The "Robot Labor, Human Feeling" Doctrine Transcript

NAMM 2026 Interview with Long Shen and Michael Dias

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We're here at the NAMM show 2026. We have Mike Dias and we have the Long Shen of Thinking Group. He is the chairman of the Long Shen. Thank

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you. Thank you guys for joining me today. And you know I'm coming from the classical music world and I'm a

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violinist. Where do you see music in 2026 heading in the next 5 to 10 years?

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We were just talking about this on just before we were recording, but I wanted to get your guys' take. My sense is that music will become more

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and more and more personalized, right? It already is. You have a jukebox in your pocket. You're able to listen to

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anything. My daughter listens to Chinese hiphop with her friends and knows all

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the words but does not know what they mean. Yeah, we will only see a continuation of this

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based on the algorithm. And once you overlay AI into this, the sky is the limit. Uh I can say something about the

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Chinese communities. Yeah, please. For classical music. Yeah. Because my uncle uh Mr. Tan T

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uh is a bass baritone singing in a Metropolitan Opera House. Yeah. For almost 20 years. So he performed the

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numerous operas with Domingo and Pavarati. And um so I had a chance to um

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participate in a lots of classic musical concerts. As a fact, we just had one in

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Chandu in mainland China uh a couple of months ago and it's opera. So we're

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singing a lot of aras and uh Chinese songs and um I have to say that the

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classic music is not only um very educational and uh um enjoyable

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and it's also elegant and I think um um in the Chinese community because the

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living standards has been improved compared with the before and uh classic

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music is becoming a one uh u spirit luxury enjoyment.

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So definitely uh technology has been um a conversation topic with um artificial

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intelligence in the classical music world. How we utilize um artificial intelligence is yet to be determined,

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but where do you guys see artificial intelligence incorporated into the music scene? Because you're coming from a

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microphone background uh with Earthworks audio. So can you can you elaborate on where that future could be? I don't

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think I'm fully qualified to speak on that, but I instead I'll speak on something else. Right? And this is what

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artificial intelligence cannot do and should not do. What I love about

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classical music as a foundation, as a background is the ability of the work

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ethic, the practice, the rehearsing, right? When I watch the discipline, right? And

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it does not matter what you do in life. If you have that discipline, you're able to use that as foundation and expand

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upon it. I think every parent is responsible for opening those doors for

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their children, for exposing them to music, for exposing their mind of different ways of seeing pattern

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recognition and for making sure that the child continues to stay with music. It

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is rare when a child just wants to do it on their own without guidance from the parent. There are many times as a parent

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I see somebody say, "I want you to stop. I want you to quit." And it is very important to make sure that the home

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supports and nurtures and pushes that forward. There's that great term of

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tiger mom. And yet when the parents don't enforce,

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the kids don't do it. And I think that it's a really interesting dynamic. You

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get to hear me as an American who did not have that musical upbringing that wasn't part of my house that is now part

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of my house with my child and then a different cultural perspective of Lshen and his family

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and what he was exposed to and how that served his life and what he's seen.

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Well, I can make up something about AI. Uh the reason for that is like I did

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spending a lot of time to study you know what AI will do and what AI may changing our life. Yeah.

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And I think everybody agree on that is like AI will completely changing human

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life. Yes. Uh I you know from um ancient time to today and we are still like uh working

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raising family and uh and uh and making money and uh whatever. Okay. Uh but

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there's one key thing. All of ours has to work. If you don't work, then that means you have no income. I mean uh uh

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it's impossible to living on the benefit from the government, right? And maybe in the Switzerland is okay. But in the

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United States, I think uh living on the benefit from the government, social security, whatever that lifestyle will

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be very bad. Now um from AI as uh Elon Musk said it's like probably

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it's going to be uh like uh more than the I mean the population. So you're talking about uh um now it's like u um

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how many billion people there 1.4 for uh uh I mean six billion people in the whole earth

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right yeah and it's going to be have a 10 billion uh robot to serve the people and the one

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billion I mean the 10 billion robot will produce more necessity for human being

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so which means right now half of the population are working and to raise up the 100% population but when the AI

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comes nobody need to work anymore because the robot will be more productive

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and then they will nobody need to work anymore because you know there's enough

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food enough necessarilities you know for human being to survive. So um now coming

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back to the music will AI compose the music that we're going to love and

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certainly not and the musician will be one of the survivor of the AI era

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because obviously you know if we making the robot has a feeling and that pretty

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dangerous because they will say hey what the hell why should I work in cooking all day long for you and you enjoy life

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because All of a sudden they develop an opinion. Exactly. And you give them emotion and feeling like

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do then it completely changes. Right. And thinking about AI robot will be much more smarter than us, stronger

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than us. What about they're in love with your wife or

