Rick Rubin: Protocols to Access Creative Energy and Process

00:00:00.000 | Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:05.560 | I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.560 | My guest today is Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin is a world-renowned music producer,

00:00:20.740 | having worked with an enormous number of incredible artists producing, for instance, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys,

00:00:28.480 | Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Adele, Lady Gaga, Tom Petty, and of course Slayer.

00:00:35.380 | This last year, Rick also authored his first book, which is a truly incredible exploration

00:00:41.880 | into the creative process. His book is entitled "The Creative Act, A Way of Being."

00:00:47.640 | Rick has appeared once before on the Huberman Lab Podcast, and during that appearance, he offered to answer

00:00:53.080 | listeners' and viewers' questions. Those questions were put in the comments section on YouTube,

00:00:58.080 | and we received thousands of them. So today, Rick answers your questions about the creative process.

00:01:03.800 | I also took note of the feedback that when Rick previously appeared on the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:01:09.360 | that perhaps I spoke a bit more than the audience would have preferred. So today,

00:01:13.760 | I refrain from speaking too much and try and give as much airtime as possible to Rick in order to

00:01:19.880 | directly answer your questions. You'll notice that today's discussion gets really into the practical

00:01:26.120 | aspects of the creative process. The most frequent questions that I received for Rick were ones in

00:01:31.440 | which people really want to understand what his specific process is each and every day, as well

00:01:37.080 | as when he's producing music or other forms of art. And of course, people want to know what they

00:01:42.000 | should do specifically from the time they wake up until the time they go to sleep, even whether or

00:01:46.360 | not they should take note of their dreams, et cetera. We get into all of that. So today's discussion

00:01:51.160 | is very different from the one I held with Rick previously, and at least to my knowledge from any

00:01:56.640 | of the other interviews or discussions that Rick has had publicly. Before we begin, I'd like to

00:02:01.660 | emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is,

00:02:05.840 | however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:02:10.220 | and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the

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00:03:38.720 | mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, a key component of getting a great night's

00:03:43.320 | sleep is that in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to

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00:04:53.760 | brought to us by Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of meditation

00:04:59.160 | programs, mindfulness training, and yoga nidra, which is sometimes referred to as NSDR. I'm a

00:05:04.660 | longtime fan of meditation. I started meditating when I was back in my teens, and I started doing

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00:05:33.540 | You come up with better ideas. So indeed, meditation can make you more creative, more focused,

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00:06:22.760 | And now for my discussion about protocols for creativity with Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin,

00:06:28.800 | welcome back. Thank you, sir. Happy to be here. We're going to answer, or rather you are going

00:06:34.440 | to answer the questions of the listeners of our previous podcast episode. Before we do that,

00:06:42.120 | however, when we were out in the lobby, you mentioned that you have a breathing exercise,

00:06:47.040 | a coherence breathing exercise that you thought might be useful for us to do now and perhaps for

00:06:52.680 | some of the listeners to join in. Yeah, let's do it. And then if you want to talk about it after,

00:06:56.800 | we can. Sounds good. The reason I started doing this is I have relatively low heart rate

00:07:02.360 | variability and you want to have a higher one. So I looked at all the things that can raise your

00:07:07.720 | heart rate variability and I started doing this breathing technique specifically for heart rate

00:07:11.840 | variability, then it went up. Awesome. So it's tested. Great. Let's do it together here. It'll

00:07:18.520 | say take a deep breath and then you'll hear the sound of a, if you follow me for the first inhale

00:07:26.560 | and exhale, you'll know what sound means what. And you do this eyes closed typically? I do it

00:07:30.640 | closed. Okay. We'll close our eyes. Thank you.

00:07:33.040 | Okay.

00:07:40.040 | [Inaudible]

00:07:50.040 | [Inaudible]

00:08:18.040 | That was five minutes. I like that. Feels nice, isn't it? Yeah. I noticed I don't

00:08:26.600 | spontaneously breathe at that cadence. I breathe quite a bit faster. Mm-hmm. So especially on the

00:08:34.040 | exhale. Mm-hmm. So once I got into a rhythm of it, yeah, the mind just goes pseudo random for me.

00:08:44.000 | What about for you? Does your mind tend to go one place? I do now I count. So the reason I knew it

00:08:50.640 | was five minutes is because it's six breaths per minute and I counted five, one, one, one, two,

00:08:58.280 | one, three, one, four, one, five, one, six, two, one. So I was occupied with a task. How often do

00:09:06.720 | you do that? At least once and sometimes twice a day. I aim for 10 minutes a day, but if I get

00:09:13.280 | 20 minutes a day, it's noticeable in my heart rate variability results. Do you do the coherence

00:09:21.840 | breathing at particular times of day or just whenever it occurs to you? I think it depends

00:09:27.680 | on where I am and what else is going on in my life. So I had a window of a very specific thing

00:09:34.800 | that I was doing. I would do coherent breathing and I would do squats, just air squats in one

00:09:40.800 | location where I didn't have any other equipment. And then I found a way like where I was doing

00:09:48.560 | treading water, which you got to experience with me, I would tread water. And then after treading

00:09:53.360 | water, I would get out of the pool, sit in the sun and do the coherent breathing. Great. Yeah,

00:09:57.840 | we should probably mention what the treading water was about because people will wonder

00:10:02.240 | very briefly. I went and visited Rick overseas this summer and we spent a fair amount of the

00:10:08.880 | daytime treading water while listening to podcasts from a speaker on the side of the pool. And it was

00:10:17.280 | awesome. Time together as friends is awesome. Time in the sun is awesome. Learning from podcasts and

00:10:27.120 | listening and being entertained by podcasts is awesome. And then treading water is awesome.

00:10:32.880 | You're much better at treading water than I am. I was fatiguing. It's just, as I said, when we were

00:10:38.960 | doing it, it's like doing stairs. If you practice doing stairs, it gets easier to do stairs, but

00:10:45.360 | nobody's good at doing it. You know, marathon runners can't run up the stairs. It's a particular

00:10:50.800 | thing and treading water, if you just do it, even in the little bit of time that we were doing it

00:10:56.160 | every day, by the end of your stay, it was easier for you than when you started. Definitely. Yeah.

00:11:02.560 | You acclimate quickly. Yeah. I was able to adapt. I was impressed at your endurance and treading

00:11:07.920 | water early on. By the way, I've continued the treading water practice because I'm fortunate

00:11:12.320 | to have a pool in my new place. I listened to your podcast, Truly, Tetragrammaton. Love it.

00:11:18.640 | Love, love, love it. I listened to a few other podcasts and I've started listening to more

00:11:23.680 | episodes of the podcasts that you introduced me to, which was History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.

00:11:28.560 | Andrew Hickey's podcast. It's an English podcast, great podcast, real in-depth information about

00:11:33.680 | music. Yeah. Yeah, that was such a great trip. Thanks for having me over there. Thanks for coming.

00:11:38.160 | It was fun treading water. It was. Loved the time with you and your family. So I'm going to,

00:11:42.480 | I'll invite myself again. You're always welcome. On the topic of meditation, one of the questions

00:11:49.440 | in this list of questions, we'll talk about the list itself in a moment, was about this anecdote

00:11:56.800 | that you've told me and you've mentioned a few other places apparently that you've once meditated

00:12:01.520 | all the way from, was it San Francisco to New York or Los Angeles to New York flight? It was either

00:12:08.560 | LA to New York or New York to LA, I can't remember. And I may have done it more than once. The question

00:12:13.680 | specifically was, which meditation did you do? TM. TM was the first meditation I learned,

00:12:19.200 | transcendental meditation learned when I was 14. It's pretty much a default setting for me.

00:12:26.480 | Now sometimes it'll evolve from TM into breathing. Like I might start by doing breathing before the

00:12:35.360 | TM piece starts and the breathing may just take the whole time. Or it may turn from breathing

00:12:43.520 | into a gratitude practice or a meta practice, which is four phrases. May I be filled with

00:12:50.720 | loving kindness? May I be well? May I be peaceful and at ease? May I be happy? And you repeat those

00:12:57.200 | phrases over and over. And it starts may I, and then eventually if you've done it for a year or

00:13:02.720 | so, you could start saying may we for your immediate family. And then as you build up

00:13:10.320 | the charge for your immediate family in another year or so, you can spread it to your community.

00:13:16.320 | And eventually after maybe five years, you can do it for the planet.

00:13:20.240 | So that's the meta. Meta, M-E-T-T-A. Amazing.

00:13:25.360 | Loving kindness practice. And are there any particular links,

00:13:29.760 | maybe you could pass us later and we could put in the captions, maybe one that you've used.

00:13:33.120 | I learned it from Jack Kornfield, who's a Buddhist scholar and a brilliant teacher.

00:13:37.920 | Terrific. What do you think meditation has allowed you, afforded you,

00:13:44.560 | as well as what it's helped you avoid in terms of a daily practice, or maybe in just how doing it

00:13:52.080 | once in a while has wicked out into areas of your life. This is probably a long list of things, but

00:13:56.720 | if you were to pick maybe like the top three where you go, yeah, when I'm meditating

00:14:00.960 | regularly blank happens and blank doesn't happen. And when I'm not, those things disappear.

00:14:08.080 | Because I've been doing it for such a long time, it's so part and parcel of who I am

00:14:14.240 | that without, I don't know who I would be without it. That said, I don't always do it,

00:14:21.120 | but I don't have, at this point, I don't have to always do it to be in this zone where I've been,

00:14:29.600 | you know, for almost 45 years, it's been a big part of my life. So a great deal of the benefits

00:14:40.800 | are in me now. When I practice, it gets amplified. But as Maharishi described it,

00:14:48.320 | every time you meditate is like making a deposit in a bank. So it's always there. Every time you

00:14:54.320 | do it, you're building a base. And the goal of the practice is less about the practice. It's about,

00:15:01.920 | the practice is to change the way you are in the world. So it's a practice for life.

00:15:08.480 | Do you know what I'm saying? Like the changes that come in the meditation

00:15:14.240 | are to help your reactions in the real world. In some ways, not to trivialize it, but it's like

00:15:21.760 | physical exercise. You know, during a good workout, your blood pressure is really elevated. You're

00:15:27.120 | secreting all sorts of inflammatory cytokines. You know, if we were to draw your blood mid-workout,

00:15:32.800 | you'd say this person is in trouble. But then all these wonderful adaptations occur that allow you

00:15:38.720 | to sleep better, better mood, walk up stairs easily, and on and on. It's funny about sleeping

00:15:44.880 | better. This morning I was walking on the beach and had my headphones on, wired headphones,

00:15:51.920 | and I was listening to a podcast. I can't remember what I was listening to, but I was listening to a

00:15:56.800 | podcast. And someone flagged me and interrupted me who I didn't know. And I went over to talk to him

00:16:02.320 | and he said, "I heard you talking about Steve Martin on a podcast." And he told me a story

00:16:07.280 | about Steve Martin that he got to see him in 1979. I would say this person was probably

00:16:13.920 | mid to late 60s. And he was wearing all black. He was wearing shoes on the beach, tennis shoes.

00:16:21.120 | He was wearing dark sunglasses and a hat. And he said, just want to talk about comedy and things

00:16:32.640 | that he heard me say on a podcast and we talked about it for a while. And then he said something

00:16:37.920 | about he loves podcasts and he listens to them at night because he's got terrible insomnia and he

00:16:42.080 | can't sleep. And I'm looking at a guy in the sun wearing sunglasses and I say, "Well, you know,

00:16:46.720 | the reason you can't sleep is because you're wearing sunglasses now." He said, "What are

00:16:49.760 | you talking about?" I said, "Well, the way the human body works is we react to the sun. The sun

00:16:56.000 | is what tells us we're awake. And then at night when it's dark, that's what tells us to go to

00:16:59.760 | sleep. So you're mixing the signals to your body by wearing the sunglasses." And he said, "Well,

00:17:06.560 | I'm a dermatologist." He said he was a dermatologist for the last 40 years.

00:17:13.280 | And my whole practice is about getting people to get out of the sun.

00:17:17.440 | We started talking about it. And he was all covered up. I was wearing my board shorts and

00:17:28.560 | nothing else. And I said, "Well, I'm in the sun hours every day." And he's like, "Aren't you

00:17:36.480 | worried about cancer?" And I said, "No, I feel pretty healthy. I feel okay." And then he said,

00:17:43.840 | "Let me see your back." And I turned around and he looked at my back. He's like, "You have perfect

00:17:47.360 | skin. They should study you in an institute." I said, "This is what normal healthy skin looks like

00:17:58.160 | if you expose it to the sun." And he said, "So you're saying everything I've been teaching in my

00:18:03.600 | medical practice for the last 40 years was wrong?" I said, "Yes, everything." It was funny. Funny

00:18:10.160 | conversation. - Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, we could go down a deep rabbit hole with this,

00:18:14.640 | but listeners of this podcast will know that I'm very much a proponent of getting those sunlight

00:18:20.080 | signals to the eyes at least once a day in the morning, but also in the evening. I'll just share

00:18:26.480 | with you now, I learned from a guest whose episode we haven't aired yet that what is so special about

00:18:35.360 | that morning and evening sunlight are the contrast between blues and oranges, blues and reds, blues

00:18:40.800 | and pinks, that we can't always see if there's cloud cover, but they come through. And it's the

00:18:45.120 | mathematical difference in their presence, a subtraction of a lot of blue and then next to it,

00:18:51.440 | a lot of orange or a lot of blue and then next to it, a lot of pink that triggers the body's

00:18:57.520 | understanding that this is morning and evening and that night is coming in the evening and that it's

00:19:02.480 | time to be awake in the morning and throughout the day. In the middle of the day, when the sun

00:19:07.600 | is out and it's overhead, it looks like white light and white light includes the blues and

00:19:12.160 | the oranges and the pinks and the reds, but they subtract to zero because they're all mixed

00:19:17.920 | together. That's why it looks just blue and white. And so while bright light is great throughout the

00:19:21.920 | day, it's those morning signals. Now the, I think the dermatology community is starting to come

00:19:27.040 | online with the idea that low solar angle sunlight early and later in the day, sunrise and sun rising

00:19:33.040 | and sun setting. And I say that because people always go, oh, do you have to see across the

00:19:36.480 | horizon? That would be ideal, but rising and setting do not create the kind of skin damage

00:19:43.120 | or eye damage that they've been so concerned about. And I think the next step for the field

00:19:46.640 | of dermatology is going to be to start communicating with the neuroscientists and the

00:19:51.520 | circadian biologists and really learning that. So thanks for bridging that gap on the beach this

00:19:56.640 | morning. I do think that's how it starts and then it wicks out. Headphones. So I made the choice a

00:20:02.320 | few years ago to stop using the Bluetooth headphones based on my personal experience,

00:20:07.920 | which was I kept getting these cysts behind my ears, which I was told were lymph, swellings of

00:20:13.520 | lymph. They would actually drain lymph if they got big enough. It was, there was really gross and

00:20:18.640 | kind of troubling. I stopped using them. I didn't get them. I started using them again. I started

00:20:23.360 | getting those lymph things and, and there was some significant heat effects as well. And I've

00:20:29.440 | interviewed a couple of people, including a neurosurgeon on the podcast about the level of EMS

00:20:35.920 | that come from them. And they were not concerned. Others I've spoken to are concerned. I'm going to

00:20:40.480 | try and balance out the conversation over time, but my feeling was, look, if there's any concern

00:20:44.960 | whatsoever, why would I use them? And I, so I use the ones with wires, but use the ones with wires

00:20:51.440 | that are even one step further away from wifi transmitters. There are ones with air tubes

00:20:58.160 | that I use depending on what's going on. And those have no electrical, there's no electric

00:21:06.240 | near your head. It's just an air tube where the sound is traveling. This actual sound is traveling

00:21:12.080 | in the tubes to your ears. I definitely sleep better with the phone out of the bedroom. Some

00:21:17.920 | people are now turning off their wifi at night. I think you and I are both really aligned in the

00:21:22.800 | sense that we've seen enough things come and go in the health space, like disparaging remarks about

00:21:29.440 | lifting weights. Like that's just for bodybuilders. And now everybody knows muscle bound. You become

00:21:33.920 | muscle bound. Now, men and women, elderly and young are encouraged to do resistance training.

