Rick Rubin: What Jay-Z Did in 30 Minutes Left Me Speechless!

Discover the spiritual and psychological creative process that legendary producer Rick Rubin uses to help the world's biggest artists transcend and achieve greatness. Rick Rubin is the co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, and the author of the philosophical bestseller The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Having collaborated with icons like Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Adele, Tom Petty, and Kanye West, Rubin does not rely on commercial metrics or audience testing to guide his workflow. He shares practical strategies for dismantling the prisons of identity, harnessing the power of "indefensible" ideas, and cultivating a state of pure creative freedom. In this episode, he explains: ■ The "Indefensible" Act: Why the greatest artistic breakthroughs defy logic and market research. ■ The Vacuum Strategy: How walking away from obligations that no longer serve you creates an energetic void, allowing the universe to present massive unexpected opportunities. ■ The Audience Trap: Why focusing on commercial incentives and audience expectations completely undermines the creative process. ■ Deconstructing the Greats: The psychological traits that separate good musicians from generational icons. ■ The Trauma of Success: Rubin opens up about his crippling depressive episode at age 33 after a corporate restructuring at Def Jam. Chapters 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:38 Rick Rubin’s "Indefensible" Rule 00:05:24 How a Meme Became Rick Rubin's "The Way of Code" 00:10:34 Why Risk Beats "More of the Same" 00:16:43 How Jay-Z's 99 Problems Was Made 00:20:47 Transcendental Meditation & Finding What You Love 00:29:00 Is Creativity Innate? 00:33:51 Stop Comparing Yourself 00:35:47 The "Lazy Workaholic" & Avoiding Deadlines 00:38:23 The 4 Phases of Creativity 00:41:04 Should You Quit Your Job to Chase Your Dream? 00:48:15 How Rick Rubin Knows an Artist Will Be Great 00:54:15 Feeling Boxed In? The “Reset Button" for Your Life 00:57:50 Ads 00:59:47 Your Identity Is the Trap: How to Start Over 01:07:39 My Depressive Episode at 33 and What It Taught Me 01:17:11 How to Be More Original 01:27:52 Is AI Dangerous? 01:29:24 Can AI Be Creative? 01:35:09 What Makes a Great Artist in the AI Era? 01:40:27 Studio Miracles 01:46:45 When the World Rejects Your Work 01:54:24 The Ace of Spades Story: Why Jay-Z Walked Away From Cristal 02:01:00 Ads 02:02:24 What If Your Art Isn't Good? 02:07:03 What Made Jay-Z Different: Inside His Writing Process 02:17:35 What Makes Kanye Brilliant + Were Great Artists Born Great? 02:22:51 The Artists Who Changed Rick Rubin 02:31:50 Why Rick Rubin Made the Jay-Z Documentary 02:42:18 Who Would You Thank? Follow Rick Rubin: Instagram - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/2PaPSZI X - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/88EVXdF YouTube - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/HGY2CrI The Way of Code - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/CTcdN7D Tetragrammaton - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/vdp2of The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BWjLTZK ◼ Shop The Diary Of A CEO collection: https://thediary.com/collections/shop ◼ Get email updates - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5IB1H6E ◼ Follow Steven - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AGU9QP4 Sponsors: Ketone - https://ketone.com/STEVEN for 30% off your subscription order Fiverr - https://fiverr.com/diary and get 10% off your first order when you use code DIARY

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Jay-Z wrote in a way that no one else wrote. All the other rappers that I worked with spent a lot of time writing lyrics. And I never saw Jay write lyrics. And when I played him the beat for 99 Problems, he said, okay, just keep playing it over and over again. And he sat in the back of the room. You could hear him mumbling or humming after 20 or 30 minutes. He's like, okay, I got it. Ran into the other room and did the first verse. He did, let's say, three takes. And then he came in, he'd listened to them. He's like, oh yeah, I think the second one's good. It just happens in his mind.

• 0:28Steven Bartlett?

  And then this big list of people that you've worked with, I mean, it's just this unbelievable list. Jay-Z, Kanye, Adele, Justin Timberlake and Mick Jagger and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Why do you think these people call you?

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Because I've been making things for 40 years and I started making music as a hobby. It ended up picking on a life of its own and becoming a business. And that list, they're not special. I would say they're ordinary people who made a decision. I think of Eminem as a good example. Eminem is someone who's always writing because he wants to be the best he could possibly be. And he's insanely obsessive about that.