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your laughing or the husband may be in love with the the uh the robot because the robot will

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be we're all married and let's keep it that way. Yeah. But we'll be much more smarter, right? and uh and uh so in that

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circumstances I would think that a robot should not have feeling will not be allowed if they don't have a feeling

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they cannot generate music they cannot compose music so musician will be there

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yeah I really do I really do believe that m musicians actually have an

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advantage over the AI revolution yes we can use it as a tool to improve our lives but it's really hard for AI to

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create authenticity in my in my view you know me being a YouTuber of over 20,000

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20 20 and a half thousand subscribers as of this video. People want that authenticity despite all of this AI. And

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we've talked about music education. You know, I have a I have a violin suit. I'm a violinist. And I believe that my job

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won't be replaced by AI because I am teaching these students. And I think that is a major advantage that I think

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the whole world is going to see like, okay, music will continue to improve our lives. And to kind of like what you

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said, Mike, that having that nurturing environment for the human, because we're

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talking about humans at this point, to succeed in that environment will go a long way. Eric, I have a question for you.

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Okay. Was your drive for music selfgenerated

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or was it your parents who helped enable and push? Well, I started playing the violin when

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I was 3 and a half years old. And it wasn't my decision actually. It was my mother's decision. My dad was like,

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"Okay, you teach him whatever you want, right?" And it wasn't until the age of seven or eight where I had to make a

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conscious decision. My my father said, "Hey, we're paying for this violin rental. If you're not practicing, then

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we're going to give it back." And then it was an overnight decision that I made at that age. I'm like, "Okay, I'm going

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to start practicing." And then since then, I started to commit. And then I started finding success but it wasn't I

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mean some anybody can be successful but it helps a lot if you have the

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environment to be successful in if you have a nurturing environment. Dr. Suzuki Japanese violin pedagogue talks about

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nurturing with love how important the parent is to music education. So that

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that is u my perspective and that's what I try to do from my from my history as a

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violin player in my youth and my adolescence and I try to do it on my students but yeah

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so I have a follow-up question right so you're teaching your students do you ever find yourself having to

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teach the parents right because every day I I think so right because

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it's a team effort and I think that this may be more of a American issue I don't

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even think a European issue and I definitely don't think it's a Chinese issue. Like did did your parents teach you to play

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music? Did you teach your children to play or practice? Your daughter played piano every day. Yes.

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Yes. Yes. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. There I think kids are very few maybe

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moat you know they were genius you know they just born with the music and they don't need anybody to

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guide them or push them. They will do it themselves. But most of the kids, I think they will like as your mom did,

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right? They will just like force you to do something or seduce you to do something and reward with a chocolate or

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candy bars, you know, that that's kind of a game goes on in every single family, right? But as Mike was saying that it's

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very much a cultural issue. I mean, I come from a European background. I was raised by Polish parents, you know, I'm

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second generation American, right? So that was part of the culture that like you are expected to do this, you are

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expected to play and you are expected to practice. So I deal with this all the time where I am talking to the student

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but the parent sometimes is not present in the lesson because they have they feel like the lesson is like their break

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and I think that's the wrong mentality because you're just doing your a child a disservice and me being a parent of one

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three and a halfyear-old and one on the way I definitely feel the struggle of feeling tired but it's a matter of just

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pushing through because it's for the benefit of your child and for their future. Well, I think if you talking about that

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part and I think China will actually very extreme because all the parents,

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you know, they will push the kids, you know, to go to the best universities and all the kids, you know, they were like

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uh they play tennis, you know, they play piano and then they will learn French

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and uh uh and uh they will do like Olympic math or something like that. I

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mean it's I think China is very similar like a Poland you know like European. Yeah. And also my wife is Korean so

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there is that Asian tiger mom discipline towards my sons too. So it's I yeah I

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feel like it also depends on the region. I feel like we're blessed to be in like from the northeast from Boston that

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there's a very rich cultural understanding that everyone values music. Music is funded. Music is in

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schools. Everybody plays an instrument or has or have played an instrument. So I think there's the benefit of of being

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making it a regional and cultural issue. But I always believe that bringing some

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European cultures into an American society sometimes is can be unsuccessful. Like trying to bring um

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like the idea of an orchestra was is very German and Beethovenian. Trying to

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bring that to America where everyone is about the self, everyone's independent solo artists very difficult to get

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culturally to come around that idea. So I think that's what makes European uh Europeans and Asian countries so

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successful in this part of classical music because there is this mutual understanding that is also for their

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benefit and for the greater good. We were just talking about this the difference of the fiercely independent

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American mentality versus the group mentality in China and Apac. And I think

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that does translate to music practice, the way you think about music, but I

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never thought about it in terms of orchestra and it makes perfect sense that way. Yeah. Just expanding a little bit little bit

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the uh the the topics, you know, they um I I think uh when we see the kids uh um

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uh whatever they're learning in US, it's so much simpler than what we were actually learning in China for the same

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grade. I would think like uh you know it's like one to two years behind it.

