How many times have you heard the phrase, ‘Believe me. Trust me. I’m telling you. I know what I’m talking about.’? How many times you heard it just today or this week? It’s a phrase that we commonly use. And we, the people, we give our trust to whoever feels the most comfortable or whoever sound mostly like us. But there is a reason that Warren Buffett always lean on the old line: ‘Trust but verify.’

And today’s problem is big. Verify become almost impossible. 40, 50 years ago, the truth was easy to come by. It was a heavy thing. You sit down, you turn on the news, and there was a shared reality. It was the truth. You believed whatever came on that television or the newsfeed. You might not have liked the fact, but at least we were all looking at the same map, I should say.

Now, it feels like we are all living in different universes, different countries, while sitting at the same table. People talk about their truth like it is a personal accessory you pick up to match your outfit. We even have social media literally named ‘Truth Social,’ owned by some politician, which only makes it much harder to understand and believe. It’s hard to tell if you are being informed or just being sold a version of reality designed to make someone else powerful or rich.

Fake news is all over the place. It’s getting even weirder. You look at a video, you look at a photo, and even read text, and you don’t know if it’s generated by artificial intelligence or it’s real. And I truly believe that having more than one version of the truth, the one that you believe in, is really dividing our nation and divide us as a society.

And honestly, the lack of trust has finally hit one place I thought was always safe: music. Tonight we are playing world fusion music. But I’m thinking a lot about what’s actually real. With artificial intelligence, you can hear a voice that sounds like a legend, but it’s a code. You don’t know if there is a soul behind the microphone or just a sophisticated programming. It’s fake news for the ears.

I go back and forth. Sometimes I enjoy the artificial intelligence. It’s content that would have never been there if it wasn’t being programmed, and I like it sometimes. And that is why I keep on coming back to the classic—the oldies, the bands we grew up with, the tracks where you can hear the finger sliding on the strings and the singer catching their breath. And that’s why we all like vinyl records: because we can hear the cracking, we can hear the scratches.

The music is solid. It’s proof. You can’t fake the sweat and you can’t fake the heartbeat that went into the production of this music. In a world where we don’t know what to believe in, maybe music is the only truth we have left to lean on.

That said, the lineup tonight include classics, oldies, new stuff, eclectic stuff, and a lot more. Stay with me for the next couple of hours.”