#492 – Rick Beato: Greatest Guitarists of All Time, History & Future of Music

Rick Beato is a music educator, interviewer, producer, songwriter, and a true multi-instrument musician, playing guitar, bass, cello & piano. His incredible YouTube channel celebrates great musicians & musical ideas, and helps millions of people fall in love with great music all over again. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep492-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/rick-beato-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Rick’s YouTube: https://youtube.com/RickBeato Rick’s X: https://x.com/rickbeato Rick’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/rickbeato1 Rick’s Website: https://rickbeato.com Rick’s Ear Training: https://beatoeartraining.com The Beato Book: https://beatobook.com SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: UPLIFT Desk: Standing desks and office ergonomics. Go to https://upliftdesk.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/uplift_desk-ep492-sc BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/betterhelp-ep492-sc LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/lmnt-ep492-sc Fin: AI agent for customer service. Go to https://fin.ai/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/fin-ep492-sc Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/shopify-ep492-sc Perplexity: AI-powered answer engine. Go to https://perplexity.ai/ https://lexfridman.com/s/perplexity-ep492-sc OUTLINE: (00:00) – Introduction (00:28) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections (09:17) – Guitar solos (13:16) – Gypsy jazz and Django Reinhardt (14:48) – Bebop jazz (19:00) – Perfect pitch vs relative pitch (23:37) – Learning to play guitar (47:08) – Miles Davis (52:34) – Bass guitar (53:41) – Greatest guitar solos of all time (1:22:56) – 27 Club (1:27:37) – Elton John (1:30:51) – Metallica (1:35:21) – Tom Waits (1:41:12) – Greatest rock stars (1:44:35) – Beethoven (1:51:10) – Bach (1:54:01) – AI in music (2:07:52) – Sabrina Carpenter (2:11:23) – YouTube copyright strikes (2:16:59) – Spotify (2:27:51) – Guitars (2:32:13) – Advice PODCAST LINKS: – Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast – Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr – Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 – RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ – Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 – Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Rick Biato, legendary music educator, interviewer, producer, songwriter, and a true multi-instrument musician playing guitar, bass, cello, and piano. Rick, with his incredible YouTube channel, celebrates great musicians and musical ideas and helps millions of people, including me, fall in love with great music all over again.

• 0:28Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. We got Uplift Desk for my favorite office desk, BetterHelp for mental health, Element for electrolytes, Finn for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and our friend, Perplexity, for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. The number of things that Perplexity ships at the rate it ships is freaking incredible. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip,

• 1:13Lex Fridman?

  please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Uplift Desk, my go-to for all office and podcast studio furniture. I'm sitting behind one right now. The podcast you're about to watch or listen to was filmed behind three Uplift Desks. It was upgraded from two because they had to expand. I guess there's four people in the podcast to make it a little bit roomier in that. Room, there's four uplift desks, because one of them I have, I don't know how many,

• 1:55Lex Fridman?

  four monitors, four monitors and a computer on which I do a lot of the editing and now a lot of the agentic stuff. Every machine, every compute surface in my place is doing some kind of agentic work. There's agents running all the time. There's an agent running right now on this very computer I'm recording this with. Anyway, that's on the software front. On the hardware front, the desks just make me feel happy. Long, long, long before Uplift was a sponsor, I was using their desk. And the fact that they're now a sponsor just brings joy to my heart. I recommend it highly. Without question, the greatest

• 2:38Lex Fridman?

  standing desks of all time, customizable, 200,000 desk combinations, makes me more productive, brings me more happiness. An incredible product, incredible people, incredible desks, cannot recommend it enough. Go to upliftdesk.com/lex, use code Lex to get four free accessories, free same-day shipping, free returns, a 15-year warranty, and an extra discount off your entire order. That's U.P.L.I.F.T.D.E.S.K. com/lex.

• 3:15Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H.E.L.P. Help. We have an incredible episode coming up on psychiatry. What an episode. What a mind-blowing, no pun intended, episode. The human mind, as I'm sure we'll get to in that episode, is an incredibly complex machine. And each individual mind has its own intricate complexities. And the history of psychiatry, which is the focus of that episode, is a history of people trying to figure out how to be a kind of mechanic to that machine. I personally think

• 3:56Lex Fridman?

  that talk therapy is one of the most powerful ways to at least elucidate, bring to the surface.

• 4:06Lex Fridman?

  The issues that need to be resolved. And that's what BetterHelp is about. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. It's easy, discreet, affordable, available everywhere. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex.

• 4:29Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Element. My daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. I gave Element actually a shout out in a recent video, training video with Habib Narmagomedov. What an incredible experience that was. And it was a funny moment because when we hung out, Islam Narmagomedov was there too. And I had Element with me. And Islam came up to me. He's, he got really excited when he saw Element. He's like, oh, can I have one of these? It was like a, it was like an infomercial. It was almost like a kind of funny Dagestan version of a commercial for Element, but it was real.

• 5:15Lex Fridman?

  And I was like, sure. It was two people who love Element kind of exchanging the goods. I guess he, he was all out. So I'm always happy to share. And in that case, I had a giant stash. So it's not like I was letting go. I still had a stash. All right, anyway, get a free eight count sample pack with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. Like I said, I have agents running everywhere all the time. This particular agent specializes in customer service.

• 6:00Lex Fridman?

  65% average resolution rate. It's trusted by over 6,000 customers, including AI companies, the engineers of some of which I've already interviewed and will interview in the future. It's built to handle complex multi-step queries like returns, exchanges and disputes. Obviously, customer service. A deep care for the concerns of the individual customer is extremely important. To the degree AI can help facilitate that, that's really important.

• 6:32Lex Fridman?

  I'm a huge believer what Jeff Bezos talked about in my conversation with him as he's always talked about an extreme focus on the customer. A company that focuses on the customer is a company that's going to succeed. And don't get comfortable just because you're making a lot of money, just because there's a lot of revenue, a lot of profit. Don't get lazy. Don't forget what brought you to the dance. It's an extreme obsession of making the customer happy. Anyway, go to fin.ai/lex to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team. That's fin.ai/lex. This episode, finally, is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone

• 7:18Lex Fridman?

  to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. Shopify's CEO that I always talk about, Toby, is now going wild programming. His GitHub is on fire. He's obviously building a lot of cool stuff. It is always really inspiring and I think really important for the engineers at the company to see that the leadership is building. Leadership is down, ground level, understanding the state of the art technologies that are involved in engineering the product, in this case of Shopify, but also just products in general, how to build. I think a builder is what makes for a great leader of other builders.

• 8:03Lex Fridman?

  And so I'm always a fan of following along of all the incredible engineering that Shopify is doing behind the scenes to deliver all the products that it is delivering. So, you know, to have the infrastructure for a huge amount of people connecting and selling stuff, plus the thousands of integrations that they have to handle seamlessly, all of that at your fingertips if you just want to sell some t-shirts like I do, or actually run a legitimate, large scale business. All of that is supported by Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today.

• 8:45Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Rick Beato.

• 9:17Lex Fridman?

  You had, I think, an incredibly fun and diverse beginning to your music journey. I heard somewhere that one of the things that made you fall in love with music was listening to guitar solos, some epic guitar solos. What's an early guitar solo that you remember you connected to spiritually, musically, where you're like, wow, there's magic in this?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Well, the first solo that I learned was Hey Joe. It was actually a good beginner song, you know, when I first started playing the guitar, because it has pretty simple chords, right? So it's like E, C, G, D, A. And I learned the solo, and I figured out this like, let's see, it's this pentatonic scale, E minor pentatonic scale. I didn't know that's what it was called, but I learned this thing. And it's like, whoa, he's just in this one shape here. Now, there was no, you couldn't go look anything up. You just, if you could figure out the notes, you noticed that there was a little pattern to it. And then I, I got so obsessed with it. And I showed my younger brother, John, who started playing guitar

• 10:22Speaker 01

  right at the same time I did. So I was 14, he was 11. And I would play rhythm for him for five minutes while he would solo over Hey Joe. And then as soon as I'd start soloing, he'd throw the guitar down, then we'd get in a fight. And so my mom eventually was like, what is going on here? And I was like, John won't play rhythm.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  John won't play rhythm for me. She's like, okay, I'll play rhythm for you. What are the chords? And I was like, okay, it's like E, C, G, D, A. And so my mom would literally play rhythm for 20 minutes while I'd play.

• 10:58Lex Fridman?

  Hashtag parenting.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  That's amazing. When I look back on it now, my mom's been gone for 10 years now. When I look back on it, it's like, my God, my parents were so cool.

• 11:09Lex Fridman?

  We should mention that Hey Joe and Hendrix in general is kind of known for the rhythm not being simple rhythm, just the chords that you mentioned. It's what you do with those chords. It's almost improvisation in the rhythm side.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  He did all those really cool chord fragments, riffs and things like that. That's just part of his, that's the Hendrix style.

• 11:27Lex Fridman?

  What do you think? I mean, many people put Hendrix as the greatest guitarist of all time. What do you think is part of that?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  You know, I, I make lists.

• 11:35Lex Fridman?

  You do. If you somehow don't know who Rick Beato is, go on YouTube right now and watch your excellent interviews with musicians. Watch your breakdown, analysis of different songs and watch your top 20 lists where you're very opinionated. Sometimes very openly critical about certain kinds of song. It's fun. Opinions are fun.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  But they do change Lex from day to day, you know?

• 12:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  But anytime I do a list, if I do 20, I like to do 20 because that gives me some leeway to, to throw in. I have to throw in something that is so weird that people, you know, something that a lot of people won't know just to have it on there. So I can at least introduce a, you know, I'll put somebody like a Alan Holdsworth, who's a famous fusion guitar player. I'll throw in one of his solos or something, just some, some oddball solo in there, just so that people, as they're listening down the list, will get exposed to something they would not necessarily get exposed to.

• 12:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, a lot of variety, but Hendrix, did you show up here today, Rick?

• 12:45Lex Fridman?

  Trying to tell me that Hendrix is not up there. I just am getting that vibe right now.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  No, I'm not. But I don't want to say greatest, you know, you can say, well, there are people that inspired Jimi Hendrix, Charlie Christian, older guitar players. Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt were the first two really big and probably and Andre Segovia were three of the giants of the 20th century as far as guitar influences for most of the players that were to follow.

• 13:16Lex Fridman?

  So here going to perplexity, Django Reinhardt was, of course, a jazz guitarist and composer, active mainly in France, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists in jazz history.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  So Django was, well, there's a huge movement right now, Gypsy Jazz movement, as they call it, that is kind of built around the style of music that he played back in the early 20th century. One of the things about Django is that he was in a fire. And he had two of his third and fourth finger, so his ring finger and pinky were essentially melted together. He had no use of them, although he could use them while he was courting. But a lot of these incredibly fast lines, he's just playing with two fingers. And it's amazing.

• 14:17Lex Fridman?

  That, what is that? So that's Gypsy Jazz?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  That's Gypsy Jazz, yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Him, Stefan Grappelli, there's a violinist that played with him a lot.

• 14:31Lex Fridman?

  How much of this is improvisation?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Everything he's doing there is improvised.

• 14:41Lex Fridman?

  Feels so free.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:44Lex Fridman?

  And fun, like swing. And then that leads to, you said, pre Bebop. So Bebop was the kind of jazz that was also influential on you and your own life journey. And it's this complicated, legendary kind of jazz that was very influential on the music that followed. So what was Bebop?

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Well, after the big bands were happening in the, you know, from the 20s through the 40s,

• 15:11Speaker 01

  small, people would go out and play in small groups that they would tour with. And Charlie Parker, who's really kind of the, one of the main figures of early Bebop, really developed the language of it. Usually the music that they're playing over are standard chord progressions that, that they would use as vehicles to improvise over. A lot of them were A A B A form. And Charlie Parker created this language of improvisation that was far more sophisticated than the swing players of the big band era. You know, think of people like Benny Goodman of that era. They would have really fast tempo songs, angular lines, chromaticism,

• 15:55Speaker 01

  things like that, chromatic notes.

• 15:58Lex Fridman?

  Chromatic notes are just notes next to each other.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Next to each other, yeah. I like to think of as connecting notes.

• 16:03Lex Fridman?

  Connecting. You're putting in more notes that are supposed to be there and so doing, creating some interesting texture.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that is one of the most difficult styles to master because all these things are a language.

• 16:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Blues playing, they're all just languages, right? It's like, just like you'd learn any type of language. My dad loved Bebop. Now, when I was a little kid and he's listening to these Bebop records, whether it's Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, or Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass, great jazz guitar player, I'm just hearing this stuff. I don't know any different. My dad was not a musician, but for some reason, he liked incredibly sophisticated music that was very technical and.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  I just heard it and just was like, oh yeah, okay, cool. And not realizing that it was developing my ear because I really, bebop is one of the hardest to improvise in that style, in that language of bebop. It's very difficult to do. And

• 17:11Speaker 01

  hearing it as a kid is one of the things that I think enables you, just like languages, enables you to learn it as opposed to somebody that's never been exposed to it and tries to learn it as a teenager. I think it's very similar to learning languages, which kind of is like my theory on perfect pitch, that every child is born with perfect pitch and they start to lose the ability around nine months. When people become culturally bound listeners, when babies do, they start out as citizens of the world, you know, they can, they have the phone, the, the neural pathways to hear the sounds, the phonemes of all 6,500 languages spoken on earth.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  But then around nine months, they begin to lose that ability and they, when they become these culturally bound listeners, there's a great YouTube video with this woman, Patricia Kuhl, she's a language researcher. And I watched this, The Linguistic Genius of Babies. I saw this in 2010, this lecture that she did, like a TED Talk. And she talks about this, that kids, they did an experiment, they exposed kids to Mandarin three times a week for 25 minute sessions, just a person speaking Mandarin to these babies. And they were able to recognize the sounds, the phonemes of that language even later on. And when I realized that my son Dylan had perfect pitch,

• 18:43Speaker 01

  I thought, why does Dylan have perfect pitch, but no one

• 18:48Speaker 01

  in my family had ever had perfect pitch? And I thought, well, it must be because of the things I exposed to him. Prenatally and then in the first nine months of his life. Cause it's the only way I could explain it.

• 19:00Lex Fridman?

  We're gonna return to Joe Pass. We gotta go to Dylan. You mentioned Dylan. I guess it's in part, one of the origin stories of you putting out videos into the world is the early videos you did with Dylan. Set of videos on his perfect pitch. And for people who don't know, maybe you can speak to what perfect pitch means.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  It's ability to identify any note without a reference tone. So you can play. It doesn't matter how quickly they are that they can, a person with perfect pitch can hear a note and immediately identify it. Or a collection of notes.

• 19:36Lex Fridman?

  And taking a tangent upon a tangent, you also have a course on ear training.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yes, but my course is for relative pitch, not to be confused with perfect pitch.

• 19:43Lex Fridman?

  Is it fair to say that relative pitch, as far as the thing you would learn is more useful for musicians?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:49Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain the difference between the two?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Relative pitch is basically learning how to identify pitches relative to a stated tonic or something that you've heard, or just relative to each other. If you hear a note and then you hear another note after it, you can recognize, let's say it's a minor third interval. So if you're on the note A, the next note would be C. So once you're given a reference note, you can use relative pitch to, to identify the relative nature from one pitch to another.

• 20:19Lex Fridman?

  And of course, intervals make up scales and intervals make up chords. And so that if you develop to any degree, uh, relative pitch, you can understand, you can hear the music better.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:36Lex Fridman?

  So what, what does it take? Uh, since we're taking a tangent on tangent, what's, uh, what does it take to train your ear? What's, uh, a TLDR in the course before people go out and sign up?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  It's just practice, basically. You start with intervals. Typically with small intervals like minor second, major second. So minor second be half step, major second be a whole step.

• 20:56Lex Fridman?

  Are you listening to the tone one after the other or to them together?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Both. So played separately, it's called melodic intervals, right? Like a melody and harmonic intervals are played like a harmony together. So you have to be able to identify them both, both ways.

• 21:11Lex Fridman?

  With an early journey, like we'll give people a preview of what they should, like, what does that look like? What is, what does practice look like?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Well, my course, it will play you an interval and then you identify it by clicking on whether it's, you know, a major third or minor third or major six or minor six or perfect fifth or tritone, whatever it is. And, and it will teach you gradually over time, how to recognize all the intervals.

• 21:36Lex Fridman?

  So you, you listen to a melodic interval or harmonic interval. How quickly does the ear in the various age groups that we humans are in? How quickly does the ear learn the different intervals? Is it a week, two weeks, a month, two months, five years?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  I think you do it pretty quickly within, you know, if you practice within a couple of months, you can, you can really make a lot of progress on it if you practice daily.

• 22:06Lex Fridman?

