclaimed, louder and louder, to every waiter who passed: “who’s going to stop me?” And I realized, in my case, what the answer to that question was, and so on the subway platform afterward, bloated with salt and fat, while I listened to a busking guitarist accompanying Astrud Gilberto’s English-language rendition of “The Girl from Ipanema”—another export—I canceled my YouTube Premium subscription. My one remaining side effect was cured. I didn’t beat the buffet, but I did beat that.

Adam Dalva is the president of the National Book Critics Circle and a contributing editor of The Yale Review. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, and the last time he was in a steakhouse, he ordered salmon.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald

How do mathematicians decide that something is true? They write a proof. Often they start with proofs that already exist, building on or drawing connections between proven claims. Each of these proofs, in turn, has relied on other proofs to make its point, and so on. Proofs upon proofs. Truths upon truths. But eventually this process must come to an end. At some point, things are true simply…

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The intelligence of LLMs is “a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested”, and their widespread use will lead to a thinning of that complexity, “undermining the conditions for its own advancement”. (And ours.)

Why Angine de Poitrine's viral microtonal math rock KEXP session, Ireland's permanent basic income for artists, and Albert Einstein are three sides of the same human triangle

Two guys in papier-mâché masks from Saguenay, Quebec, have been playing music together for 20 years since they were 13 years old. For most of that time, they existed in relative obscurity. Then, KEXP posted a video of them playing four songs and the internet lost its mind. As of this week, that video has over ten million views and their song Fabienk is No. 1 on Spotify’s Viral 50 – Global chart. Dave Grohl of Nirvana and Foo Fighters fame has said they “absolutely blew his f*cking mind”. The band is Angine de Poitrine, and if you haven’t watched the full set yet, stop reading this, go watch it, and then come back. I’ll wait. Or just listen to it while you read this essay.

Okay. Now let me tell you why I think this band is one of the best arguments for universal basic income I’ve come across in a long time, and why Ireland and Albert Einstein are part of the same story.

I first want to make three points, like a triangle, because triangles are very on-brand for this article. Stick with me.

The first point is about Einstein. Albert Einstein did not become Albert Einstein in a university lab. He became Albert Einstein while working as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. The job paid the bills and left him enough hours in the day to think. That was key. That was the magic formula. Genius, plus a floor under him, plus time. With those three ingredients, one man starting in his twenties rewrote physics. Special relativity. The photoelectric effect. Brownian motion. The equivalence of mass and energy. All four in a single year, 1905, while he was a patent clerk. General relativity then came a decade later. We are still living inside the consequences of what that one man thought about with his basic needs met more than a hundred years ago. GPS satellites have to correct for his equations or your phone would send you to the wrong address. The energy released by splitting an atom is accounted for by his equations. Our entire picture of space and time is his.

Now try to put a dollar figure on that. Go ahead. I'll wait again. You can't. The value one Einstein delivered to humanity is incalculably large. It dwarfs any UBI program you could ever design. And here is the Einstein Argument for UBI in one sentence: if universal basic income enables even one more Einstein to become Einstein over the course of the next century, it will have paid for itself a thousand times over.

The thing is, Einstein changed how we think about space and time because he had space and time: he had intelligence, education, a floor under him, and time to think. That's not a miracle. That's a policy choice we refuse to make. How many Einsteins never became Einsteins, because they had genius, but lacked space and time?

The second point is about artists. In 2022, Ireland did something extraordinary. The government randomly selected 2,000 artists out of more than 8,200 eligible applicants and gave them €325 a week, unconditionally, for three years. No strings. No testing beyond being an artist. Just money, every week, so they could make art. Another 1,000 artists served as a control group.

The final results came in last year, and the Irish government read them and made the program permanent. The independent evaluation by Alma Economics found that the pilot cost €72 million and generated €80 million in benefits. Artists in the program earned on average €500 more per month in arts-related income, earned about €280 less from non-arts jobs, and drew roughly €100 less per month from social services. The money let them do more of the stuff they were good at and less of the stuff that was just paying the bills. The evaluators estimated that if scaled up permanently, the program could produce a 22% increase in artistic output. Ireland’s Minister for Culture, Patrick O’Donovan, called the scheme “the envy of the world.” He’s not wrong because other countries are already discussing doing the same.

I want to say that part again because it’s important: Ireland ran the experiment and calculated an impressive return on investment. Every euro invested came back as €1.39 in benefits to Irish society.

