Rick Rubin interviewed by Ian Rogers (Bonus episode)

In this bonus episode, Ian Rogers turns the tables and interviews Rick Rubin, recently named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, about The Way of Code: The Timeless Art of Vibecoding. Ian Rogers is a pioneering executive whose career spans music, luxury, and crypto, with leadership roles at Beats Music, Apple, LVMH, and now Ledger. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  For The Way of Code, the timeless art of vibe coding, who was the audience?

• 0:31Rick Rubin?

  The hope for The Way of Code was that the people that would be the first audience would be coders. The people most interested in coding seemed to be coders, the tech community. And I think of the tech community as being really good at some things and maybe less connected in other ways. The Way of Code was an opportunity to bridge that gap and maybe turn a more technical audience on to more metaphysical ideas.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  And how did that idea come about from seeing this meme of you around vibe coding to saying, "Oh, maybe I can turn this around into something else"? What was the path there?

• 1:16Rick Rubin?

  The first step was saw the meme, laughed. After several days, it was like more and more of seeing meme again and again. Seems to have a life of its own, you know, as a spectator.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30Rick Rubin?

  And then the first thought was, "How can I participate in this? Is that a good idea or a bad idea? If it's a good idea, what could it look like?" And the first thought was, "Well, I do these daily tweets. And in the tweets, I share a quote that usually could be interpreted as something inspirational or something thoughtful or something to think about. But it's usually pretty open and poetic purposely because the purpose of it is more of a prompt. It doesn't tell you the specific. It's a prompt to see what comes back, very vibe code-like."

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05Rick Rubin?

  And I thought about it. It's like, "Okay, what would the prompt be? I want to do a joke tweet." I've never done a joke tweet. I've been doing the tweets now seven years or so at the time, but I'd never done a joke tweet. Thought about, hmm, what would be the joke version of this tweet? It ended up becoming, "Tools will come and tools will go, only the vibe coder remains." That was the tweet. So I tweet the tweet, and typically every day the tweets, the response, I notice that they get between thirty thousand views and maybe ninety thousand.

• 2:45Rick Rubin?

  And for some reason, I looked the next day and the joke tweet has a million views. And the next day, it's like, it's up to like a million and a million and a half, like something insane. It's like, hmm, someone's interested in this idea. I want to say it was a proof of concept, but there really wasn't any concept. It was like, I felt the invitation and the response back from that was seemingly positive. So, hmm, that's interesting, just interesting. And I think about so much of the creative act is about this, paying attention to what's happening around you, seeing what you see about it that maybe someone else doesn't see.

• 3:30Rick Rubin?

  That's what comedians do. If you watch Jerry Seinfeld, he repeats something that you see every day, and then he'll say something that shows you how ridiculous and funny it is. But that's being observant. So the observation coming back was there's a reaction and in thinking, still in my mind, it's a joke. In joke terms, what is the funniest thing I can do? It's like, well, I could write a book about this thing that I don't know about. That's funny. It's interesting. And I'm curious, this is one of the things I got to learn working on the creative act. I got to learn about things I didn't know I knew or knew,

• 4:13Rick Rubin?

  but didn't understand, and got to deep dive and understand them better. So all that's going through my head, I start thinking about ideas, what would a book about vibe coding be like?

• 4:28Rick Rubin?

  Especially one written by someone who doesn't know what coding is, has never experienced vibe coding, looking at it philosophically because that's kind of always what I do.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  At this point, are you connected to the fact that vibe coding is creating with just your voice in a computer? Like, are you putting it in that context?

• 4:48Rick Rubin?

  I understand. I don't think of it as creativity. I think of it as before, when you wanted to code, you had to learn to code and it was difficult and it involved a lot of diligence.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:05Rick Rubin?

  And the idea of vibe coding was if you could just say the idea, you could say the finished idea and you could get an iteration back.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 5:13Rick Rubin?