• 1:00Steven Bartlett?

  It appears that some people are just inherently more creative than others.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Well, creativity is beaten out of us over the course of our lives. We go to school, we're taught to follow rules. The rules are not there to help us. The rules are there to control us. We're not taught to be free, creative thinkers. So I'm suggesting we break free and express ourselves freely.

• 1:21Steven Bartlett?

  How?

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Well, all of the best things involve risk. It's only through the risk that the greatness is shown. And so something needs to die. That lifestyle in that moment, that career path, that relationship, that's what needs to die.

• 1:34Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a step one in that direction for people that want to hit the reset button?

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, the first one I'll say is.

• 1:41Steven Bartlett?

  Your early 30s, you had a depressive episode yourself.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was really a tough time. I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. Started having panic attacks and couldn't sleep. I got really sick and it felt like I was shot with a poison arrow.

• 1:57Steven Bartlett?

  Take me into that part of your life.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  So.

• 2:04Steven Bartlett?

  Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

• 2:38Steven Bartlett?

  I'm going to start, Rick, where my curiosity is.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:41Steven Bartlett?

  How do you sort of self categorize or self identify in terms of like your profession?

• 2:48Speaker 00

  I would say I'm involved in art and creativity.

• 2:51Steven Bartlett?

  And what is your involvement in art and creativity?

• 2:53Speaker 00

  Might be as a coach. It might be as a collaborator. It might come up in a film project or it might come up in someone who has a startup who wants to talk about what are things, creative solutions and any problem that we have or any, anything we want to get better at, there's usually a creative path to improve or at least to test to see if there are other ways around. Often the accepted version of how to move forward is another limitation.

• 3:31Steven Bartlett?

  I'm very curious about your principles as it relates to finding the solution, whether that's in business or whether it's in music. And I'm really interested in if there's any similarities in the process of finding a solution, because I'm an entrepreneur, I guess I'm a podcaster as well. I do investments all day, every day. I'm in the pursuit of a solution to a problem, a people problem, a creative problem.

• 3:55Steven Bartlett?

  Do you have any high level principles that are broadly applicable irrespective of the type of problem you're solving?

• 3:59Speaker 00

  I'll tell you an interesting one. A word I've been thinking about lately is indefensible. Indefensible is a funny word because it's a, it's a really pejorative word. It's a strong pejorative. If something is indefensible, it's not just bad. Indefensible is really extreme. I'm thinking that in making art, indefensible is actually a good thing. Maybe not only a good thing, maybe a necessary thing. That you take things to the extreme that are indefensible. I can't tell you why.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  I can't tell you why, because it's beyond reason.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  So I'm, I'm in that camp of reason is a, is a tiny sliver of how decisions get made.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  And I would be much more in the camp of intuition or maybe some sort of a guy, guidance from the universe. Openness to being guided by something more, something, the creative force of the universe. You could call it God. I call it God. You're not required to.

• 5:26Steven Bartlett?

  What art that you've been involved in creating, would you, would you define in the moment as being indefensible?

• 5:33Speaker 00

  A little over a year ago, there was a meme about vibe coding. The way it started was if something new happened, a guy named Andrej Karpeji coined the term vibe coding. I didn't know what it was. That same day that he coined the term and tweeted about it, someone put a picture of me with my, wearing headphones with my eyes closed, hand on a mouse. And that image became associated with vibe coding. Had nothing to do with me. I saw it, I didn't know what it meant. But then over the next few days, friends started sending me hundreds of this image associated with vibe coding in all different ways. And I thought, hmm.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Now, the, the old me, pre creative act me, would have laughed and moved on with my life. And one of the things that I learned through working on the creative act, one of the things that talks about a lot is we're given information all the time around us. There are all these opportunities or invitations being made all the time. In the past, if someone told me about a movie that sounded like I didn't want to see it, that doesn't sound like it's for me, I would, I would ignore it. But if two or three people say, you might want to see this movie. I might, even if it's not interesting to me, it's almost like the universe, some too

• 6:59Speaker 00

  much energy behind this. So this was an example of a lot of energy coming towards me relating to vibe coding. I don't know what it is. And I thought, okay, how do I participate? If I want to participate in this thing that's going on, an experiment, creative experiment. And I thought, okay, I'm going to write a joke tweet