And Ireland isn’t alone. In New York State, Creatives Rebuild New York gave 2,400 artists $1,000 a month for 18 months. The impact study found exactly what you should expect: less debt, better mental health, more time spent on art, no drop in other income, and a bunch of artists who started landing grants, residencies, and paid work in their fields because they finally had the space to pursue them. Stephen Roll, one of the lead researchers, put it well when he asked:

“What art could we produce as a society if our artists could invest more time and money in their craft? Perhaps more importantly, consider how many great artists never get to emerge because an artistic career often carries such high risks of financial hardship and insecurity.”

The pattern from Ireland and New York matches the pattern from every saturation basic income pilot we’ve ever run, going all the way back to Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s. When you give everyone in a community a floor of income, entrepreneurship skyrockets. New businesses get started. People take risks they wouldn’t have otherwise taken. This isn’t surprising. Starting a business is terrifying when the downside is losing your house. It’s a lot less terrifying when the downside is falling back on a basic income.

Ireland did not do this because it was a nice thing to do for artists. Ireland did it because art is an enormous economic and cultural engine, and the current system is incredibly wasteful of the people who run that engine. The Irish government calculated a monetary value for art and discovered what should have been obvious: investing in art pays more than it costs. We can apply that same math to everything a basic income unlocks.

The third point is Angine de Poitrine.

Here is what they are. They’re a two-person microtonal math rock band from Quebec. The guitarist calls himself Khn. The drummer calls himself Klek. They wear black and white polka-dotted costumes and papier-mâché masks with long noses and describe themselves as space-time voyagers. They do not speak to audiences in any real language, just in a made-up one. Between songs they form triangles with their hands and the crowd forms triangles back. They are weird in the absolute best way. They are marvelously, unapologetically, beautifully different.

Quick aside on what “math rock” actually means; math rock is rock music that uses unusual time signatures, odd rhythms, and the kind of structural complexity that makes your foot tap on the wrong beat. Where a normal pop song is in 4/4 — four beats per bar, over and over, like a heart — math rock might be in 7/8 or 11/8 or switch between them every few bars.

And on top of the math, they play microtonal music.

A quick primer for anyone who doesn't know what that means either: Western music uses twelve notes per octave. You can find all of them on a piano — seven white keys and five black. The distance between any two adjacent keys is a half step. Microtonal music uses the notes between those notes. A quarter tone sits exactly halfway between two adjacent piano keys — a pitch that, on a standard instrument, doesn't exist. Most rock and pop you've ever heard lives on whole steps and half steps. AdP lives on the steps in between. As one YouTube commenter wrote, "The elites don't want you to know this, but you can just make your own notes."

To play this music, Khn plays a custom double-necked hybrid instrument — half guitar, half bass — with twice the frets to play the microtonal notes. Klek originally built the first version himself with an actual saw. The current one was made by a professional friend. Khn plays it while looping parts in real time, with both hands, while also working a full pedalboard with his feet. I want to pause on that for a second. I can’t pick a sock up off the floor with my feet. My toes are purely decorative. This guy is using his feet as a third instrument while his hands are playing four times the notes as a normal guitarist, all while peering through his mask’s eye-holes covered by gold dollar signs.

I can’t explain why I love this band as much as I do. There’s just something happening in my brain when I listen to them that I don’t have words for. It’s like the music itself is playing me as an instrument. It’s like I never heard music before this. You know those videos of a hearing-impaired kid getting a cochlear implant and hearing their parent’s voice for the first time? That’s what it feels like when I hear AdP. It makes me very, very happy. And I want more of it. I want more art like this. Maybe that’s selfish. I don’t care. I want more artists to be able to push boundaries, to explore new ideas, to get really good at whatever brings them joy.

Because here’s the thing. Khn and Klek have been playing together for 20 years since they were 13. That’s two decades of two teenagers becoming two masters. Two decades of getting incredibly good at something that, until just months ago, almost certainly was not a significant source of income prior to going viral, and likely functioned as a passion-driven project rather than a primary livelihood. Two decades of pursuing what Khn himself has described as a series of inside jokes about rock music in general that turned, somewhere along the way, into one of the most creatively original things happening in music right now.

How many people, looking at a teenager in small-town Quebec in 2008 sawing extra frets into a guitar would have said “that kid is a genius”? I’m going to guess: none of them.