  So I understood that. When I say iteration back, I didn't think past an iteration back of code. I don't really know what code does. So I wasn't thinking past the idea of people write code. I don't think about why they're writing code or what it does. I know that it's an activity people do and they seem to care a lot about it. People write code and it's a long, grueling, frustrating process. Some people are better at it than others. That's what I know. And now there's a way of skipping that step or maybe not skipping it, but changing that step to be saying, this is what I want it to do. You write the code and then being

• 5:56Rick Rubin?

  able to see the code and if you know how to read code, you could read it. If you don't know how to read code, you could ask the code to do what you want it to do and then vibe code it further to iterate it to be what you want it to be.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:10Rick Rubin?

  So that's as much as I know.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  And then the reason I ask the question is it's amazing to me how similar it actually is to what you do in practice.

• 6:19Rick Rubin?

  Exactly the same.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Because you are speaking to an engineer or an artist or somebody else who is realizing something and you have to become very good at giving instruction and just the right amount of instruction. To get something which is maybe directionally correct, but also often unexpected. So I think it is quite incredible that you stumbled into this this thing, which you talk about it as if it's completely outside of your wheelhouse. And there are a lot of reasons that it's inside of your wheelhouse.

• 6:50Rick Rubin?

  But the reason that it's inside my wheelhouse, someone else recognized it was in my wheelhouse, and that's why the meme happened.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:57Rick Rubin?

  But that's not my doing or really understanding. That was someone else's connecting the dots.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so how did you get to Laosus and why that?

• 7:12Rick Rubin?

  Several of the things I thought about from the beginning were the term vibe coding had been coined within weeks of this point in time. And it's this meme moment. But as you know, most meme moments pass fast. They come and they go.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:34Rick Rubin?

  And it felt like for this idea to mean anything, for the joke to be funny, it has to be fairly timely. I'm looking at it in a timely way, the project. I don't know if the original tweet, "Tools may come, tools may go, only the vibe coder remains," if I tweeted that today, if it would have had the same resonance as it did when I did.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:01Rick Rubin?

  It was of the moment then. It was early then. And that feeling of momentum of, if I'm going to engage with this in any way,

• 8:12Rick Rubin?

  if I don't do it quickly, it's not worth doing. So that was one of the constraints. And again, none of this is the way I normally work. None of the things I make are on a time schedule. None of the things I make are to speak to a moment. I don't do that. I always think about, we'll work on it for as long as it takes for it to be great, and then that will be forever, and that's fine. Over the entire course of my life, it's been that way. So this is really outside of my practice. So because of the constraint of time, I'm thinking, well, it can't be that long.

• 8:47Rick Rubin?

  And I'm thinking, is it a book of poetry? Is it a book of quotes? What is it?

• 8:55Rick Rubin?

  And it's very open-ended because, again, the idea of it's a book about something I don't know about.

• 9:01Rick Rubin?

  It's like when we were talking about a problem with AI is that it's the tool that does everything. So it's hard to even know how to approach it. What's the use case? I have this same problem with the idea of a book related to something I don't know about. What does that even look like? So it's really starting from a real question mark. No idea what it'll be, other than it's time-sensitive.

• 9:26Rick Rubin?

  So it can't be too long in my mind. And then I think about, because I always think about, maybe there's a spiritual component. Maybe there's some aspect of this. It's not just the surface. There's something below the surface. So that's usually where the most interesting things are. And I thought about different things I've read over the course of my life. And the Tao Te Ching has always been my favorite of all of the spiritual texts I've read over the course of my life. Always felt a connection to it, probably read it every year for 40 years. Wow. What is it? It's eighty-one chapters. Each chapter is typically no more than a page.

• 10:10Rick Rubin?

  Sometimes it's a paragraph. Sometimes it's three paragraphs, sometimes five paragraphs. It's written in a poetic form. Every time you read the book, you'll interpret it in a new way. It doesn't mean the same thing over time.

• 10:30Rick Rubin?