  What benefit does it have to, uh, to you as a musician in general?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Well, it's great if you want to hear a chord progression, if you're trying to figure out a song. And you can say, oh, that's going from the six minor chord to the four major to the five major to one major. And you can just identify it immediately. And then you figure out what the first chord is, then you know what the rest of the chords are. Cause they're in relation to whatever that first chord is. And for learning solos, for example, or learning melodies, being able to sound something out.

• 22:34Lex Fridman?

  Now, do you recommend people couple that with, uh, music theory, uh, in terms of education, the, the education journey?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  They have to be taught together because these terms are really music theory, right? Those intervals, major second, minor second, major third, minor third, perfect fourth. So as you're doing that, and then. You, once you learn the intervals, the 12 intervals in an octave, then you, you learn them both melodically and harmonically, so played together and separate. Then you learn chords. And so then you learn to identify major, minor, diminished, augmented, suspended chords, things like that. Well, you're basically learning music theory at the same time with that. Cause learning, music theory is just the name of things in music.

• 23:21Lex Fridman?

  So there's the sound of things. There's the name of things. And then there's the haptic, like playing the thing, probably. So playing chords, playing scales, you have, I believe, a course on scales and on chords.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:36Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Since we're doing the tangent, let's go. How do you recommend people, there's a bunch of people listening to this that are curious about how they can start in playing guitar, maybe even playing piano, maybe playing other instruments. Although guitar, of course, is the greatest instrument of all time. What are the early steps of that journey? What, what do you recommend people do in general?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Well, if you're a beginner, uh, getting a good beginner guitar course and learning, first of all, the open chords in first position. A lot of songs can be played that way. A lot of old songs can be played that way. Maybe not new, modern songs necessarily.

• 24:12Lex Fridman?

  So learning a few chords and with an eye towards maybe playing a song?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. With an eye towards, you learn, you learn the chord shapes and you learn how to strum basic patterns to begin with. I think the first thing for learning guitar is actually how to position your fingers so that you, you don't mute strings that you don't want to mute.

• 24:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  That's the hardest thing for people to do, basically, is to get their fingers arched to where they, if you're playing a C major chord, your index finger is on the first fret of the B string and you have to have that open E string ringing there. And it's hard for people to make those micro, micro adjustments. You take it for granted, like you've been playing guitar for, I don't know how many years, forever, right?

• 24:55Lex Fridman?

  Forever, yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  And you don't even think about stuff like that when you're playing a guitar solo. Every little thing that you do, if you're playing your comfortably numb guitar solo. You have to, out of midair, strike the string that your finger's on to play the note. And these are all fine adjustments that you're doing.

• 25:12Lex Fridman?

  I'm just a hobbyist or recreational player, but wow, you're taking me all the way back. You're right, it's the haptic, the physical aspect of it is really tricky. Unfortunately, numb is a good example, but if you do lead, you have to get a super clean sound. Now, that's both when you're playing fast, you want it to be super precise. But when you play slow, when you have one note and you're holding it and you're bending it, it better be really clean.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:39Lex Fridman?

  And for that, it's, I guess you have to really place the finger in the right place. Plus, there's the, well, there's the calluses, so it doesn't hurt. And then the positioning of the string on the curvature of the finger, where does it fall? Like, how much do you bend the finger?

• 25:58Speaker 01

  You have to have enough of flesh on it to actually raise the, raise the string and pitch.

• 26:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Otherwise it...

• 26:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, because you're lifting it with part of a flesh. And of course, you have to decide, depends how OCD you are. Do you want to be like the perfect, the proper musician? Or do you want to do a Hendrix? So the thumb over the top.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Way over the top, yes.

• 26:21Lex Fridman?

  And so like, if you have a fretboard here, I think the more like classical guitarists, the very proper, perfect perpendicular alignment of the fingertips to the fretboard versus like Hendrix is like, fuck it.

• 26:39Lex Fridman?

  You nerds.

• 26:42Lex Fridman?

  I'm gonna do it. With the messiness is part of the magic. Of course, like BB King is also kind of messy looking in terms of his positioning of the fingers, but his tone is incredibly clean.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Yes, super clean.

• 26:56Lex Fridman?

  So like, that teaches you that maybe any position can converge towards a super clean tone. You just have to figure it out.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  I think a lot of it has to do with... How they wear their guitars. If you wear your guitar low, if you're Hendrix and you're wearing your guitar.

• 27:11Lex Fridman?

  That's true.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  If you're wearing it lower, lower, then you, you can't get your fingers on top of it like that. And the thumb acts as a way to mute the lower strings from ringing if you're playing through a loud amplifier. So there's so many other micro adjustments when you're playing leads, because you have to kind of mute the other strings that are, so they don't ring out. If you're playing the first note and comfortably numb at the solo at the end, and you're at the ninth fret of the G string and you bend that, if you bend that G string and you accidentally hit the B string under it, you don't want that ringing. So you have to kind of angle your index finger so it

• 27:51Lex Fridman?

  To mute.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  To mute that. So all these micro adjustments that you don't even think about, I mean, you're not thinking about that likes when you're playing it. You've done it so many times that these things are just part of your, of your brain. That's why this is such a great brain developer for kids to learn instruments.

• 28:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, of course, you have to solve that puzzle. Must be really frustrating in the beginning, like holding a chord.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:16Lex Fridman?

  Like all of them. It hurts too, right?

• 28:19Speaker 01

  It does hurt.

• 28:20Lex Fridman?

  If you're on an acoustic guitar.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Not for that long, though. For like, a week.

• 28:24Lex Fridman?

  Couple, yeah.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Couple weeks.

• 28:26Lex Fridman?

  Couple.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  I don't want to discourage anyone, you know, it's, it's actually pretty easy to learn. Basic stuff.

• 28:33Lex Fridman?

  Right, but the, the pain is temporary, I guess is the point I'm trying to make.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  It is.

• 28:37Lex Fridman?

  Uh, so, so what else? So the physical component, play a few chords. Where does the journey continue if you're learning guitar?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Well, then it's like, if you play electric guitar, then you get into single note playing and stuff like that. That's where it gets, to me, where it gets really fun. You know, you have single note playing that with riffs, if you think of Back in Black, right, that has a riff embedded in the, in the actual melody. Or many songs that have riffs, the Hendrix stuff that has chordal riffs, and you're moving up the neck and And involving all the fingers and things like that. So there's, it really depends on what you wanna, what styles you wanna play.

• 29:18Lex Fridman?

  So you're thinking about song learning. So different components of song learning. So riffs in songs, lead in songs.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  And then you have finger picking. If you have Stairway to Heaven, songs like that. How about wanting to learn that? That involves finger picking because the, you have to isolate certain notes of the chord and play two together, you know, and multiple times.

• 29:40Lex Fridman?

  There's a few crossroads where you get to select things. So I guess you're speaking to the fact there's the, if you're a righty, there's a right hand, you can use your fingers or you can use a pick.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 29:52Lex Fridman?

  And it's a choice you make.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  And sometimes you use both. Cause in Stairway to Heaven, you're using the fingers at the beginning, or fingers and pick, hybrid, they call it hybrid picking. And then later on, you're using the pick to flat pick the picking patterns.

• 30:08Lex Fridman?

  On the music theory front, do you recommend people learn scales and chords and like the theory of it?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Later on, I would say, I wouldn't say necessarily right, right off the bat. I think, I think learning songs is the, is the first thing that you should do. Cause that you want to keep people motivated.

• 30:25Lex Fridman?

  So you get them to like fall in love with music and playing? All right. And that takes a couple of months, three months?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Depends on how motivated they're.

• 30:35Lex Fridman?

  So you recommend practicing, what, every day?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Every day. My son Dylan, when he started learning the guitar a couple of years ago, I said, it's better to practice 10 minutes a day, seven days a week than to practice one day for an hour, which is roughly the same amount of time.

• 30:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But it usually turns into something longer. But otherwise, like if you're a busy life, you know, taking a day off, that day turns into a week and then a week turns into a month and all of a sudden you haven't touched the instrument for months.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Which is why I leave my guitar on a stand all the time. So that if I walk by it, I'm like, okay, I'll just pick it up for a second. And then the second turns into 10 minutes and an hour, two hours.

• 31:17Lex Fridman?

  All right. We gotta talk about this Dylan video. So this might be one of the earliest.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  That's the first one.

• 31:21Lex Fridman?

  That's the first video on the channel.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  It was actually before the channel, cause this actually blew up on Facebook and then I put it on YouTube after.

• 31:32Lex Fridman?

  Uh, so if it's okay.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, Dylan, we're gonna do the hardest ear training test of all time. Are you ready? Right.

• 31:40Lex Fridman?

  Oh.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Now, I just a quick backstory on this. I made this for my friend Shane's wife who wanted to see, because Shane was a uh, friend that I was producing. And he was there and Dylan had come down the day in the day and I said, oh, check this out. And I played this stuff. He's like, that's amazing. Can you make a video so I can show my wife? And I was on the way to a school board meeting because I was on the school board at Dylan's school. And I said, hey, Dylan, come downstairs. I want to make this video. Take one minute. Just need to do this thing for my friend Shane. And he's like, I don't want to. And I said, come on, so take one minute. I don't want to. So I said to my wife, I'm like, would you tell Dylan to come downstairs? I want to do this video. Take one minute.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  She's like, Dylan, go downstairs. And he had, he has a mouthful of candy there because he was eating candy. So if you look at him, he's, he's he's literally has a mouthful of candy while he's doing this.

• 32:37Lex Fridman?

  And we should say on Facebook, it wasn't quite viral.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, like that.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  I don't know, 80 million views, something like, they had like 250,000 comments, something like that. Insane.

• 32:49Lex Fridman?

  How old is Dylan here?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  He's eight.

• 32:51Lex Fridman?

  Eight years old.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:52Lex Fridman?

  Can you actually give some more backstory about like how you discovered that Dylan has perfect pitch?

• 32:56Speaker 01

  So when Dylan was about two, he, I was doing a FaceTime with my brother, John, and and I was, I was like, check this out, John. And I played the Stone in Love, Neil Shone's solo from Journey. And, and I was like, check this out. And Dylan would sing along and and my, my brother John was like, wow, Dylan can sing all the notes. And I was like, yeah. And then I played Black Dog, Zeppelin, and Dylan would sing that. And it's like Dylan's got a good ear. And then John and I were like, well, we have good ears too. So maybe we could have done that when we were that age. So a couple of more years goes by. Well, he was about three and a half. And I'm in the car. I was like, Dylan, sing the Star Wars theme. And he sings it. And I'm like,

• 33:36Speaker 01

  That's in the right key. And I checked, I played on my phone. I was like, oh my gosh. And then I asked him, play, sing the Superman theme because we'd been listening to John Williams soundtracks the week before. And he sings that. And that was in the right key. And I asked him another song. So I turned the car around. I go back to the studio. I go to the piano, hit the note B flat. And Dylan says, Star Wars. Star Wars starts on a big B flat major chord, but it's the note B flat is the main one that you hear. And then I played the note G and he goes Superman. And that's the first note in the trumpet part of the, of the Superman theme. And then I realized that he had perfect pitch. And then in five minutes, I taught him the name of the 12 notes. Which he already knew, but he just didn't know the names.

• 34:19Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so you just associate the, the names to the thing, you know? What do you think is in his mind? Cause it's not just individual notes. He can like hear everything.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:28Lex Fridman?

  What is that?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  He doesn't see colors. He just says every note sounds completely different.

• 34:35Lex Fridman?

  Wow. Like you said, maybe it's a language thing.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:39Lex Fridman?

  Is there really is a, he just learned the language?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, the language. It's like, it's like perfect. It's like native music fluency, if you think of it like that.

• 34:49Lex Fridman?

  So let's, let's listen to some of this.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Turn around. Here we go. As fast as you can, we're gonna start with single notes. So we're gonna do some intervals, then chords. Okay, here we go.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Okay, good. Two notes at once. Here we go.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Great. How about this?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Great. What about this?

• 35:14Lex Fridman?

  This is incredible.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  And then how about this?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  What is it? Correct. He's annoyed. He is annoyed.

• 35:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  The, the part of this, when I play these next chords, that's really, I think, why the video went so viral. The next part of this, where I play these super complex polychords. Okay, I'm gonna do some polychords for you. These are really gonna be hard. You ready? What's this?

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Okay, sing a B flat.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Very good. What's this chord?

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Uh. F flat, oh, F flat major over A major.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Great, singing F sharp.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Excellent. What's this chord?

• 36:15Speaker 02

  A minor over D flat major.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Great. What's this chord?

• 36:20Speaker 02

  E add nine over F major.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  He had nine over F major, so I had to look at my hand to make sure that that's what it was. Cause they're all in inversions. So I think the reason that this went so viral is that the more that someone knew about music, the more that they shared the video because these poly chords, so the people that were the best musicians were like, were, would looked at, I was like, oh my God, you know, is C augmented over D flat augmented?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  And the second chord was A flat major over A major, but they were both in inversion, right? So it was like a, a first inversion A flat major chord, first inversion A major chord. And then A minor over D flat major, and then E add nine over F major. And for an eight year, I mean, for anyone, plus they're all close voiced. They're all just right next to each other.

• 37:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  It's not like, you know, where you can hear them clear. It's all in the mid-range of the piano. So you have to really listen and, and you have to, he has to dissect each one. Like what are the notes being played there? And, and what is, like, what's the theory? Cause he's actually using music theory to dissect them.

• 37:33Lex Fridman?

  It must be in his brain. Those components of the chords all sound different, like very clearly different.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:41Lex Fridman?

  It's truly incredible. The human mind is incredible. And so you're, you're saying like some part of that is the things you hear in the first few months of life.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  I did a thing where I, I played what I call high information music. High information music would be. Bach, well-tempered clavier, fugues, anything Bach. And I would play the well-tempered clavier and I would play, I have a friend, Turkish pianist, who's one of the greatest improvisers I've ever heard, his name is Aiden Essen. And I would play Aiden's improvisations for Dylan, had very sophisticated harmony and linear things in it. And Keith Jarrett, and mainly jazz, classical and modern classical music. And then we would play, listen to rock music once he was born.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  I'm talking on my wife's stomach before Dylan was born, starting at 15 weeks for 30 minutes a night. And then when Dylan was born, I would sit with him for an hour every morning and listen to music and I would look at him. In order for this, for them to hear these phonemes apparently and develop this language or get the, the language acquisition has to involve the social brain. So when kids look at you, you're, when a baby is looking at you, they're looking at your mouth and they're getting social cues from, from that. And this is also another component of saying, uh, this is where this word stops or starts and stops.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  These are how this, the phonemes are separated from one another. These are how they're connected. So I believe that all kids are born with perfect pitch and then around nine months they begin to lose it. If you don't engage their social brain, making these pitches know, I never played pitches for Dylan and said, this is a C, this is a B flat, this is a G. I just played complex, high information music for him and, and played with him.

• 39:40Lex Fridman?

  And that applies maybe even more generally to high information language.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:46Lex Fridman?

  And it starts before they're born. I think I, I saw some, some of the, these incredible scientists that work on the neuroscience and neurobiology, the psychology of language in early life.

• 40:00Lex Fridman?

  I think a big part is in the mother's stomach, you're listening to the mother speak.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 40:08Lex Fridman?

  So like that's, that's how on the language side, you're picking up the language already.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  That's right. And you're picking up the music, musical language. So native music fluency, you could call it.

• 40:19Lex Fridman?

  So if the mother's sitting back and listening to Bach and some bebop jazz, you have, you have a pretty good chance.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Much better chance.

• 40:29Lex Fridman?

  Okay. All right. So that is we unwind our way back. Joe Pass and bebop. You were, you were funny enough talking about what is bebop jazz and, and people like Joe Pass. And in your own life, your dad was somehow listening to that kind of incredibly complex and sophisticated music.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  But wasn't a musician, which was very weird. I, we never, my, I have six siblings and we could never figure out why dad liked really sophisticated jazz.

• 41:00Lex Fridman?

  We just took it for granted at that time.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, just took it for granted. And my dad passed away in 2004 and we never really talked about that, but he and I used to listen to music together all the time. But we'd put on a record. I'd sit on one side of the room, he'd sit on the other and not say a word, listen through the whole side A, I'd go flip it over, listen to side B, never say a word, and then get up and go do stuff. And we did that all the time.

• 41:25Lex Fridman?

  And so the first time you impressed your dad was with Joe Pass, right? And by the way, we have to go to this song, cause people must have forgot, is, people just think you're like a good communicator or something. They, they don't realize how good you are at guitar, how good you are, actually a lot of instruments, but guitar, especially and there's this video, the greatest guitar solo, period.

• 41:56Lex Fridman?