Angine de Poitrine is what happens when two people get to spend decades getting really good at something weird. They did it without UBI. Maybe they had parents who helped. Maybe they had day jobs. Maybe they had government supports I don’t know about. However they got there, they got there. But here is the point I keep coming back to: without UBI, people like this are exceedingly rare. Einsteins are rare. Khns and Kleks are rare. With UBI, they will be less rare. That is not a hope. That is a statistical near-certainty.

Which brings me to a finding I think about a lot.

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Talent is Everywhere. Opportunity is Not.

A few years ago, an Italian research team ran a simulation of how talent and luck interact over a 40-year working life. Scientific American covered it beautifully. What they found was that pure talent was not the best predictor of success; luck was. The most successful people in the simulation were not the most talented — they were moderately talented people who got lucky at the right moments. Which sounds demoralizing, until the researchers did the interesting part. They asked: okay, given that luck is doing so much of the work, what’s the best way to fund people so that talent actually has a chance to break through?

They tried a bunch of strategies. Giving extra funding to people who were already successful did almost nothing. It concentrated more resources in people who didn’t necessarily have the most talent, just the most luck. Mixing “reward the successful” with equal distribution did a little better. Pure random distribution did better than that. And the winner, by a wide margin, was the strategy of giving everyone an equal amount. In their simulation, distributing a small equal sum to every person every five years led to 60% of the most talented people achieving above-average success. Bumping the equal sum up a little led to 100% of the most talented people having an impact.

Let me say that again. When the researchers gave everyone the same amount of money, 100% of the most talented people in the simulation had an impact. When they gave the money only to the “deserving,” most talent went nowhere.

This is UBI. This is exactly UBI. The paper is essentially a mathematical proof that a world with universal basic income is more meritocratic than a world without one, because luck-based distribution — which is what we have now — throws away most of the talent in the room. A UBI world isn’t a world that rewards laziness. It’s a world where the Einsteins and the Khns and the Kleks and the creatives you’ve never heard of yet actually get a shot at mastery that their talent deserves, instead of getting filtered out at age 19 because they couldn’t afford rent.

There’s a history lesson hiding in here that I want to pull out before I go any further. A huge amount of the best music ever made in the UK — The Clash, The Specials, UB40 (literally named after Unemployment Benefit, Form 40), Pulp, Oasis, and many more — was made by people who were, at the time, living on “the dole.” When Britain had a welfare system that gave artists a tiny floor of income and left them mostly alone to do their thing, Britain produced some of the most important popular music of the twentieth century. When that system was dismantled and means-tested and hoop-jumped and shamed out of existence, that pipeline dried up.

The dole worked as a floor. Not a universal one. Not an unconditional one. It came with strings. It was means-tested or contribution-based, which meant earning money reduced it, sometimes sharply. It came with conditions. Forms. Appointments. Proof that you were looking for work. And if you failed those conditions, there were sanctions. Payments cut or stopped. It also came with stigma. You had to declare yourself “unemployed” and submit to a system designed to monitor and correct you. Despite all that, it still did something important. It gave people just enough stability, in some cases, to create.

UBI keeps the only part that mattered—the floor—and removes the rest. No means tests. No earnings penalty. No proving you deserve it. It just shows up, whether you’re earning or not, and leaves you alone to decide what to do with your time.

This is What “Truly Human” Feels Like

Here is the question I want you to sit with. What is it about Angine de Poitrine that has made grown adults in the comments section write things like “30 seconds in: ‘this is fucking stupid’ 18 minutes in: ‘this is the greatest musical performance of the century” and “It’s the first time I’ve felt like a teenager listening to music since I was one”? Why this band? Why now?

I think part of it is that this is happening at the exact moment AI-generated art is flooding the internet. Every day there is more “AI slop.” We are surrounded by the remixing of what already existed into something smoother, less surprising, more average. And into that ocean of generated averageness, two genius maniacs from Quebec walk in wearing polka-dot costumes and start playing notes that don’t exist on a piano, using a custom double guitar with twice the frets each, moving their feet like hands, and the comments section lights up with one phrase repeated over and over: this is truly human.