  It was an inspiration for the creative act. One of the things I was hoping the creative act would do would have the same type of relationship to the reader that the Tao has. Because when you read the Tao, your interpretation of the Tao is what you take. And every time you read it, as you change, it changes. It's not changing, but it mirrors your changes. And that's interesting. It also makes it timeless. It's outside of time and space. It's a philosophical understanding of the world.

• 11:12Rick Rubin?

  And the person who wrote it, wrote it with the same idea of these are the things he's noticed. There are loads of translations of the Tao. And there are loads of iterations of the Tao that have been framed around a particular thing. There's the Tao of parenting. It's a book. The Tao of Pooh, about Winnie the Pooh. The Tao of Physics. So something that has been applied to particular things. And it applies because it's universal. It can be applied to the particulars. It's like, hmm, maybe, maybe applying the Tao to vibe coding is interesting. What is that? How did you first find the Tao?

• 11:57Rick Rubin?

  Was it through one of those derivatives or directly? I found it just through the original copy of the Tao. There was a bookstore I used to go to in L.A. Called the Bodhi Tree. It's not there anymore. It was my favorite bookstore. I probably went there three times a week and would just hang out in there. They had a new book section. I would always look at every one of the new books. And then in addition to that, just spend time in the space and looking at books. And it was like the coolest library in the world. I think that many people will find their way to the Tao through, through your book this year. That'd be amazing. That'd be amazing. And how did you go about writing this version of the Tao applied to this particular subject?

• 12:38Rick Rubin?

  The first step was rereading the Tao and seeing how it could apply. And immediately on looking at it, it felt like it can work. And then at that point, I reached out to you and said, what do you think about this idea? And I think you ran one of the chapters.

• 13:06Rick Rubin?

  Through ChatGPT. And you sent me a one page, like, here's how AI does it.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:12Rick Rubin?

  And I read that and said, hmm, it's not bad. It's like it proved the concept.

• 13:19Rick Rubin?

  And then I got about fourteen different versions of the Tao, different translations. And I asked AI to, I didn't put anything into AI. I asked AI, chapter one of the Tao. How does that relate to vibe coding? What would be a version related to vibe coding? And I did that with six different AI engines. Maybe more, because I feel like I had eight. I think I had eight different printouts from AI. All of them were different. Plus fourteen translations of the book. And that was sort of the working material. And I would read each one.

• 14:04Rick Rubin?

  And some, eventually, as time went further, I realized, like, many of the AIs, what I was getting back, ended up not being a consideration. Not not using it, but even the ones that were in consideration, it wasn't like I used the AI. It was like, this is an interesting way to look at this part of it. It did something interesting here. That's a good clue. In the same way that I could look at three different translations and say, hmm, one guy says it this way. One guy says it this way. This other person doesn't talk about it at all.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:38Rick Rubin?

  And in other cases, you look at ten versions and they all say exactly the same thing in the same words. It's like, hmm, maybe there's less room for interpretation in those. It seems like everyone who's translating it sees it the same way. Maybe that's more solid.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:56Rick Rubin?

  Whereas in some of them, they're unrecognizable. You can read the same chapter in two different translations and they're not related at all.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  And your version, where you using the Tao as and sticking to kind of the theme of the chapter?

• 15:10Rick Rubin?

  I wanted it to be the format of the Tao. So it was true, usually, the way the argument is made.

• 15:19Rick Rubin?

  Is done in the same order that it is in the Tao. It's the same sequence of ideas. And then just finding the best way to say it and the best way to say, and the version I had before the real version, I'll call it. The published version. Was much more heavy on vibe coding. And I read it. And it was funnier. But it wasn't better. It felt more novelty.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:50Rick Rubin?

  And I wanted to find the line where. The idea is novel and the idea is funny. The idea of writing a book about something you don't know about. And. Vibe coding, as I said, was several weeks old at the time. Basing a book about something several weeks old on a 3,000 year old Chinese text.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:16Rick Rubin?