00:21:38.800 | Yoga used to be cast in this kind of magic carpet realm, breath work. All of this stuff has become

00:21:46.400 | over time mainstream, but it's taken a very long time and the road has been choppy and sometimes

00:21:51.120 | my opinion, really unfair to the, to the practices and their value. I mean, these are zero cost

00:21:57.280 | practices in many cases that can really help people. And so when I look at something like

00:22:00.880 | sunscreen or, or, you know, Bluetooth headphones, or we're talking about some of these things,

00:22:06.160 | I wish I had a portal into the future where we look back and go like, of course,

00:22:10.880 | of course. So what are your thoughts on just kind of health and wellness as you've observed it in

00:22:17.040 | the last 20, 30 years? I mean, you've been in this for a while. I mean, you paid attention to

00:22:21.600 | mindfulness and mind, body stuff. You know, what are your thoughts? I try to live in as natural

00:22:27.920 | way as possible. I try to eat as few processed foods as possible, try to eat grass fed animals.

00:22:34.720 | And I use hardly any products of any kind, you know, that, that aren't just something that grows

00:22:43.760 | or lives on the planet. There were a couple of questions about this, so I'll ask now.

00:22:48.160 | You lost a tremendous amount of weight. You look great by the way. Thank you. You look super fit.

00:22:53.840 | Every time I see you, you're in better and better shape. And that's, that's in,

00:22:59.440 | that's your perception. It's not in fact the case. I don't know when I see each time you, I mean,

00:23:06.000 | you're extremely mobile, you you're sleeping well, you have a robust life, like, you know,

00:23:11.280 | I mean, all the marks of health and vitality. So I've heard you mentioned before that you lost a

00:23:19.200 | significant amount of weight. How much weight and how did you do it? 135 pounds through a high

00:23:25.760 | protein, low calorie, low carb diet. And that went against the convention at the time? Well,

00:23:36.640 | the person who suggested it was someone at UCLA. So it was a mainstream doctor who helped me with

00:23:44.640 | my weight loss. I had been a vegan at that time, which was not mainstream then. And it was very

00:23:51.600 | unhealthy, but I did that for 20 some odd years because I believed in the theory of it, but it

00:23:57.360 | proved not to be healthy for me. Do you think that different diets likely work for different people?

00:24:04.000 | Yes. So that not everyone necessarily should do what you did? No, no, but I think most people

00:24:11.840 | would probably benefit from healthy red meat. I'm saying that only because it's so vilified in our

00:24:18.240 | culture. Yeah, I agree. And I think the healthy piece is key there to non factory farmed animals,

00:24:24.240 | which fortunately reasonably cost sources that are becoming more available.

00:24:29.200 | Well, I'm going to start pulling from the list of questions. By the way, folks, there were more than

00:24:36.320 | a thousand questions in just the one third printout that I did. It's an intimidating stack

00:24:43.840 | in front of you. It's the most notes I've ever put in front of me during a guest discussion here on

00:24:49.120 | the podcast. And we are not going to ask you every question, but I've organized them in some sense of

00:24:55.920 | coherent order. Did you organize them or did AI organize them? I organized them,

00:25:02.160 | but that's a great opportunity to ask you one of the questions that came up several times,

00:25:05.840 | which was what are your thoughts on AI and its ability to shape how music is made,

00:25:12.400 | how visual arts are made? Are you one of these like scared of AI or do you embrace new technology?

00:25:18.880 | I don't know enough about it yet to talk about it. What I will say is what I find interesting

00:25:25.760 | about art is the point of view of the person making it. And I don't know that AI has a point

00:25:30.640 | of view of its own. So I don't know how interesting it would be, AI's point of view.

00:25:36.640 | But I like people's points of view and what makes an artist a great artist to me is something about

00:25:44.800 | their point of view does something to me. Childhood. A question for Rick Rubin was

00:25:52.320 | what activities did you find most enjoyable and easy to get lost in as a child? I love this

00:25:58.720 | question for you in particular. Reading was a big part of my life. Listening to music was a big part

00:26:04.320 | of my life. Playing guitar along with music can't really play, but the idea of playing along. So it

00:26:10.480 | didn't have to actually be good enough to play along because I didn't have that skill set,

00:26:15.680 | but I liked the experience of doing my best to play along with something I was listening to.

00:26:21.600 | And also magic. Learning like shuffling cards in front of a mirror and coin tricks and slide of

00:26:35.120 | hand was just interesting to me. Do you still do magic? I don't. Okay. At the time that music took

00:26:41.200 | over my life, I had to choose between the two because both of them were full-time life pursuits.

00:26:47.840 | I went and saw a mentalist in New York this summer with my sister, Asi Wind is his name,

00:26:53.120 | A-S-I, first name, last name, Wind. Every time I see a mentalist, and especially when I see Asi,

00:27:00.880 | I've seen him twice, it blows my mind. What are your thoughts on mentalists? It's my favorite

00:27:08.880 | form of magic. Really most interesting because it doesn't rely on props. It's pure.

00:27:17.840 | It feels like pure magic. If you have a box and you pull something out of the box,

00:27:31.040 | there's probably something tricky about the box. But when someone can look at you and tell you what

00:27:37.600 | you're thinking, it's just wild. It's really wild. So I love that. After Asi did his act,

00:27:47.920 | when we pseudo-returned to reality, because it really does change the way you look at

00:27:53.120 | things after that for quite a while, maybe forever. I asked him if he was willing to share

00:27:58.320 | maybe just one nugget of insight into how he does what he does. And of course I wasn't expecting he

00:28:04.000 | was going to give away the whole thing. And he said, a lot of it has to do with forming and

00:28:11.360 | erasing memories in people quickly, which sounds very dark and mysterious. That's really

00:28:17.840 | interesting. Yeah, that maybe it's possible to erase memories in people. Like maybe what we

00:28:22.960 | thought we saw, we really didn't see or hear. Wow. So I dig that. Great description. Yeah.

00:28:27.920 | I'm going to bring him out here, by the way. So we should all get together. I would love to see that.

00:28:31.760 | I want to get him on the podcast. Okay. A full 10% of the questions for you

00:28:37.520 | were around writer's blocks, sticking points, this kind of thing, like feeling stuck in the creative

00:28:47.040 | process. Now people didn't specify whether or not they were stuck at the beginning, the middle of

00:28:52.400 | the end, but based on my read of all of these questions, I got the sense that people were

00:28:59.840 | feeling like there's something in them that they want access to. They want to create, but they

00:29:06.000 | don't know how to get past that initial stage as opposed to somebody who's like 90% done and they

00:29:10.400 | just can't finish the last 10%. What are your thoughts about these kinds of blocks and how to

00:29:17.680 | overcome them? Any experience you've had with them yourself and perhaps with working with other

00:29:24.560 | artists? The first thought is to go past the idea of the block and think about what's the cause of

00:29:35.760 | the block. And the block is usually something like, it's either a personal, I'm not good enough.

00:29:44.720 | It can be a confidence issue. I don't have anything to say. Or it could be a

00:29:52.960 | thinking about someone else. Nobody's going to like what I make. Do you know what I'm saying?

00:30:01.760 | So it's either a self-judgment or a fear of outside judgment. So if you're making something

00:30:09.600 | with a freedom of, this is something I'm making for myself for now, that's all it is.

00:30:21.120 | It's a diary entry. Everything I make is a diary entry. The beauty of a diary entry is

00:30:29.680 | I can write my diary entry and you can't tell me my diary entry wasn't good enough or that's not

00:30:40.080 | what I experienced. Of course, it's what I experienced. I'm writing a personal diary

00:30:46.000 | for myself. No one else can judge it. It is my experience of my life. Everything we make

00:30:55.120 | can be that, can be a personal reflection of who we are in that moment of time. It doesn't have to

00:31:08.400 | be the greatest you could ever do. It doesn't have to have any expectation that it's going to

00:31:13.920 | change the world. It doesn't have to be this has to sell a certain number of copies for any reason.

00:31:20.560 | It doesn't have any of those things. All it is is I'm making this thing. I'm making this thing for

00:31:26.560 | me and I want to do it to the best of my ability to where I feel good about it and where it's honest.

00:31:32.560 | It's honest of where I'm at. And if you're living in this world of just being honest to where you're

00:31:39.120 | at, there's nothing blocking that. Do you know what I'm saying? There are no blocks. The blocks

00:31:45.840 | are all based on dealing with a different force or a different perception that is made up. You make

00:31:56.160 | up the story and you're living the story. I'm in this block because I just can't do it. The reason

00:32:02.880 | you can't do it is because you're afraid someone else is not going to like it or you're there's

00:32:07.760 | no blocks. There's infinite amount of information out there to work with because it also doesn't

00:32:15.360 | stem from us. We're vehicles for this information and it's coming through us all the time. So if you

00:32:23.200 | don't have an idea when you're sitting at your desk, if you go for a walk, chances are you'll

00:32:26.800 | see something that'll spark something in you as a seed to take off from. That makes a lot of sense.

00:32:36.720 | That makes a lot of sense. And I had a thought while you were saying that one of the challenges

00:32:43.040 | that I have in completing work and getting into a good work groove is that, especially nowadays

00:32:49.920 | because of phones and so easy to communicate with other people, it's not that they interrupt me.

00:32:55.040 | It's that, and this happened the other day, I set up my new office really nicely. I'm living in a

00:33:00.480 | very quiet place now. It's like almost completely silent unless I'm playing music. It's really

00:33:07.040 | interesting. Or the coyotes sometimes come around and start doing their thing at night, but

00:33:10.960 | completely silent. And I realized I was having a hard time getting into a work groove.

00:33:16.320 | And I realized that I felt compelled to continue to reach out to people. And then I realized,

00:33:21.360 | as you just provided your answer to the last question, that there's probably something in

00:33:28.160 | me that has a bit of a fear of separation or abandonment from people based on my own experience.

00:33:36.320 | And I feel very well supported by my friends and coworkers these days. Very, very well supported.

00:33:42.320 | I'm in a kind of pinch me place around that. And, but I realize now that what's happening in my mind

00:33:48.240 | is it's not a challenge of getting into the work. It's a fear that if I spend a couple of hours

00:33:52.240 | really in that tight tunnel of creation, that there might not be anyone there when I exit it,

00:34:01.040 | which is a crazy thought. But that's the anxiety. And I only realize that now. So thank you.

00:34:06.640 | I trust that you guys will be there when I exit the tunnel. And when there's a deadline,

00:34:12.800 | I have no choice but to jump into that tunnel. That's actually what helps. Deadlines really

00:34:18.480 | help me. Do deadlines help you? Do you like deadlines? Deadlines don't help me at the

00:34:22.880 | beginning of a process. They can help at the end. Once the code's been cracked, usually when I start

00:34:29.760 | something, I have no idea what it's going to be. So it's a very open process in the beginning.

00:34:36.080 | And if there's any sense of required timing, that would undermine the freedom needed for it to be

00:34:44.320 | all that it could be. But once the code's cracked and you know what it is, and it's all there,

00:34:49.040 | and you're dealing with the fine points, then it can be really helpful to have a deadline.

00:34:56.640 | As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012. So I'm delighted that they're

00:35:02.880 | sponsoring the podcast. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that's designed to meet all of

00:35:07.760 | your foundational nutrition needs. Now, of course, I try to get enough servings of vitamins and

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00:35:21.200 | minerals and the probiotics that I need. And it also contains adaptogens to help buffer stress.

00:35:26.560 | Simply put, I always feel better when I take AG1. I have more focus and energy and I sleep better,

00:35:31.920 | and it also happens to taste great. For all these reasons, whenever I'm asked if you could take just

00:35:36.800 | one supplement, what would it be? I answer AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, go to drinkag1.com/huberman

00:35:44.880 | to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin

00:35:49.840 | D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman. - A number of questions were sort of comments

00:35:57.760 | about what people believe your process is. And one of the repeating themes there,

00:36:04.480 | which I thought was interesting, was it seems that Rick Rubin is comfortable with uncertainty

00:36:10.400 | and the unknown. - Yes, that is true. Yes, I am comfortable with it because I accept

00:36:17.520 | that's the way things are. That said, when I start a new project, I always have anxiety because

00:36:24.880 | I'm uncertain of what's gonna happen and I want it to be good. Now, I know it won't be done until

00:36:33.840 | I feel good about it. So in that way, there's no real pressure, but I do still feel this anxiety

00:36:43.120 | of, "I wonder what's gonna happen today. I hope it's good." - When you've worked with musical

00:36:49.760 | artists, let's say, how important is it to you to know what challenges, maybe even what successes,

00:36:58.160 | but certainly what challenges they happen to be going through at that period of time?

00:37:03.280 | Put differently, do you end finding yourself playing therapist and guide and psychological/emotional

00:37:10.640 | mentor to artists you work with during the creative process, or is that separate? - If they're going

00:37:18.560 | through something that's interfering with the work, anything that gets in the way of the work

00:37:23.280 | is something worth discussing. Our focus there together is to get the work done. Sometimes it

00:37:30.640 | ends up being more therapeutic to allow that to happen. - One of the questions that really stood

00:37:38.160 | out to me in this vast list of questions involved a quote from your last discussion on this podcast,

00:37:45.200 | our last discussion on this podcast. So I'm gonna read a little bit of it 'cause it's fairly long,

00:37:50.400 | but I found this to be a really important question that we should get into in a bit more depth.

00:37:56.960 | Somebody, I don't know who said, if you happen to talk to Rick, I happen to be talking to you,

00:38:00.960 | ask him this for me. In his book, in the section on self-doubt, Rick said, quote, "One of the reasons

00:38:08.080 | so many great artists die of overdoses early in their lives is because they use drugs to numb a

00:38:12.640 | very painful existence. The reason it is painful is the reason they became an artist in the first

00:38:17.200 | place, their incredible sensitivity. If you see tremendous beauty or tremendous pain where other

00:38:22.400 | people see little or nothing at all, you're confronted with big feelings all the time.

00:38:27.360 | These emotions can be confusing and overwhelming." So this goes on for some pages. And then this

00:38:36.240 | person says, and I think they're speaking for many people when they said, "This resonated with

00:38:40.880 | me personally. And I wonder whether or not this is something that maybe you've experienced yourself

00:38:44.800 | or that you just noticed about artists in similar situations. And what sort of advice do you give

00:38:51.120 | the artists you work with in order to embrace those painful tones within them and transmute

00:38:57.600 | them into great work?" I've definitely felt them myself. I'm unusually sensitive in the world.