  Can you give me some context for this particular intricate, complicated solo? Who's Joe Pass?

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Joe Pass was a guitarist. He lived from 1929 to 1994. And he was one of the greatest bebop players and solo guitar players. So he made a record that this is off of called Virtuoso in 1973 that my dad gave me for Christmas when I was in 10th grade. And he said, and this is not like my dad, my dad worked for the railroad. He was very, you know, few words spoken, born in 1919. He said, if you ever learn to play guitar like this, you've accomplished something with your life. And I was like, what? So this record state was unopened until about March after Christmas. And then one day I was like, okay, I'll open it up and I put it on. I start listening to it.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  And I was like, whoa, this is kind of cool. And so I said, I think I can figure out some of this stuff. So I figured out this thing.

• 42:57Lex Fridman?

  Is it by ear mostly?

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, just by ear. I didn't know any of the chords or anything.

• 43:01Lex Fridman?

  If you can listen to a little bit here.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  If you go back to that brother, brother to brother, Gino Vannelli thing with Carlos Rios playing, that stuff is incredibly hard. This, I'm starting, I don't know any of these chords. So I start out, I don't even know what that chord is, but I figured it out.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  I just, and it's weird. I mean, look at that weird bar.

• 43:19Lex Fridman?

  So you were just finding, like playing around, putting your fingers on the various positions?

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Right. Trying every combination of fingers. I'd never played that chord. It's a weird looking chord.

• 43:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  And, but I kept, I moved my fingers around till I heard to where it sounded like, oh, that's it. Definitely. And I looked at my hands like, what is that? Had no idea what it was.

• 43:41Lex Fridman?

  So you were connected to this. You were really connected to the music.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:45Lex Fridman?

  And so that, that's why you can hear, it's not necessarily, did you even, you didn't have perfect pitch?

• 43:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 43:51Lex Fridman?

  And not even relative pitch?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  No, I did not.

• 43:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  No, I didn't know anything about intervals. I didn't know anything about music theory, anything. This is all just.

• 43:58Lex Fridman?

  You're just like playing around with different shapes. That's amazing.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  I mean, look at that weird bar there.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  But then you get into these things.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  So that stuff there, I could figure out.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  And then this.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  That stuff I could figure out. And then these things here.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Those are just inversions of a. But I didn't know that.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  I'd heard Joe play that on the record. This is the last song on there. I'd listened to it a bunch of times.

• 44:35Lex Fridman?

  So you just replay over and over and over and over and you're like trying to replicate it?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Yes, and I'm memorizing every different chord shape, all chord shapes that I had never played before.

• 44:46Lex Fridman?

  Would you recommend people do something like that on a really complicated song?

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there's so many YouTube videos that you can go and just learn it without having to. Yes, I would recommend.

• 44:57Lex Fridman?

  I feel like the struggle.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  The struggle is where it's at.

• 45:00Lex Fridman?

  This is true for education in general. People like, there's all these educators that try to make learning easier.

• 45:08Lex Fridman?

  And more fun and all that kind of stuff. Great, wonderful, but part of the thing is the struggle.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 45:15Lex Fridman?

  But yeah, let's uh.

• 45:19Lex Fridman?

  You're nuts.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  I heard licks like that all over this, so I knew that that was.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  And then. These licks here.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  He plays a lot of ideas like that. That's basically a C9 chord in the top notes of it.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  So all these are just inversions of of the same chord. So if I could play that, then it's just figuring out the single notes. Okay, so.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so if you just take this first part here, when he goes. So this this intro part.

• 46:11Lex Fridman?

  You make it sound so simple when you break it down. And by the way, Joe Pass, incredible guitar player. Like, this is obvious.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  And he improvised all this.

• 46:20Lex Fridman?

  He could have played it like this. But, you know, the first.

• 46:26Lex Fridman?

  Was the inversion notes.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Ooh, that's hard. Maybe just play it like that.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  That sounds more more realistic.

• 46:42Lex Fridman?

  The amount of different genres that you were able to replicate is just incredible.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  This is just taking the needle, moving it there, then going back a little, oh, there. And then by the end, the record was so scratched.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  It was, uh, um, but it was worth it. When I played it for my dad, he couldn't believe. I mean, he didn't say, that's amazing. He was just like, hmm, pretty good.

• 47:08Lex Fridman?

  So what was the role of bebop jazz in the history of music? It seems like it was influential in your life. Uh, another guy you had an incredible interview with, uh, Flea. People should go listen to that. It was a great conversation. One of the things that surprised me is just how many musical genres influenced Flea. And the guy showed up in a Miles Davis t-shirt.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  And Miles Davis played with Charlie Parker when he was 18 years old. And that's his, Charlie Parker was really his mentor.

• 47:36Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain to me why with many of the folks you've interviewed,

• 47:42Lex Fridman?

  and in general out there in the, in the world of jazz, all roads lead to Miles Davis? Why he's such an influential figure?

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Because he was the greatest innovator in the history of jazz. He was at the forefront of all these different styles of jazz. I mean, he started as a bebop player and then he, you had records like The Birth, Birth of Cool and modal jazz and, um, hard bop and records like Bitch's Brew where he started to, I guess you would call fusion. You start to get these records. You had two main groups of Miles Davis. You had the Miles Davis 50s quintet and the Miles Davis 60s quintet. Now, Miles made records with many people, but the 50s quintet had John Coltrane in it. I mean, different piano players could be Witten Kelly, but Paul Chambers in the bass, Philly Joe Jones in the drums.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Um, and that particular group was, uh, made just incredibly important records. And then he had his 60s group, which was, uh, Herbie Hancock on the piano, Ron Carter on the bass, Tony Williams in the drums and Wayne Shorter on the saxophone. And they made all these incredibly important records.

• 48:59Lex Fridman?

  I forget who said it, uh, in an interview with you, but they talked about like, Miles Davis, his music feeling like, I think toes hanging over the cliff or something like this, meaning like there's always a risk, there's a danger that you're willing to make, to fuck it all up live. And that feeling is what creates the aliveness of the music. Can you speak to that? Just the creating in the music, the feeling like you're on the edge, like you're challenging the possibilities of what can happen and it all can go to shit. And because of that, it feels alive.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Well, when I interviewed Ron Carter that played in Miles's 60s quintet, I asked Ron, because Ron did records, he played bass on 2200 recording, famous records. And I said, did you guys ever rehearse with Miles? No, never. I said, so what we do? He goes, we just show up at the studio and he'd have the charts, put them on the stand and we would, he'd just roll. And I said, would you listen to it after? No. And I said, well, what about your, what about the, the live records that you did at, when you'd record at clubs and things like that? He goes, we never knew that we were recording. He goes, maybe I'd

• 50:24Speaker 01

  see a microphone, a different kind of microphone in my bass amp. He goes, then months later, there are record would come out and I'd see it and I was on it and I would take it down to the union and say, I played on this record. So you get paid for it. But he said, we didn't even know we were recording. So Miles was always about, you know, don't think about it. Just, just play.

• 50:47Lex Fridman?

  That's crazy. That was on purpose. That was done on purpose, not to, not to do rehearsals, none of that.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. He wanted people to just feel it, play it.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Thought is the enemy of flow, as Vinnie Caliuta told me.

• 51:03Lex Fridman?

  Thought is the enemy of flow. How do you make sense that Flea, the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is influenced by bebop jazz?

• 51:11Speaker 01

  So his stepfather was a jazz bass player. And his, when his parents got divorced, his, he was born in Australia and then they moved to, New York. Then his parents got divorced and his mom married his stepfather, who was a jazz, jazz musicians. And they, then they used to have jam sessions at their place. And Flea loved it. It was kind of like my upbringing with my dad playing jazz all the time. And once, once it gets inside you, it's just there. And, uh, and so he is heavily influenced by jazz musicians.

• 51:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. His impression, which is hilarious. I mean, he's a character. His whole physical way of being is a character. And his impression of just upright bass is just, it's fun to watch this whole.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  His intensity, when he picked up his bass during the interview, it, he's an intense guy and funny and, you know, really,

• 52:11Speaker 01

  emotional and, um, and he picks up his bass and there's a fierceness that you immediately feel. And he starts, he talks about how he practices and then when he starts doing slapping stuff, he gets, is so into it. And I'm just sitting there going, whoa.

• 52:28Lex Fridman?

  Wow. He talked about his practicing routine with you. And one of the things he's like, I have to practice the slap.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  And yeah.

• 52:34Lex Fridman?

  No, there's differences in the structure of the different bands, but usually like the bassist has a vibe to them. I don't know if we can put words to exactly what that is. It's a kind of energy that drives the band.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  To me, the bass is one of the only instruments that when you play a bad note, everybody notices. I started on the bass as a kid.

• 52:57Lex Fridman?

  Oh, interesting.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:58Lex Fridman?

  But you also play drums. You also play.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. But my first instrument was the cello in third grade and then I switched to the bass in sixth grade. And I majored, my undergrad degree is in classical bass. So I.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  I always think of myself as a bass player first. And I always think the bass is the most important instrument because

• 53:18Lex Fridman?

  Strong words.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Because as much as I love to play the guitar, and I love to play the guitar more than anything, I think. But the bass really defines what the quality of the chord is. Cause you can put the root in there, you could put the third of the chord in the bass, you put the fifth in there. You can play a lot of notes and whatever you play in the bass kind of defines what kind of chord it is. So the bass player has a lot of power.

• 53:41Lex Fridman?

  I have to go back to the beginning of our conversation. What, what do you think are some of the great solos of all time? Can we, can we put a few into consideration? You have a great list on the top 20 rock guitar solos of all time.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I put comfortably numb as my favorite is my top one.

• 53:59Lex Fridman?

  On that day, right?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  On that day.

• 54:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Right. Now the day later, I would have said it's the second solo.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  But I did the first solo because, because nobody talks about that solo and that solo is equally great. And when David Gilmour, when I played it for him and we talked about it in my interview with him, it was just to watch his face when he listened to it was incredible. I mean, I'm thinking to myself, it's like, I'm sitting with David Gilmour and he's listening to comfortably numb. And he's hearing it. He's played it a million times live, but how many times has he gone back and listened to it on the record? Probably not for a long time. And then he's hearing, he's like, ooh.

• 54:44Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you just don't look back. When you do great things, you don't look back.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Miles never looked back. He never wanted to hear the old stuff. He always moved on.

• 54:51Lex Fridman?

  There was this funny moment where you, where you made a video, why David Gilmour will never be on the channel. And then you ended up, of course, interviewing him twice. He's one of the greatest guitar players of all time. What do you think is at the core of his genius?

• 55:06Speaker 01

  He has just an incredible melodic sense.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  He knows how phrases should be put together. There's a flow to his ideas that I think is just incredible. It's the same with Hendrix. This flow, how one idea leads to the next, how there's space between them. It's just like speaking.

• 55:29Lex Fridman?

  That's why I read about Miles Davis is he was very good at understanding tempo and the value of silence.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:39Lex Fridman?

  And I think, I think David Gilmour doesn't always play fast.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:45Lex Fridman?

  But he does a lot with less.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:48Lex Fridman?

  And some of that is also on the more technical side, probably the tone of the, I mean, he's one of the most uniquely recognizable tones in all of music.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:59Lex Fridman?

  What do you understand about what it takes to shape the tone that is David Gilmour?

• 56:04Speaker 01

  He has a very sophisticated setup for his tone. And, and that was one of the things when I went to his studio. And I said to him, so David, is there anything I'm not supposed to see here? I mean, he never sits down and shows people his gear and he laughed about it. But there I am, sitting there right next to all these pedals that, and I, and I asked his tech, Phil, I said, did these are the same ones he used on the records? He's like, yeah. His tech has been with him for like 50 years. And I mean, the exact ones, yes. It's just hard to, it's hard to imagine that those things still, of course, though, they, he's just kept it. Yeah, this is his Benson Echo that he played through.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  And this is this, you know, these are all the same effects pedals and the, wait, is this the same high watt amp? Yeah. Is this the same? Yes. Yeah, you get some new stuff, but, but they keep all their own gear. And that's, I mean, he's did, he does sell his guitars for charity. But like he has a black strat that is a, it's a signature version. It's like his exact copy of his old one. So to him, it's, it sounds exactly the same, plays the same.

• 57:12Lex Fridman?

  Well, of course they converged towards that kind of. Hardware, but there's so many tiny details over the years. You see the final result of it, but there's a, there's a journey there of, of exploring. And of course he's not, I guess he's not doing any soft, like no emulation, no amp.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  He does do emulation, actually. He does. He has this thing. And this is, I asked him in the first interview about this. There's a little rack thing that I had heard that he used, but I asked him for sure. It's called the Zoom 9030. I put out a short where he talks about it. I said, so that, that Zoom 93, is that a real thing? Cause I've read about it. He's like, yeah. And he talks about how when he's sitting there recording on his own, and he, he runs Pro Tools himself and, and so he'll be sitting there. There's no one there to help him. He's like, I'll just plug into this thing and then it'll play a solo with this model. It's like a kind of nineties modeling, early modeling thing. And he'll play a solo and then after a while you hear the solo and it's like,

• 58:15Speaker 01

  well, I'm not going to replay that. That sounds great. You get used to the sound of it and that's what it is. So people always talk about, oh, well, he couldn't have used that. He's recording through an amp and, cause it sounds great. And, uh, and then he's like, yeah, yeah. So that's what I use. And then I've, I have the video of it right there and it has his presets DG1 and DG2 and you know, whatever.

• 58:36Lex Fridman?

  What's your process for preparing for interviews like that? You've done a few legendary people.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  I never prepare for interviews. Because I ask people things that I'm interested in knowing.

• 58:50Lex Fridman?

  So just letting your curiosity just play.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Yes. And I can think of a hundred questions to ask David Gilmour. And, but I always ask my questions based on what they say to me.

• 59:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  So, but I do make a playlist of songs that I want to talk about. So that kind of guides me is that, cause I want to make sure that I, there's specific things that I need to play to, so that you can jog his memory. Cause anytime you play something that somebody recorded even 50 years ago, they'll remember. If they don't remember the exact specifics, they. That that brings it to life to them again, and they can, they can kind of piece together some aspects about it and they can really talk. He can talk about the phrasing and the, you know, the kind of melodic direction of things like that.

• 59:45Lex Fridman?

  So there's a lot of tiny details that go into a particular song, whether it's in the production or how it's played or how it was composed, all that kind of stuff. And you don't know what those are ahead of time.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  No.

• 59:56Lex Fridman?

  You just know the song and you just are looking to jog their memory. And maybe your own curiosity of like, how did you do this or how did what this sound or that? You make it look easy, but you have to have a depth of knowledge. You're saying you don't prepare.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  I have an incredibly good memory.

• 1:00:15Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  That's what it is. It's that I can remember when records came out, who produced them, where they recorded them, who was the engineer, what the, what songs are on it. And not only that, but the, with people I'm interviewing know that I can play all the parts of all the instruments, because I've done breakdowns of their songs, which is why I get the interviews with them in the first place, really.

• 1:00:39Lex Fridman?

  But the actual, like the skill of the interview, the thing you're not saying, the preparation is the you young listening to bebop.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:00:48Lex Fridman?

  It's the background now, it's the soul carrying with you, being able to radiate the love of the soul of music.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  I will say this, Lex, is that the, the other thing is that most of these people have a really good sense of humor. When I was, when, the first time I interviewed David in New York, my brother, John came along and he is a massive David Gilmour fan. That's his biggest influence as a guitar player. And so he said, you're interviewing David Gilmour? Well, I'm, I'm coming. I was like, all right, come on, come on down. So, so my brother, John's standing about five feet away and John is a sales guy, but he, great guitar player. So John's like, I was like, this is John, this is David, this is my brother, John. David, great to meet you, buddy. And, you know, John's like, so he's a sales guy. And, and so during the interview, I, I was like, hey, John, what was I going to ask David?

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Oh, ask me about the Gilmour effect. Oh yeah, that's right. And the Gilmour effect is my thing that I say in the comments section when people say anytime anybody plays anything technical. Oh yeah, that's great, but I much prefer David Gilmour. And so I always call it the Gilmour effect. Anytime I have like Yngwie Malmsteen, anybody that played that has chops that I interview, that the the negative comments are always, well, I prefer David Gilmour. And I said that I told David that he's like, well, maybe they should keep their opinions to themselves.

• 1:02:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, a lot of these folks have really wonderful personalities with a with a trusted person to be able to reveal that personality. So confidently numb at the top on that day. What else is up there?

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Stare at heaven. Hey, Joe.

• 1:02:29Lex Fridman?