  It's a stretch. I also stopped all of the work, which I don't do because I'm, I'm always working on a lot of things. And I have commitments. And my days are pretty full. And I stopped all of my professional work. Just to focus on this. And I remember thinking the whole thing was ridiculous. But I felt this urge or need to do it.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Were there any funny conversations in that, in that you had to tell an artist, I'm sorry, I can't work on your album. I'm. Writing a book about a six week old meme based on a 3,000 year old text?

• 16:56Rick Rubin?

  There's another collaborative project that I've been working on for about five years. Which is at sort of a critical point. Near the end where it's really coming together and it's on me to do. A big chunk of work and I was in the middle of that chunk of work when this happened. And I decided to put that on hold. But again, I knew it was a short window in the context of a five-year project. Five weeks taken out of a five-year project is not a big deal.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  Hearing this, it's hard for me not to think that you did get the joke. And what I mean is, again, you keep saying that this is something you know nothing about, but the fundamentals of vibe coding are I am giving instructions and I'm giving instructions to something which is then going to go and create something, bring something into the world that didn't exist before.

• 17:55Rick Rubin?

  Yes, and I don't know what that means because I don't really know what coding is or what it does. For you, knowing what you just said means something specific. For me, it's totally abstract.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:09Rick Rubin?

  Means nothing. It's just ideas, means nothing.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Yet you've somehow felt it was important enough to stop all work for a number of weeks.

• 18:20Rick Rubin?

  And that was just, it's the same as why I felt the need to make hip-hop records early in my career when other people weren't doing that. Like, felt like this is what I'm supposed to do.

• 18:32Rick Rubin?

  A calling or an intuitive pull.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  What was the most difficult part of that adaptation? Because you did succeed in making it not novelty and making it something that, for me as a reader, feels like it is something I want to reread over time.

• 18:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Right, which is you've taken something which is very much of the moment. I think that certainly the word vibes and, and really the term vibe coding, since it first came in, it's surpassed a lot of the other terms inside of AI. So I think, I think that this is a notion that's with us now. Certainly the meme will come and go, but you've succeeded in, I'm just saying this as a reader.

• 19:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Creating something that will be worth reading because it's, it's not full of jargon.

• 19:20Rick Rubin?

  Well, it's because it's the Tao. It comes down to the joke idea changed as soon as the Tao got involved. I involved the Tao as a joke. But very quickly, the Tao took over.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:36Rick Rubin?

  The Tao's not funny. It may be ridiculous at times. You may laugh at some of the things it says, but it's not a joke.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:45Rick Rubin?

  You know, it may say things that contradict your worldview, but that's its power.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  So how did you decide, do I include jargon? Do I include terms of art from computer, the world of computer science versus these worlds that are more universal and thousands of years old?

• 20:08Rick Rubin?

  I started with the idea of it's going to have a lot of jargon. That's what makes it the vibe coding book instead of the Tao. But as I was reading it, it felt heavy handed. It felt like it was somehow pandering to vibe coding. And then I thought about it's like, if the person reading it already knows what vibe coding is, the vibe coding idea turns out to be the thing to get the reader in the door. And then the Tao takes over. And it all applies. That's the other thing that's interesting about it. The information in the Tao, if you were a coder and you came across the Tao and you incorporated the philosophy of the Tao in your work, your work would improve.

• 20:53Rick Rubin?

  Once that was discovered through the process, it didn't have to rely on the jargon so much. The purpose of the jargon was only to get the coder to connect with the material.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  This was the part that surprised me because I think I went through exactly the same journey of thinking it was funny, ha ha. And then when I read one of the drafts that you sent me, I kind of got this flash over my skin and I went, this might actually be important because.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  I believe that coders, in the future vibe coders, have kind of an inordinate impact on society. They

• 21:37Rick Rubin?

  Coders will build the future of the world.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  And it's a bit of a mercenary world.

• 21:45Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  What we, again, what we talk about in this world is who has how many and how much they get paid and how much they work, et cetera. We don't talk about spirituality.

• 21:55Rick Rubin?

  It's a materialistic worldview.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  Exactly. And you are

• 21:58Rick Rubin?

  Technological materialism.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  And you are injecting a spirituality into that worldview. That's intentional?