00:39:04.720 | I'm wearing red glasses in here for a reason. I live a very protected monk-like life because

00:39:16.880 | simulation gets in the way of my ability to be where I want to be. So I tend to stay away from

00:39:26.480 | things. And it seems to be the case with many artists, a desire for nurturing their internal

00:39:43.520 | life. And if the goal is to nurture our internal life, it invariably leads to sacrifices.

00:39:54.400 | Did you spend a lot of time alone as a kid? I'm asking this question.

00:39:58.960 | I did. Yeah, I was the only child and I spent most of my time alone.

00:40:01.920 | When you talk about controlling this amount and type of stimulation in your life to protect that

00:40:07.520 | inner landscape, does that pertain to certain personality types, even voice types? I've found

00:40:14.080 | at various times in my life, I love people, but there are certain voices that just grate on me

00:40:21.280 | and I can't be around them. I just can't be around them. It's like a cacophony inside. I just feel

00:40:29.040 | like I'm being asked to drink something that tastes awful. Does that resonate?

00:40:35.840 | I try to curate the people around me to be people I want to have around me, whatever that is.

00:40:41.440 | You said you protect the inner landscape, but certainly you're not averse to high intensity

00:40:48.320 | stimulation. Last night we went to the AEW and by the way, thank you for taking me. That was such an

00:40:52.960 | incredible experience. It was really fun.

00:40:54.800 | It was really fun. It reminded me of early punk rock shows where I really did some of

00:40:59.920 | my first punk rock shows where I went and just was like, Oh my gosh, this is exciting and scary.

00:41:05.760 | And I love it. And it felt loving too, which is also the community of punk rock that I observed

00:41:12.960 | and have been blessed to be a part of. It's like, yeah, there's aggression, but there's also love.

00:41:18.160 | And then there's romance. And then there's also betrayal and there's all the elements,

00:41:23.120 | but there's still a sense of like, everyone wants to be here. And there's a sense of goodness behind

00:41:27.280 | it all, even though some of it was bloody and violent. So for you, what does wrestling allow

00:41:33.680 | you to feel in those high intensity environments? It completely relaxes me because there are no

00:41:39.600 | stakes. You know, nobody, everyone's working together in the show to protect each other.

00:41:47.120 | No one's trying to hurt anybody regardless of what the story line is. It's like a ballet where

00:41:52.960 | there's a fight in the ballet. There's no, there's no actual aggression of people towards each other.

00:42:01.360 | It's just the opposite, but you get to experience this wildly dynamic, exciting, surreal theater

00:42:10.640 | piece where people are doing these gymnastic and acrobatic things that are truly death-defying.

00:42:18.880 | And it's fun. And the storylines absorb you in a way where, you know, you never know what's true

00:42:29.280 | and what's not. You know, we know wrestling's fake. We're told wrestling's fake, but there's

00:42:34.960 | something legitimate about it that seems to me more legitimate than anything else. The most

00:42:44.480 | legitimate because it's the closest to what the world's actually like. People don't always tell

00:42:51.920 | you what they really think. And when someone tells you a story, it might not really be the true story.

00:42:58.160 | They may even think they may be, they may think they're telling you the real story.

00:43:03.200 | And that might not be the real story. We don't know. We know so little. You know, we experienced

00:43:11.760 | something and then we make up a story to understand it ourselves. And then forever more when we tell

00:43:17.920 | that story, it was our version of an experience, but we don't know that's what happened. That was

00:43:23.280 | our take on it. Wrestling is like, that's what the real world is like. Because when you watch

00:43:34.080 | wrestling, you never know what's true. That's what, if you watch the news, like you watch

00:43:39.520 | wrestling and you never know what's true, it would be more accurate. You'd have a better sense of the

00:43:46.320 | world if you took it all in like it was pro wrestling. I think we're in a place in human

00:43:51.440 | history where people are starting to feel that way about the media. It's also why wrestling's

00:43:56.720 | so popular. You know, it's more popular than it's ever been. Yeah, that's interesting. Things like

00:44:01.440 | UFC, kind of gladiator like octagon fights and wrestling are increasing in popularity, despite

00:44:09.040 | the fact that supposedly we're evolving. So I think it reflects something both primitive and

00:44:14.560 | evolved about the human brain. Yes. Right. Primitive in the sense that, yeah, there's some

00:44:18.160 | violence. It's physical. That's down in the hypothalamus, as we'd say. It scratches that itch,

00:44:24.640 | but they're actually protecting each other. It scratches that itch of seeing the gladiators,

00:44:33.840 | but it's like watching a movie. They're not really hurting each other. They get hurt,

00:44:40.800 | but only because the things they're doing are so crazy. I think in order to be able to thoroughly

00:44:46.560 | enjoy wrestling, one has to be able to give up narrative distancing just a little bit,

00:44:52.160 | right? Narrative distancing is this sense that this is a story, it's a movie, it's not real,

00:44:56.800 | but there were moments like yesterday, the jump off the top rope onto the guy who splayed out

00:45:01.920 | on the ladder, the ladder breaks. This was right in front of us. It couldn't have felt good. No,

00:45:08.080 | he walked away. He seemed fine-ish, but that, and then there was a match between two women where a

00:45:17.920 | woman put a metal plate into the bottoms of her suit and then ran and then jumped onto the other

00:45:24.400 | woman and hit her with the metal plate. Then the metal plate slipped out and she was walking around

00:45:28.640 | and everyone knew she had cheated because you're not supposed to use the metal plate.

00:45:31.920 | So it was exciting because she had done it, exciting because she had

00:45:36.560 | gotten away with it. And then at the same time, exciting and upsetting that the referee

00:45:41.760 | saw it, but then didn't call it. This is like Twitter X. This is like Instagram. This is like

00:45:48.000 | politics. This is like, this is real life, right? Like seeing people get away with things is so

00:45:52.960 | frustrating if you feel they shouldn't have. Yeah. That's all part of it. It's like, it's a very

00:45:57.840 | accurate representation of the world. Love it. It's weird because I never would have thought

00:46:06.000 | I'd be hooked. I'm hooked. It's like archery and professional wrestling. Now it's like,

00:46:11.280 | I'm going to be busy guy in 24. I'm going to come back to this very practical question and ask a

00:46:17.680 | different question first. There are a few comments in here that are just priceless by the way.

00:46:24.400 | Someone wanted to point out that you're a Pisces and so was Einstein.

00:46:32.800 | A couple of historical questions. I know you're not big on answering historical questions

00:46:36.880 | necessarily. Maybe you are, but I can't help every time I see you asking a question about

00:46:42.800 | the Ramones or asking a question about Joe Strummer. But I like this question. First of

00:46:48.240 | all, it starts off. I love Rick Rubin. He's so fascinating. There are so many questions that

00:46:53.520 | start that way on the podcast that you did with Joe Rogan. You talked about your experience with

00:47:01.280 | Johnny Cash and seeing him in a new light after doing interviews for a book about Johnny or

00:47:07.680 | something like that. The question this person asked was from your present view, what was the

00:47:14.240 | most impactful moment or moments from being with him and working with him? Or simply do you recall

00:47:19.600 | a moment working with Johnny Cash that you particularly enjoyed? I enjoyed any time I got

00:47:26.320 | to spend time with him. He was a really soulful, serious, shy, quiet man. Incredibly knowledgeable.

00:47:38.240 | He knew a great deal about history and so much about music. He knew every song. He may not have

00:47:44.880 | known modern songs, but he knew the history of music really well. There was just a humble

00:47:54.240 | honesty about him that came through. I think that the strength of him as an artist was

00:48:01.600 | when he said words, even if he didn't write the words, if he told a story in words,

00:48:07.440 | you believe that story. So he had a credible gravitas.

00:48:14.400 | He was great because of who he was. It wasn't his ability as a singer. It wasn't his ability

00:48:23.840 | as a songwriter, although he was a great songwriter and he was a great singer,

00:48:28.160 | but that's not why he was Johnny Cash. He was Johnny Cash because of the human being

00:48:32.400 | underneath and anything that guy would have done, we would be interested in because that's how much

00:48:41.360 | of a beam of light he was on the planet. It just happened to be music.

00:48:45.920 | It just happened to be music. I love that. One question that came up a lot, and I think I can

00:48:55.280 | understand why, which is how does one convince themselves that what they're doing and working on

00:49:02.720 | is worth it? And I think here we have to define worth it and we can find that in a number of ways,

00:49:08.480 | but I think this is a feeling that I hear people express a lot. How do I know if I'm on the right

00:49:13.920 | path? And I just want to remind your earlier answer that you're pretty comfortable with

00:49:19.840 | uncertainty and the unknown. And I think that's a rare trait.

00:49:24.800 | The question of worth it is reliant on an outcome. We don't make these things for an outcome.

00:49:32.160 | It's not the mindset to make something great. The outcome happens, you're making the best thing you

00:49:42.400 | can make. It's a devotional practice. Whatever happens after that happens and that part that

00:49:52.720 | happens after it is completely out of your control. Putting any energy into that part that's out of

00:49:59.120 | your control, it's a waste of time. All it does is undermine your work. Your work is to make the best

00:50:05.280 | thing you can. So any thought you have about outcome undermines the whole thing. Let that

00:50:12.720 | one sink in. I think that's so important for people to hear. And I'll say it's okay to think

00:50:18.080 | about outcome after you've finished the thing you're making. Once you've made it, then you

00:50:23.360 | can say, "Hmm, what can I do to turn people onto this?" But in the making of it, it's premature.

00:50:32.640 | Which brings my mind back to that diary entry-like approach. Because when you do a diary entry,

00:50:37.680 | if you lie to yourself, you're going to get a lot less out of it.

00:50:41.520 | It's a ridiculous idea, lying in your diary entries.

00:50:45.040 | It is. Well, it's so interesting because when you learn how to do really good science,

00:50:49.680 | and I was fortunate to work with someone who was truly committed to the truth and accuracy.

00:50:55.280 | She used to just say, whenever there was a scandal published, someone fabricated data,

00:51:00.000 | she was like, "This is so crazy. Why would you get into science?"

00:51:03.040 | If you want to make stuff up, you'd be better off going to something else. So clearly they weren't

00:51:07.440 | those people who make up data were not in science for discovery of truth as best we can understand

00:51:14.320 | it. They were into it for something else. But it's the same way you formulate a question,

00:51:18.640 | then a hypothesis, and then you just go see what is and what isn't. And then afterwards you decide,

00:51:24.160 | "Well, is this a paper that's sent to a top journal or a mediocre journal?" But you can't

00:51:28.320 | control the outcome. So it's very similar. Exactly the same. And you'll see it in so many

00:51:34.800 | different aspects of life beyond art. I think one of the things that was interesting that came up in

00:51:40.400 | writing the book is it started being about art, and I came to realize as I was putting the ideas

00:51:48.160 | together that it seems like regardless of what you do in life, if you follow these principles,

00:51:54.960 | your life will probably improve. You'll probably be a better husband or a better father or better

00:52:00.640 | whatever it is. It seems like the art is an outgrowth of why the subtitle is a way of being.

00:52:11.440 | It's like you create yourself in a way in the world where the things that you make

00:52:18.480 | are tapped into something deep. But that comes from you being tapped into something deep. That's

00:52:24.960 | how it works. So tapping into self, grounding in self, not thinking about outcome, diary entry-like

00:52:34.560 | approach to creating stuff. That seems to be the... And I think one thing I'll say that because I say

00:52:42.320 | tapping into self, it doesn't come from the self, but you have to tap into yourself because you're

00:52:50.720 | the vessel to allow it to come out. Everything in the vessel is coming from somewhere else.

00:52:56.320 | It's not your creation. It's like you're the sculptor or you're the

00:53:11.520 | data analyst. We are taking these things from different places that you've noticed.

00:53:19.120 | Some things that you've noticed, some things that you don't know that you've noticed, but you did.

00:53:22.640 | That's how we learn. We take in a lot of information that we don't even know we're taking in.

00:53:26.960 | But the way we can take these data points that are inside of us, that came from outside of us,

00:53:35.280 | and create a constellation. That's what the artist's job is. But also, that's what we all

00:53:42.960 | do all the time. And to get better at it, it's getting more in tune with yourself and opening

00:53:50.480 | yourself to things outside of... I'll say if you have a narrow belief system, you'll have less

00:54:00.080 | information to work with, less data points. So being open-minded and allowing surprise to be

00:54:08.320 | surprised, holding all of your beliefs very loosely. It's interesting because the way you

00:54:17.920 | describe this and from knowing you as well, it seems that this whole process is best served by

00:54:23.680 | having really good boundaries, not getting foggy about what's about you and what's about somebody

00:54:31.360 | else or about what other people want or the world wants, but also having really good antennae and

00:54:38.080 | being able to see what's happening in the world. You can't be cloistered and like this, but part

00:54:44.160 | of the creative process feels and looks like you're in a tunnel, but then you have to bring

00:54:50.720 | in from the outside. So it seems like making these two separate compartments that you can

00:54:56.800 | bridge seems important and healthy. I mean, here, as you mentioned, it's a way of being. It's not

00:55:01.920 | just about creating things. That's also a healthy way to be in the world because if you're constantly

00:55:05.600 | getting pulled around by everything emotionally and things are upsetting you, that's not good.

00:55:10.400 | But if you're just cut off from everything, that's not good either. Do you cultivate

00:55:17.440 | that way of being through these practices or do you think you've been, there's something

00:55:24.720 | about the way you're wired that you started off that way? It feels natural to me. It feels natural

00:55:29.520 | to me. And I'll tell you, when I was younger, I thought I would live in New York City my whole

00:55:32.960 | life. And there was a time when I felt like having that energy and noise around me felt good. Now I

00:55:39.600 | feel best in the jungle or the forest. I didn't decide that. I didn't decide what feels good,

00:55:46.720 | you know. It just happened. So you're clearly willing to update and adapt, change your

00:55:52.480 | nutrition, change your city, change the way you feel. Get new information, update. Love it.

00:55:59.360 | You're a scientist. Well, I don't know anything. Again, we start with I know nothing. We all know

00:56:06.240 | nothing. So if something sounds interesting, worth trying, I'll try it. See, does it work,

00:56:12.480 | does it not work? You know, I thought at one point in time, I thought veganism was a good idea. I was

00:56:18.240 | excited about it. And I did it for a long time. I didn't get the results I was hoping for. I didn't

00:56:24.720 | have better health. I had much worse health. I had, you know, a tremendous amount of weight gain,

00:56:30.560 | and I was very ill through that diet. But I didn't, my intentions were good.

00:56:37.360 | How do you approach resistance, especially resistance in other artists you work with?

00:56:43.120 | You know, presumably people hire you. They want to work with you. They do want to work with you.

00:56:49.280 | But I think what the person is asking here is if somebody you're working with is stuck,

00:56:54.160 | like they're stuck, do you ask them to think? Do you ask them to feel? Do you ask them to take a

00:56:59.760 | day off? Do you do a Dennis Rodman on them and send them to Vegas to party for a couple of days?

00:57:05.200 | Because that's what worked for Dennis. Do you leave them alone? Let them come to you? I think

00:57:13.120 | people are very curious about what those sorts of interactions are like.