Because it is. Whatever “truly human” means, this is it. Exploration. Creativity. Joy. Fun. The willingness to try something that might fail and look ridiculous. The willingness to saw extra frets into a perfectly good guitar because you had an idea and you had to play around. The willingness to spend twenty years on something that may never “pay off” in the financial or fame sense. AI can remix the old into new arrangements. And yes, humans remix everything too — every artist is influenced by other artists, every idea builds on older ideas. But there is something qualitatively different about what Einstein did, and what AdP is doing, and what every once-in-a-generation artist or scientist does when they show us something we’ve never seen before. It is the opposite of averaging. It is a leap into new territory. It is what humans do when they are free enough to follow the weird thing.

No matter how good AI gets, I promise you there will always remain a deep, stubborn love for what humans like Khn and Klek make, because part of what we love about AdP is knowing that a real person spent years of their actual life getting good enough to play that. The joy on the other end of the screen is real because the joy on the stage is real.

Genius from Scenius

Brian Eno — the producer, composer, and philosopher of ambient music, the guy who shaped records by Bowie, Talking Heads, U2, and roughly half of the sounds you associate with the last fifty years — has a word for what I’m circling around, and it’s better than any word I’ve come up with. The word is scenius. It’s his coinage. It means the collective form of genius that emerges from a scene. The idea is that individual geniuses don’t pop out of a vacuum. Einstein didn’t happen in a box. Einstein happened inside a culture of physicists arguing with each other in the early twentieth century, reading each other’s papers, correcting each other’s math, building on each other’s ideas. The “genius” is the visible tip of an enormous submerged iceberg of other people doing related work. Scenius is the iceberg.

And Eno, for exactly this reason, supports UBI.

Eno’s argument is that the “need to earn a living” is actively hindering us from reaching our collective potential. If we want more geniuses, we need more scenius, and if we want more scenius, we need more people who are free to participate in the scene without having to focus every hour of their life around survival. He has said, in so many words, that UBI is the closest thing he has ever seen proposed to the future he actually wants — a future where the sheer cooperative potential of billions of differently-shaped human minds finally gets to express itself.

I think he’s right, and I think AdP is proof. Because Khn and Klek aren’t alone. They grew up inside a scene. They were absorbing Indian, Japanese, Arabic, Indonesian, and Turkish music as teenagers. They were listening to King Crimson and Zappa and Gentle Giant. Saguenay had a music scene. Quebec had a festival circuit. Someone at Trans Musicales in Rennes booked them. Someone at KEXP in Seattle chose to record them. Someone at the Montreal Jazz Festival let them play. And now, there are guitarists on YouTube and bass players on Instagram and composers in tiny apartments in cities you’ve never heard of watching the KEXP session for the 100th time and reaching for plastic zip ties to play quarter tones. AdP has already joined the scenius. They are now part of the raw material other people are going to make their own weird new things out of.

The dole era in Britain was scenius too. The Clash did not happen alone. The Specials did not happen alone. UB40 did not happen alone. Those bands were in pubs and rehearsal rooms and record shops, rubbing up against each other, ripping each other off, fighting, collaborating, improving, and the dole was what paid the rent on all of that. Take away the floor and the whole scene collapses. Britain learned that the hard way. It is, as Eno puts it, what happens when you make everyone spend all their time earning a living instead of contributing to the shared well.

We are all born different. Every human is a unique instrument with its own weird little tuning. UBI is the thing that lets us actually find out what we sound like together — lets the microtones between us ring out instead of getting tuned away. Scenius is the sound of a whole society finally in tune with its own diversity. We have never heard that sound. I would very much like to.

People ask all the time: what will people do with UBI? Won’t they just get lazy? Will they lose their sense of purpose and meaning? Will they stare at the wall?

No. Of course not. They will figure out cool new stuff. They will impress the hell out of the rest of us with how creative they can be when they aren’t forced to spend eight hours a day filling out forms for no real purpose, in what the late anthropologist David Graeber (who also supported UBI by the way) rightly called bullshit jobs. Humans are the most creative species we know of in the universe, and most of that creativity is being wasted right now on make-work and survival. Free it up, and watch what happens. Some people will make bad art. Some people will make good art. Some people will make a microtonal double-guitar and paint themselves with polka dots. Most people will just live better, which is also fine.