  What in that list? Your top Hendrix solo was Hey Joe.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  It's the first guitar solo I ever learned, so I had to put it on there. So I don't I don't necessarily do these by. I do those in kind of how how important they are to me and in my development. So there there is always a biographical component to these lists. Number three was Kid Charlemagne, a Steely Dan solo, Larry Carlton, amazing solo, extremely difficult to figure out. Probably there's two solos on the list that are just about are very that one I can play. Oh, well, there's a few solos that are very hard to play. Stone in Love by Journey by Neil Sean is very hard to play some licks.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  The there's a song, a solo by guitarist Carlos Rios that people don't know. It's a brother to brother, Gino Vannelli song, but it's very hard to play and figure out and that people don't know the solo. So I put it on my list because I knew a lot of people are going to watch it and they're going to know what this solo is.

• 1:03:34Lex Fridman?

  For me, the sentimental one, my my first solo is Mr. Crowley, Randy Rhoads. I like the musicality, Mr. Crowley, that there is a melodic component to it. You're playing really fast, but there's there's a melody to it. And also there's like a legendary nature to the the the brief time we had to we had Randy Rhoads. This is probably one of the greatest guitarists ever.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Fifty six to eighty two, I think. Terrible.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  He was.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Absolute brilliant guitarist, had his own style. We should say he's the guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne, the band. Yeah, and that Mr. Crowley solo is a, is a great solo, great solo. And he's incredibly influential as a guitar player to, for metal guitar players. And I love Randy Rhoads. Another guy, so one of my favorites is Mark Knopfler. Yes, and I did have Mark Knopfler on my list, Soul on the Swing. That's right, you did. Now, I had it high on the list, and I'll tell you why. I would have had it, had it lower because it's one of the early ones because I want people to be like, okay, oh, this is a serious list.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  So Rick's going to talk about serious stuff, so, and Rick's going to play along with all these things.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  So I wanted to kind of state that at the beginning of the video. I mean, I made the video in one day to do 20 solos. I think I played 19 of them, but the heart solo that I had on there, Nancy Wilson, I, I played the video of. And I tried to get a couple of my friends to play the Ice Cream Man Van Halen solo. So I called Dweezil Zappa and I was like, Dweezil, can you play the Ice Cream Man solo? I'm making a video about it. He's like, oh, I'd have to practice that. And I called my friend Phil X, who's amazing guitar player. And that, and he's like, no, I'd have to practice that. I was like, come on, man, can't let me play Ice Cream Man. The opening lick of Ice Cream Man that he plays is very hard to play because it's an incredibly long stretch.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  And it hurt my fingers to do, and Eddie would turn his guitar up like this to, to play. And plus, it's a tricky, it's just, it's a tricky rhythm. And, and it's such a big stretch. It's like, man, I can't, that hurts my hand. I just love that that's the Van Halen solo you have.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  See, I have to do some, there's so many Van Halen, my God, it could be, I can pick. Twenty-five different Van Halen solos.

• 1:06:15Lex Fridman?

  But to me, I mean, there really is nobody like Mark Knopfler. I mean, this is unique guitarist. There's something about his tone. Speaking of Gilmore, there's just the tone, the care, the timing of the notes. His improvisation, like the live performances of Salt and the Swing. That's been actually going like somewhat viral around recently. His, his pretty old live performance of Salt and the Swing. For me, Brothers in Arms, these kind of soulful, mournful type of solos. He does really, really well.

• 1:06:58Lex Fridman?

  Also, the interesting instrumentation of Romeo and Juliet. Just so, so many is truly one of the greats.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Now, obviously, the intro to Money for Nothing is, is one of the greatest. Almost impossible to recreate that because of the sound is so unique and his. It's just improvised. It's so cool.

• 1:07:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's certain songs like Europa by Santana. Santana can have that tone too.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Lex Fridman?

  That Mark Knopfler makes me really, just how clean it is. I think he beats B B King in my book on terms of the cleanness of just pure beauty of a single note. It's like a power of a single note. I don't know anybody who beats Mark Knopfler.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Well, that thing about being able to recognize somebody from a note.

• 1:07:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  You know? When I hear Brian May, I can immediately recognize it's Brian May. Incredibly melodic, the tone that he has, Gilmore, Hendrix. Everyone that we're talking about, Van Halen, it's just they have that one note. It's, oh, I know who that is. And that's, that's why we're talking about him.

• 1:08:08Lex Fridman?

  That'd be funny. That'd be a good video.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  B B King, you hear one note.

• 1:08:12Lex Fridman?

  As a test of like, how quickly can you recognize just a solo starts playing?

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  That's a great, I'm gonna make that video tomorrow.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Lex, the day after tomorrow, you'll see it.

• 1:08:25Lex Fridman?

  I would love to see that.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Can you recognize these players by one note?

• 1:08:28Lex Fridman?

  By one note?

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Lex Fridman?

  I think it's, I think we're being a little too aggressive with that. I think you need like two or three or four or five.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  I guarantee you. So I, I was gonna do a video last week where I was gonna play songs in reverse, okay? And see if you can recognize these songs in reverse. And I had my two assistants come in. It's like, do you know what song that is? They're like, oh, that's Adele. Like, what? Then they're like, oh, that's Nirvana. Instantly, they could recognize, like, well, that's not worth making. I said, yeah, it's so obvious. You hear the tone of the voice backwards, forwards, it doesn't matter. You know who it is.

• 1:09:00Lex Fridman?

  Okay. So it's about the tone?

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Lex Fridman?

  How could you possibly know from a single note? I guess, Van Halen, you can.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  One note of BB King's vibrato, you could know.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  I'm gonna, what I'll do is I would separate the guitars. I'll, I can actually separate the tracks and I'll just play one note.

• 1:09:21Lex Fridman?

  You think from a single vibrato, you can know it's BB King?

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, we'll see.

• 1:09:26Lex Fridman?

  Put it on record. I'm skeptical.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do, I'll do 20 of them. Can you recognize these guitarists from a single note?

• 1:09:32Lex Fridman?

  Could you recognize Stevie Ray Vaughan?

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:35Lex Fridman?

  Versus?

• 1:09:37Lex Fridman?

  Eric Clapton?

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Lex Fridman?

  All right. You might be right. You might be right. Quick 30 second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. We've got Uplift Desk for my favorite office desks, BetterHelp for mental health, Element for electrolytes, Finn for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, back to my conversation with Rick Piano. What do you think is the best Eric Clapton song?

• 1:10:21Lex Fridman?

  One of the things we haven't mentioned so far is the importance of lyrics and maybe meaning of the song, what it represents. So in that sense, Tears in Heaven.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Well, the story behind that is heartbreaking.

• 1:10:36Lex Fridman?

  And then, I personally really love The Sound of Wonderful Tonight.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  It's a great song. That's one of my favorite Clapton songs.

• 1:10:44Lex Fridman?

  And I, as I was like, listening to it.

• 1:10:48Lex Fridman?

  Just doing a whole personal journey introspection, knowing that I'm going to talk to Rick Beato, listening to just a bunch of songs. And I, I learned, it's embarrassing that I didn't know the, the stories behind the music, but I learned that Eric Clapton was married for ten, for a decade to the same woman that George Harrison was married to. And that this woman was the muse, the inspiration for, for like so many of the legendary songs of rock, including A Wonderful Tonight, including Layla, and including George Harrison's something.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Lex Fridman?

  Legendary song also. The same woman, is she the greatest muse in rock history?

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  Probably yes.

• 1:11:38Lex Fridman?

  This is great. Uh, so in your interviews of musicians and producers, I think the thing you're ultimately fascinated by is their whole, the process, the, the, the recording, the production, the songwriting, the different elements of the process. So, uh, are there examples of different things that stand out to you from the, all the interviews you've done? And all, by the way, all the recording and production you've done yourself. So on the recording front, on the production front, on the songwriting process front, just things that pop into memory.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  When I've interviewed the, the guys that are the producers, like Rick Rubin, Daniel Annois, Brendan O'Brien, Butch Vig, the thing about producers as opposed to people that are musicians, if you're in a musician, even if you're David Gilmour, you're, you do a record and then you tour and then you do another record, maybe years go by, but producers are working on multiple records. You know, sometimes at a time, Rick Rubin could be working on multiple records and, and the variety of things that they do, you can talk to, I mean, I can talk to Rick about the Chili Peppers and I can talk to him about Johnny Cash. I can talk to him about Tom Petty

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  and all these records that I love. And there's just so many interesting stories that, I mean, these interviews could go on for, for days with, with Rick and the variety of records that he worked on. And, um, and there's so much knowledge to be gained for me at least. And I think that, that the craft of production and recording engineering is something that is not well documented. Um, especially since there's no, there's so few studios nowadays where there used to be a mentorship thing where you go and you work as an assistant engineer and you work your way up. I interviewed a guy named Ken Scott that worked with the Beatles. I interviewed him

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  at Abbey Road Studios. It's just two months ago. And he started as a tape op when he was 16. He started on the Hard Days Night record with the Beatles. And he worked his way up and he said, the first time he ever recorded in orchestra was he recorded I'm the Walrus, the orchestra part. He set up the mics and I asked him, I said, so where was the band? Standing right behind me, the Beatles, right behind him. The guy I'm interviewing at Abbey Road recorded I'm the Walrus there. I mean, he recorded many Beatles songs and,

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  and he was 18 years old and the, I mean, I just can't, I can't even fathom that. They have a little cafe in the basement of Abbey Road. And I said, did the Beatles come in here? He goes, oh yeah, they come in here and get coffee. And I remember when they got two microwaves that, like the first microwave was in 1965 and they were amazed by them. And it's hard to imagine that I'm talking to people that worked on these historic records, but you know, they all start with a blank tape or an empty hard drive. And then

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  You've eventually filled them up with this music that you can't, you can never imagine it not existing like Stairway to Heaven or whatever it is.

• 1:14:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. It's funny, like looking back, even probably for them, just to realize they've created that magic is hard to believe.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Lex Fridman?

  Cause you're looking at a blank thing and then magic comes out and you don't even, you don't even understand. You don't understand, probably a lot of these artists don't understand where that came from. They're channeling some deeper thing.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  When I interviewed Brian May, he told me, I can't remember if this was, if we talked about it on camera or not, but we talked about Bohemian Rhapsody. At the very end, there was a thing where he was depressing his whammy bar a little bit and it sounds like the piano is out of tune. I never noticed it before he mentioned this to me. And he said it always bothered him and the, there's always something about these songs that bothers people. Even these songs.

• 1:15:49Lex Fridman?

  These little things, yeah.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Right. There's always little things and they, they sit and they hear it and they're like, oh man, I wish I bent up a little higher on that or whatever.

• 1:15:56Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that, that, there's certain moments in songs that are just unlike anything else. And Bohemian Rhapsody, when Freddie Mercury is sometimes wish I've never been born at all.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:16:11Lex Fridman?

  And then guitar comes in. I mean, there's just nothing like that.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:16Lex Fridman?

  That was, that, I don't even know. I mean, that, that whole thing, you've done videos on it. It's incredibly complicated composition. It's crazy that a popular song, popular rock song could be this operatic, so complicated. The other thing akin to that moment is Phil Collins with, uh, in the air tonight, the drum bridge.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  Do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

• 1:16:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah. And what is that? I kills it. I don't, I don't understand how you can create that. What is that? Why is that so magical? Why is it so singular? Inside a particular song and in rock history, period? Like, these moments? I don't know, musically, I don't understand how you create them. Cause it might be bigger than musical, it might be cultural, all a bunch of different elements. And plus, it's him filled with, like, I've seen live before, he has like a headset, he does, there's something, he's like a telemarketer or something, like, this whole vibe and look to him. He doesn't look like a rock star, but he is.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Those are hooks, when you think about it, right? It's like, it's as much of a hook as any, as the chorus of the song or any song. That drum thing is something that people wait for and they air drum to it. Everybody air drums to it and it is a hook. And those are hard to create. Those are, those moments are really hard to create and usually they're done by accident.

• 1:17:42Lex Fridman?

  Yes, it's hard, if you chase it, you're not gonna get it.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Lex Fridman?

  And your conversation with Sting, he said something about how modern music is simpler, more minimalistic, and the bridge is gone, I think he said. And he said he thought that the bridge is therapy.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:07Lex Fridman?

  It's like a chance for you to reflect, I guess, on the verse.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:18:11Lex Fridman?

  Before the chorus comes in. It changed my view of the bridge, I suppose, the therapeutic nature of it, at least lyrically. You think he's onto something, the value of the bridge?

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  The bridge is a place, I think, where you can kind of change the frame of reference of a song.

• 1:18:28Lex Fridman?

  You could probably do anything, I guess.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Lennon used to, he would have some kind of biting lyrics, like, "We can work it out." So McCartney writes the, you know, "Try to see it my way, do I have to keep on going until I can't go on?" And then, but the bridge is very Lennon. "Life is very short and there's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend. I've always thought that it's a crime, so I'll ask you once again." I mean, it's very, you know, very Lennon-esque. This is, that was really a kind of a... Uh, real collaboration between the two of those.

• 1:19:03Lex Fridman?

  This were different parts of the band can clash in interesting ways. I mean, the Beatles are the epitome of that. Such like each individual Beato is a, a great talent in their own right.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:15Lex Fridman?

  How were the Beatles able to create some of the greatest songs of all time, all before they turned 30 years old?

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  I have never been able to figure that out, but I have a theory that because.

• 1:19:31Lex Fridman?

  I have a theory.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Because PA systems were so bad back then and the Beatles, people screamed so loudly that the Beatles thought, okay, we don't, we don't need, we can't tour anymore because we can't even hear ourselves. So we're just going to be a studio band. And maybe because of, we have all these great late Beatles records are from 1966 on. Just because they had bad PA systems. And they had no monitors, you know, they're in Shea Stadium. People are screaming so loudly, they can't hear themselves. They're like, okay, forget this, we can't tour. We'll just make studio records. So that's what they did. And in that one year, like from August 6th, 1965, they put out Help.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Then in December 3rd, they put out Rubber Soul of 65. Then, then August 5th, they put out Revolver. So within 365 days, they put out three 14, I think 14 song records. So they wrote and recorded three incredibly important records. They were in the studio. It's like working out. They're practicing their craft every day, writing songs, trying to outdo the other ones. And so you had the, the perfect thing of, of four supremely talented musicians, songwriters, singers. And then the best producer you could possibly have, George Martin.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  And it was just a perfect storm. I think that, uh, when I would talk to friends that would just play in local clubs and they'd play four hour sets, five nights a week. And they never lost their voices because they're always working those muscles. And same with the Beatles. They were always in the studio singing every single day, doing takes and.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  And I think that that was part of it, at least.

• 1:21:24Lex Fridman?

  But you also have this theory that, you know, that the greatest productivity that musicians have is before they turn 30. The greatest sort of creative genius that can come out of the human mind musically is before the age of 30.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's the same in mathematics as well. You have this fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence up until you're about, you know, in your late twenties, 30 years old, and then crystallized. So you're using, the crystallize is you're using your life experience to, to write things. So you'll find that, that composers Bach, Beethoven, Mozart wrote their most important works at the end of their lives. Beethoven, the late string quartets, the Ninth Symphony, things like that. So they have a whole lifetime of experience that lead up to this. And there's not, they're not improvising, but things for improvising, writing pop songs and that I think when your mind is really most active

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  and your brain processing speed is at its pinnacle, that, this is my theory, that people can come up with those kind of ideas. Same with improvising. I think that most jazz improvisers, not all, but most do their best improvising before the age 30.

• 1:22:47Lex Fridman?

  Creating something new.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:22:48Lex Fridman?

  Truly novel that that requires a youth.

• 1:22:54Lex Fridman?

  It's just a theory, though, but it seems to apply. What do you think about the 27 Club? A bunch of the music greats died at 27. Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  Kurt Cobain.

• 1:23:07Lex Fridman?

  Kurt Cobain, of course. A big part of music history is linked to drug history.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:15Lex Fridman?

  LSD.

• 1:23:19Lex Fridman?

  Coke, heroin, weed.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  Smoking.

• 1:23:23Lex Fridman?

  Smoking.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  I think about this a lot. If you go back and you watch videos, The Beatles, any of their movies, they're smoking all the time. The Get Back documentary, they're smoking constantly. Go watch any of the MTV Unplugs, Nirvana, Kurt Cobain is smoking every second that he's not playing, he's smoking. Every singer smoked, every musician smoked. Nowadays, I asked my son Dylan, Dylan, does anybody smoke at his high school? He's like, smoke? Nobody smokes. He's like, it was an absurd question. And that was part of culture.

• 1:23:57Lex Fridman?