00:57:15.840 | I think it's always a case by case situation. It really depends on the artist. It depends on the

00:57:20.000 | situation. And usually by the time that we're working together, any resistance they had in

00:57:28.240 | the past has already been overcome. Usually I'm together with someone where we make a team

00:57:35.600 | with the idea of making the best thing we possibly can. And we'll both do anything we can for that

00:57:41.120 | thing to be the best it can be. We're past the resistance. I notice you remain friends with a

00:57:49.280 | lot of the people you've worked with, which is a great testament to you and your work and who you

00:57:54.160 | are. I just want to mention that. That's not always the case, folks, with other producer-artist

00:58:00.160 | relationships. So it's worth pointing out. A practical question, but I think one that

00:58:04.720 | is worth asking is, do you handle the finances around your work with artists? Do you have

00:58:12.000 | someone else do negotiations and all of that kind of stuff? I honestly have no idea how it works.

00:58:17.680 | I have no clue. Everything seems to get done, but I have no idea in the inner workings of any of it.

00:58:25.680 | I try to stay out of as much. If it's not about making the beautiful thing in the moment,

00:58:35.120 | I don't really want to think about it too much. I don't want to be involved in that aspect.

00:58:39.520 | It was interesting when I was visiting you this summer, we had a really delightful

00:58:44.320 | dinner conversation with one of your other guests. At one point, probably due to me, frankly,

00:58:51.120 | the conversation veered a bit into the business realm. I'll never forget, you said,

00:58:56.080 | in a very polite way that didn't feel dismissive at all, you said, "Let's talk about art instead."

00:59:02.720 | Enough about business. Let's talk about art instead. In that moment-

00:59:08.400 | I don't remember that.

00:59:09.200 | Well, I gleaned a lot of gems from that visit. I wasn't there to study you. I was there to hang

00:59:14.000 | out with you, but I gleaned so many gems, treading water in the pool, some of the other practices

00:59:18.080 | we'll talk about. I remember that, and I think about that in myself a lot. In the morning,

00:59:23.840 | the emails and things coming in, and then I think my purpose in life at this point in my life is to

00:59:30.800 | collect, organize, and disseminate health and science information.

00:59:35.280 | That, for me, is art in this sense. Anything else feels boring.

00:59:42.720 | Someone else can do that. You have a particular gift in that you can take complicated scientific

00:59:50.160 | ideas and explain them in a way that all of us who are not scientists or not medical students

00:59:56.400 | can understand. It's really helpful. You do it in a kind and loving way where

01:00:03.760 | we get the sense that you care, that we understand. You explain it in a way that

01:00:10.960 | there's a care in it that really speaks to us. So thank you for teaching us.

01:00:18.320 | Thank you, and thanks for the words. That means a lot to me. That is indeed what it is for me. I

01:00:23.040 | want people to know the information because I think it's so cool and so important, and they

01:00:26.480 | need the information, and it's not about me. It's like they have to know. And you did it this

01:00:32.160 | morning for this guy on the beach, so he'll see the light, pun intended.

01:00:37.680 | I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a

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01:01:38.640 | Do you prefer the WWE or the AEW, Rick?

01:01:42.400 | I love them both. I love pro wrestling. Pro wrestling is great.

01:01:45.680 | How often do you abandon an idea or project? Is there a pile of journals with crossed out ideas

01:01:57.280 | some place in Rick Rubin's basement?

01:01:59.120 | I would say there are many ideas that have not yet come to fruition, but I wouldn't say

01:02:03.440 | I've abandoned any. It seems like the ideas have a time when they want to come to fruition,

01:02:13.520 | and regardless of what I think, I don't get to determine the calendar. The ideas come,

01:02:19.280 | I can get excited about it, I can work on it, and then hit a wall. Nothing else and nothing,

01:02:26.080 | it's just impenetrable. Then there'll be another project that's just sailing along easily and the

01:02:31.600 | universe is working to help support that idea. I tend to work where there are several balls in

01:02:38.160 | the air at once and I don't fight against... If the universe is not helping a project,

01:02:48.160 | I'm wary to fight with the universe.

01:02:53.040 | How many projects are you working on right now or typically?

01:02:56.320 | It's impossible for me to even say. There are so many ideas and some of them are in idea phase,

01:03:06.720 | and some of them are in mid making stage, and some of them are in the final detail stage. There's

01:03:14.800 | always something happening. I'm always thinking about a lot of stuff. Some of it is stuff that

01:03:21.200 | I get to share with the world, but some of it might be remodeling a space or I'm always thinking

01:03:27.520 | about some creative puzzle. I have to imagine that for you, when the internet came to be,

01:03:36.480 | that it must have been really exciting because like me, you love foraging for information.

01:03:41.280 | I used to go to the library and Xerox copy papers and I loved looking through the stacks,

01:03:45.600 | but frankly it was physically exhausting and time consuming and financially it was hard for me at

01:03:50.720 | the time. Then you'd always get those copies where the book crease obscured the text closer to the

01:03:58.160 | spine of the book. I love PubMed. The world's at my fingertips. The world of research is at

01:04:04.160 | my fingertips. My goodness. How do you feel about smartphones and the internet? To you,

01:04:10.880 | does it feel like a giant gift for your creative process or is it an inhibitor?

01:04:15.440 | It's both. I love that all the information is at our fingertips.

01:04:20.160 | Sometimes having so much information, it's hard to sort. I'll tell you a quick story, which was

01:04:32.960 | when the music streaming revolution happened. I was really excited. The idea that all of music

01:04:40.960 | is in my pocket now and I can listen to any song, any album from any point in my life where I get

01:04:47.760 | to hear about something and it's all accessible right now in this moment. I was thinking at that

01:04:52.800 | time, I'm just going to DJ. All I'm going to do is DJ and I'm going to listen to anything I can

01:04:58.000 | think of that I'm excited about. Haven't heard the talking heads in a while. Let's listen to talking

01:05:01.280 | heads. Just how great that freedom is to have everything at your fingertips. What I came to

01:05:07.760 | learn very quickly is I don't want to DJ all day. I love that I have the ability to DJ all day.

01:05:15.680 | I love that when there's something I want to hear, I can find it, but I don't want to have to do the

01:05:23.120 | work of picking everything I'm going to listen to. I like being programmed to, and I like the

01:05:29.200 | discovery of somebody else playing something that I wasn't expecting and getting to enjoy that.

01:05:35.600 | So now I do more listening to either somebody's curated playlists or online radio stations and I

01:05:46.240 | do less picking music to listen to, but I never would have known that before because I always

01:05:52.480 | thought, well, if I could listen to anything I want, I want to listen to what I want to listen

01:05:55.840 | to. I didn't know that I didn't want to have to pick it. I love the rare live versions and

01:06:04.320 | B-sides and whatever Z-sides that one can find on YouTube. Like the other day you sent me just

01:06:09.600 | at random a clip from, I think it was a Japanese television show with the Ramones opening up

01:06:16.080 | and Johnny opens up with, "You're a loud mouth, baby. You better shut up." And then they dive

01:06:24.160 | into loud mouth. And it's the song I could have heard anywhere else, but it was the fact that it

01:06:31.040 | was shot from above, that it was black and white. And then he adds this little riff at the beginning,

01:06:37.600 | "You're a loud mouth, baby. You better shut up." And then just dives into it. That made it for me

01:06:41.600 | as a huge Ramones fan. I was like, yeah, I think I did that in my kitchen. Yeah. I was so hyped

01:06:48.160 | because when you go and just listen to a song that's recorded as part of an album,

01:06:53.760 | you're not going to get those additional pieces back in the day. And still now,

01:06:58.080 | if you went to a live show, you might see that and hear that and never forget that.

01:07:01.600 | But in that sense to me, YouTube and the internet is like, whoa, it's this archive of gems that I

01:07:09.040 | potentially have been there. Maybe it was '79, I would have been four years old.

01:07:12.400 | So anyway, thanks for sending me that clip. Loved it because you know how much I love the Ramones.

01:07:18.960 | But things like that, I just think, God, the internet is just amazing and so spectacular.

01:07:26.560 | Yeah. And the amount of lectures you could find on YouTube are unbelievable.

01:07:30.480 | The greatest thinkers in the world, I don't want to say are on YouTube because they probably didn't

01:07:36.800 | post on YouTube, but their material is on YouTube and it's unbelievable. You know, things from old

01:07:41.920 | films from the fifties and sixties, it's all on YouTube. Yeah. I've been listening to Bible

01:07:46.800 | interpretation on YouTube and there's just, it's interesting to hear different interpretations

01:07:51.840 | from different perspectives. And I would have never found these people. Most of them are dead.

01:07:57.520 | Yeah, they're so good. I'm trying to work through the old Testament start to finish now as a

01:08:02.560 | learning and a practice and wow. Okay. So the question was, are smartphones the chains that

01:08:10.000 | bind us and prevent our creativity? But I think you answered that it's both a

01:08:18.480 | rocket ship to creativity and chains to the ground. And it's like all of the tools. It's

01:08:24.400 | like the tools don't make or break your art. It's just, it's another tool. You can use it or misuse

01:08:30.480 | it. Someone wanted to know, and I would like to know whether or not you have any recurring dreams

01:08:36.640 | and what are your thoughts on dreams and dreaming in general? Do you write down your dreams? Do you

01:08:40.880 | spend time thinking about them? I've gone through phases of my life where I've written down dreams.

01:08:45.360 | I'm not doing it right now. I think we can learn a lot from writing our dreams. I tend not to

01:08:53.360 | analyze them in the moment, but I've noticed when I've kept a dream journal and looked at it years

01:08:57.280 | later, these surreal things that made no sense were all saying the same thing and they were all

01:09:04.560 | very clear based on my life experience at that time. So it gives us clues as to

01:09:12.000 | what's actually going on, the way our subconscious is experiencing our lives. It's giving us,

01:09:18.320 | I don't know if I would call them pointers, reflections would maybe be a better word.

01:09:28.160 | Our mutual friend, Paul Conte, believes that the unconscious or subconscious is both used

01:09:36.880 | interchangeably is the supercomputer of the human brain. That the misconception is that the forebrain,

01:09:44.560 | which is involved in planning and context and anticipation of outcomes, et cetera,

01:09:48.320 | people think that's the supercomputer, but that the supercomputer is the unconscious. That's Paul's

01:09:53.200 | belief. He's stated that very clearly on this podcast and elsewhere. And he believes that in

01:09:58.080 | dreams, the unconscious mind is controlling more of the dialogue, which makes a lot of sense,

01:10:03.920 | but also that the unconscious mind is constantly trying to teach us things in the way that we

01:10:10.080 | learn best. So like my dreams, for instance, are all analogies because that's pretty much,

01:10:15.520 | if people listen to me talk on the podcast, I often will use analogy and I'm very visual.

01:10:21.200 | So it will present things to me in visual symbols. So Paul said in terms of dream interpretation,

01:10:27.200 | that we would all be wise to think about how we learn best. And our unconscious mind is trying to

01:10:33.200 | toss us things in dreams to explain things in the way that we learn.

01:10:38.880 | It makes sense. And I would say also unconscious and our instinct, the way we act instinctually

01:10:45.920 | is a reflection of our unconscious. And as artists, that's a tapping into that,

01:10:51.520 | the instinct and the unconscious is where the great ideas are. And then things that come from our

01:11:01.040 | intellectual selves are much less, they have much less of a charge. They're much smaller ideas.

01:11:07.920 | Yeah, I think the conscious mind and the intellectual mind, as you're calling it,

01:11:12.880 | are bound to outcome in a big way. I'm going to inject a question of my own.

01:11:20.640 | I'm fascinated by the way you've discussed people's real underlying motivations and how that

01:11:28.080 | shapes their creative process, but also their career. If you would be willing to talk a little

01:11:34.640 | bit about the story of Andrew Dice Clay, that's the story that to me captures it best.

01:11:40.880 | Andrew Dice Clay was a comedian who told really offensive jokes and his audience loved him for it.

01:11:53.760 | But the people who weren't his audience didn't really understand it. And they vilified him.

01:11:59.920 | And he became a comedian because he wanted people to love him. He didn't become a comedian to

01:12:06.640 | hurt anybody. He wanted to entertain people. And while he was playing to sold out Madison Square

01:12:14.880 | Gardens full of people, newspapers would write terrible things about him. And it really got to

01:12:23.440 | him. And he decided to change his artistic output to try to make the people who didn't like him,

01:12:31.920 | like him. And when he did that, it undermined his whole gift. And it seemed like things fell apart.

01:12:45.600 | I think he's in a better place now. I haven't seen him in a while, but I think he's in a better place

01:12:50.240 | now. And he's back to caring less about the reaction and in turn getting a better reaction

01:13:00.000 | because he's being pure in what he thinks is funny.

01:13:04.480 | I liked him very much. In fact, I thought he did a spectacular job as playing the female artist's

01:13:14.400 | father in A Star is Born. He had Lady Gaga and Brad Cooper.

01:13:18.800 | He's a really good actor. He's a great actor.

01:13:20.960 | Yeah. Well, I really liked the story about him because it encapsulates so much

01:13:29.360 | that if people can think about why they do what they do, they're going to avoid pitfalls

01:13:36.480 | potentially. But how much time do you think people should spend introspecting

01:13:42.800 | about what makes them tick and why they want to entertain or make jokes?

01:13:46.000 | I don't think it's a one size fits all. I don't know that I can answer that question.

01:13:51.120 | Is it true that Ad Rock encouraged you to give LL Cool J a chance?

01:13:56.800 | Yes, that is true. Ad Rock heard the demo tape and insisted that I listen to it.

01:14:02.080 | I love that. This is a kind of generic question, but I think it's good to put these in every once

01:14:10.640 | in a while. What is your advice to a starting comedian? I always think of these like sophomore

01:14:19.520 | in high school kind of question, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're bad. In some sense,

01:14:22.720 | that's what makes it such a great question. What would your advice be to a starting comedian?

01:14:26.960 | Be true to yourself and not to listen to anyone. There you go. It would be a great book,

01:14:33.840 | except it'd be a very short book, but you may also make it a very great book.

01:14:37.120 | Book could be a blank book. You can just put all the things that you want to put in it.

01:14:43.280 | I'm working on a book now and I'll tell you it's hard. By the way, I asked Rick for advice about

01:14:47.520 | book writing because I've been trying to write this book for a while and he gave me this the

01:14:52.080 | following advice. So I'm injecting my own question. He said, the sooner you can get to a complete

01:14:56.960 | draft that you're happy with or happiest with the better the process will go. So I'm working on

01:15:04.240 | getting that complete draft. Yeah. I would say don't focus too much on any of the individual

01:15:09.200 | details until you have the whole thing down and then you can focus on all making everything better

01:15:15.200 | that you want to make better. Don't get bogged down in that at the expense of getting through

01:15:20.080 | the project. Your advice has really been helping me by the way. Great. I'm doing it like diary

01:15:25.200 | entries. Great. And I've kept a diary for many years, so that's somewhat natural.

01:15:30.160 | Tell me a little bit about your diary entries. How long is a diary? Sure. Yeah. A diary entry

01:15:37.920 | is anywhere from like one to eight handwritten pages, single line spacing, going back and forth

01:15:44.720 | between. I usually start in all capitals and then switch over to cursive as I speed up.