• 7:22Speaker 00

  related to vibe coding. I thought about it and came up with tools will come, tools will go, only the vibe coder remains. And typically the tweets get 10,000, 20,000 views. I looked the next day and this joke tweet has a million and a half views. It's like, something's going on. It was an indefensible act. There was no reason for me to do it, but I'm feeling this energy coming at me from all of these different directions. I participate, I, I answer the invitation, comes back, there's interest. It's like, hmm, what would be the next step? And the next step is, well, I still don't really know what vibe coding is.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Maybe I'll write a book about vibe coding. I put aside all of my real work, my professional work to dedicate myself to this book on vibe coding. And again, I couldn't explain it. I couldn't tell you why. I can't say it was a good idea. None of those things. I was following a calling, feeling like I was being invited to participate in this thing and this is the way that I could answer the call. So I did.

• 8:38Steven Bartlett?

  In so many parts of our life, we might get that invitation to participate in something that is none of our business.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Yes, all the time.

• 8:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And we, and we usually say no, because it's not what's on our business card. It's not what we've done in the past. And we are, you know, the more successful we become, the more narrow we become in many respects.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:56Steven Bartlett?

  I'm thinking about this idea of like how one resists their label so they can capitalize on all the callings or, you know, so they don't miss importing.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Any label that you put on yourself or that's put on you makes you smaller. No label supply. No label supply. We are beyond labels.

• 9:16Steven Bartlett?

  It's tempting though, isn't it? Because labels are nice shortcuts at cocktail parties.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  There are also no shortcuts.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  And I hope you don't spend too much time in cocktail parties.

• 9:25Steven Bartlett?

  No, I don't, don't worry. I'm guessing what goes on there. Okay. So that's interesting, this idea of sometimes following the indefensible.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  Well, if you feel a call, even if it doesn't make sense,

• 9:39Speaker 00

  if you, for, for an artist to write a song

• 9:44Speaker 00

  and you really feel like this is really, this is some, this is really meaningful to me. I think no one's going to like it, but I really feel it. I can't defend it. That's the best thing you can do. If you make something where you think this is for everyone or they're going to love it,

• 10:04Speaker 00

  it's like, it's too easy. The most interesting things are challenging. It's challenging to you. It's challenging to the people who see it. The things that are revolutionary, most of the things that I've fallen in love with over my life creatively, art, when I first see it often or first hear it, I might not like it at first because it's, it's too much or I don't have any context for it. The true revolutionary works, we don't have context for.

• 10:36Steven Bartlett?

  It appears to me, Rick, that sometimes things that are more of the same do bigger numbers. So I'm thinking about.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Maybe for a period of time.

• 10:45Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking about two artists. One of them is Drake, who listen, makes great music, makes hits. Everybody loves him. They come out, we dance in the clubs to them, et cetera. Then I was thinking about, I think a record that you worked on with Kanye, Yeezus. And I remember where I was when I first heard that. As a huge Kanye fan, I thought, here we go, we're going to get more college dropout. Here we go.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:06Steven Bartlett?

  And I put it on and I was like, what the fuck is this? But then I loved it and in my little group of six.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  How long did it take? A while?

• 11:13Steven Bartlett?

  A while.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:14Steven Bartlett?

  It took a while. I mean, you know, with Drake's stuff, I tend to like it on first listen. But with that Yeezus album, I had to really like persevere. And then I thought it was, was genius because it was a new paradigm. And you worked on that album.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that, that's a good example of like, it was a sort of an anti hip hop album. And that was done intentionally. And it definitely, we went as far as we could into

• 11:48Speaker 00

  into an indefensible realm.

• 11:51Steven Bartlett?

  But what about the numbers? What about the sales? What about the record label?

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Do you, is it an important album to you now?

• 11:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Okay. Did its job.

• 12:01Steven Bartlett?