  It was for everybody. I mean, that was, that was a big transformation over the past 20 years. And just everybody stopped smoking. But I don't think smoking has the kind of hard negative effect that we're talking about. I mean, I almost would rather have them smoke than some of the other hard drugs. Maybe smoking distracts them from the hard. I mean, heroin and coke, I mean, those, those things really, and alcohol unfortunately, can be easily abused, I think. It seems like it's the, the life of a musician, this dopamine thing of getting on stage and be, being adored by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.

• 1:24:40Lex Fridman?

  The high of that, and then the come down after is really hard life for just even neurobiologically of like, how you deal with that. You have to be able to control the roller coaster of your mind. And of course, drugs will be a part of that. And you think everything is allowed and everything is possible. And then there's also culture, depending on who you hang out with, that certain kinds of categories of drugs are good for your creativity. And so naturally start to abuse those drugs. I don't know. I think, I think, I think it's really interesting, the role that drugs have played in the, in the history of music.

• 1:25:23Lex Fridman?

  They have certainly been extremely destructive, but they have also certainly been productive.

• 1:25:32Lex Fridman?

  Muses, inspirations for some of these folks.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Now.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Would we want to, you know, advocate people doing things like that to boost their creativity?

• 1:25:46Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  Well, I wouldn't, but just like smoking, which I think improved people's voices.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  I mean, really, the raspiness of it, this is the reason that the, that, that so many of these, virtually every famous singer, no matter what genre of music, jazz, soul, rock, they all smoked. Nat King Cole.

• 1:26:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Miles Davis too.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Miles, everybody smoked. Miles did, well, Miles was a heroin addict too. I mean,

• 1:26:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  So many jazz musicians.

• 1:26:20Lex Fridman?

  Well, Miles had a sound to him. You're right. I mean, smoking must, must play a gigantic role to that, adding some complexity to the voice.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:26:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, some richness to the voice.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  Nat King Cole, he's, he smoked, I think, four packs a day. He died of lung cancer. Lot of heavy smokers, those singers. Frank Sinatra, heavy smoker. McCartney was a heavy smoker. Lennon, all those guys smoked.

• 1:26:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's hard to know a chicken or the egg, but I certainly wouldn't recommend doing drugs as a way to get better at music.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:26:57Lex Fridman?

  But, you know, it does seem to go hand in hand. And some of it has to do with the period, with the time period, with the, with the place. Cause sometimes it's part of the culture. The drugies, like you're saying, smoking, if you're smoking now, that's going to be a very different experience than smoking 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago. It's a different, different vibe. So sometimes the drug is a deep, integrated part of the culture versus an actual chemical substance. The sixties, right? There, I don't know, they were on everything in the sixties.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  I mean, it has to account for something, Lex, you know.

• 1:27:37Lex Fridman?

  On the songwriting front, you mentioned a story about Elton John recording. So he's one of the legendary songwriters. But yeah, you've met him and you know something about the process of his.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, because he was recording in a studio in Atlanta that I was working with a band that I was producing. And he was in, I was in Studio B, he was in Studio A. And this band that I was working with, they were called Jump Little Children. And so he had his assistant come in and ask, hey, is this, are you guys Jump Little Children? Yeah. And then all of a sudden, I couldn't see out into the live room. Elton walked into the thing and we were getting ready to track and I'm, I'm pressing the button. Yo, where are, where are you guys? What's up? I thought we were going to start this and no one's responding. I can hear talking. It's like, what's going on? Where are they? Then all of a sudden they come back in the studio and they were stunned. I said, where were you guys? Elton John just walked into our session and he said he's a big fan. He said to come over when we're done and, and hang out in Studio A.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  So, so we did, and he was there with Bernie Toppin. They were working on a song and he, we talked, we were there for, for an hour and he was talking about recording two records a year and then they'd go on tour and they'd write and record the whole record in two weeks. So Bernie would give him lyrics. Elton would go out and spend 15 minutes writing all the melody. He'd look at his lyrics and he was doing that that day. Bernie was there and they had a lyric sheet up on the piano. And Elton would go on and they just, okay, just record this. And Elton would sit there and, and play and come up with the song in 15 minutes or so.

• 1:29:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  There's a great version of, I think Tiny Dancer, where Elton is coming up with it on, it's on YouTube. And he's just coming up with the music right there. And then the band, okay, here's how it goes. And they record it right then. They move on to the next song. It's really incredible.

• 1:29:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  That's it. Yeah.

• 1:29:29Speaker 03

  There's one that I sort of done the other day with Tiny Dancer, which is about Bernie's girlfriend. So I just sort of ran it through and then put two verses together, then a middle line, then a chorus, and then back to the, sort of verse sort of thing. It's, it's a very, it happens very quickly. It sounds long, but it's sort of, it's, it sort of starts off. Blue jean baby, LA lady, seamstress for the band.

• 1:30:08Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  It's really amazing that he just.

• 1:30:11Lex Fridman?

  He's looking at just the lyrics.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's one of the, he's one of the very few people that has the lyrics first and writes the music to it, which to me is far more difficult. Ninety nine percent of songwriters write the music first and then they put the melody and lyrics to the finished backing track.

• 1:30:31Lex Fridman?

  And maybe they write like lyrics, they write like nonsense words kind of thing. And then they figure out from there. Yeah, that's, I mean, I don't know what skill that is exactly. That's incredible. I mean, in that process, he makes it his own.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:30:50Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Uh, you had an amazing interview with Kirk Hammett. I'm a huge Metallica fan.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Same here.

• 1:30:59Lex Fridman?

  There's a lot of interesting stuff that came out of that, from that conversation. One is the distinction between heavy metal and hard rock, which is very interesting. Of course, Metallica went through their own evolution. They had many periods. I mean, they've been around forty years.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  Over forty years, yeah, crazy.

• 1:31:18Lex Fridman?

  The other thing is the downpicking, which was interesting, was just creating that really distinct sound.

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  James and Kirk's, the, the down, the downpicking, I used to be able to do that. I just can't do that anymore. It hurts my thumb to do it. I think honestly, I thought a lot about it. It's like, why does it, why is it so painful? Why is it so hard? It's from swiping with your thumb on phones. And I think it affects that basal joint there. And I'm, no, I'm serious. I think that that's actually right because I'm thinking like, why does that hurt so much to do that? All the downstrokes and stuff. It's gotta be something. It's like, yeah, it's from, from swiping with the phone.

• 1:31:56Lex Fridman?

  The other thing that came through is, um, that he's an improviser at heart. And that I think clashes with this kind of rigid structure that metal is. So there's a real soulful, melodic aspect to him. And he gave a lot of props to James Hetfield for just being a great composer, being a great musician and writer of riffs, of rhythm.

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  The improvisation part of it, you don't think of because they, they, because you have the finished songs that you listen to. But those songs are born out of improvisations of jams, of little fragments of ideas. And then they craft them into these masterpieces.

• 1:32:37Lex Fridman?

  Also, you mentioned that this is weird that I didn't know that Hendrix was use different gauges strings.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was the one that talked about that, wasn't he?

• 1:32:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was really interesting. See, these are the things I like to learn from, uh, from these interviews with these people. I was like, what? Why have I never heard of that?

• 1:32:57Lex Fridman?

  It's like, it's one of the ways you can find uniqueness of sound is by trying different things that are not. I mean, I guess Zappa was really good at this, right?

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:06Lex Fridman?

  Completely breaking out of what you're supposed to do, the ways you're supposed to do them and doing it completely differently. You often ask musicians what their perfect song is. First of all, it's an interesting question.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  What is a perfect song?

• 1:33:20Lex Fridman?

  Like one surprised me is Hans Zimmer said, God Only Knows by the Peach Boys.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  I was surprised by that too, but I thought it was like, yeah, okay, that's a perfect song for sure. The first interview I ever did was with Peter Frampton in 2018. And I asked him in that interview, what's a perfect song? And he said, White or Shade of Pale. And I was like, oh, that's a great song. And then I thought, I'm going to ask that to people just to see what they, now people are prepared if I ask that.

• 1:33:48Lex Fridman?

  But it's like, they're willing to go out on a limb and say it.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:51Lex Fridman?

  Like, if you ask me, I don't even know. I guess you just say it, whatever, right? Like, what would I even say? What's a perfect song? Yeah, I would go, see, I feel the pressure.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:34:03Lex Fridman?

  Because, because the problem is, the reality is, it changes day by day, like minute by minute. I.

• 1:34:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I would probably, I'm sorry, but I would have to go Mark Knopfler. And I would probably go, is it, is it really cheesy to say the obvious thing? I will go Saltin's A Swing, even though like I'm tempted to say Europa, but then like.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Saltin's A Swing hits on so many levels because it's got.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  A great melody, great lyrics, and then multiple great guitar solos. And it has such a unique sound to it. The other thing is that it sounds very different from other Dire Straits songs. I mean, that's like early Dire Straits strat tone. And then you think of like Money for Nothing is a Les Paul and it's a totally different kind of vibe than him playing on Songs of Swing. But that song's amazing.

• 1:34:59Lex Fridman?

  Plus, it's about music.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:35:03Lex Fridman?

  So it's like there's a, there's a meta aspect to it. But then there's also like, we're talking about this guitar stuff, but Leonard Cohen, hallelujah. And Leonard Cohen in general, like these songwriters that go super simple on guitar. And there is just, uh, what's that called singer songwriter type. Uh, I told you off mic, uh, one of my, maybe the music guest that's a dream guest is Tom Waits. I've wanted to talk to Tom Waits for a very long time and I've gone through different periods of. You've met me at a point in my life where I've given up on it a little bit.

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  That's when it's gonna happen.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  Once you give up on it, it's gonna happen.

• 1:35:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  Why, Tom Waits won't be on your podcast.

• 1:35:56Lex Fridman?

  Exactly, exactly, dude. This is, this is my, this is my.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  Tom, come, come here. Let's do it. I want to see it.

• 1:36:04Lex Fridman?

  I'm such a, a fan of like the Zappa like artistry on the, on the musical front, which Tom Waits has. But I'm a, I'm a sucker for great lyrics. Lyrics to me is such a big part of great songs. And, and he's another example. He has a song called Martha. It's about a love story that didn't work out. And it's an older man calling the woman that he was in love with. And basically reminiscing about like, you know, thinking about like, what, what would have happened if it worked out, that kind of thing. And then, you know, I love that song for a long time. And, you know,

• 1:36:44Lex Fridman?

  at some point, I found out that he wrote that when he was in his early twenties. And you realize similar with the Beatles, like these guys somehow were able to capture the human condition so masterfully. And they're kids.

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:59Lex Fridman?

  This, I don't get it. I don't understand it.

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  I can't speak for Tom Waits, but in the Beatles case, they went to Hamburg. They spent time on their own. They played cover gigs that were eight hours long and they lived.

• 1:37:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, they've lived.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  They lived life.

• 1:37:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  It's not like, not like kids today.

• 1:37:19Lex Fridman?

  Now you're on a porch. You also had an amazing interview with Billy Corgan, the Smashing Pumpkins. He is definitively one of my favorite musicians.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  I love Billy.

• 1:37:33Lex Fridman?

  You asked him an interesting question about how he creates this melancholy feeling that permeates a lot of his songs. And he jokingly said that the secret is all about the seventh and then, and the ninth.

• 1:37:47Lex Fridman?

  So like musically chord wise, what do you think about that? You think he's onto something?

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  He's talking a little music theory there.

• 1:37:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  Seventh and ninth over the chord that he's playing. So if you're playing a C chord, he's singing a B would be the seventh, D would be the ninth. And he does use a lot of those notes. But almost all these people that we're talking, no, all these people that we're talking about use these notes. And this is why their songs, I, and when I interviewed Sting, I call them surprise tones. And Sting's like, I like the way he uses the word surprise. Notes that are outside the chord that are dissonant with the chords that they're playing. And then that creates emotion, dissonance equals emotion. And that's, that's what I like. I want music to be, to depress me.

• 1:38:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What is that? I don't know. They, but melancholy, and I think you articulated in the interviews, it's not actually that depressing. There's something about that melancholy feeling. That is somehow the other side of the coin of happiness is a kind of longing.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:49Lex Fridman?

  There's a hopefulness to it, that aloneness that you feel. I mean, that's actually like one of the intimate connections you have with music is when you're alone. There's, I think there's a social way of listening to music when maybe a concert and so on. But there's this, there's nothing like you're alone in a car, driving, listening to like whatever it is, Bruce Springsteen. I think Louis C K has a bit about that. It was a Bruce Springsteen place. Sometimes he has to pull over to the side of the road and just weep or something like this. It's just, there's some, there's something about that. Sometimes a song just connects with you. And I don't know, nothing like a melancholy song could do that. It, you think about like

• 1:39:32Lex Fridman?

  maybe things you regret or how life could have worked out. And sometimes it's not even about like, it's not even real. It's just connects something to the, in the soul, the uneasiness that we all feel, maybe the loneliness we all feel that underpins so much of the human condition. It just connects with that. I don't know what that is.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  There's a Kurt Cobain lyric, it was on the In Uteri record from the song Francis Farmer. The chorus part is, I miss the comfort of being sad. And I was like, yes.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  I miss the comfort in being sad. I was like, yeah, that's it right there.

• 1:40:09Lex Fridman?

  In terms of love songs, somehow I find powerful, that kind of desperation. So I've always connected with Pearl Jam's Black.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  Oh, amazing.

• 1:40:20Lex Fridman?

  That line, there's a friend of mine was going through a breakup. So I was listening and he, he's the one that introduced me to Pearl Jam during that, that whole period. When Pearl Jam was huge with ten.

• 1:40:33Lex Fridman?

  Is that line is someday?

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  Someday you'll have a beautiful life. You know, someday you'll be a star in somebody else's sky. Why, why, why can't it be, can't it be mine? Oh, my God, that blows me away. That's an amazing line.

• 1:40:52Lex Fridman?

  Why? Yeah.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  The delivery is incredible on it, too.

• 1:40:55Lex Fridman?

  Eddie Vedder, one of the great frontmen of all time.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:58Lex Fridman?

  And that whole period, that whole moment in history of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder that captured that was the 90s, that was one side of the 90s. That just this singular moment in history. Who, who do you think are the great frontmen in history of music?

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  Freddie Mercury, Robert Plant.

• 1:41:20Lex Fridman?

  Freddie Mercury, number one, probably.

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  Steven Tyler.

• 1:41:23Lex Fridman?

  Jim Morrison.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  Jim Morrison. Yeah, Roger Daltrey.

• 1:41:29Lex Fridman?

  Well, we have to say, I have to say, we have to say, James Hetfield.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  James Hetfield.

• 1:41:34Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's nothing I have. I mean, I have to talk to you about this. I have, I mean, this is the greatest, I think, the greatest concert of all time. This is their historic performance in Moscow in September of 91. This is shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed. Plus, we should mention ACDC and Pantera were there, too. And about 1.6 million people were there. Now, by the way, there's like some kind of reporting that there was a half a million people, 500,000 people that's somewhere. I've seen statements like that. That's a ridiculously inaccurate statement. So it's a free concert. So any official counts don't count.

• 1:42:20Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's definitely over a million. It's, it's very likely to be 1.5, 1.6 million people. And this moment in history that I think they channeled. It's like whenever great music, the Metallica was firing on all cylinders at the very top of their game. And they meet this moment in history and this place in history. Those are a defining part of the 20th century collapsing. And you have these people who are.

• 1:42:46Lex Fridman?

  For a moment through music are able to escape the fear, the anger they feel, the all of it. There's also political, social, cultural moment, meeting the musical moment. And the, the setlist, I was just, I listened to several ties over the past few days, just taking myself back into that moment in time. Listen to the setlist. Enter Sandman, Creeping Death, Harvester of Sorrow, Fade to Black, Sad But True, Master of Puppets, Seek and Destroy, For Whom The Bell Tolls, One, and Whiplash. Look at that. How is that, that just?

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  That's my kind of set.

• 1:43:25Lex Fridman?

  Get the fuck out of here. This is amazing.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  That's my kind of set right there.

• 1:43:30Lex Fridman?

  I don't know if you could think of anything that could beat that.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  I think that the guys in the band would say that too. That was, I mean, they were really at their, at their peak. The Black Album had just come out then, and that must have been so, so exciting.

• 1:43:45Lex Fridman?

  I mean, Woodstock was big. There's, there's certain moments in time when they really, really meet the moment. Are you a fan of live, live, like, big?

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  I used to be, but at this point, I can't, you know.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  I'd much rather see people play in small clubs and, or go to the, I'd like to listen to the studio. Go to the studio even.

• 1:44:10Lex Fridman?

  I generally almost entirely agree with you. I just think that there's these historic moments, but you don't know which are gonna be which. But you're making the concert free. It's just all of it to get, plus Pantera and ACDC. The other, which actually is a legitimate thing you mentioned, is, as one of the greatest concerts of all time, is Beethoven's world premiere of Ninth Symphony. You know, I didn't really know the personal side of Beethoven until I saw this movie called The Mortal Beloved. It's an excellent movie with Gary Oldman.