01:15:50.400 | I've been doing that since, gosh, since high school. I've got a drawer filled with them,

01:15:56.240 | dated and everything. And it's usually a process of just trying to get something out of my system

01:16:04.240 | that I feel is like clogging me, some frustration with the outside world. But sometimes like this

01:16:10.400 | morning, I journaled in the room before you showed up and I just was like, I think I was riding high

01:16:18.080 | off wrestling last night. I was marveling at how similar the great experiences of my life are now

01:16:25.120 | as they were to every other stage of my life in the sense that they give me this feeling of like,

01:16:31.440 | okay, they're these gems and I'm of people, you and others and experiences and I'm finding them,

01:16:39.200 | like I'm experiencing them and reminding myself that there are long periods in between those

01:16:44.480 | moments where things feel kind of like not empty, certainly not empty, but kind of frustrating in

01:16:50.640 | the sense that like I'm busy and I'm dealing with a bunch of things and things don't feel smooth.

01:16:55.360 | But I've been through enough of these cycles that I just

01:16:59.920 | am really learning to enjoy the cycles. And that was it. And I think the last line in my entry was

01:17:07.360 | something like, and I can't wait for more or something. So this morning is just a very positive

01:17:12.080 | entry, but sometimes, I mean, there are definitely some tear-stained entries and there are definitely

01:17:16.560 | some entries where I'm just so pissed I can barely get the writing out, but it's a process of like

01:17:20.480 | getting that stuff out so that then I can lean into the day.

01:17:24.720 | Do you ever go back and look at them?

01:17:26.240 | I did the other day because I recorded an episode on a very particular type of journaling that's

01:17:31.840 | supported by over 200 peer-reviewed studies, which is called expressive writing. I can tell you about

01:17:36.800 | it. It's a process that was developed by James Pennebaker, who is a professor at University

01:17:42.480 | of Texas, Austin. And he had his students write as part of an experiment for 15 minutes a day

01:17:50.400 | for just four days, either consecutive days or a week apart, but about the same thing.

01:17:59.040 | And the thing that they're supposed to write about is the most challenging,

01:18:01.840 | upsetting, or even traumatizing experience of their life. And it shows that the data from

01:18:06.800 | over 200 studies show incredible positive shifts in psychology, physiology, immune system function,

01:18:13.600 | and ability to combat infections. I was so struck by the data from this work that I decided to

01:18:19.920 | dedicate a whole podcast episode to it. It'll probably be out by time this episode airs, but

01:18:25.120 | I haven't done that one yet. I'm going to do it. It's a little bit of a higher bar of entry

01:18:30.080 | because it's like, okay, I'm going to, I hear that the first day especially is pretty upsetting

01:18:33.920 | because you're purposely picking something really hard, but yeah, but most of the journaling I do

01:18:42.080 | is just kind of diary, like here's what happened. Here's what's going on. And my biggest fear is

01:18:47.200 | that somebody would find them. But in preparation for that episode about Pennebaker, I went and

01:18:51.920 | looked at my journals and was like, well, what do I write about? And I realized they're pretty

01:18:55.440 | autobiographical sometimes about troubling things, but never before had I written four times in a row

01:19:01.120 | about the exact same thing. - Interesting.

01:19:03.440 | - Yeah. Yeah. Pennebaker, I think deserves a Nobel prize. If you look at the data on this compared

01:19:08.080 | to, and I'm not disparaging prescription drugs per se, but like SSRIs for depression, it's like

01:19:14.160 | at least as good a treatment. It's like zero cost stuff, but it, you know, and on and on,

01:19:20.480 | you don't want to be careful. I'll start giving the podcast again now.

01:19:24.800 | There were a number of questions about quote unquote entertainment and music industry,

01:19:29.840 | none of which unfortunately were particularly complimentary of quote the industry. And I think

01:19:37.120 | this is something that comes up a lot because people often focus on the marketing, the

01:19:43.200 | personalities that may or may not be so pleasant at times. I'm sure there are a ton of pleasant

01:19:48.560 | personalities in the industry too. But the question is this, how do you deal with the,

01:19:55.200 | and these are their words, soul crushing anti-creative aspects of the entertainment

01:20:01.600 | industry and hold on to that sense of creativity and love for the work?

01:20:06.000 | - I'm just focused on the work. I don't think of myself as part of the

01:20:12.160 | entertainment industrial complex. I just make the things I make and then there are other people who

01:20:20.000 | are good at figuring out how to sell them or get them into stores or get them onto services.

01:20:25.360 | - Do you have a process of capturing ideas? Like do you write them down? And the reason this

01:20:33.680 | question came up so many times, I think is that a lot of people feel like they get great ideas

01:20:38.000 | right upon waking or while driving or in the shower at random times. And they were wondering

01:20:43.040 | whether or not you have any way of collecting and curating your ideas prior to embarking on

01:20:48.640 | quote unquote, a project. - I write them, I make notes in my phone. I do it all the time.

01:20:54.480 | I don't have a great way of doing it. And sometimes I'll make a note and then come back

01:21:01.040 | to it later and have no idea what it means. - Do you make those notes by writing or by

01:21:06.960 | like voice memo? - Writing, that said voice memo might be something worth trying. I've never tried

01:21:14.320 | that. - How do you view money in relationship to your work? Meaning how do you place it in

01:21:21.680 | the constellation of things related to a project? You mentioned earlier you let other people do the

01:21:26.720 | negotiations, but money is just another form of energy. How do you place it in the contour of

01:21:34.720 | what you do? - I try not to think of it at all. Because I come from punk rock background, which

01:21:40.240 | was like a do it yourself background, it was always more about the idea and the execution of

01:21:45.840 | the idea with whatever you could use to do it. So if I didn't have enough to go to a professional

01:21:53.920 | recording studio, then I would find a friend who had a home recording studio and record or

01:22:00.320 | whatever it was or borrowing a drum machine when I before I had a drum machine, I would always find

01:22:05.600 | ways to make the things I wanted to make. And I can't remember a time where a financial boundary

01:22:15.600 | got in the way of making something. And I see it happening a lot around me. And I think some

01:22:24.080 | I think some people look at it as the money is what allows it to happen. And I think I just see

01:22:30.400 | it as the ideas what allows it to happen. And then the ingenuity is figuring out how to do it with,

01:22:36.160 | you know, by any means necessary, just got to make it. Whatever that version is, it may not be the

01:22:41.920 | dream version. But whatever version you can execute is the one for you to make. - I can

01:22:48.080 | attest to the fact that I launched my podcast in my closet in Topanga Canyon, which felt totally

01:22:52.880 | natural because I also come from the skateboarding punk rock thing where like, wouldn't ever occur to

01:22:58.400 | me to like, get a professional studio built. Like we're now we had this one built for us. But at the

01:23:03.920 | time, like, of course, you use a closet because you just need a black backdrop. And, you know,

01:23:07.840 | I think starting from there makes so much sense. And you also realize in the minimalist approach,

01:23:12.720 | you know, anything added is just something added. So you don't really know what you need

01:23:17.440 | if you start with a lot of stuff around you. - Yeah. It's, it can just be a distraction.

01:23:21.920 | I'm friends with Darren Aronofsky, who's a great director. And his first movie was called Pie. And

01:23:26.800 | he made it for practically no money. And it was really well loved. And then the next movie he made

01:23:32.640 | was also wildly successful. And he made it for very little money. And then he made this huge

01:23:37.520 | hundred million dollar movie. And it wasn't, it turned out not to be a success, that movie.

01:23:44.080 | And it was a case of where having more money didn't help him tell a story. It's just one

01:23:51.040 | particular case. And it's no rule to follow. But there is something about making the version that

01:24:00.720 | you can make with the means that you have that adds something real to the project that may be

01:24:11.520 | better than the one that has a lot of money thrown at it. - I'm letting that sink in around

01:24:17.440 | a lot of online tutorials for science have a lot of visuals, but we knew we wanted to do YouTube,

01:24:24.080 | but also just pure audio. And there's nothing more frustrating than somebody talking about something

01:24:28.400 | or somebody that you can't see 'cause you're just listening to it. And the visuals were really

01:24:33.920 | expensive to do right. And in the end, I think if I firmly believe in the classroom, as well as via

01:24:40.480 | podcasting, if people can hear something clearly enough and create an image in their own mind of

01:24:47.200 | how they would visualize it, then it's in there for good. Whereas just having people look at a

01:24:52.560 | slide with a bunch of beautiful illustrations on it that does nothing for retention of material.

01:24:57.920 | So I think the minimalist approach, I think sometimes is really the best one. Maybe it's

01:25:04.800 | always the best one because it forces the better solution. In any case, I do realize I editorialized

01:25:13.760 | there folks. I entered the answering portion of the, not just the question asking portion.

01:25:20.080 | Have you ever felt that something was too obscure for mainstream audience appeal to

01:25:25.680 | the point where you did not release it? - Never. - Tell us more. - If I like something,

01:25:31.040 | someone else maybe they'll like it. I don't know. How can I judge? How can I judge? I've been told

01:25:39.680 | with every new thing that I've done, it's a terrible idea and it won't work every single

01:25:44.800 | time. - Really? - Every single time. - Ghetto Boys, LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, Slayer, Adele.

01:25:50.800 | - Every one of them. - Eminem. - Every time when I went from producing rap records to producing

01:25:56.560 | Slayer, you can't do that. You're a rap producer. It's gonna be terrible. Don't do it. Or then

01:26:03.200 | Johnny Cash, you can't do that. You're a metal rap producer. You can't do that. It's gonna be

01:26:08.720 | terrible. Don't do it. Every single time, still to this day. Still to this day. - I was so excited

01:26:17.840 | when you launched Tetragrammaton and it's going so well. I listened to every episode. I love the

01:26:23.360 | interviews. I've been fortunate to be on there twice. I think the second one is still hasn't

01:26:27.760 | been released yet, but I mentioned Tetragrammaton because it just feels so you, like the Adoreets,

01:26:37.440 | which I talked about it during my intro, but the Adoreets are amazing. Like I listened to the

01:26:42.000 | Adoreets over and over again because they're so clever and they, I don't know, they put me in a

01:26:46.320 | state I feel like I'm watching, like I'm transported to as if I was like born in the 1940s. I'm

01:26:52.960 | listening to television for the first time. There's something there, like there's really something

01:26:58.160 | there. - It came out of solving a problem. The problem was when I decided to do the podcast,

01:27:07.360 | I had even recorded the first several episodes. A friend of mine said, "Well, you're going to have

01:27:12.880 | to, if you want to have ads on the show to support being able to do the show, then you're going to

01:27:19.440 | have to read the ads." And I said, "I don't really feel comfortable reading ads. I don't think that's

01:27:23.520 | something I can do well." I said, "I'm cool with the idea of only advertising products I believe

01:27:29.440 | in or that I use because that's, if I get to essentially promote something, I'll do that with

01:27:35.120 | things that I use, but I don't feel comfortable reading it." And he's like, "Well, you have to.

01:27:42.560 | It's going to be expected of you." And it was just an opportunity. It was like, "Okay,

01:27:49.760 | I understand it's expected of me. What can I do that's true to me that adds something? Instead of

01:27:57.920 | it being less than, how can I make it more than?" And it was just solving this problem of needing

01:28:04.160 | a way to have an advertisement that I didn't feel bad about. And then I got inspired and had this

01:28:11.360 | idea and started making them. And now they're my favorite thing in the podcast. In many podcasts,

01:28:16.800 | honestly, when the ads come up, I forward through them as a listener. On Tetra Grammaton, when a

01:28:24.160 | commercial comes on, I always listen to them. It's a highlight and they make me smile.

01:28:32.960 | And again, I didn't set out to do that. I just was trying to solve a creative problem.

01:28:37.440 | So sometimes the innovative ideas don't come when you're looking for an innovative idea.

01:28:45.840 | It's just, there's this slot to fill. This is the way it's normally done. I'm not comfortable doing

01:28:52.400 | it the normal way. How else can we solve this problem? And sometimes it doesn't just solve

01:28:57.840 | the problem, but it becomes an actual feature. Yeah. There's something about that solution

01:29:03.200 | seeking that is part of, or at least is aligned with the creative process, right? Yeah. The ads

01:29:12.240 | are extraordinary. We were listening to them in Italy. I'm like, play that one again. I love the

01:29:17.200 | way the guy who says the word shilajit. He says shilajit or something like that. But I can't do

01:29:22.560 | the accent, folks. Don't take what I just said as evidence of what the ads are like.

01:29:26.400 | Australian accent, that guy. Shilajit. And the chimes in the background, it's so good.

01:29:31.440 | You don't drink alcohol, correct? Correct. Have you ever had a sip of alcohol? I had,

01:29:41.200 | I drank alcohol once as part of a class experiment and had to mix all these drinks and taste them.

01:29:51.680 | And it was a terrible experience, but it was, it was a requirement in the class I was taking.

01:29:59.120 | Wow. School was different back then where that school was different. I think school

01:30:03.120 | was different. We used to prick our fingers and do our own blood tests in science class.

01:30:06.720 | I never did it because I was always needle phobic,

01:30:09.040 | but that was definitely something that was asked of us to do.

01:30:12.240 | Yeah. You could never get away with that now in the high school classroom.

01:30:15.600 | The reason I ask about alcohol is first of all, I'm not the anti-alcohol crusader,

01:30:20.480 | even though I did an episode about alcohol, which discouraged many people from drinking more of it.

01:30:24.160 | But I think for a lot of people, the idea of smoking cannabis, drinking alcohol

01:30:33.760 | for them in their mind is synonymous with the creative process, especially music

01:30:38.320 | for a lot of reasons that people can imagine. I think it's remarkable and impressive

01:30:47.040 | and worth spending a few moments with you sharing with us, you know, how is it that you were around

01:30:51.760 | all of that? You're clearly part of the, part of the crew, meaning you're part of the creative

01:30:59.760 | process. Presumably people offered you alcohol, drugs, et cetera, but something in you seems like

01:31:06.560 | resistant to any kind of peer pressure. And, and as an adult, that's impressive, but to think like,

01:31:12.480 | you know, like when I was 15, 16, sure, you know, I sort of regret it, but yeah, I drank, I

01:31:17.920 | had my experiences and then eventually stopped that. But most people are not good at like not

01:31:26.320 | drinking if they don't want to drink ever, or just once from a high school class. What,

01:31:31.760 | what was the internal narrative in your mind when that stuff was around and what allowed you to just

01:31:40.720 | say, no, I'm going to, I belong here, but I'm not going to do that.

01:31:44.800 | It just was never interesting to me. And I think maybe it had to do with being an only child. I'd

01:31:50.560 | never being an only child, I think made me less resistant to peer pressure because I felt more

01:31:57.280 | confident in who I was, whatever that was. Just from being with my being with myself and not with

01:32:07.360 | other siblings, I'm guessing, I don't know if that's right, but that's my first, my first

01:32:12.880 | inclination is to guess that would be the case. Also, I've always known what I like and known

01:32:18.960 | what I don't like and know there are things I want to try. There are things I don't want to try. And

01:32:23.760 | I feel very good about not doing something I don't want to do. I feel great about it.

01:32:28.480 | Have you ever been curious about psychedelics given that?

