Jamil Apostol
Singer-songwriter, kirtan artist, community builder, and advocate for culture, music and the arts. Author of The Artist Operator and founder of HEADLINE.WORLD.
A musician who went and learned the other five jobs
Jamil led the Americana band The Bonfire Set, founded Butter Thieves, and plays in the kirtan supergroup Burning Mantra at Burning Man.
Initiated as Janardana Das by the master Bhakti artist Srimati Syamarani Dasi, he spent years inside a monastic community before moving into technology. He has served as president of an AI company in New York.
That combination is the reason The Artist Operatorexists. The argument in it — that a career runs six jobs, that five of them used to belong to somebody else, and that knowing which ones a machine should never touch is now part of the work — comes from having done the playing and the operating both.
What people who do this work say
“I have spent my career at the intersection of technology and music, and I have never seen the two worlds explained to each other this well.”
“This is the first book that answered that fear honestly. It has a plan instead of a pep talk, and a fierce case for why the human at the center of the song still matters most.”