• 1:44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:47Lex Fridman?

  Just a really, he's a masterful celebration of Beethoven in an interesting kind of way through the perspective of a love letter that he's written. But then I realized like this early, this many, many, this couple of decades ago now, that, you know, he went deaf. Before he even started writing the Ninth Symphony, which is why they consider it to be one of the greatest compositions of all time, greatest symphonies of all time. He went deaf, couldn't hear anything. Before he even started writing it. And so there's that famous story of him in that world premiere of having to be turned around because he can't hear people applauding. So he has to be turned around to see that people are actually clapping.

• 1:45:30Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's this whole tragic element, plus the, the meaning of the symphony that ends in this beautiful ode to joy. The symphony itself is a kind of, it starts with the chaos and conflict and ends with this celebration of peace and brotherly unity. And I guess a call for that, a reaching for that, for that peace. And it's a, there's a tragic element to it, again, connected to history, which is it was post Napoleonic wars and before the American Civil War.

• 1:46:09Lex Fridman?

  So like you're in this, in this middle, this respite from, from war, calling for peace, not knowing that truly horrific wars are coming. So you have the, the American Civil War and you have the, of course, the two world wars coming. So this, all of it together. And the fact that he's conducting deaf and he wrote this whole thing deaf. I was reading a lot about his process and he just edits and edits and edits and edits. So the fact that he had to edit in his head is just insane.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  I mean, Beethoven was sick all the time, too. I mean, there are a lot of people were sick all the time. It was very common. What would motivate you to write music, this beautiful music that you can never actually hear except for in your head, right? Like, why? The amount of time it takes to write, to write a 35 minute, 40 minute piece, all the parts, you've got to hear all the orchestration in your head, you're editing, you're doing all these things. Where do you get the motivation when you can't hear the actual finished work? Well, and people would say, well, he's here, here's in his head.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  But what kind of enjoyment is it? You want to hear the orchestra? I mean, it's really profound that he. That that he was inspired to do this. There's a thing called the Hellegastat Testament that he wrote. It was a letter to his brothers in from 1802. I think they found it in his desk after Beethoven died. And he felt a sense of shame and humiliation because of his hearing loss. And he said that he was afflicted with this thing where him of all people, that someone standing next to him could hear a flute that he could not hear, or a shepherd singing in the field that, and he could not hear this.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  And, and of all the people, why him, where hearing played such an important part. Another person that would had to have had perfect pitch because you could never do this.

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  If you didn't have perfect pitch, which I think all these great composers, for the most part, Brahms didn't, from what I know. But all the rest of them for sure had perfect pitch. So they could hear these things in their head and that's how they composed.

• 1:48:30Lex Fridman?

  I mean, you love sound and music. What do you think it was like gradually losing your hearing for Beethoven?

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  It must have been terrible. I mean, I just terrible. I mean, I've heard things where he had to would have a stick in his mouth and, and put it on the soundboard of the piano. And you could feel the vibrations in his skull and things like that.

• 1:48:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, desperately trying to.

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I just.

• 1:49:03Lex Fridman?

  But also there's what is, what is that that he's able to write?

• 1:49:09Lex Fridman?

  Like one of the greatest symphonies ever while deaf. So there's something about that. We mentioned darkness, but torment that he's going through. And ultimately ode to joy, like not a cynical thing.

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49:24Lex Fridman?

  A call for the positive.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  That's, that's, uh, I, I've devoted many, many hours thinking about that.

• 1:49:37Lex Fridman?

  And plus Napoleon broke his heart because he was a supporter of Napoleon because Napoleon was supposed to represent the French Revolution, this, this hopeful future of no more kings, no more monarchs, no more authoritarian regimes. And Napoleon ended up becoming a century king.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49:55Lex Fridman?

  Uh, becoming authoritarian and Beethoven, um, sort of famously was critical of that. Nevertheless, I think maintained a fascination with Napoleon throughout his life, but sort of a kind of more sophisticated, complex view of human nature and human civilization. So becoming more cynical, like seeing more clearly that the world disappoints you, the dreams get shattered. And through that is able to still do this call for the hopeful future. All right. So, okay. So Beethoven, one of the greats for sure. Like basically everybody I know how to play the first movement of Moonlight Sonata.

• 1:50:39Lex Fridman?

  But I always avoided the third movement because I was like, I'm never be good enough.

• 1:50:45Lex Fridman?

  Never, never.

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  Never say never, Lex.

• 1:50:48Lex Fridman?

  One of these days, maybe, you know, it'd be great if Tom Waits writes me an email that says, I only talk to people that can play the third movement.

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  Play the third movement.

• 1:50:58Lex Fridman?

  That'd be, that'd be a dream come true.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:51:00Lex Fridman?

  Be like, for this.

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  That's motivation.

• 1:51:02Lex Fridman?

  That's my dragon or whatever you do. You have to have a prince and rescue the princess. My dragon is the third movement, the Moonlight Sonata. Okay. Uh, you often highlight the importance of Bach. In fact, so many of your guests.

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  Every famous songwriter is influenced by Bach. They are. The greatest composer of all time, the greatest musician of all time.

• 1:51:23Lex Fridman?

  Even Sting and Dominic Miller said they go to Bach even for like practice.

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  Every day. People talk about Bach was not known other than in his places he lived. Eisenach, he was born in Leipzig. He spent many years. But Bach was known to great musicians. It was difficult to find manuscripts, but there was a premiere of the Saint Matthew Passion that Mendelssohn had done in seventeen, in eighteen twenty nine. It was on March 11th, I believe. He had a manuscript because his father and mother collected manuscripts. And he got a manuscript of this piece and I think he was 20 years old and, and they had a performance of it in Berlin.

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  And Beethoven, Mozart, they studied the Well-Tempered Clavier, the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier. But Bach wrote profoundly beautiful music and some of the most complex contrapuntal music that I don't think anyone has ever done like that. Extremely bright guy, had 20 kids, 10 of them, only 10 survived till adulthood. Lost both his parents when he was nine, within nine months of each other, went to live with an older brother.

• 1:52:44Lex Fridman?

  Extremely productive.

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:52:46Lex Fridman?

  So I, yeah. I think from all the music teachers I've ever had, I, I understood the importance of studying Bach.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  He didn't write Master of Puppets, but he wrote some great, powerful music.

• 1:53:01Lex Fridman?

  Well put. I, I, I tried to educate the aforementioned music teachers of the brilliance of the Master of the Puppets. Sometimes a good riff is greater than any musical composition.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  I, I agree. I go back and I play Master of Puppets. Every time I'm trying out a new amplifier. That's my go to.

• 1:53:25Lex Fridman?

  That's your go to.

• 1:53:28Lex Fridman?

  So like, so the stereotypical like guitar store, when you come in, you're playing Master of Puppets.

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  I'll play Master of Puppets. I will play, I have to play some heavy riff. And so usually it will default to some Metallica or something like that. Or I'll play Alice in Chains, or I do usually, like a lot of times I'll go and I'll do drop D something or play Tool. I usually would do something, do, do some drop tuning thing. And it's always got to be some, some type of metal that I'll test to see if the, if the bottom end's tight on the amp and stuff. So, yes.

• 1:54:01Lex Fridman?

  All right. We have to talk about this a little bit. You made a bunch of videos about it.

• 1:54:06Lex Fridman?

  There's, there's a moment in time, it still goes on, but there's a moment where it's really people are freaking out about the use of AI in music.

• 1:54:15Lex Fridman?

  So there's these, I would say incredible apps like Suno, U D O, Eleven Labs Music is also great. They can generate basically text to song, full song from a text prompt. And a lot of people start freaking out just by, based on how good it is. And so you start to immediately imagine how this is going to transform music and you're going to replace musicians and all that kind of stuff. It is legitimately nerve wracking because these are early versions. You don't know where it goes. But in your intuition now, you've been thinking about this, you made a bunch of videos. Now like being able to reflect, okay, everybody chill, calm down.

• 1:54:56Speaker 01

  So if you write a prompt in Suno and it spits out a song, which I've did, I've done, made a bunch of videos in this. I made up a fake artist, Eli Mercer in this video. Then I did a thing for CBS News. I made up this fake artist, Sadie Winters and came up with this song, Walking Away. Well, the computer, the program came up with it.

• 1:55:15Lex Fridman?

  There is some creativity in a process. So in this particular thing, the process is you generate an image.

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  I did it in Chat G P T, the image. And then I went to, then I went to Claude and I wrote the lyrics because Claude's way better at lyrics than Suno is. Suno is bad at lyrics, at least right now. So I, so I did, I created the lyrics in Claude and then I imported the lyrics into Suno. And I had great results with the songs that I came up, that it came up with. I always have to qualify that. But I started thinking about this. People freak out about this. Oh, this is bad. This is bad. And then I thought it's like, no, who are going to be the ones that are going to benefit from AI? Well, the people that are already great songwriters, because you have to be able to recognize when it spits out something good versus when it spits out something that's not that good.

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  And every other song, I've probably created 130 song ideas, out of which there's three good ones.

• 1:56:11Lex Fridman?

  And there's a thing that's happening where people's ear very quickly is becoming attuned to AI slop.

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:56:19Lex Fridman?

  And that's actually quite fascinating. Like, for example, one of the things, there's this viral clip going around of an AI-based, like a soul jazz remix of songs like Fifty Cent, Many Men. And I think it is super impressive. And there's a different pipeline, actually. It's a tricky pipeline to how to pull that off. And I think a lot of the creativity in that, even that kind of remixing is in the pipeline that of how you actually do that, because there's actually a lot of manual stuff in that pipeline.

• 1:56:51Lex Fridman?

  But I think ironically, it's very cool at first, but when you listen to it for a while, you understand that this is AI slop.

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:57:01Lex Fridman?

  For a soul remix, it actually lacks soul. But it made me think of like, when I listen to soul or blues, I think I really want, in that case, to know, I don't want an AI BB King. I want the real BB King. And I, if I, if I know if any AI is involved in the BB King process, I'm tuning out.

• 1:57:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:57:27Lex Fridman?

  And I don't think I'm being curmudgeonly old dude in that. I think we humans want authenticity.

• 1:57:37Speaker 01

  So when, when AI, when I first started making these AI videos, it started back in 2023. I made my first one.

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  And I would take my phone, come up in the kitchen, I play a song and my, my youngest and Dylan, my youngest, Leila, and I have three kids and my oldest Dylan, soon as I play, why are you listening to AI? And I was like, oh my God, instantly, I was like, how do you know? Oh, it has this ringing sound in the thing. So it took me probably about four or five days to figure, okay, what are the hearing that I'm not hearing? So I did, I separated all the parts and what they're hearing was the artifacts that are in the vocal reverb that sent, that were, uh, that made incomplete. It just couldn't do the ambiances correctly, right? Cause it's trained on, a lot of these AI programs are trained

• 1:58:30Speaker 01

  on very low bit, bit rate, uh, MP3s, right? So they feed all this stuff in there. So they're getting really inferior information on the, in the training process, whereas now when they make these deals with the major labels, they'll get the multi-tracks and they'll get high quality wave files to train from, right? And whoever opts in, they get the solo vocal tracks, you know, if Ed Sheeran wants to do it, or Drake, or whoever wants to give their voice to it, let it do its thing and then get their royalties from it. I'm not saying that any, any of them are doing, I'm just giving an example, but

• 1:59:06Speaker 01

  every time that I would do it, I could be down the hall and I would play something on my phone just to see if they'll like, why are you listening to AI? Oh, they can instantly tell. Then eventually it started getting better. And then, and then it'd be like, is this AI? I'd be in the car with Leila coming back from Taekwondo practice and she's like, is this AI? Why does it sound like AI? It sounds like it could be AI. And I'd be like, yeah, it's AI. She's like, oh, it's getting better. And then I did this song for, um, it was an NPR interview. I created a song with a fake artist. And the song was called Neon Ghosts and I played it for Leila in the car. She's like, Can you separate the tracks? I said, yeah, I have them separated back home. Okay, I want to go down here.

• 1:59:48Speaker 01

  So we go down to the studio and I play it for her and she listens to the soloed vocal. She said, wow, this is really realistic. This is very hard to tell, even with a soloed vocal.

• 2:00:00Lex Fridman?

  I think the room for creativity right now for humans is lyrics. It seems like the lyrics that are being generated, they lack soul somehow. I don't know the words correctly.

• 2:00:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:14Lex Fridman?

  I mean, they can be incredibly sophisticated, but there's something, the edge is not there. Some kind of edge that we want in our lyrics, some kind of surprise, but not cringe or not cliche. Something truly novel in the lyrics. But if that's the case, it's kind of sad that

• 2:00:39Lex Fridman?

  that's where the creativity has to come from, but not from the music. Because then if we can create very realistic music that sounds really damn good, where's the role of the musician there?

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  I think the role of the musician is that in actually, if they use AI to assist them in coming up with ideas as a creation tool, then the musician, like some of the stuff is just not high quality, sonically high quality. So the musician goes in and redoes stuff and changes things and adds parts. And then they actually do music production. And maybe they re-sing the parts and they change the stuff. And then it's just basically like an idea generator. And I think that that's a great use of AI is for that.

• 2:01:27Lex Fridman?

  But see, if you do that, does it make you sad that you don't necessarily need to learn instruments?

• 2:01:35Lex Fridman?

  So basically, you can, I mean, you could think of it as a different kind of instrument, but you can write lyrics, you can hum the melody, you could just hum parts.

• 2:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:46Lex Fridman?

  You know, and then, and then do A B kind of thing, this kind of rhythm, this kind of, and stitch them together. And never actually have your fingers on a guitar or, or.

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  That's why I'm not gonna use AI, Lex, is for that reason, because to me, it's just boring. And I, when I use it, it's like, eh, but I, I used it for about a month or so, just because I was making videos and I was trying to see how it's advancing. Every, every three or four months, I'll, I'll, I'll sit down and I'll see whatever new versions they have and I'll write some songs, write some songs. I'll prompt some songs and see what they come up with and see if they're improving on the things, but ultimately, I don't find it interesting to, to use.

• 2:02:31Lex Fridman?

  I hear you.

• 2:02:34Lex Fridman?

  You're a bit old school.

• 2:02:35Speaker 01

  I'm old school, yeah.

• 2:02:37Lex Fridman?

  I'm trying to think about the future and I think it's still, even in the future, also going to be boring. I think there's something fundamentally boring about it and I've been trying to figure it out. So for example, I use it a lot for more and more and more for programming. So for building stuff. And there it's not about, the, the final output is not the code, the output is what the code creates. And there it's extremely useful, not, it doesn't matter if it's boring and that's useful. But when the final output is the thing that AI creates, which it would be in, in music, then there's something about us that just, like, we know, we, there is something boring about it.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:03:19Lex Fridman?

  We want to celebrate and see the thing that's hard to create. And if AI can just text the song, generate a top 10 hit, we, we will quickly lose value for that, I think. And so we'll want raw, like, raw, whatever, whatever shape that raw takes, I wouldn't say raw talent, but that raw talent of any kind. And perhaps it would make me a little bit sad, but that's also awesome. Perhaps the new kind of raw talent that civilization is asking for is how to make uh, great TikToks. Maybe that's what raw talent looks like.

• 2:04:02Lex Fridman?

  It makes me a little bit sad because I'm a huge fan of long form.

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:04:06Lex Fridman?

  Uh, but that that also creating TikToks and is is also talent.

• 2:04:11Speaker 01

  It's a, it is a talent. Absolutely. Um, when I see anything that's AI generated, I instantly recognize it. Any video, I'm like, boring, boring, boring. And my kids do the same thing. They just have no interest in engaging with it as soon as they recognize it and they can spot it a mile away. And they're just like boring, boring, boring, boring, boring. And then they kind of just, then they, they don't even want to engage with the social media platforms, which is, which is a danger, which I think they need to crack down on the AI slop. YouTube's done a pretty good job on it, but um, it's hard to, it's hard to stay on this. It's getting, it gets flooded with so much of this stuff.

• 2:04:50Speaker 01

  It's so easy to create and put up there and to just be in the um, in the whack a mole thing, where you're just trying to get rid of it all is, is.

• 2:05:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, fundamentally like, it's fundamentally boring. I think boring is a really good.

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  Boring.

• 2:05:05Lex Fridman?

  And it's, and it's annoying to have to uh, flip through the AI slop.

• 2:05:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:11Lex Fridman?

  But I think actually as a civilization is just inspiring for authenticity. Cause you want to be real and being raw, which I, you know, one of the things I like about podcasts is people just shooting shit and just being themselves in in the long form versus overproduced. I think AI is making people realize that AI is good at being overproduced.

