Why Rick Rubin Loves Pro Wrestling | Rick Rubin & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | You said you protect the inner landscape, but certainly you're not averse to high-intensity
00:00:07.740 | stimulation.
00:00:08.740 | Last night, we went to the AEW, and by the way, thank you for taking me.
00:00:11.780 | That was such an incredible experience.
00:00:13.420 | It was really fun.
00:00:14.420 | It was really fun.
00:00:15.420 | It reminded me of early punk rock shows, some of my first punk rock shows, where I went
00:00:20.620 | and just was like, "Oh my gosh, this is exciting and scary, and I love it."
00:00:26.700 | And it felt loving, too, which is also the community of punk rock that I observed and
00:00:33.260 | have been blessed to be a part of.
00:00:34.660 | It's like, yeah, there's aggression, but there's also love, and then there's romance, and then
00:00:38.940 | there's also betrayal, and there's all the elements.
00:00:42.660 | But there's still a sense of like everyone wants to be here, and there's a sense of goodness
00:00:46.180 | behind it all, even though some of it was bloody and violent.
00:00:49.780 | So for you, what does wrestling allow you to feel in those high-intensity environments?
00:00:56.460 | It completely relaxes me because there are no stakes.
00:01:03.100 | Everyone's working together in the show to protect each other.
00:01:06.620 | No one's trying to hurt anybody, regardless of what the storyline is.
00:01:10.540 | It's like a ballet where there's a fight in the ballet.
00:01:17.180 | There's no actual aggression of people towards each other.
00:01:20.900 | It's just the opposite.
00:01:24.020 | But you get to experience this wildly dynamic, exciting, surreal theater piece where people
00:01:32.260 | are doing these gymnastic and acrobatic things that are truly death-defying.
00:01:42.260 | And it's fun, and the storylines absorb you in a way where you never know what's true
00:01:48.500 | and what's not.
00:01:50.680 | We know wrestling's fake.
00:01:51.820 | We're told wrestling's fake.
00:01:53.900 | But there's something legitimate about it that seems to me more legitimate than anything
00:02:02.220 | else, the most legitimate, because it's the closest to what the world's actually like.
00:02:10.580 | People don't always tell you what they really think.
00:02:13.140 | And when someone tells you a story, it might not really be the true story.
00:02:17.620 | They may think they're telling you the real story, and that might not be the real story.
00:02:26.180 | We don't know.
00:02:27.180 | We know so little.
00:02:30.400 | We experience something, and then we make up a story to understand it ourselves.
00:02:36.060 | And then forevermore, when we tell that story, it was our version of an experience.
00:02:40.740 | But we don't know that's what happened.
00:02:42.260 | That was our take on it.
00:02:46.780 | Wrestling is like-- that's what the real world is like, because when you watch wrestling,
00:02:54.020 | you never know what's true.
00:02:57.020 | If you watch the news like you watch wrestling, and you never know what's true, it would be
00:03:02.660 | more accurate.
00:03:04.260 | You'd have a better sense of the world if you took it all in like it was pro wrestling.
00:03:09.020 | I think we're in a place in human history where people are starting to feel that way
00:03:13.260 | about the media.
00:03:15.280 | It's also why wrestling is so popular.
00:03:17.500 | It's more popular than it's ever been.
00:03:19.580 | Yeah, that's interesting.
00:03:20.580 | Things like UFC, the kind of gladiator-like octagon fights, and wrestling are increasing
00:03:26.480 | in popularity, despite the fact that supposedly we're evolving.
00:03:31.660 | So I think it reflects something both primitive and evolved about the human brain.
00:03:36.420 | Primitive in the sense that, yeah, there's some violence.
00:03:38.100 | It's physical.
00:03:39.580 | That's down in the hypothalamus, as we'd say.
00:03:41.740 | It scratches that itch, but they're actually protecting each other.
00:03:50.100 | It scratches that itch of seeing the gladiators, but it's like watching a movie.
00:03:57.860 | They're not really hurting each other.
00:03:59.500 | They get hurt, but only because the things they're doing are so crazy.
00:04:03.860 | I think in order to be able to thoroughly enjoy wrestling, one has to be able to give
00:04:07.740 | up narrative distancing just a little bit.
00:04:12.060 | Narrative distancing is this sense that this is a story, it's a movie, it's not real.
00:04:16.340 | But there were moments like yesterday, the jump off the top rope onto the guy who's splayed
00:04:21.000 | out on the ladder.
00:04:22.020 | The ladder breaks.
00:04:23.020 | This was right in front of us.
00:04:25.000 | It couldn't have felt good.
00:04:27.500 | He walked away.
00:04:28.780 | He seemed fine-ish, but that and then there was a match between two women where a woman
00:04:37.480 | put a metal plate into the bottoms of her suit and then ran and then jumped onto the
00:04:43.520 | other woman and hit her with the metal plate.
00:04:45.340 | Then the metal plate slipped out.
00:04:46.940 | She was walking around and everyone knew she had cheated because you're not supposed to
00:04:50.500 | use the metal plate.
00:04:51.500 | It was exciting because she had done it, exciting because she had gotten away with it.
00:04:56.980 | Then at the same time, exciting and upsetting that the referee saw it, but then didn't call
00:05:02.460 | it.
00:05:03.460 | This is like Twitter X, this is like Instagram, this is like politics, this is real life.
00:05:10.860 | Seeing people get away with things is so frustrating if you feel they shouldn't have.
00:05:14.900 | That's all part of it.
00:05:16.580 | It's a very accurate representation of the world.