01:32:32.400 | I'm very curious. I've never done it, but I'm very curious. And I've been curious for a long time.

01:32:37.040 | There may be a time when I experiment.

01:32:38.960 | Yeah, there are two psychedelics in particular that I find really interesting. One is

01:32:43.520 | macro-dose psilocybin, which I've done as part of a clinical trial.

01:32:46.880 | And my understanding is it reveals in a very intense and experiential way,

01:32:52.160 | some component of the unconscious mind. And it allows for plasticity and rewiring

01:32:56.640 | of the brain that's permanent if you come to some understanding through the so-called integration.

01:33:03.280 | It's not without its risks. The other one that's really interesting that I've been hearing more

01:33:06.800 | about, and I have not tried, and it carries some dangers is ibogaine, which is 22 hours long.

01:33:12.880 | And people experience the world as normal with their eyes open, but when they close their eyes,

01:33:19.360 | they get a like high resolution movie-like version of prior experiences, but they have

01:33:24.960 | agency within those movies. They can reshape their reactions. This is being used to treat PTSD in

01:33:29.920 | veterans to great success. It has some cardiac risk associated with it. So, and it's not legal

01:33:39.040 | in the United States and it's not being explored in clinical trials yet, but the state of Kentucky

01:33:44.000 | recently took, I think it's $40 million from the oxycontin settlement and it's putting it to

01:33:52.000 | ibogaine research. Interesting. Yeah. So those are the two that kind of spring to mind, you know,

01:33:57.760 | kind of the classic psychedelic experience. I've also heard good things about MDMA,

01:34:01.920 | but I've never done that. Yeah. I have done MDMA as part, again, as part of a therapeutic trial.

01:34:06.960 | It's a strong empathogen. The danger with MDMA, I think, is that if you don't stay in the eye mask

01:34:18.160 | or if you're listening to music or something, you can easily get anchored to some external

01:34:24.560 | cue and like see a plant and be like, I love plants and spend the whole four to six hours

01:34:28.960 | thinking about your love of plants, which might be valuable. But I think the strong introspective

01:34:33.520 | work is best done with a therapist there and you and the eye mask and occasionally leaving the eye

01:34:39.280 | mask and writing things down. So, you know, the reason I put that detail in there is that

01:34:44.320 | the psychedelic experience is very different with eyes open versus in the eye mask with a clinician

01:34:52.720 | there versus recreationally. And it's not just about dangers versus safety. It's also about

01:34:59.600 | like, it's a big investment and what one stands to get out of it, I think depends on how much

01:35:04.640 | introspection you're willing to do. We won't be doing it this afternoon. There were at least

01:35:11.520 | a thousand questions about attention deficit and neuroticism. People who feel like they can't

01:35:21.280 | organize themselves. And I thought a lot about these questions and tried to distill them into

01:35:25.200 | a single question. And eventually I did. And it's this for many people, they associate the creative

01:35:32.880 | process with disorganization. I think what's so striking about you is that you embody both

01:35:39.840 | the creative process, but also a strong sense of organization around it. Like nothing seems

01:35:50.080 | harebrained or like random or haphazard about anything that you do. And yet for a lot of people

01:36:00.080 | who call themselves creatives, they'll say, I'm a creative and this, that, and you'll look at the

01:36:04.000 | space they're in and it's like chaos or they, or their life is kind of chaos. Not all of them, but

01:36:09.680 | is what I'm saying making sense? Cause I think why people orient toward you. And one of the

01:36:16.480 | reasons for your success with the creative process is that you're extremely organized,

01:36:22.560 | but not to the point of being rigid. Be willing to embellish a little bit on that perception,

01:36:29.440 | whether or not it's accurate, inaccurate. I would say there's a part in the process early on

01:36:34.640 | where it is before it can get organized where it's free and it's playful and it can be chaotic.

01:36:45.040 | It's just not the, it's a by-product of whatever's happening. It's not, it's good because

01:36:54.240 | it's chaotic and it's, it just happens to be sometimes chaotic in that, in that experiment,

01:37:00.000 | in the beginning where we're really playing with this idea of, of having fun and creating

01:37:07.200 | stimulation and seeing how it makes us feel. And we try a lot of, we could try wacky things

01:37:13.440 | to get there. But then when it happens, when you get that, that feeling of like, oh, this

01:37:19.040 | is interesting. I haven't seen this before. Then it gets more controlled, but it starts in a very

01:37:28.320 | free place. And I don't know if I would really use the word chaotic, but it could be. It certainly

01:37:35.200 | wouldn't be wrong. I would say more free would be the word. Free. Like no, no expectation

01:37:44.720 | and total immersion in like an improvisation that you're participating in that can go wherever

01:37:55.760 | it wants to go. And you're cool allowing it to go wherever it wants to go. And sometimes when

01:38:02.000 | it goes somewhere dangerous, that's when it gets interesting. So the, the, I can understand that,

01:38:07.280 | that danger aspect, maybe that's why I like pro wrestling. I don't know. But there's something

01:38:11.760 | about when you get to this, these edges where this is not for everybody, it can get very interesting.

01:38:19.840 | Speaking of stuff that's not for everybody and that to some people might've been shocking. I

01:38:27.760 | remember hearing ghetto boys for the first time and like, whoa, like they're taking certain things

01:38:33.360 | pretty far when you're working with an artist and they venture out into that place where things are

01:38:41.040 | like, maybe even a little shocking. What does that feeling for you internally? Like, is it,

01:38:48.800 | how do you distinguish between shock value for its own sake and something that's really

01:38:53.920 | opening up a new creative avenue or insight? Like, like how do you, do you recall the first time you,

01:39:00.080 | you heard like Bushwick and those guys do their thing? What was your internal narrative?

01:39:05.840 | I can't believe it. I can't believe what they're saying. It's really pushing the boundaries of what

01:39:12.480 | anyone has said in this music before it had switched because the, the original in originally

01:39:19.440 | in rap, there was a lot of boasting about themselves bragging. And then we got to the

01:39:27.520 | message happened and there was some social commentary. Then there was gangster rap.

01:39:33.840 | And then the ghetto boys took a version of gangster rap and turned it into horror rap, which was

01:39:44.000 | much more graphic than gangster rap. Gangster rap was talking about a, a real life situation

01:39:54.960 | whereas the ghetto boys took it into horror movie territory. It was more fantasy.

01:40:02.720 | But it seemed really scary at the time in the way that you're scared at a great horror movie.

01:40:10.880 | Do you like horror movies? I don't. Do you like monster movies where you know,

01:40:15.680 | it's not real, like it's impossible as opposed to horror movies where, you know,

01:40:20.720 | it's you know, people getting killed by another human, like stuff that could happen in the world

01:40:27.120 | versus you know, monsters and zombies and that kind of thing. I don't think I really like either

01:40:34.640 | of them very much. I like things that make me feel good. I don't really like adrenaline. You know,

01:40:39.600 | I don't like to be excited. For some reason in audio, I like something that makes me excited,

01:40:47.360 | but in visuals, I tend not to like things that make me excited.

01:40:50.960 | Interesting. And you're able to kind of clean yourself of experiences easily, right? Like it

01:40:58.720 | seems like if you listen to something that's really shocking, you don't carry that shock to

01:41:02.640 | your sleep or to the next day. Like it doesn't trouble you. But a movie can, can impact me. Like

01:41:08.560 | there was a movie called Melancholia that I saw years ago, Lars von Trier movie. And I thought

01:41:13.360 | it was a very beautiful movie, but I was in a bad mood. I would say for three months from the time I

01:41:19.440 | watched that movie on, it just like did something to my brain that didn't feel good and it couldn't

01:41:26.000 | snap out of it. It's interesting. There, there are a few movies that have done that to me,

01:41:30.800 | the movie Blue Valentine, which has done really well, which is with Ryan Gosling and someone

01:41:38.480 | else where it's a relationship. I won't explain what happens in the arc of the relationship,

01:41:43.680 | but it just like the movie haunted me. There's one scene where he's wearing a misfit shirt and I was

01:41:49.200 | like, ah, like, and that's a particularly good scene where he's singing to her. But the rest

01:41:54.480 | of the movie just brings about such feelings of like, just how hard life can be sometimes

01:42:00.400 | and how misguided people can be in relationship. And it it's interesting how movies can just kind

01:42:06.320 | of embed in us. It's not pleasant. I don't want to talk about it anymore.

01:42:10.240 | There were a number of questions asking about how you consume information in the world related to

01:42:18.480 | what's happening in the world. Like where do you get your news from? You and I talk about this a

01:42:23.520 | lot. How do we know what to trust these days? Did, should we have ever trusted the news or is it less

01:42:30.880 | trustworthy now? Like where do you get your information about what's happening in the world

01:42:34.560 | and stay abreast of like world affairs? I honestly, I don't feel like I know anything about it. You

01:42:41.440 | know, I I tend to look at it all like wrestling. So if the story's good, I might be more interested

01:42:52.640 | in the story, but I still don't hold much belief that that story is true. Yeah. I don't know what

01:43:00.640 | to believe anymore. I was asked to comment on a particularly well-known person who's not considered

01:43:08.880 | very savory by a couple of news avenues in the last couple of years. And I don't know how people

01:43:17.440 | had in mind that I would have knowledge about this person. And, and I gave zero information to these

01:43:22.800 | news outlets. And nonetheless, they, they, they didn't publish quotes from me, but they, they

01:43:28.880 | publish things that I know to be completely false and they know to be completely false. So I was

01:43:33.920 | just struck by the fact that like in scientific publishing, that would get you, you'd lose your

01:43:37.440 | job forever. Well, at one point in time, you would have lost your job. Now. I don't know if that's

01:43:41.920 | true. If you lose your job. Cause we see it happening a lot, right? Yeah. It's wild. Have

01:43:47.760 | you ever read anything about you? That's not true. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. So based on that,

01:43:54.960 | absolutely. I mean, some of it is playful stuff like on Reddit and now they've flagged us as

01:44:00.720 | play. They have a little flag that they can put as, you know, comedic or something, but,

01:44:04.400 | Oh, sure. I mean, things not just taken out of context, but things like completely wrong.

01:44:10.640 | Like just like that. I don't, I don't even know where people get this stuff from. I keep waiting

01:44:14.000 | for the thing that I'm going to see that says that I'm dead now, but that'll be the moment.

01:44:17.680 | So based on that experience, why would you believe anything you read about anyone else? You, you,

01:44:23.360 | you get to see firsthand that there are just stories, just not true. And presumably you've

01:44:30.000 | seen things written about you that are not true. Absolutely. Right. Absolutely. Right. And artists,

01:44:34.880 | I know friends of mine, they write things about them. I know it's not true. Wild.

01:44:39.760 | What do you think about the state of play and is the experience of being a parent and having a

01:44:48.400 | young child, has that allowed you more opportunities for play and to see through the world through

01:44:53.760 | childlike lenses in a greater capacity, or is it, you know, just separate from your creative process?

01:45:04.560 | I would say I'm fairly childlike all the time. I try to stay as a open, the beauty of childhood

01:45:14.880 | is that you don't know, you haven't been indoctrinated yet.

01:45:21.840 | So you, you see things and you have wonder about them. And it's a great feeling, that feeling of

01:45:29.920 | wonder. And now when someone, I'll tell you a story. This is a true story. My friend Owen came

01:45:36.240 | over one night in the middle of the night and he had just seen luminescence in the water for the

01:45:43.680 | first time. And he had, didn't know what, what it was and thought he was having a mystical experience.

01:45:49.040 | And he was so excited. He's like, you won't believe what happened. The, the waves were like,

01:45:54.400 | there was light everywhere. It was so cool. I'd never saw anything like it. And I said, oh yeah,

01:45:59.200 | that's a luminescence. And I explained what it was and it destroyed the magic for him.

01:46:07.520 | He was really having a childlike magical experience. And I destroyed it by

01:46:14.720 | telling him the science behind it. I try to live in a world where I can experience

01:46:21.840 | what he experiences and I don't let the story ruin what's, I allow the possibility

01:46:30.640 | to go past what I'm told the story is, but that things can be even wilder than the rational

01:46:39.600 | explanation. For me, learning the reductionist science behind something to me adds depth and

01:46:48.400 | beauty. But then again, I realize I'm sort of, I've been indoctrinated into the field of science.

01:46:54.320 | So the matrix, they call it the matrix. This is one I didn't understand, but I'm going to assume

01:46:59.680 | that you understand because it has to do with people you've worked with. If Rick had casually

01:47:04.000 | dropped that the Ramones named themselves after the fake last name Paul McCartney used to check

01:47:08.160 | into hotels during Beatlemania, would that have blown Andrew's mind? That's a kind of weird

01:47:13.520 | question. I guess the question is, is it true that the Ramones named themselves after the fake last

01:47:18.480 | name that Paul McCartney used to check into hotels during Beatlemania? I don't know that, I don't know

01:47:24.000 | if that's a true story. I do know that Paul McCartney used the name Paul Ramone when checking

01:47:31.040 | into hotels, but I don't know if that's where the Ramones got the name. Got it. And here is how

01:47:37.440 | rumors turn into quote unquote facts on the internet. And also maybe the Paul Ramone story

01:47:44.000 | is not true either, but that's story I've heard. Right. That reminds me, and I think this is an

01:47:49.920 | important case in point that there's a, what I consider a very famous photograph of you,

01:47:54.560 | Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer, and Henry Rollins. You're wearing a Dead Kennedy shirt. The four of

01:48:00.720 | you are facing one another. And I love that photograph because of who's in it. And I remember

01:48:08.240 | hearing a rare track from Strummer and the Mescaleros called On the Road to Rock and Roll.

01:48:18.400 | And then for some reason, probably because my phone is tapped into my brain,

01:48:23.840 | I was served up a video on social media of Henry Rollins telling the story of that gathering of

01:48:31.840 | the four of you where Rollins is describing the story of Joe Strummer leaning into

01:48:38.320 | Johnny Cash and saying, hey, I wrote a song for you. It goes on the road to rock. Okay.

01:48:45.280 | And I remember coming to you and saying, Rick, guess what? Remember that photo? You're like,

01:48:49.040 | I remember the photo. I said, yeah, Rollins has the story of what was happening in that moment.

01:48:53.520 | And I was so excited. And you said, you said, yeah, I don't remember that. It might be true.

01:49:00.560 | It might be true.

01:49:01.280 | But it might be entirely made up also. And we're not calling Henry a liar, but Henry, I believe.

01:49:06.480 | I believe Henry remembers that story. And that was his experience. That was not my experience,

01:49:11.920 | or I don't remember it being my experience, but who knows? Anything could have been said.

01:49:16.640 | It's true. Anything could have been said. It had as much to do, the fact that I don't remember has

01:49:25.280 | as much to do with whatever I was thinking about when that happened. And the story that Henry told

01:49:30.320 | had as much to do with what was going on in Henry's head when it happened. We have no idea.

01:49:35.440 | We have no idea.

01:49:38.720 | Do you remember somebody shooting the photograph?

01:49:40.560 | I do not.

01:49:41.280 | I'll put a link to that photograph on the internet. It's a really incredible gathering of-

01:49:44.880 | I've seen the photo, but I don't remember it being shot.

01:49:47.200 | I'm looking for a high resolution version of that photo. If anyone can find me one,

01:49:50.400 | I'll be happy to compensate you well.

