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Music

Moby Claims He Gave Apple the Idea for the iPod and iPhone

A new interview in 'The Guardian' has the electronica icon saying that he pushed Apple to make a music player and predicted that they'd put a camera on it one day.
Photo by Randy Shropshire for Getty Images

We say this every month (probably every week), but perhaps we've reached a saturation point of people saying weird and/or dumb shit and getting attention for it. That being said, Moby's increasingly strange attempts to place himself as some kind of Edward Snowden-meets-Nostradamus figure are entering the DeLonge Area of conspiracy-fiction logic, so they're very entertaining. A mere month after claiming that his social media following urged the CIA to clue him in on the ongoing Trump-Russia scandal, Moby has spoken to the Guardian in a new interview as part of the promo for his album Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt and he's really leaning into his role as an InfoSec prophet.

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When writer Sophie Heawood refers to Moby as "a pioneer," he pulls out a story to prove that take:

“Well here’s the funniest one and I’m hesitant to talk about this because it sounds either like nonsense, or self-aggrandizing.” He goes on to explain how Apple launched iTunes and he told Jimmy Dickson, one of the heads, that they needed a proprietary Apple MP3 player. Their Newton device had failed and they weren’t keen, but he insisted. “A year or two later they brought me to a hotel room at the Crosby in New York, handed me the first iPod and said: ‘Steve wanted you to have this.’ I said: ‘You do know at some point this is going to have a camera and a phone attached to it?’ And they laughed at me and said that could never happen.”

The insinuation here is that Moby not only was a key advisor to Apple on the initial build of the iPod but also predicted the iPhone in about 2001 or 2002, immediately after receiving an early model of the former from Steve Jobs himself, no less. He gave a similar story to Entertainment Weekly in 2016, saying that he spoke to "a bigwig at Apple" about creating an MP3 player to accompany iTunes, so maybe there is some truth to the events.

However, here is Moby being utterly astounded by the iPod's capabilities and design in the device's very first promo video. Is this the face of a man who was so ahead of the curve that he suggested such miraculous technology in the first place?

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Maybe he's just acting.

Elsewhere in the interview, Moby offers another prediction of the future, saying that it will be "a non-human dictatorship. Meaning, I think that people will get so tired of corrupt human politicians that, at some point, they will create an algorithm that makes these decisions for us that is non-corruptible."

That's… pretty tight, I guess? Anyways, read the rest of the interview here.

Phil is on Twitter.