How to Be More Creative | Rick Rubin & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | When something feels creatively right, and you're sensing it, and you're there, let's
00:00:10.720 | say in the studio, or maybe even you're listening to something that somebody sent you, how do
00:00:16.400 | you translate that, given the absence of language?
00:00:22.000 | How do you translate that into a conversation with the artist?
00:00:26.360 | And again, this could be about writing, or comedy, or science, or podcasting, for that
00:00:30.480 | matter.
00:00:31.480 | How do you say that, keep going that way, when they might not even recognize that they
00:00:37.120 | did it?
00:00:38.120 | And I'm guessing a lot of times, they don't.
00:00:39.840 | Yeah, sometimes they don't.
00:00:41.080 | It depends.
00:00:42.080 | When we're in the-- I'll try to be in a setting where, as we're talking about it, we can engage
00:00:51.320 | with it in that moment.
00:00:53.040 | So it's not much good-- let's say I was producing your new record, and you played me something,
00:00:59.360 | and I had some thoughts about it.
00:01:01.360 | It wouldn't be so helpful for me to tell you what those were.
00:01:04.720 | It'd be better for us to wait till we were in a place where we could try things and see
00:01:08.520 | where it goes.
00:01:10.400 | So the first thing is, I wouldn't rely on language to do it.
00:01:16.100 | It would be more of making a suggestion of something that's actionable.
00:01:22.520 | We try it, and then we have more data.
00:01:24.880 | And either we're moving in a good direction, or we're moving away from it.
00:01:27.920 | We're moving towards it or away from it, and we never know.
00:01:31.400 | And so it's always an experiment.
00:01:33.440 | Maybe a simple way to talk about it would be like, if I gave you two dishes of food
00:01:39.280 | and asked you to taste them, and tell me which one you like better.
00:01:43.360 | Usually it's pretty straightforward.
00:01:44.360 | You know when you have two choices which you like better.
00:01:47.400 | And I think most creativity can be boiled down to that.
00:01:52.280 | That's very different than, I wonder how this is going to perform on certain social media
00:01:58.360 | platforms.
00:01:59.360 | That's different than, what is it, when I'm tasting these two things, which is the one
00:02:03.720 | I want to finish eating.
00:02:06.520 | And if I would say, I like this one better, but it needs a little salt, and then put a
00:02:10.640 | little salt on it.
00:02:11.640 | It's like, maybe I put too much salt.
00:02:13.680 | And you know when you taste it.
00:02:16.400 | It's that simple.
00:02:20.680 | Being in tune enough with ourselves to really know how we feel in the face of knowing that
00:02:29.760 | other people might feel very differently, which is part of the challenge.
00:02:33.520 | It's like if everyone tells you A, A, A, A, A, A, A and you listen and you're like, that's
00:02:41.680 | B.
00:02:46.120 | As an artist, it's important to be able to say, to me it's B.
00:02:54.680 | And it's a disconnect because so much of when we go to school, it's to get us to follow
00:03:02.120 | the rules.
00:03:04.040 | And in art, it's different because the rules are there as a scaffolding to be chipped away
00:03:12.480 | as need be.
00:03:14.380 | Sometimes they're helpful, sometimes they're not.
00:03:16.580 | And sometimes we'll even impose our own rules to give something its shape.
00:03:22.440 | So we can decide to make a, we're going to make a painting, but we're only going to use
00:03:29.160 | green and red are the only colors we're allowed to use.
00:03:32.360 | We decide that in advance.
00:03:34.280 | And then how do we solve the problem knowing all we have is green and red?
00:03:39.440 | You can, because otherwise if there's an infinite number of choices, anything can be anything.
00:03:47.040 | You know, it's like it's sometimes more choices is not better.
00:03:52.340 | So limiting your palette to something manageable forces you to solve problems in a different
00:04:00.740 | way.
00:04:01.740 | You know, in our digital age, music wise, you can make anything digitally.
00:04:11.860 | There's no like in, there was a time when if you didn't have a guitar in the studio,
00:04:16.000 | you couldn't record guitar.
00:04:17.280 | Or if you didn't, if you couldn't hire an orchestra, there couldn't be orchestra on
00:04:20.760 | your recording.
00:04:21.760 | Now you can just call any of those things up.
00:04:24.400 | So there's infinite choices and infinite choices don't necessarily lead to better, better compositions
00:04:35.000 | or better final, final works, understanding how, how you feel in the face of other voices
00:04:47.620 | without second guessing yourself is probably the single most important thing to practice
00:04:57.160 | as an artist or skill set to develop as an artist is to know how you feel and own your
00:05:04.000 | feelings.
00:05:05.380 | And the key to that is not, I know, so I know what's right for you.
00:05:09.820 | It doesn't work that way.
00:05:11.060 | It's just, I know for me.
00:05:13.640 | And the reason I chose to be an artist is to demonstrate this is how I see it.
00:05:20.900 | If I'm, if I'm undermining my taste for some commercial idea or it defeats the whole purpose
00:05:30.560 | of doing this, this is not, that's not what this process is about.
00:05:34.440 | This process is I'm doing me and I'm showing you who I am and you can like it or not, but
00:05:42.120 | either way, this is still how I see it.
00:05:44.040 | [Music]