• 2:05:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:05:32Lex Fridman?

  So there'll be more.

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  Let's get that covered.

• 2:05:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, even artists, because you're saying like, yeah, they'll use it as tools. Part of me thinks like, not really. Like I, I think, I think, I think they'll quickly, this kind of process of generating a bunch of different options, uh, and choosing the one you like the most, I think is a really frustrating process for artists. And it, I, I think it, I think AI will, will definitely be used extremely effectively.

• 2:06:01Lex Fridman?

  As a very fine grained tool in the image domain, it's editing images, but not like macro editing, but very specific kind of editing that Photoshop is increasingly integrated in. I mentioned to you offline, so the whole Isotope RX group of software that does a lot of the de-noising, all the de- removing the wind, all the, they integrate machine learning extremely effectively.

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:06:33Lex Fridman?

  For working with audio in different kinds of ways. There's a bunch of different other programs that do that. Maybe for like B-roll footage and same thing on the audio. If you just need a little audio to create a feeling of a scene, yeah, it might be used there in that kind of way. But truly original stuff.

• 2:06:53Speaker 01

  I've saved videos where I'm doing, speaking over music, for example, in an interview. Somebody's playing and we have two people speaking in laves, but it's, but there's so much bleed coming from the person playing that you can't hear what we're saying. And then we'll split out the voice for that section, the two voices, separate them and then take the music and separate that stuff. And so it's really helpful for things like that.

• 2:07:19Lex Fridman?

  And now, once again, quick 30 second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. We got Uplive Desk for my favorite office desks, BetterHelp for mental health, Element for electrolytes, Finn for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, back to my conversation with Rick Beato. So you have this video, breaking down Sabrina Carpenter's song Man Child, and you use that as an example of

• 2:08:01Lex Fridman?

  Building up people's intuition about the the music business and how the music production for these popular songs is being done these days. Who's doing the songwriting? How is it being done? And all that kind of, I was wondering if you could speak to that.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  In that particular song, Jack Antonoff, who was one of the writers, Amy Allen, Sabrina Carpenter, said in some awards thing that there's an old guy on YouTube that says that Sabrina had very little to do with the song. And so he said in this clip.

• 2:08:33Lex Fridman?

  You being the old guy.

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  Me being the old guy that, well, Sabrina really was the, she's amazing and she's the one that wrote everything of, and the song is like, so my response is like, well, why are you guys even included on the songwriting then?

• 2:08:48Lex Fridman?

  So one of these you highlight is a lot of people are included on the list of

• 2:08:54Lex Fridman?

  songwriters.

• 2:08:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. 10 people, 11 people. I mean, you know, like, why are the song, why is song of the year have songs that are interpolation, meaning that they have melodies from other songs and they're interpolation? They used to call it stealing. And then you have songs that are, use samples for the whole thing, like the Dochi song that's out right now. And I said, look, she took a Gautier song and basically took off his melody and she created her own melody over it. It's like, well, it's, I mean, it saves time for, you don't have to actually create a track, you just can sing over someone else's song that was already successful.

• 2:09:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you pointing that out, the song Anxiety, it broke my brain.

• 2:09:36Speaker 01

  I mean, it's so absurd.

• 2:09:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, this feels unfair. It feels, it's a good song, but it was also a good song before, and it was, before that it was also a good song.

• 2:09:48Speaker 01

  Right, 2011 or Louis Monfa in 1967. So why is that considered to be in the top songs of the year? It's like, come on, you can't find another song that's not based on that? That's ridiculous.

• 2:10:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:06Speaker 01

  And Don't you have some really good songs on a record?

• 2:10:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but why are these the ones that are coming to the top?

• 2:10:11Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:10:12Lex Fridman?

  This is interesting. That that that might be just a criticism of the machinery of the business.

• 2:10:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:10:17Lex Fridman?

  That drives them. It's not necessarily like a lot of these folks are really good musicians.

• 2:10:26Lex Fridman?

  First of all, I think a lot of them are also good. The the actual songs that make it to the top are good. I'm I'm a big fan of Bruno Mars. He's a great songwriter and he's a great musician all around.

• 2:10:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:10:38Lex Fridman?

  You know, this is Michael Jackson reincarnated.

• 2:10:41Speaker 01

  Super, super talented guy.

• 2:10:42Lex Fridman?

  Incredible, right?

• 2:10:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:10:44Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned Billie Eilish and her brother, right? A lot of the songs.

• 2:10:47Speaker 01

  So good, yeah, super talented.

• 2:10:50Lex Fridman?

  I mean, Taylor Swift is unlike anything. I mean, that's a historic figure in music. She's a fundamentally, at least originally, a singer songwriter.

• 2:11:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:11:01Lex Fridman?

  So that's a, I mean, that, I mean, I'm sorry, but that that is a like of the kind of music that Rick Beato

• 2:11:09Lex Fridman?

  gives props to. She's the, she carries the flame forward.

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  She works on her own songs, absolutely. And she, but she never has more than two co writers on things.

• 2:11:20Lex Fridman?

  Let me take a quick bathroom break.

• 2:11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:22Lex Fridman?

  Okay. I have to ask you about this complexity that you're facing on a basically daily basis. I think it's a challenge a lot of YouTube folks experience, but you're just so viscerally experiencing it because a lot of what you do in your channel is celebrate music broadly. And so as part of that process, you have to sometimes show clips of music. And I think all of that falls under fair use, quite obviously. And so you get all these YouTube copyright claims. And for folks who don't know, if you get three, three of those, it's each one of those can be a strike on the channel and can take down your channel. And you get some insane amount.

• 2:12:04Lex Fridman?

  You said you got like, I think I had a similar thing on my Rick Rubin episode, like 13, I think he said 13.

• 2:12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:12Lex Fridman?

  13. So what, can you just speak to this whole thing? You've been in a constant battle, W M G, U M G. All the

• 2:12:21Speaker 01

  All the, all the three letter name, record labels, right?

• 2:12:24Lex Fridman?

  The, the music business people. So what, what's the story there?

• 2:12:27Speaker 01

  Well, this has been going on since the beginning of my channel and I've made videos periodically. When I first started, it was just instant blocks. So you never knew back in, I started, it'll be 10 years in June. So when I play music in a video, YouTubers were not playing music in videos because they didn't, because of the content ID things and the takedowns and stuff. So I would play music and I would just see what happens. And then you get a content ID claim or you realize that people were quote unquote blockers. And I came up with that term that they would block your video, take down your video. And I, I realized at first it was like anything Guns N' Roses, which is still the case, Guns N' Roses, ACDC.

• 2:13:11Speaker 01

  I mean, many bands, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin. And then, and then something happened. There, there, there was that guy on the skateboard on Tik Tok that had the ocean spray thing. And, and he was listening to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac.

• 2:13:29Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 2:13:29Speaker 01

  And that blew up and became a number one song again. And the labels then realized, I mean, I'd made many videos about, about why this is wrong and it should be fair use and everything. Well, because of that, the label's like, ooh, maybe we should rethink this. And then they just started demonetizing videos.

• 2:13:49Lex Fridman?

  And demonetize means they get all the money.

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  They get all the money. In a one hour video, if they, if you use 20 seconds of a clip, they get all the money. Okay? So I hired a lawyer finally after the Rick Rubin video. Cause I thought it was ridiculous. I go over to, to, to Tuscany, I interview Rick at his house and. And I hired a lawyer to fight this, who I'm gonna have on my channel. I don't want to say who it is, but he's another YouTuber. And he had approached me a couple of years ago, and it's not cheap to do.

• 2:14:26Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you're gonna do like a public interview with him?

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do an interview with him, yes. I talked to him today about it.

• 2:14:31Lex Fridman?

  I can't wait.

• 2:14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:32Lex Fridman?

  That'd be great.

• 2:14:33Speaker 01

  So he said, you should fight these because every single one of them is fair use. And he went through my, my entire catalog. I have 2,100 videos. And he's fought 4,000 content ID claims and won every single one of them. 4,000. That's a lot. I mean, when I do top 20 guitar solos, there's 20 content ID claims, you know? It's, and it's either, it can be either from the sound recording, if I use that, or if I just play it, it can be from the publisher.

• 2:15:09Lex Fridman?

  That's amazing.

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:10Lex Fridman?

  So is there, I mean, that's, it's still, he's still a lawyer, still work. Does that, is there a hopeful thing you can say about the future of?

• 2:15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, fight these content ID claims. If it's fair use, if you're not just playing the song and listening to it, and, because a lot of stuff that are reaction videos or whatever, that are not, where they play the whole song. I mean, I'm using these things and I'm talking, a lot of the times it's in interviews, or it's in, I'm breaking down a solo and there's a.

• 2:15:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, see, that's an obvious one, but even reaction videos, right?

• 2:15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, even reaction videos, yes, absolutely.

• 2:15:47Lex Fridman?

  Those are more borderline.

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:51Lex Fridman?

  But I don't know. I love those videos.

• 2:15:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:15:54Lex Fridman?

  Like when a person is just sitting there and listening to it, and they're like, you know, like a, like a voice teacher is listening to a vocal performance.

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but those are breakdowns.

• 2:16:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, those are breakdowns, yeah.

• 2:16:05Speaker 01

  I think that the content ID stuff that was happening with these major labels, they would hire third parties. They would go out, use AI and go and. Anytime they detect anything, they always go to the biggest channels first to get the most views, makes sense and stuff. And, and they would claim everything that they could. And historically, YouTubers never would fight back. They were like, oh, this is easy money. YouTubers never fight back and at these things because they're afraid to have their channels taken down.

• 2:16:35Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 2:16:35Speaker 01

  So.

• 2:16:37Lex Fridman?

  Rick, be honest, they hold my dear.

• 2:16:38Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 2:16:39Lex Fridman?

  So I mean, I mean, it's important.

• 2:16:40Speaker 01

  I mean, it took me years, though, Lex. I didn't, I've been doing this. So I, so I've been doing it for one year now, and I'm nine years, I'm 10 years into my channel. So it took me that long.

• 2:16:50Lex Fridman?

  I mean, hopefully it, there's a ripple effect also. It's not just your situation. Hopefully you don't have to deal with this for much longer.

• 2:16:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:17:01Lex Fridman?

  How has Spotify changed music? Sometimes we highlight the fact that they changed the nature of music and that it's, the scarcity is not there. But also allows it, it's like every kind of music is available and so fast and it's so easy. It's so easy to explore.

• 2:17:17Speaker 01

  It's a commodity. It's like turning on a water faucet.

• 2:17:20Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there's some good to, I mean, there's a lot of good to that, right?

• 2:17:26Lex Fridman?

  Have you, did you go through that whole process? I, I still remember where I had to basically throw away the albums.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  I never did that. When, if you, if you uploaded them into your computer?

• 2:17:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So there's that two-step process. One, there's like the hard albums, CDs.

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:46Lex Fridman?

  Okay. And then, and then you upload them into your computer.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:17:50Lex Fridman?

  And you save them. And then you, uh, how do you put it? Allegedly a friend of yours pirates some extra songs.

• 2:18:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:18:02Lex Fridman?

  And then post them on the computer. So you have, but you have your stash on the computer. You're like, this is my finely selected stash of greatness. Uh, sometimes organized by albums, sometimes not. And then the big moment for me that was really difficult to do, really difficult to do is throw away that stash. And switch to Spotify.

• 2:18:24Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:18:25Lex Fridman?

  Switch to streaming and basically rebuild the stash of playlists and all this kind of stuff. And it was heartbreaking because so much love and effort went into that, both the CD, the stashing of the CD and the stashing of the MP3s in the computer. And then in Spotify, it just seems just effortless. But it helped me discover all kinds of artists I never would have discovered otherwise. And Pandora, I use a lot. Pandora is more

• 2:18:57Lex Fridman?

  prioritizing on the discovery part versus the organization part. And that was really wonderful.

• 2:19:03Speaker 01

  So one of the things I I'll start with the positive that I like about Spotify is that they show view count. They show play counts. Whether they're real or not, that's another question, but but they show how many plays songs have. And that's how the charts are based.

• 2:19:18Lex Fridman?

  Does that give you signal that something is listened to a billion times? Does that mean something to you?

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it means that that it's a popular song. Well, that's a massive hit. That's very few songs that have a billion billion plays. Now, the downside of Spotify is the way that they pay their artists. Now they've lumped in podcasts with that that are getting a cut of the the streaming with the with the music.

• 2:19:45Speaker 01

  And you know, the search and discovery, I mean, there's there's a there's benefits of algorithms and there's negative things of algorithms. Algorithms happen to kind of a lot of many times pigeonhole people into listening to the same genre of music all the time and not expanding their,

• 2:20:06Speaker 01

  you know, the discovery of of of new music where that you might hear on the radio back in the day where program directors would play things that they liked, right? And you might hear some, oh, what is that? Oh, that's a new

• 2:20:21Speaker 01

  Soundgarden record or something like, whoa, I like that. I'm gonna go buy, check that out, you know, something you might not have heard or something odd.

• 2:20:28Lex Fridman?

  Like, one thing I really love doing on Spotify is you can you can have radio.

• 2:20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:33Lex Fridman?

  Meaning like you have a few, it's similar to Pandora, like you can.

• 2:20:40Lex Fridman?

  Okay, this is gonna reveal a little too much about myself, but usually when I go work out,

• 2:20:46Lex Fridman?

  I'll listen to something like Rage Against the Machine Radio.

• 2:20:50Lex Fridman?

  I'm sorry.

• 2:20:50Speaker 01

  What else would you listen to?

• 2:20:52Lex Fridman?

  I need motivation, classical music. I don't know. But yeah, it's pretty good because it recommends a bunch of other stuff. I wouldn't even know. Some of it I know, obviously. But akin to the similar to the Rage Against the Machiny type thing. It recommends a bunch of artists. It's like, oh, holy shit. That's awesome. So I don't know that that discovery works really well. So some of it is a technology thing. But that experience is fundamentally more vibrant than I had previously with my stash. That I would just keep a stash and I would listen to the same record over and over and over and over.

• 2:21:29Lex Fridman?

  But yeah, there's what's lost is the, the, I'm sure you love, you love this, but listening through the Led Zeppelin records. Just driving in a car and listening to the whole thing all the way through. Yeah, that's lost.

• 2:21:43Speaker 01

  So I have my old iTunes libraries from 2005 that I listed that I that I have saved the CDs that I uploaded into my computer.

• 2:21:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:55Speaker 01

  Anytime I do that, I play songs on my, um, when I'm doing an interview, I always play WAV files. I put them in. And it's funny that when I interview a mixer, I interviewed this mixing engineer, Andy Wallace. And people comment, wow, that the song sounded amazing in here. Well, not only are they great mixes that he did, but I'm using WAV files in there and people notice that. And these are WAV files from, from, you know, original encoding, not, not remastered things that Spotify keeps doing. And adding a bunch more top end and things like that, that these are the, these are actually the, the original WAV files from off the CD that I ripped.

• 2:22:40Speaker 01

  Twenty years ago.

• 2:22:42Lex Fridman?

  What's your current? And people are really curious about that. So what's your current stack? What are the tools you use? What's your DAW? What's the audio interface? What are the mics?

• 2:22:51Speaker 01

  So I use Pro Tools for the most part, but I also use Logic and Ableton. I've got all, I've got all those.

• 2:22:58Lex Fridman?

  So you're mostly on a Mac?

• 2:23:00Speaker 01

  I'm only on a Mac.

• 2:23:01Lex Fridman?

  Only on a Mac?

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  Only on a Mac.

• 2:23:02Lex Fridman?

  I'm only the opposite.

• 2:23:04Speaker 01

  Although we have multiple PCs because my kids use PCs.

• 2:23:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, just to rebel.

• 2:23:10Speaker 01

  They do it for gaming. They like to game.

• 2:23:12Lex Fridman?

  That's true. I, but like in terms of editing, I hate how, how good Mac is.

• 2:23:18Speaker 01

  So good.

• 2:23:19Lex Fridman?

  At just integrating the, the hardware and the software just work well together, both.

• 2:23:23Speaker 01

  If I didn't have a Mac, honestly, I wouldn't be talking to you right now because I got a G3. That's the only good thing that a major label did for me is when, when my band was on UMG and they bought a, um, they bought me a G3 and a, and an SM7 and Pro Tools Digi01, the first prosumer Pro Tools thing. And I learned how to use Pro Tools and that allowed me to learn how to edit video and become a record producer. So I gotta give it, give it to Max for that.

• 2:23:56Lex Fridman?

  So Pro Tools, I mean, that's still the, the standard.

• 2:23:58Speaker 01

  That's kind of the industry standard. Yeah.

• 2:24:00Lex Fridman?

