When something feels creatively right, and you're sensing it, and you're there, let's say in the studio, or maybe even you're listening to something that somebody sent you, how do you translate that, given the absence of language? How do you translate that into a conversation with the artist? And again, this could be about writing, or comedy, or science, or podcasting, for that matter.

How do you say that, keep going that way, when they might not even recognize that they did it? And I'm guessing a lot of times, they don't. Yeah, sometimes they don't. It depends. When we're in the-- I'll try to be in a setting where, as we're talking about it, we can engage with it in that moment.

So it's not much good-- let's say I was producing your new record, and you played me something, and I had some thoughts about it. It wouldn't be so helpful for me to tell you what those were. It'd be better for us to wait till we were in a place where we could try things and see where it goes.

So the first thing is, I wouldn't rely on language to do it. It would be more of making a suggestion of something that's actionable. We try it, and then we have more data. And either we're moving in a good direction, or we're moving away from it. We're moving towards it or away from it, and we never know.

And so it's always an experiment. Maybe a simple way to talk about it would be like, if I gave you two dishes of food and asked you to taste them, and tell me which one you like better. Usually it's pretty straightforward. You know when you have two choices which you like better.

And I think most creativity can be boiled down to that. That's very different than, I wonder how this is going to perform on certain social media platforms. That's different than, what is it, when I'm tasting these two things, which is the one I want to finish eating. And if I would say, I like this one better, but it needs a little salt, and then put a little salt on it.

It's like, maybe I put too much salt. And you know when you taste it. It's that simple. Being in tune enough with ourselves to really know how we feel in the face of knowing that other people might feel very differently, which is part of the challenge. It's like if everyone tells you A, A, A, A, A, A, A and you listen and you're like, that's B.

As an artist, it's important to be able to say, to me it's B. And it's a disconnect because so much of when we go to school, it's to get us to follow the rules. And in art, it's different because the rules are there as a scaffolding to be chipped away as need be.

Sometimes they're helpful, sometimes they're not. And sometimes we'll even impose our own rules to give something its shape. So we can decide to make a, we're going to make a painting, but we're only going to use green and red are the only colors we're allowed to use. We decide that in advance.

And then how do we solve the problem knowing all we have is green and red? You can, because otherwise if there's an infinite number of choices, anything can be anything. You know, it's like it's sometimes more choices is not better. So limiting your palette to something manageable forces you to solve problems in a different way.

You know, in our digital age, music wise, you can make anything digitally. There's no like in, there was a time when if you didn't have a guitar in the studio, you couldn't record guitar. Or if you didn't, if you couldn't hire an orchestra, there couldn't be orchestra on your recording.

Now you can just call any of those things up. So there's infinite choices and infinite choices don't necessarily lead to better, better compositions or better final, final works, understanding how, how you feel in the face of other voices without second guessing yourself is probably the single most important thing to practice as an artist or skill set to develop as an artist is to know how you feel and own your feelings.

And the key to that is not, I know, so I know what's right for you. It doesn't work that way. It's just, I know for me. And the reason I chose to be an artist is to demonstrate this is how I see it. If I'm, if I'm undermining my taste for some commercial idea or it defeats the whole purpose of doing this, this is not, that's not what this process is about.

This process is I'm doing me and I'm showing you who I am and you can like it or not, but either way, this is still how I see it.