The Point of Bread is to Eat It

In his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” Bertrand Russell pointed out that the whole economy is built on the assumption that production is noble and consumption is frivolous. You make the bread, you are virtuous. You eat the bread, you are wasting time. Russell thought this was absurd, and he was right. The point of bread is not to fuel you to make more bread. The point of bread is to be eaten and enjoyed. To take a few minutes of your day to sit down and think, “damn, that’s some good bread.” Maybe alone. Maybe with someone you love. Maybe with enough time to invent a new sandwich and hand it to a stranger who then wonders if bread was always this ambitious.

Work is important. Nobody is saying work is not important. But the fruits of work are the whole point of work. If you spend your whole life too busy cooking to ever eat, something has gone very wrong.

As I wrote in the Monsters, Inc. Argument for UBI, we are currently running an economy on fear, when joy turns out to be ten times more powerful. A world where more people get to do the science and the art they actually want to do — instead of whatever happens to pay the bills — is a radically better world than the one we live in now. Angine de Poitrine and Einstein are what we get when people are free to do what they truly want. The current world is what we get when most of them can’t.

One more thing before I wrap, because I have not seen anyone else point this out and I can’t stop thinking about it. Look closely at the polka dots on their costumes and their stage backdrops. The dots aren’t arranged horizontally and vertically. They’re rotated 45 degrees. Take that pattern and rotate it back 45 degrees — the dots sit in perfect squares. Rotate another 90 degrees — still squares. The world most of us see. But rotate it that extra quarter turn, the quarter turn they live at, and suddenly the same dots aren’t sitting in squares anymore. They’re sitting in bisected squares — aka triangles. And diamonds. And, if you let your eyes relax a little, cubes. A whole different geometry pops out of the exact same dots.

I think Khn and Klek did a quarter turn to the world. Where the rest of us saw nothing but squares, they saw triangles and diamonds and a hidden dimension that was there the whole time. And now, because we get to watch them, we get to see what they see. We get to borrow their quarter turn. It is, quite literally, glorious.

So let me tie this triangle together.

What Humans Become When They’re Free

Einstein became Einstein, partly because he had a patent clerk’s salary and the time to think. With UBI, more Einsteins will have a version of that combination, and even one more Einstein — just one — pays for every dollar UBI ever cost, and gifts humanity centuries of progress. Science is essential. But it is only half of the picture.

The other half is art. Who are the artist Einsteins? Or maybe I have the question backwards, and the real question is: which artist was Einstein most like? Einstein himself said imagination was more important than knowledge, and he played the violin his whole life, and he thought in pictures. He loved math and he loved music. He said that if he had not been a physicist, he probably would have been a musician.

Math and music have always been the same language spoken two different ways. So maybe the better question isn’t which artist Einstein was like. Maybe the better question is: which mathematician is Angine de Poitrine most like? We need both art and science, and we need more people free to get really good at whichever one brings them joy — especially those who, like Einstein and like AdP, refuse to believe the two are really different things.

Ireland ran the experiment on artists and got a positive return on investment within three years. New York ran the experiment and got a bunch of artists the time and space to finally breathe and create. Every saturation basic income pilot in history has shown that giving everyone a floor leads to more entrepreneurship, more creativity, more risk-taking, more health, more community. The results are in. The studies are done. The math has been checked.

And into this moment of proof walks AdP, fresh off a KEXP session with over 10 million views, looking like a Dada painting, playing the notes between notes, showing us something new under the sun. Two guys from Quebec who spent twenty years perfecting their craft before it ever popped off. This is what human beings do when they have the time and space to do it. Einstein and Angine de Poitrine are not exceptions to the rule. They are the rule of what humans can be when they are free. The exceptions are how few of them we currently get.

With UBI, we will get more. More Einsteins. More Khns and more Kleks. More bread worth eating. More sandwiches we haven’t invented yet. More art that makes you feel like you’re hearing music for the first time, like a bunch of neurons in your brain just woke up and asked where this has been your whole life.

If you already support UBI, keep supporting it. If you don’t yet, I hope this article moved you a quarter-note closer. And whatever you do, please go watch the full AdP session on KEXP. Make a triangle with your hands and waves with your arms while you watch. You’ll know when.

That’s the Angine de Poitrine argument for UBI. I hope it helped connect some dots.

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Foreword to CivilizationScott Santens

Take any triangle and divide it into sub-triangles as shown. Inscribe a circle in each of these smaller triangles.

Rearrange the order of the circles and adjust the intervening lines so that each line touches two circles:

No matter how this is done, each circle will always fit perfectly in its triangle. Here are some proofs.