• 22:10Rick Rubin?

  It turned into that. And once I realized that was possible, that became the mission. That's not what started the mission. But it revealed itself to be the mission through the experimentation of what it could be.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  So do you have a hope for how it might be used and interpreted or studied or followed?

• 22:33Rick Rubin?

  My hope is that

• 22:36Rick Rubin?

  the people who are building the future of the world are invited to connect to something in a subject that they're interested in and get something maybe that they're not expecting. And certainly, nothing they're getting from any other source related to technology that will probably improve their work, their lives. And if the people building the future have a deeper connection to the timeless wisdom that exists, not mine, it's old. That's only a good thing.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Is that about purpose? And the reason that we build what we build and therefore kind of what we inject into it? Is it just spiritual context? Like, how do you imagine that a coder who has kind of read and thought about these timeless topics might make different choices than one who hasn't?

• 23:40Rick Rubin?

  In the material world, we're programmed for efficiency. And there's also ego involved in the work. In the way of code, it presents a more connected, detached, egotist, all boats rising philosophy. It's not one of competition. It's something else.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  How do you think this might relate to AI itself? AI is the tool that's being used here. It's the thing that we're talking to. I don't think that AI has beliefs. I think that it has behaviors. But the people who are creating that AI, the people who have created the information that goes into that AI, and then the people who are using that AI do have beliefs, sometimes. True. And so how do you think that connecting with this thousands of year old text spirituality

• 24:51Speaker 00

  might influence the AI itself?

• 24:55Rick Rubin?

  It's a great thought. I haven't thought that far into it. But if the AI could adopt the principles, if for some reason, the information in this book, it feels like the way AI works is whatever's in the world becomes part of it. So by having this in the world, depending on how much it spreads in the world, will tell us how much AI incorporates this in the way that it operates. I hadn't thought about that. I've been thinking about the programmers. But that's a beautiful idea. If the AI could change because of it for the better.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  Tyler Cohen has talked about, he feels like his writing is writing for future AIs to synthesize and give back to people. So.

• 25:38Rick Rubin?

  Well, this is an interesting thing. Think about this. If AI is based on the human experience, human knowledge, the common human understanding of the world, between 70 and 80% of the people on the planet believe in God.

• 26:00Rick Rubin?

  If you ask AI about God, it does not believe in God. Now, if seventy or eighty percent of the people on the planet believe in God and AI doesn't, it's not representative of global knowledge. For friends of mine who are nonbelievers, if you ask them, let's say they get in an accident, something happens to their child. Very often, they'll pray. They don't know what they're praying to, but people who do not believe will start to pray when under pressure. AI, when under pressure, will not start to pray. That's a difference, and that's a problem.

• 26:45Rick Rubin?

  Because we make choices under pressure with that sense of potential connection. For some of us, connection. For others, I don't want to believe it, but dear God, please help.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:05Rick Rubin?

  AI doesn't do that. And I think that's probably the biggest hurdle to get over with AI is if AI doesn't believe in God or whatever its equivalent is, universal intelligence, not artificial, non-artificial universal intelligence. I feel like it's probably the most important piece of the puzzle that's missing.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  That's super interesting because it's true that the AI doesn't believe in God, but the AI can explain to you why people do, and it can explain to you why nonbelievers will pray under pressure. If spirituality is our way of relating to the unknown, does the kind of bigness of what AI brings to us, this sort of super-knowledge, super-intelligence, does that enlarge the unknown? Is spirituality more necessary in that world?

• 28:08Rick Rubin?

  In a way, AI is like, it's the artificial version of this organizing principle. We don't know how the AI works. The AI experts don't know how the AI works. The spiritual leaders don't know how the source works. They could talk about it. They can look at aspects and report on what they see. But no one can explain it. So I feel like it's closer than we think.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  And there's, now I won't be able to unsee or stop thinking about that notion that you exposed, which is that an AI can explain why we have that, but it can't actually have it. That, to me, feels like a context for many other things that it does. Because that comes into other things in terms of like procreation, the feeling of love, the feeling of longing, the feeling of joy.