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So uh when the Chinese student graduate from elementary school they already know

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so much. Yeah. And from the US we can tell from the textbook you know and also from the

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load by the teachers are so much smaller you know the maybe the kids are more

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happier but I have to say that you know the knowledge is quite a different and besides that right now it's like u you

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know when you're talking about AI world right there's expert um evaluated different kind of language

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in the future AI world play different roles so the Chinese characters has some

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advantages. Yes. Because you know Chinese were actually formed by 3,000 characters. So and then

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you can re combine them you know it's like uh uh you know in for example grape

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in China we will say pa and like reason we will say

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okay and wine we will say so everything is like defined by grape first and then

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you can adding one word after that to change in the meaning. But in the English and the reason why the grip

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they're all unrelated, right? So you need like a million characters, I mean millions of uh words in English to

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complete the uh uh to express the exactly meaning. But for the Chinese,

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you know, we only need 3,000 characters. So I would say that um the characters

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has some advantages and maybe like uh like your daughter are learning Mandarin

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they are should not only just lesson they should also understanding you know that will be good for her.

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So, in your opinion, because we have very limited time, in your opinion, someone who's watching this on YouTube,

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who's in the music business, who wants to kind of break in or anyone who is just wanting to break out just like get

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noticed, what should what should artists be doing to gain exposure in the in the

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2026 musical climate in your opinion? So, the first and only answer is

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practice. Like, do the work, right? Yeah, do the work and perform over and over

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and over again. I do a lot of public speaking and I'm not very good at it and

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yet I keep doing it and I keep failing and I keep getting back up and I keep getting better slowly. It is impossible

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to say I want to be an influencer. I want to be a musician. I want to be famous without failing a million times

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on the road to that. Okay. Every artist who has played a giant hall. Your uncle

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who plays the Met started off playing a million empty

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rooms. You do not just start at the Met. You don't jump to that level. Yet in our

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culture, we'd like to think that we can. And so my advice to anybody is to do it

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over and over and over and over again. not to worry about the putting it out

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there or the marketing or the social aspects of it but to actually focus on the craft and the work. The rest of it

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comes and radiates out from there. Uh I I think for a musician, you know, um

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the kids need to be uh talented and the parents has to be uh financially

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uh uh available and someone has to supervisor the kid which means you need

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a time and after that you need a luck. So for raising up a musician I realize

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how difficult it is and this is like you're going to Las Vegas 99% will lose

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but 1% maybe win big or small. So to be a professional musician the chances are

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less than winning in Las Vegas and that's just uh unfortunately that's a

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situation. You heard it here folks. We're all doomed. Not the advice you were hoping for.

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Right. No, but I I just want to point out that you said the word financially available. Can you elaborate on that because some people say you have to be

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financially secure, but you say financially available, which is such a such an interesting word to use.

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Well, it's like it's so expensive, frankly speaking. Yeah, of course. You know, the piano teachers or violin

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teachers and uh and uh uh not every family can afford it because you know,

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if you take a one class per month, you know, that means nothing, right? But if you want to be the kids

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really uh uh make a progress and learning and becoming a habit, you probably need to do that every day or at

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least every other day. But how many family can afford it? Yeah. So financial is a big issue.

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Yeah. And so this is like um you know consider this. It's like a talented kids may not

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have a financial support, right? And uh um and he is talented but he also

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need a supervision. Somebody has to managing him or her to make sure that he do that every day because he may forgot

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and uh um so uh even you have a money and you have a talent but the parents

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has no time and nobody taking him or her to the teacher you know then he will not

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be physically able to learning that. So you know from my point of view that is

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it's a very difficult to generate one musician. So for you I can tell that

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it's not easy you know that's that's your parents and yourself you know and

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it's very lucky to become a professional musician. Yeah I appreciate that. One last question

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one word to describe what you're looking forward to in 2026.

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Example, grateful. Focus. Inspiration. What would that word be for

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2026 for you? Effort. Effort. Effort. Okay. And what about you, Lshan?

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We definitely need music. Music. Music is like most important part of

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life. So we should supporting all the musicians to make sure that they will continue study and contribute more

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music, better music performing or compose. So that's what we needed because we don't need a money or food

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anymore because the robot will do. But music has to be generated by musician.

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You heard it here folks. Thank you so much to Mike D and Long Shen for joining me on this quick interview. These are

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industry vets. Please support them. Long group and Mike Das speaks. I'll leave links in the

48:41

YouTube description below. Thanks so much gentlemen. Thank you so much.

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