01:49:52.640 | There were a lot of questions about your daily routine. People love this. The morning routine,

01:50:00.720 | the daily routine. And while I have to believe that everybody's necessary routine is

01:50:07.920 | quite different from the next, if you wouldn't mind just giving us a sense of

01:50:12.320 | like the first couple hours of your day, what that typically looks like when you're

01:50:15.440 | like not traveling and you're settled into a place.

01:50:19.280 | It's different depending on the place that I'm in, but typically it involves waking up,

01:50:26.640 | going out into the sun as naked as possible to start the day. I try to wake up slowly.

01:50:38.080 | And probably within an hour of that, I'll leave the house and go for as long of a beach walk as

01:50:47.040 | possible. Or if I'm in a place where there's a gym several days a week, I'll go to the gym instead.

01:50:51.680 | But I'll do some activity, I would say about an hour after waking up. Sometimes it's an hour

01:50:58.160 | and a half. Sometimes it's less. Depending on the place I'm at, I also might do stretching before

01:51:04.160 | I go on the walk and do just several stretches on yoga mats on the floor or with foam rollers

01:51:13.040 | or balls or some different things. I don't start my day until those things are out of the way.

01:51:21.840 | I try to avoid any work-related anything. Now that said, if a thought comes up

01:51:30.560 | that I'm excited about, I'll note it. I won't avoid thoughts, but I tend not to engage in any

01:51:37.520 | work until probably 11 o'clock. 11 a.m. would be the soonest. And some days not until one o'clock.

01:51:47.520 | And then I do focused work until maybe six. And then I spend the rest of the night

01:51:59.760 | trying to wind down out of work mode.

01:52:06.640 | So 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. are really the peak quote-unquote work hours.

01:52:12.720 | Could be 11 too. Like today we started here at 11 and that felt like I'd be good by 11. And I

01:52:18.160 | already did my morning walk. I had the argument on the beach. I was in the sun. I was in the hot tub.

01:52:24.640 | I had a whole morning already. And then what does your evening wind down look like

01:52:31.040 | in terms of the space that you're in or trying to create and your internal landscape? Well, it's

01:52:38.720 | only red light. I'm usually wearing, from the time the sun sets, I'm wearing red glasses.

01:52:45.120 | I'm in a space with only red light. I'm 99% of the time home with my family.

01:52:54.880 | And we talk. I might watch a wrestling or a documentary with red glasses on.

01:53:04.080 | We eat dinner together or we eat dinner in shifts depending on how it's working. But we're all

01:53:12.800 | we're all together. And I find something to occupy my mind that gets me out of the work day.

01:53:22.000 | That said, sometimes the ideas still flow and I'll note them. But I avoid, I avoid any kind of a

01:53:28.720 | work phone call or anything that's stimulating or that will get me thinking about it.

01:53:36.960 | I aim for sunset. And then I'm usually in bed. I'm usually in bed by 10.

01:53:50.080 | And I fall asleep within 15 minutes. Your relationship to light is fascinating.

01:53:56.880 | The sunlight piece makes a lot of sense and will make sense to the listeners of this podcast.

01:54:01.600 | We haven't done too many episodes, but we will do more that covers the trying to avoid

01:54:08.320 | bright light exposure in the evening. You're wearing the red lens glasses now, even though

01:54:14.960 | it's the middle of the day. That's because we've got these bright lights around us, correct?

01:54:18.240 | Yeah. And have you found that

01:54:21.040 | limiting your bright artificial light exposure in the evening has benefited you and in what ways?

01:54:25.440 | Absolutely. And once you've done it, once you've changed and avoid like looking at screens or my,

01:54:32.720 | you know, my phone turns red at night. When I see someone else's phone, if someone comes to visit

01:54:40.080 | and their phone lights up at night, it's blinding. And it's so disturbing. And for them,

01:54:50.880 | that's normal. They're in this heightened, blown out place all the time. I'm staying at neutral.

01:54:58.160 | I'm staying at the more natural, how the world would be if man didn't create all of these

01:55:09.920 | loud things, loud, loud, loud devices. Yeah. I've switched my phone thanks to your input.

01:55:18.400 | And we will have released a clip on this by 10. This episode airs on the triple click approach

01:55:25.360 | to the phone that you can put in very easily to allow it to go from regular screen to red screen

01:55:31.440 | at night so that you don't have to go into the settings each time you just triple click.

01:55:35.520 | We'll provide a link to that explanation. And Rick taught me that when I was over in Italy,

01:55:41.600 | everyone in his home turned to me and said, wait, your phone is so bright. You got to do the red

01:55:46.720 | light thing. I said, I don't know how. And he taught me that. So it's a very useful trick.

01:55:50.880 | Have you noticed a difference since looking at huge positive difference?

01:55:55.760 | I sleep better. There are great data now because of course I go then find the data that, you know,

01:56:00.560 | for shift workers, people that have to be up at night working, if they put them under red light,

01:56:04.640 | the amount of cortisol at that time is suppressed, which is great as compared to when they're under

01:56:11.600 | bright artificial lights without red lens glasses or they're in red lights. It's far,

01:56:18.240 | far more beneficial, less cortisol. You want cortisol high early in the day,

01:56:21.440 | viewing sunlight early in the day, increase it by at least 50%. Then you want it to taper off

01:56:26.400 | and on and on. I heard something recently, which is going to make a lot of sense.

01:56:33.360 | One thing that's happened in the last 30 years, which may at least partially explain the obesity

01:56:37.520 | crisis is that calories, which are depleted of nutrients, micronutrients are very cheap now.

01:56:46.960 | They're very cheap to get calories, but they aren't nutritious calories. In addition,

01:56:54.080 | there's been a change in lighting technology so that blue light photons are very cheap. Like when

01:57:00.640 | I was a kid, they, my parents would say, turn off the lights. It's costing us all this money. Now

01:57:04.640 | it's very cheap to keep the lights on in a home. The heat is a different story, but with respect.

01:57:10.000 | So we have a lot of cheap photons. So I think of blue light as cheap photons, not the good for you

01:57:16.960 | photons, not nourishing photons and consuming calories too often or at the wrong times of day,

01:57:22.160 | we know is bad for you consuming photons in the wrong form at the wrong time of day, bad for you.

01:57:27.200 | And I think those two things combined plus all the downstream negative cascades can largely explain

01:57:32.880 | the obesity and in some sense, mental health crisis. Interesting. Yeah. So just to there,

01:57:37.680 | I editorialized again, I realized that we're trying to shift the ratio to more Rick, less

01:57:41.440 | Andrew, but he can't help himself. He can't help himself. And Rick indulges me. So actually there

01:57:46.320 | were a number of questions in here that asked me, you know, how has Rick helped you? And I'm

01:57:50.080 | refraining from answering those because this is people want your answers for them, but I do all

01:57:54.800 | the things that Rick's referring to. I'm not wearing red lens glasses now, but I have changed

01:57:58.560 | a lot of my health practices and or sought out science to test whether or not some of the things

01:58:05.200 | that you've been doing for awhile makes sense. And indeed in every case, they've made sense.

01:58:08.800 | I'm not just saying that because, because you're here, but you and I do a lot of the same thing.

01:58:12.560 | We're interested. And if it didn't work, we'd probably stop doing it eventually.

01:58:16.880 | Right. It's like we're testing. Right. Right. And I do believe that what starts out as crazy,

01:58:23.040 | like Mike Mentzer stuff of low volume weight training with heavy weights, it works so much

01:58:28.480 | better than the high volumes. All that stuff is being shown to be true in these peer reviewed

01:58:32.560 | trials. So, you know, that's the nature of science. It often comes, science often follows

01:58:38.000 | the practitioners by many decades. You know, it doesn't get there first because it's a slower,

01:58:45.920 | more iterative process, but some people need to see those clinical trials to feel comfortable

01:58:50.560 | doing something. I think the creative process is uniquely separated from academic science and

01:58:56.560 | academic scholarship in a way that I think has really benefited it. I mean, can you imagine

01:59:01.120 | if the ghetto boys had to get a degree in music theory in order to do what they do?

01:59:05.520 | They wouldn't be the ghetto boys. Right. Or Slayer.

01:59:07.920 | They would not be Slayer. Yeah. Or Public Enemy.

01:59:11.680 | Yes. Or Adele.

01:59:12.960 | Yes. Or Eminem.

01:59:14.080 | Right. It's, it's almost by virtue of the fact that there is no degree for that per se, that

01:59:20.480 | allowed them to do what they did. Right. Yeah. Absolutely.

01:59:24.960 | So what are your thoughts on schooling in higher education or just education? I mean,

01:59:29.280 | you were at NYU when you launched your record label, you graduated NYU.

01:59:33.040 | I did. What are your thoughts on getting a quote unquote formal education?

01:59:39.040 | It seems like an obsolete idea. I think maybe there was a time where it would have been helpful.

01:59:46.560 | And maybe depending on if the thing that you want to study can only be learned in an institution,

01:59:55.040 | maybe it would make sense. But I think the real world, getting an internship or

02:00:02.560 | finding the right mentor and going into whatever the thing is that you're interested in learning

02:00:10.560 | about, learning from people who do it as opposed to the system, I think,

02:00:18.240 | I think might be a more, a better use of your time.

02:00:22.240 | The creative process doesn't exist in a vacuum and relationships are a huge part of life.

02:00:31.360 | One thing that I've heard you say, and that certainly I've been working to internalize

02:00:34.960 | is this idea that whatever relationships one has in their life, romantic relationships are not

02:00:41.760 | married or not, kids are not, that the ideal circumstance is where one's work is the most

02:00:50.400 | stressful part of their life. Can you tell us more about that?

02:00:53.840 | Yeah. The home is the safe place from which you can go out and be a warrior and do all

02:01:04.240 | these great things and these crazy things. I'm fearless when it comes to art. I'm not

02:01:13.200 | fearless when it comes to life. Life is my relationships. Art is where we can do these

02:01:21.760 | crazy things and have fun and try extreme things and see what happens. That's a safe

02:01:34.480 | place to do that because it's just expression. It's not the things we make don't have to

02:01:43.200 | represent who we are. They're just the things we make. That's a point of view. It's like,

02:01:49.440 | this is interesting to me in this moment. Check it out. That's all it is. May have a completely

02:01:54.480 | different feeling tomorrow. Whereas in a relationship, it's long-term, hopefully.

02:02:01.120 | And it's as long-term as it's a productive relationship where everybody is getting what

02:02:07.280 | they want from that relationship. Everybody's needs are being met and everybody cares enough to

02:02:13.120 | meet each other's needs. I've always admired how rational you are about relationships and this

02:02:20.240 | notion that if everybody isn't being honest, there's no relationship actually. Not it's a

02:02:27.040 | bad relationship, but there's actually no relationship. No, because if someone's not

02:02:33.280 | telling the truth, then each person is experiencing a different understanding of the world.

02:02:43.120 | You're living in two different worlds. So they're never actually together

02:02:49.200 | when you're experiencing a different world. So unless you can, you don't have to agree.

02:02:55.200 | I'm not saying you have to agree on everything, but you have to be truthful in saying,

02:03:00.560 | this is how I see it. And your partner is clear in, yes, this is how I see it or no,

02:03:08.000 | this is how I see it. You're on the same page, even in disagreement, but it's real.

02:03:16.000 | Each of you are being who you are for and with the other. But if you're not opening yourself up

02:03:26.560 | in that way to your partner, you're in a different world. They have an idea of what's happening

02:03:33.200 | that's completely different than what you have an idea of what's happening. That's not what you

02:03:37.600 | that's not, that's not being together. No masks.

02:03:41.040 | No, no. It's the, it's the same as when you said earlier about lying in your diary.

02:03:51.440 | You'd only be doing a disservice to yourself. Lying in a relationship would only be doing

02:03:59.040 | a disservice to yourself. Mike Ness of Social Distortion has a song

02:04:05.600 | called Cheating at Solitaire, which seems like an appropriate title to mention right now.

02:04:10.400 | Lying in the diary, cheating at solitaire. Yeah. It's ridiculous.

02:04:14.080 | Doesn't make any sense. No, you're not, you're not actually playing the game.

02:04:17.760 | Do you know what I mean? If you're cheating at it, you're not actually playing the game.

02:04:21.680 | The whole point of the game is the game. If you cheat at it, you're not playing the game.

02:04:29.440 | Do you have any must read books for people? I'll throw one out. Rick's book on the creative act,

02:04:36.080 | A Way of Being. But in addition to that book, what are some books that you recommend to people for

02:04:47.200 | stimulating thoughts or for, I don't know, health purposes or things that you found particularly

02:04:52.960 | beneficial in book form? My favorite book about meditation

02:04:56.560 | is called Wherever You Go, There You Are. And I just got sent the 30th anniversary edition,

02:05:03.280 | which is completely rewritten. I have not yet read the rewritten version, but I love the original

02:05:09.200 | version and I know the rewritten version. I'm guessing that the rewritten version is just more

02:05:14.240 | refined and even better. Such a great book. That book was given to me when I was about 14 and a

02:05:19.440 | half when I was released from a particularly uncomfortable non-voluntary state of affairs.

02:05:29.520 | And one of the things that I remember about that book that helped me through so many years of life,

02:05:34.320 | and I have to go back to, is this mountain visualization meditation.

02:05:37.760 | Being a mountain. I don't know why it was so helpful,

02:05:42.240 | but goodness, was it helpful for me. It's a beautiful idea. It's a beautiful idea.

02:05:49.040 | Yeah. I don't know why I thought of that just now, but I'm going to go back and read it.

02:05:51.520 | Do you think that there's genetic, epigenetic, family lineage stuff unrelated to genetics that

02:06:04.240 | leads us to create things that are really about like our ancestors? For instance, is it possible

02:06:14.240 | that let's take Johnny Cash for instance, or an artist that you've worked with more recently,

02:06:22.720 | Chili Peppers, that when they got together to make music, that something from Anthony's family line

02:06:31.840 | was being transmuted through him into the songs. Is that happening? Do you think that we can work

02:06:39.520 | out and include things that are generations far back enough that we don't even really know what

02:06:45.840 | happened to them? I mean, it's coming through in our genes. I think it's certainly possible,

02:06:49.120 | but I don't think we can know. And I don't think it's necessarily even helpful to know.

02:06:55.040 | It just is one of those mysterious things. I don't think we know why we do many of the things we do.

02:07:04.160 | And it's just another example of that. And that's a possible theory to explain why we do the things

02:07:09.680 | we do maybe, but there may be another one. It may be UFOs are controlling us. I don't know. Do you

02:07:15.280 | know what I'm saying? It could be anything. - There are people on the internet that thinks

02:07:20.640 | it's UFOs that are controlling us. - I wouldn't disagree with that.

02:07:25.440 | - More and more evidence is coming out that unidentified flying objects might

02:07:32.000 | actually be a documented phenomenon by the US government. I haven't looked into it yet, but-

02:07:38.560 | - I wouldn't be surprised. - When you were on this podcast before

02:07:42.880 | and on several other podcasts, you mentioned that you don't play music, at least not routinely. You

02:07:49.600 | don't play an instrument, that you have limited knowledge of how a soundboard works. So when you're

02:07:55.920 | listening to artists, are you listening for something or you're staying open for something

02:08:02.560 | that you might hear, that will trigger a certain state in you that you recognize?