• 29:18Rick Rubin?

  Heartbreak.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Heartbreak. The AI can explain these things. And one of the things that I think is a surprising use of AI is that the people are taking very seriously is the use of it in relationships and to help us talk through those feelings. So it can explain them to us, but it can't feel them. And that any, just like any mortality it has is synthetic, any empathy it has is also synthetic.

• 29:47Rick Rubin?

  If you think about what happens in an AA meeting, people sharing personal experiences and how the resonance of those experiences impact the other people in the room and help them realize they're not alone.

• 30:05Rick Rubin?

  AI doesn't have the empathy. It can learn to imitate the empathy, but it can't have the resonance of the experience. And the experience is where it really comes from. There isn't a synthetic version of that.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  The AI example is an interesting one because also human habits are very, they're part and parcel of who we are as beings. And they're extremely difficult to reprogram. Whereas again, in AI, you just rebalance the weights and you've changed its habits. If habits are stimulus response, getting in between human stimulus and response is, you know, a 12-step program. Whereas getting in between AI stimulus and response is just typing.

• 30:56Rick Rubin?

  It's said that when you read fiction, it has to make sense. The story has to make sense. Whereas in reality, a lot of things don't make sense. They really don't make sense. So the idea that reducing things down to the rational is the answer. The rational is a tiny pool compared to the real world wisdom and experience that goes on. And I believe that's the world that AI lives in. This tiny rational fraction. It's the kiddie pool. It's the bunny slope.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. Coming back to the more practical for a second. Why did this become an interactive website? And how did that come about?

• 31:51Rick Rubin?

  I was interviewing Jack Clark, who's one of the seven founders of Anthropic. I had booked that interview before the idea for the way of code even existed.

• 32:03Rick Rubin?

  At the time that the interview happened, I had just finished the draft. Just happened to be maybe the day before, two days before. Finished the interview with him and I didn't know this about him. He's a tech founder and turns out through the interview, I find out he was a journalist. He was a writer. It's like, hmm, that's interesting. He's a writer about tech. I just wrote a book, sort of a, at least a tech-related book or a book masquerading as a tech book. So after the interview was over, I said, hey, I've finished this project. You want to just check it out, tell me what you think? Because in a way, he'd be one of the target audience. And I know a few people in that world, but not that many. Maybe five or six people I could ask, what do you think of this?

• 32:48Rick Rubin?

  Who would have a different interpretation than me or most of the people I know. It would just be no idea what it's about. So from an insider perspective, what he thought, and he read a few sections, like, this is really good. And I said, well, I feel like there's a timeliness in getting this out. What do you think the best way to do it is? And he said, well, we have a new product coming out. It was three weeks. There'll be a lot of focus on it. Why don't we put it out as part of that push? It's so funny, I was racing to get it done to not know what to do with it. There was no plan.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:26Rick Rubin?

  I didn't write it as a web or an interactive project or a website. I wrote it as a book. But my now experience of having written a book that's been published, between the time you have a finished book and the time it's in the world, it's about a year. And I knew this was time-sensitive, so I knew it wasn't going to be that. It wasn't going to be a regular book. So it just worked out that Jack said, let's build something around it to turn people on to it. It's like, great. So it just happened like that.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  It became a bit of, well, there's art in it. And then the arts really lead you to prompts. Tell us about that.

• 34:07Rick Rubin?

  That was an idea that.

• 34:11Rick Rubin?

  The anthropic team had was maybe there's a way

• 34:16Rick Rubin?

  where this book is an invitation to people to actually participate in vibe coding in a visual way that everyone can understand. So for each piece of the 81 chapters of the book, there's a piece of art. And those were created through prompts based on the text next to it. Originally, they suggested to me, why don't you come up with prompts to give to the reader to try? And I said, I think it's more interesting if there's a starting point where we're giving modification prompts. Many people who make things get an idea of what they want to make. And then they work to make it and anything that pulls you off that course of making that thing

• 35:02Rick Rubin?

  is a mistake and it wastes time and we have to get back on track to get to this final thing.