  Those near term incentives though, listen, we need Drake, we need you to make another.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  We never consider near term incentive ever at any point in time. Never once. Never consideration.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  It doesn't exist. We're making things forever. We're making things that are truly personal to us. And if it's truly personal to us, if someone doesn't get it, that's, they just don't get it yet. Or maybe they'll never get it and it's fine because I know this is my diary entry. Can someone else read your diary entry and tell you it's wrong? It's not good enough or it's not true. It's not how you see the world. Everything we make is a diary entry. Everything we make is our personal, true expression.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  The reason we're saying it is to show, you see it like that, we see it like this, or I see it like this, this is how I see it. And with that information, you can see it's like, ah, I never considered that before. There's more, the world is bigger than I thought.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  It's not just more the same. It's not just more numbers. And it's also the, the more numbers game is a shorter term game. I remember I made an album with Linkin Park, who at the time were probably one of the biggest bands in the world. And they'd made three albums that were, I would say stylistically very similar. They were rap rock and they were, there was this, there was a rap rock movement, Korn, I guess Rage Against the Machine was first, Korn, Limp Bizkit, all these bands. And Linkin Park was probably the last of that wave of music. And they were wildly successful doing that music.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  And when we started working together, there was a choice. We could continue and do the next in that same style, which the audience would love and it would be easy to do. Or we could be true to where the band was in this moment of time, 10 years after they started about, probably eight, 10 years after they started and be free to find the new sound, the next sound. And when we did that, probably half of the audience didn't like it. And half of the audience loved it and new people came along. And they set themselves up to have a much longer career of making the things that they wanted to make.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Whereas they were already on the tail end of a genre that had they made another one, maybe it would have been, it probably would have been, you know, as successful as what they had done. But long term, the genre was dying. So again, none of this was thought about at the time. Another example I think of is Radiohead's Kid A. I remember when Kid A came out, I didn't like it at all. I loved the Benz and OK Computer, they were my favorite band. And then they made this album Kid A and it was totally different. And it really alienated me. And today, that might be my favorite Radiohead album.

• 15:19Steven Bartlett?

  It feels like a risk.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Yes, but that's all of the best things involve risk.

• 15:25Steven Bartlett?

  Because I'm sure you've also got examples where someone followed that thesis of listening to what they wanted to make or doing it for themselves and not thinking too much about the audience and it didn't work.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 15:35Steven Bartlett?

  And they could have just made, you know, a hit and paid off their mortgage and.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not so interesting. I know it's not so interesting to me. I think that's, it's a different game. That's the, you know, that's the investment commerce game and I'm in the art game. It's just a different thing. There's nothing wrong with that other game. It's just not my game.

• 15:55Steven Bartlett?

  Which one leads to more success over the long term? Defined by, let's say, if we define success in this context by the subjective opinion of people that that was good and money.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  All I can say is that I've been making things for 40 years. I have never done it the way you're suggesting. I have always taken the risk. I've always made my favorite thing. I've always supported the artists in making their favorite thing. And luckily, a lot of revolutionary things have happened from that. And I would say things that probably inspired other artists to be more free and more true and more honest and take bigger risks to make something more interesting, made the world a more interesting place.

• 16:44Steven Bartlett?

  Why do you think these people call you?

• 16:47Speaker 00

  I think it's probably different for different artists.

• 16:50Steven Bartlett?

  Why did Jay-Z call you?

• 16:52Speaker 00

  The time that I first met Jay was when he was making the Black Album and he wanted to, he was planning on retiring and this was going to be his one song, his final album, the Black Album was the, Jay-Z's last album. Turned out not to be, but that was the plan. And he asked his 10 favorite producers to each make one track with him. And ours was called 99 Problems. And it was a really fun experience to make.

• 17:20Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, what an iconic record that is. What was your contribution to that record? Everybody knows that record. Everybody.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, we created the track and we played it for Jay and he liked it. And then he wrote the words and wrapped on top of it.

• 17:33Steven Bartlett?

  So you, you produced the music?

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Made the music.

• 17:36Steven Bartlett?

  Made the music. I read that you gave him direction in terms of the lyrics as well.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  Well, my friend Chris Rock had the idea of, Ice T had a song called 99 Problems that was the opposite. It was, I have 99 problems and a bitch ain't one. And then it's a story about the girls. And Chris said, you know, 99 problems would be a great hook and it doesn't have to be about the girls. And then I suggested to Jay, make it about the problems. And then that's what it was.

• 18:10Steven Bartlett?

  And business people, startups, they seek your advice as well, entrepreneurs?

• 18:14Speaker 00

  All the time.

• 18:15Steven Bartlett?

  And what are they seeking?

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Let's talk about 99 problems a little more because it's an interesting story. Jay-Z was signed to Def Jam Records.