02:08:07.760 | - I'm open to just see what's happening. I listen and recognize, is this making me lean forward?

02:08:17.840 | Am I curious to see what's gonna happen next? Is the thing that happens next different than

02:08:23.200 | what I thought was gonna happen next? That could be interesting. I listen to a lot of music when

02:08:28.000 | it doesn't do what's expected. That's really interesting, especially if it sounds good,

02:08:32.000 | if it works. So I'm just open to experiencing what it is. And I'll say something funny about it,

02:08:42.320 | which is this will sound mystical. I don't understand it. But often you can tell a lot

02:08:48.000 | about the piece of music you're gonna listen to based on the first sound you hear, like the first

02:08:54.640 | moment. It's not about what note it is. It's not about what instrument it is. It's

02:09:05.120 | intention in the performance. And that performance could even be a machine.

02:09:17.440 | The way when something starts, sometimes there's this feeling of, oh, this is gonna be good,

02:09:24.240 | just out of the boom, the downbeat. Can't explain it.

02:09:28.800 | - It reminds me of dating. And you know within half a nanosecond, this is gonna be a fun night,

02:09:40.320 | to be an interesting night. This person's interesting. Or, okay, this is not a night

02:09:47.920 | to continue, right? I don't know. And it's not what's said necessarily or even how it's said,

02:09:53.760 | just it's a feeling. - I know that depending on how I'm feeling,

02:10:00.320 | I'll avoid listening critically to something if I'm not feeling well. If I don't feel like I can be

02:10:08.640 | completely there and open, I'll not listen. I know I wanna really be there for the thing that I'm

02:10:21.840 | listening to. - Do you inform people if like,

02:10:26.720 | hey, I'm not here today, like I can't- - Sometimes.

02:10:29.200 | - Yeah. - Sometimes.

02:10:30.320 | - As somebody who has never been part of the music production process,

02:10:35.680 | how long does it take, like for an album, like let's throw out an artist you've worked with,

02:10:41.440 | like you worked with Eminem. How long did that? Oh, you did some songs on that album

02:10:46.240 | or the whole album? - I did some songs.

02:10:47.520 | - So did he come in with those written and then you guys worked together on those songs?

02:10:53.840 | How long was that? A week, a month, a day? - I think we were together for several weeks.

02:11:01.840 | It's been long enough now that I can't remember the specifics, but there is no

02:11:05.680 | rule of how that works. And sometimes things come together very quickly. An album can be made in a

02:11:12.320 | weekend and some albums are years in the making. When it's years in the making, it's rarely every

02:11:19.040 | day for years in the making. It's usually more episodic, but there is something, both versions

02:11:27.600 | are very interesting and it's something that comes out almost fully formed very quickly,

02:11:32.000 | has particular energy. And then something that's made over time

02:11:37.360 | can have all of those individual moments, all the changes that happen within you over that period

02:11:46.800 | of time, those can all be reflected and be the difference between a daily diary journal and

02:11:55.840 | reading three months. It's different. They're two different things. Can't say one's better than the

02:12:02.880 | other. They're just two different things. So some projects are more like a year's diary and some

02:12:10.320 | are more like a weekend. And same, you watch a movie, some movies, the movie story takes place

02:12:17.280 | in 24 hours. And sometimes it's a person's lifetime. One's not a better method than the

02:12:23.760 | other. It's whatever suits the work. Speaking of your work with Eminem, but also with

02:12:29.760 | Jay-Z and with Beastie Boys and others, you are featured in a number of the videos.

02:12:37.760 | You show up in those videos. Whose decision was that? And what are your thoughts on music videos?

02:12:42.880 | I remember when music videos first came out, the whole MTV era and just thinking like, this is so

02:12:47.680 | cool. I can see the artists, see how they're dressed. I love the crazy styles and all of that

02:12:53.760 | that accompany the music. Two questions. One, whose decision was it to be in the videos?

02:13:00.720 | Because producers often are not included in the videos.

02:13:04.400 | It would always be if the artists asked. They'd be the only reason I would be there.

02:13:07.760 | And two, what are your thoughts on music videos and the idea that then it puts a very strong

02:13:13.440 | visual to the song, whereas where they're not to be a video, people could just imagine something

02:13:19.280 | based on what they're hearing and hearing alone. They're two different things. There's not a better

02:13:25.840 | or worse. There's sometimes where the video makes the song better. And there's often the case where

02:13:33.680 | the poetry of the words, if you close your eyes and listen to what the words are, as a listener,

02:13:43.280 | you get to participate in that, in creating that world in your head. So sometimes photographs can

02:13:52.800 | tell us too much information. It's too leading. It limits the story to just this photograph.

02:13:59.440 | The photograph tells you much more than the words. The words can be interpreted in many ways,

02:14:06.720 | and then we each get to have that experience. It's something in the book that I was

02:14:12.240 | cognizant of in picking the words was never to be specific to the point of where the reader

02:14:21.600 | doesn't get to participate in this act. So it doesn't tell you what to think. It's an

02:14:28.720 | invitation to think. It's an invitation to say, "Where am I in this? What's my version of this?"

02:14:38.560 | It's not about anyone else. It's about the reader. From the beginning, that was always

02:14:46.720 | part of my understanding of what I thought would be the most helpful.

02:14:52.880 | The cover certainly embodies that, that it's not clear exactly what the cover design is

02:15:00.160 | quote unquote supposed to be. It's open to interpretation.

02:15:03.680 | Interpret it as you wish, and different people see different things.

02:15:06.640 | Let's get current. What are you working on now that you're excited about if you can share?

02:15:13.840 | Let me see what I can and can't share.

02:15:16.640 | Could be broad categories of things too.

02:15:19.600 | I'm working on a couple of documentary projects that I'm excited about,

02:15:26.400 | and some albums that I've been working on over time are coming out. One is an incredible singer,

02:15:35.360 | guitar player named Marcus King. His album's about to come out. The Gossip is a band that I made an

02:15:41.840 | album with 10 years ago, and we just made a new album, or we made an album maybe 18 months ago,

02:15:48.080 | and that's coming out now. Those are the first ones that come to mind.

02:15:54.080 | Is the documentary process fun for you, and how do you approach that?

02:16:02.240 | I watch a lot of documentaries to learn what I don't want to do.

02:16:05.920 | I don't think I've been inspired. Well, maybe some cases where I get inspired by what I'm seeing,

02:16:12.480 | but more often I see things and I say, "Okay, these documentaries all have this format,

02:16:17.600 | so I know I don't want it to be this format." It's more of a ruling out, and it's fun to find new ways

02:16:29.120 | that reveal different information than the standard format allows.

02:16:35.520 | It's interesting to me. We'll see if anyone else cares.

02:16:39.520 | You have a unique approach to podcasting. First of all, what are your criteria for who you invite on

02:16:46.240 | as a guest? Second, what do you have in mind when you sit down and podcast?

02:16:53.040 | I have some ideas about how you're going to answer, but I think it's important that

02:16:59.120 | I not inject. I think people are interested in this even if they don't want a podcast because

02:17:04.240 | I think it gets to the process of something that you're doing now and how you're doing it now.

02:17:08.320 | Yeah. I didn't set out to do what I'm about to tell you. I didn't set out to do this,

02:17:15.760 | but it's something that after I started doing it, I came to realize it's an interesting thing.

02:17:21.280 | I actually learned this from listening to your podcast. It was actually Lex's podcast with you.

02:17:29.200 | I was listening to the podcast, and I know you know Lex, and I know you guys are friends.

02:17:33.920 | Both of you, in addition to you talking to Lex, you're talking to the audience. Lex,

02:17:43.040 | in addition to talking to you, talks to the audience. The audience was a participant

02:17:49.360 | in your conversation. I realized that at the Tetragrammaton podcast, it's different than that.

02:17:58.480 | It's more of an intimate, personal, like the interview with you that hasn't come out yet.

02:18:05.760 | That was me talking to you. I certainly didn't have any idea that anybody else was going to hear

02:18:15.920 | it other than yes, someone else is going to hear it, but that's not what this is. I was asking you

02:18:21.040 | the questions I was interested in, and I wanted to learn as much as I could. If you said something

02:18:26.400 | that I didn't understand, I'd ask you to explain it, or if you told me a story about something that

02:18:31.280 | sent me on a tangent that I want to know more about this left side of what you said or the

02:18:36.800 | right side of what you said, I would ask, but only following my own interests. It has an intimacy.

02:18:45.040 | It's turned into, if I listen to a Tetragrammaton podcast, it sounds like I'm overhearing a

02:18:51.680 | conversation, a personal conversation. It has turned into parts of certain decisions we've made,

02:19:02.560 | like there's music at the beginning, and then you hear the guest more often than not

02:19:11.840 | is in the middle of a story, and it's almost as if you've walked into a room and people are in this

02:19:18.640 | deep conversation, and you're just sitting on the side quietly and hearing this conversation,

02:19:23.360 | and it's a real moment that's happening there, and it's just different. I can't say it's better,

02:19:30.000 | can't say it's worse, can't say it. I don't know what's interesting about it,

02:19:33.440 | but something about it's interesting to me, and when I listen to it, I feel a different kind of an

02:19:39.360 | intimacy. And again, it wasn't premeditated. This is after the fact I'm looking back and

02:19:47.520 | understanding, "Oh, this is what it is. This is why this is different."

02:19:50.800 | Yeah. The podcast that I did with you on your podcast when I was featured as, I guess,

02:19:58.480 | the second time, I completely forgot that we were podcasting. It was also good we'd had a few days

02:20:04.240 | together overseas there. We're in a very kind of isolated environment. That helped me get out of

02:20:10.560 | the mode of there are listeners. Yeah. There's no sense of performance involved.

02:20:16.720 | It couldn't be more casual. And the reason I chose not to film it is because the nature of

02:20:26.000 | lights and cameras make it harder to forget that you're doing it.

02:20:33.440 | So I aim for it to be as natural an experience so that you can have the conversation that you

02:20:42.640 | really would have if there were no lights and cameras. Not that we want to reveal anything.

02:20:47.360 | It's just a level of comfort and openness where you're talking to somebody you like and you're

02:20:55.040 | enjoying the conversation. And that's so you. I just have to share that the first time we met

02:21:00.080 | in person, you and I had FaceTimed a number of times previous to that. But the first time we met

02:21:05.360 | in person, came over to your house, we ended up doing sauna and cold. And I was going through a

02:21:11.120 | particularly challenging time in my life. I mean, it had really just hit me square in the face. And

02:21:16.480 | I remember saying, "Hey, listen, I don't know if we can talk about this," but I just opened up about

02:21:21.440 | all of it. And that's the moment when we would have become friends anyway, but that's where

02:21:26.560 | things really took off 'cause I kept apologizing at the end. I said, "I'm so sorry." And you said,

02:21:31.120 | "No, no, this is actually what we're supposed to do." And I feel very grateful that we've remained

02:21:38.240 | close friends ever since. And that catalyzed a lot. But I think that one of the things I love

02:21:45.680 | about podcasts, not just podcasting, but podcasts is that the really effective podcasts like yours,

02:21:53.040 | like Lex's, like Rogan, like Rich Roll, Tim Ferriss, they really reflect the love and passion

02:22:00.240 | that the person has for that kind of conversation. I mean, I can certainly say this about my podcast.

02:22:05.200 | I've been learning, organizing, and distributing information since I was six years old.

02:22:13.520 | So my podcast is just that. You like real conversation and real things that are

02:22:19.600 | unbarriered by the idea that maybe someone's going to listen and how will it work out,

02:22:23.600 | just like we talked about earlier, and you answered the questions that way.

02:22:26.880 | And I think Lex likes Lex's form of thing and Joe is doing his form of thing. And I think that's,

02:22:33.440 | to me, one of the great gifts of podcasting. If anyone wants to know how to create a successful

02:22:37.760 | podcast, quote unquote successful, it's have the kind of conversations and talk about the kinds of

02:22:42.560 | things you really love. Like Cameron Haynes has this lift, run, shoot podcast where you go to his

02:22:46.960 | house, you do a workout, then you go for a run and then he teaches you archery. And the reason it's

02:22:52.960 | so effective is that he loves lifting, running, and shooting. And then he's honest and he loves

02:22:59.120 | teaching people that. So at the end of the day, you're sitting down talking about a great day

02:23:03.120 | that embodies everything that he's about and the person learned. And like, I couldn't do that

02:23:07.840 | podcast. I can go on as a guest and I loved being guests, but I think that's the message.

02:23:12.560 | And it brings us back to what you were talking about earlier and throughout today's discussion.

02:23:16.560 | Just that if you're thinking about how it's going to land, how the hell could it ever work?

02:23:23.040 | Yeah. It's just a different thing. I had a conversation yesterday for the podcast with

02:23:28.560 | Daniel Kaluuya, who I've never met before. Incredible actor and beautiful human being.

02:23:34.000 | And we probably talked for about three hours and it was a deep conversation. And I feel like I

02:23:40.560 | might have a new best friend. Like he's unbelievable. The coolest guy. If I wasn't doing the

02:23:44.720 | podcast, I don't know if I would have met him. It just worked out. It worked out that I got to meet

02:23:50.560 | this incredible person. Well, Rick, we covered most of the most frequently asked questions and

02:23:59.200 | you've been extremely gracious with your time and thoughtfulness and answering them. And I don't

02:24:07.120 | know what to say, except thank you for taking the time to do yet another podcast to answer the

02:24:12.400 | audience's questions. They were here in this podcast in the form of this very large stack

02:24:17.520 | of questions. And of course, your book includes a lot of information that encapsulates this,

02:24:26.640 | but I think this really fleshes out some of the details of like how you go about things, how

02:24:32.320 | certain things can't be the same for everybody. And I think in answering these questions,

02:24:39.760 | you provided a great service to people who are perhaps still struggling with getting the creative

02:24:44.160 | process going or flowing. I'm certain that it's going to change the way that I focus and lean

02:24:50.560 | into my day. I've got a number of different notes here and maybe I'll be willing to share them with

02:24:54.160 | people, but then that would go against the principle of this is for me and everyone's

02:24:58.000 | going to work it out their own way. So we'll provide links to everything that was mentioned

02:25:02.880 | where there's a link that's relevant. And yeah, man, I would just want to say thank you so much

02:25:08.000 | for being such an incredible educator and such an incredible friend as well.

02:25:12.400 | Thank you. It's a funny idea of being an educator. I can't imagine that, but I appreciate the,

02:25:17.440 | I appreciate those words.

02:25:20.160 | Well, you are indeed an educator. We're learning so much from you. And,

02:25:23.600 | and if you just step back for a second and think about all the creative works that have stemmed

02:25:29.280 | and are going to stem from the learnings that people have achieved from hearing your experience

02:25:34.880 | and wisdom, it's incalculable. Wow. I'll take it. Thank you, sir.

02:25:40.720 | Thank you for joining me for today's discussion about protocols for creativity with the one and

02:25:46.320 | only Rick Rubin. Please also be sure to check out the links in the show note captions in particular

02:25:51.920 | to Rick's incredible book, all about the creative process entitled the creative act, a way of being

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02:28:02.960 | interest in science.

Rick Rubin: Protocols to Access Creative Energy and Process

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