  I gotta ask you, cause I know I've never used Pro Tools. I've used, again, I'm a caveman. I've used Reaper. I've used Studio One. That's recently I've used that. And for the most time I've used Ableton Live. I feel like I'm using 1% of the power of the tool. Like Ableton Live makes me feel like I'm literally just pressing the record button.

• 2:24:24Speaker 01

  Ableton's amazing. It really is.

• 2:24:26Lex Fridman?

  It is. But I feel like that, I mean, it's designed for people that are. Doing like all kinds of meaty stuff and like looping and do the, what is it? The push buttons with the, with the beats and the, I mean, I sound, I sound really out of touch, but it's just, the power is incredible. Also, it's, I think it's not just for recording, it's also for live performances.

• 2:24:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:24:52Lex Fridman?

  So this is why Studio One has been a little bit nicer for me because it's simpler, made for recording more so.

• 2:25:01Speaker 01

  Any DAW that you get used to, Lex, that's.

• 2:25:05Lex Fridman?

  Just use anything.

• 2:25:06Speaker 01

  Using it, yeah. And, and you have to become a master at the things. If you want to be a recording engineer or producer, you, you become an expert. A lot of the, you know, Phineas and Billie Eilish, I think that they use Logic. That's their DAW that they like to use and Logic, you know, a lot of pros use Logic. You know, I, I fire up Logic every couple of days and I use it for things. I have, I have it on my laptop here and I, I have Pro Tools and Logic on my laptop. I use both. I use Pro Tools mostly though.

• 2:25:33Lex Fridman?

  But Pro Tools, that's where you feel like at home?

• 2:25:36Speaker 01

  I'm an, I'm an expert in Pro Tools.

• 2:25:38Lex Fridman?

  Are you using any emulation, any amp sims or it's all real amps?

• 2:25:45Speaker 01

  No, I use amp sims. On my laptop here, when I travel and things like that, I use Neural DSP, which I just did a video at their headquarters in Helsinki. And their, the CEO Doug Castro is a, is a friend of mine. I actually talked to him today as a matter of fact. And I have a Kemper amp sim, you know, modeler. I have an Axe FX. I've got a Helix. I pretty much have all these things. But for me, I can, I have a hundred amps in my studio. So, and I have mics set up all the time and cabinets and stuff. I have a hundred amplifiers, real amplifiers.

• 2:26:22Lex Fridman?

  Real?

• 2:26:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:24Lex Fridman?

  Wait, sorry, a hundred?

• 2:26:25Speaker 01

  I have a hundred, yeah. About a hundred, maybe 95.

• 2:26:30Lex Fridman?

  How do, how does one go get to that level?

• 2:26:34Speaker 01

  Collecting and being, I'll be sixty four in, in April, so.

• 2:26:38Lex Fridman?

  So you just don't let go?

• 2:26:39Speaker 01

  I don't let go, no.

• 2:26:41Lex Fridman?

  Why would you get to a hundred? Like, is it, is it tone difference?

• 2:26:45Speaker 01

  Yes, so everything does one thing really well. And so it'd be like, okay, so I have this Marshall JCM eight hundred that's modded that, that does this one thing. It's got great mids and it's good for this kind of a tune, so I will pull that out. Then it's like, no, I need more of like a scooped metal tune, sound that's more like Metallica or Dream Theater or something. So I'm going to pull out my, my Mesa, Mesa Boogie. Or I need a, I need something that's chimy, that's more like Brian May or like the Edge. I'm going to pull out my Vox AC thirty. So everything and, and that's, that's why I have so many amps. Because they all do, every amp I have does one thing really well.

• 2:27:29Speaker 01

  If it doesn't do well, do it well, I get rid of it. And I've, and I'm down to a hundred.

• 2:27:34Lex Fridman?

  Down to a hundred, it's only a hundred.

• 2:27:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can get by with probably seventy five.

• 2:27:40Lex Fridman?

  Come on, but then you're really running the risk of not having just the right amp. But you're using emulation, so that's, that's great. I mean, on that, but there's the other side of it, which is the guitar.

• 2:27:53Lex Fridman?

  I told you offline, I think having multiple guitars is cheating, but whatever. Nobody agrees with me on this. I only have like one, I, I do have some side pieces, but one main.

• 2:28:05Speaker 01

  The greatest guitar?

• 2:28:06Lex Fridman?

  What do you play? Strat, yeah, American Strat. I said I would never do this, but I was in a guitar store, I live next to a guitar store in Cambridge. And one day I would always stop by, I don't know why, I just, just to look at the guitars. Like, I don't really know why exactly, just to be in the aura of these great instruments. And I, they, they brought in this American Strat. They had these different shades of, it was like a silver.

• 2:28:35Lex Fridman?

  And I just, I've never had this feeling. They talk about love at first sight. I just fell in love with a guitar. Can you just speak to the kind of guitars you have and you love?

• 2:28:46Speaker 01

  I pretty much have mainly

• 2:28:52Speaker 01

  old school guitars, right? So I have Gibsons, I have Fenders, I have PRS guitars. And then I have, I have two Gibson acoustics. I have a 1957 Country and Western that I've had for probably 30 some odd years. It's a great guitar. And I have a J45 Gibson. And I have a Martin D28. So I only have three nice acoustics. And I have a Guild 12 string. And I have a Guild Nashville tuned guitars. The low strings are up, up the octave. So the EA and D and G are up the octave. That's Nashville tuning. Six string though. Like basically what David Gilmour plays on Comfortably Numb in my video. He plays a Nashville

• 2:29:37Speaker 01

  tune, but with one variation, the low E is up two octaves. So he, he demonstrates actually the, and this is how he wrote Comfortably Numb. The chorus part of it was with this particular guitar that he's playing in the video.

• 2:29:55Lex Fridman?

  What can you say about like the different feels that the guitars, the acoustics have? Like what, how do you know which one to pull out?

• 2:30:04Speaker 01

  It depends on the kind of part that I'm playing. If I want something with really tight mid-range with not, that doesn't have a lot of low, low bass. This particular old Gibson that I have, the 57, I will pull that out. It's got very balanced strings and mid-range doesn't have a lot, it doesn't have a booming bottom end, booming low E string or anything or A string. So it depends on what, what kind of sound I'm looking for.

• 2:30:31Lex Fridman?

  It's more about sound versus feel?

• 2:30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. All my guitars play equally well. I have them all set up to where they play well.

• 2:30:41Speaker 01

  I have a signature Gibson guitar that I've had for Five years now?

• 2:30:46Lex Fridman?

  When you say Gibson, Gibson Les Paul?

• 2:30:48Speaker 01

  Gibson, it's a double cut Les Paul special, yeah, with P90 pickups.

• 2:30:53Lex Fridman?

  I don't know what double cut means, but it sounds impressive.

• 2:30:55Speaker 01

  That means two cut, cut, two, um.

• 2:30:57Lex Fridman?

  Oh.

• 2:30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, as opposed to a Les Paul that has one cut. So it's a Les Paul special with, that has two. I have it over there. My signature guitar.

• 2:31:05Lex Fridman?

  That's the, alright, nice.

• 2:31:07Speaker 01

  When you play this, you're gonna be like, oh my God, this is butter.

• 2:31:11Lex Fridman?

  Now, um, again, I said it's cheating. I don't.

• 2:31:13Speaker 01

  And what amp do you play through? Do you play through an amp sim or do you have, what do you have, like a?

• 2:31:18Lex Fridman?

  This is gonna be, yeah, yeah, I use Bias FX. I'm sorry.

• 2:31:23Speaker 01

  Lex, I, I use amp sims too, so. I just got the new John Mayer Neural DSP plugin today that I have not tried out. He did a modeling of all his amplifiers that, that Neural DSP did and, um, it sounds great. John played it. It sounds just like his amps.

• 2:31:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, John is incredible.

• 2:31:41Speaker 01

  John's great.

• 2:31:41Lex Fridman?

  I've been fortunate enough to have dinner with him two times. And, uh, aside of being an incredible musician, he's also conversationalist.

• 2:31:50Speaker 01

  Yes. I've known John since he was, he, he lived in Atlanta, but when he got signed and I knew John from way back then, right in the early 2000s.

• 2:31:59Lex Fridman?

  I think he doesn't get enough credit. Like, he's one of the greatest living guitarists.

• 2:32:05Speaker 01

  He's a fantastic guitar player. Absolutely.

• 2:32:07Lex Fridman?

  And a celebrator, if that's a word, of great guitar playing.

• 2:32:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:32:14Lex Fridman?

  By way of advice, you started, uh, your YouTube channel in your mid 50s and found incredible success. You've, you've had essentially multiple careers. Um, is there some wisdom you can extract from that?

• 2:32:30Speaker 01

  So my, my theory is that

• 2:32:35Speaker 01

  somebody's got to be successful, so why can't it be you? That was, that was.

• 2:32:42Speaker 01

  That's, that was my, when I started my channel, I mean, I didn't start it to, it started by accident with the Dylan video. And, um, and really so many people reached out to me. I started it six months after that viral video. So many people wrote to me, can you teach me this? Pro musicians, well-known ones that you would, who you'd know, can you teach me this? I can't teach you what Dylan did, but I can, I can teach you relative pitch, develop your ear that way. But then I had conservatories writing to me about this stuff from all over the world. How did you teach Dylan this? Cause we made about four different videos and they got more and more sophisticated. And, um, so I thought, okay, I'll make some YouTube videos and explain this stuff.

• 2:33:25Speaker 01

  This is, that's really why I started. So I didn't have to keep, I couldn't answer the emails. There's so many of them. So I just started making videos on how to train your ear and music theory. And that's really how I started my channel. And, and my wife was like, what are you doing? I said, I'm making YouTube videos. Why? So I don't have to keep telling people how I did this stuff. And then all of a sudden, you know, a few, I had 4,000 subscribers the first month. Another 4,000, then hit a hundred thousand after a year, and then six months later, 200,000, then three months later, 300,000. So.

• 2:33:59Lex Fridman?

  I think there, one thing that should be said, that in modern culture for young people, a lot of them will see YouTube and Tik Tok and Instagram. And they kind of want to be famous. They want to get the clicks and the views and so on. And that's the thing they chase and optimize. I think the thing that you're leaving unstated perhaps is that you spend many years pursuing the mastery of a craft. And there's a lot of value to getting good at something.

• 2:34:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:34:33Lex Fridman?

  Offline, you can actually reveal your journey online, but the thing you're chasing is not, uh, fame. It's getting good at something. And I think actually what happens is even if the thing you get good at.

• 2:34:51Lex Fridman?

  Is not the thing that you become famous for, if that's the thing you're, uh, that ends up happening. It's still like getting good at one thing, kind of somehow relates to getting good at another thing. Somehow they'll lead you to get better at getting better at the next thing, at the next thing, and the next thing. But if you're just chasing fame and trying to figure out, how do I do the viral thing or so on? It just seems to, you might actually get there, but it'll be unfulfilling and not long lasting.

• 2:35:20Speaker 01

  My theory of my channel has always been make videos on things I'm interested in. And at first I thought, oh, nobody's going to watch an old white haired guy on YouTube.

• 2:35:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:30Speaker 01

  That was kind of my thing. Well, that was not correct.

• 2:35:37Speaker 01

  And then it's like, we'll just make videos on stuff I'm interested in. It just so happens that other people are interested in the same things I'm interested in and keep learning. And I, when I produce bands, I never let them take my picture ever. I never let them record me in the studio. There's virtually no pictures of any band I ever produced. So from 1999 to 2015, when I, December 2015, when that Dylan video came out, no one took my picture. There were no pictures of me on the internet.

• 2:36:06Lex Fridman?

  You're fully behind the camera kind of guy, meaning like no.

• 2:36:10Speaker 01

  No, no pictures, no, no pictures with people. Hey, can we take a picture? I said, no, no pictures with people.

• 2:36:17Lex Fridman?

  And now you're like, you're the talent. You're the face.

• 2:36:24Lex Fridman?

  No, I mean, but again, the thing you're leaving unstated there is, is like you spent a lot of years, you're teaching music, like really exploring music, trying a music career of like trying to create, trying to produce, trying to be musician and all these, not just trying, like being, getting extremely good at it. I just, I think in modern culture. There's a sense you want to skip that part. I want to be famous. I want to, you know, this. And that is a thing that's not going to be, in most cases, effective as a primary thing to chase.

• 2:37:04Speaker 01

  So I have an undergrad in classical bass. I have a master's from New England Conservatory in jazz guitar. Then I taught college for, I taught jazz studies for five years from eighty seven to ninety two. Then I got a publishing deal, my first publishing deal in nineteen ninety two with Polygram Publishing. And then I became a producer when I was thirty seven, having no idea how to engineer. I taught myself engineering. And then YouTube. I taught myself how to edit videos.

• 2:37:32Lex Fridman?

  And then you taught yourself how to interview.

• 2:37:34Speaker 01

  And I taught myself an interview. I'd never done an interview before. And it was like an interviewer, what?

• 2:37:38Lex Fridman?

  You haven't just done that. You've taught yourself not how to do just YouTube, but YouTube shorts.

• 2:37:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:37:45Lex Fridman?

  Different, totally different thing.

• 2:37:46Speaker 01

  Totally different skill.

• 2:37:48Lex Fridman?

  And then not just YouTube, but like, how to be like a, there's a, because you're both a YouTuber and, and like a musician who posts stuff on YouTube. YouTuber means like you're thinking about stuff like thumbnails and.

• 2:38:04Speaker 01

  Which I make my own thumbnails. I've always made my own thumbnails.

• 2:38:08Lex Fridman?

  By the way, before I forget, I think I, I speak for the entirety of the internet, thanking you for how you introduce your videos and how you close them. Because you, this is a big part of YouTube where people have a thirty minute introduction to, to a five minute video. You just go straight in. That's really wonderful. It's, I mean, and on all fronts. I mean, I suppose that has to do with the production skill that you have of understanding, cutting, cutting the fat. Yep. Yeah. Cutting, cutting the fluff, cutting the bullshit. I'll just get straight to the core of the thing. I've heard you talk about maintaining friendships for a long time. You said never waste a friendship. Can you elaborate on that?

• 2:38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's one of my things is that I really value the time I've spent with people, friendships and keeping in touch with people. I talk to each one of my siblings multiple times a week. I talk to my sisters probably every night, my two sisters. I, I have friends from college. I get friends from growing up. I have friends from, you know. Both colleges I went to, I have friends from all different eras in my life that I keep in touch with and visit whenever I can and.

• 2:39:19Lex Fridman?

  And you must have met some incredible humans and incredibly weird and interesting humans throughout your life.

• 2:39:25Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:39:27Lex Fridman?

  So it's worth it, the effort to, to connect and reconnect.

• 2:39:32Speaker 01

  I mean, is that pretty much everything in life? Nothing means anything more than the friendships that you make in your, in your family.

• 2:39:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, what's the point of this whole thing?

• 2:39:40Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:39:42Lex Fridman?

  What's the role of music in, uh, in the human experience?

• 2:39:47Speaker 01

  Well, hopefully to enlighten people and to create the soundtrack of their life.

• 2:39:53Lex Fridman?

  It is, right?

• 2:39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:55Lex Fridman?

  Music, music does something. I'll, I'll get, sometimes when I'm alone, I'll listen, listen to a song.

• 2:40:03Lex Fridman?

  And there's nothing quite like a song.

• 2:40:07Lex Fridman?

  That makes me truly feel like feel alive and whatever that is sadness or hope or excitement. Or, um. When I'm working out, listening to Rage Against the Machine, like protest. Or as I was listening to the Metallica, the, I was really seeing to the set that they played in, in Moscow, just hyped, like truly hyped. I was like pacing, listening to it.

• 2:40:36Lex Fridman?

  And there's nothing like that.

• 2:40:38Speaker 01

  I've never found anything.

• 2:40:39Lex Fridman?

  And I don't know what that is in the human psyche that's that. But I'm so glad we found it. We humans created instruments. They can vibrate strings and together. Create harmonies and melodies and, and ones that reverberate through generations and they carry that.

• 2:41:00Speaker 01

  It's one of the greatest things that humans ever did, creating music.

• 2:41:05Lex Fridman?

  And all of that led up to you, some guy being listened to by millions of people on the internet.

• 2:41:14Lex Fridman?

  This is all a simulation, Rick. And I've been a fan of yours for a long time. Like I told you, this is crazy to meet you. Same, Lex. Thank you for everything you do for the world, for celebrating music, for helping us discover and rediscover some of the incredible musicians and songs that have been created over the decade, over the centuries. Thank you for being who you are and thank you for talking today. Thanks, I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rick Beato. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from Friedrich Nietzsche,

• 2:41:59Lex Fridman?

  as I often do. Without music, life would be a mistake. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.