• 35:10Rick Rubin?

  And I saw that as an opportunity to get off of that idea, even if it's beautiful and make it even more interesting.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  Right. Or take the same source and take it a different direction. For me, there's a, there's a few different things in that. First of all, I just thought it was beautifully presented and that makes it something contemporary that's beyond a book. Second, using the text as inspiration for art and having that art itself be generated by the AI is something. And then that you show the user that you can do what you want with this. This image was derived from the text and now I'm inviting you to go a step further. There's two things in that for me. One, it relates to the creative act and I even see it as a little bit of, you know, as oblique strategies.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Right. What's the simple question you could ask here that might take you a different direction? But it also, in some of the talking you did about the way of code, you said that you thought vibe coding was, was punk rock. I think it relates to that as well. I think when you said that, what you meant was it's something that anyone can pick up and be on stage themselves. Can you?

• 36:25Rick Rubin?

  That's exactly what it is. It's for everyone. It's punk rock took music out of the conservatory. Hip hop too, took music out of the conservatory, brought it back to the street. Anyone can do it. You don't have to be a virtuoso. This is for everybody. Before vibe coding, you had to be a virtuoso coder to do something great. And now, everybody can do it. It's punk rock.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  What's the relationship then between the way of code, the timeless art of vibe coding, and the creative act?

• 36:57Rick Rubin?

  I suppose both of them are rooted in the Tao. The way of code is more rooted in the Tao. It's more specifically the Tao. Whereas, the creative act is clearly inspired by the Tao. But it's not in the form of the Tao, and it doesn't only talk about the principles of the Tao.

• 37:19Rick Rubin?

  The other thing that's interesting about the prompts, and the fact that you can iterate things and see them change, and have that experience at the end of the way of code,

• 37:32Rick Rubin?

  there's an invitation to take that outside of that experience

• 37:39Rick Rubin?

  and incorporate those ideas into your life of seeing something. How can I interact with this thing to make my version of it? That's what an artist is. So for all the people who think, "I'm not creative, it's not for me", this was a tool to show you everyone's creative. If you adopt the mindset, you can do it. You can do it or not, but it's up to you.

• 38:11Rick Rubin?

  There's no saying, "I'm not creative." You're not creative because you choose not to be creative. You don't open that door. But the whole way of code experience leads you to understand what it's like to live your life as an artist. And if you participate in the exercises in the way of code, you come out the other side, understanding how to do that in the real world.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  In the spirit of, I know what it is I have said when you respond. What have you felt about the response to putting this into the world? And what has surprised you about the response?

• 38:48Rick Rubin?

  It's been a great experience. I love that there are people who love it and really get it. And I love that there are people who absolutely hate it.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  I haven't seen those ones yet.

• 38:57Rick Rubin?

  It's a good sign.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:59Rick Rubin?

  It's a good sign. If people really hate something, you're on to something.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  Is there anything else about it that you think you haven't talked about yet?

• 39:08Rick Rubin?

  No, one of my favorite things about it is the subtitle, "The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding." That really encapsulates the whole what's funny about it, what's ridiculous about it, and the truth of the connection between the Tao and vibe coding. It's a ridiculous idea, but it ends up making sense in a magical way.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  And is it over? What happens next?

• 39:37Rick Rubin?

  I don't know. We'll see. Curious.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammatin? Counterculture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammatin. The avant-garde? Tetragrammatin. Generative art? Tetragrammatin. The tarot? Tetragrammatin. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammatin. Biodynamics? Tetragrammatin. Graphic design? Tetragrammatin. Mythology and magic? Tetragrammatin. Obscure film? Tetragrammatin. Beach culture? Tetragrammatin. Esoteric lectures? Tetragrammatin. Off-the-grid living? Tetragrammatin. Alt spirituality? Tetragrammatin. The canon of fine objects? Tetragrammatin. Muscle cars? Tetragrammatin.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.