• 18:22Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  Def Jam Records was the label that I founded. And I was no longer at Def Jam when we made 99 Problems. And I remember giving it to the people at Def Jam and the person who was the president of Def Jam at the time listened to it and he's like, oh, this is great. It'll never be a single, but it'll be a great album track. I remember thinking, okay. And again, I don't, I don't know. I, I couldn't say, but

• 18:45Speaker 00

  the president of the label that I founded was saying, this could never be a single because it doesn't sound like everything else on the radio.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  That was the old way of thinking. That was the normal way of thinking of like, you make things up to go on the radio that sound like everything else on the radio. But if you do that.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Who cares? It's just more of the same. So 99 problems didn't sound like anything on the radio. So when it eventually got on the radio, it had a big impact. So another band I work with is called System of a Down.

• 19:18Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I remember.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  And I remember bringing their record to Kevin Weatherly at K-Rock, which is the rock station, alternative rock station in California. And if they play it, all of the other alternative rock stations in the country play it. They were like the leading station. And this was a California band that was starting to get popular in the clubs. Maybe 200 people would come, but in a club, the club would sell out. Good sign. And I brought, I think the song was called Sugar. And I brought it to Kevin Weatherly and I played it for him. And he said, not only will we not play this record, we will never play this band on our station because it sounded insane. It didn't sound like anything else on the station. One year later, number one song on the station, most requested.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  And two weeks ago, I saw System of a Down sell out 80,000 seats in a stadium in Paris. They sold it out two nights in a row. I can't tell you how or why this this works. I can't tell you that there's anything to follow, but I will say, we made the things that we loved. We never questioned if anyone else was going to like it. We never questioned what the audience was going to think. We never questioned where does it fit in the market? None of them, none of those normal conversations. We made our favorite thing. We took it to an indefensible level as far as we could go. And luckily, it worked out.

• 20:48Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a way to get clearer on what you love? This sounds like a strange question, but um.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Meditate.

• 20:54Steven Bartlett?

  Meditate.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  I learned to meditate when I was 14. And I think having a TM as a grounding element in my life.

• 21:06Steven Bartlett?

  TM.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  A transcendental meditation. That was the first type of meditation I learned when I was 14. It it it changed me. I know this because I stopped meditating when I went to college. And then when I moved to California, right after college, I started meditating again. Somewhere I knew it was a big decision and somewhere I knew there would be a right moment to start. And it took several months before I actually sat for the first meditation after not doing it for several years. And in that first meditation, I realized, oh, this is, this is very familiar to me. This is a big part of who I am, even though I haven't done it in five years.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  It's a big part of how I see the world. The fact that I got to do that from a young age.

• 21:58Steven Bartlett?

  To understand who you are with it, I'm going to ask you who you would be without it.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  I don't know. It'd be, I'm curious. I'm happy that I don't know because I like having the practice. But whether I continue a practice or not, I've done enough of it over the course of my life that I'm there. I'm, when I meditate more, it gets deeper. But even if I don't meditate, it's like Maharishi, the teacher of transcendental meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, says every time you meditate, it's like making a deposit in the bank. So it builds up. And again, that was rhetoric before, but in my experience, I got to see, oh, it's not rhetoric. Like I actually had this experience.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  And it changed the way I saw the world. And and I'll say, you see beyond the surface. You can see the depth underneath. And for me, the things on the surface are not so interesting. I'm interested in the depth, the the the depth behind it.

• 23:09Steven Bartlett?

  So my first question would be, what is transcendental meditation?

• 23:12Speaker 00

  It's a mantra practice that's done silently. You do it sitting with your eyes closed. You learn it from a TM teacher I can't teach it to. We close our eyes. And then the mantra is a sound vibration that gets given to you. I was given mine when I was 14. I have never uttered it out loud since that time. I've never shared it with anyone and that's part of the training. It it's like a private sound. And you engage with this sound in the way that you're taught. 20 minutes, at least once a day, typically twice a day.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  I would do it right when I woke up in the morning and then again before dinner. Those would be the two, the two windows. I, when I lived in California and I was working in different recording studios, I meditated with Tom Petty and Johnny Cash and different artists before sessions. That would be part of our practice, Red Hot Chili Peppers. We would sit and meditate together before sessions. So I've had this experience for a while in my life and it's a, it's probably the most profound thing I can mention. We'll get to others, but that that, that's one that's a learnable, practicable action that really changed who I am.

• 24:33Steven Bartlett?

  How did you know it was efficacious? How did you know it was working? What is the measure that this practice is worth that investment in time? In your view?

• 24:44Speaker 00

  The only proof that I had was getting away from it and coming back to it. That was, I recognized it in that first meditation back, how deep and connected I was to this thing.

• 24:58Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm guessing this unlocks, you said, a deeper level, a deeper level of creativity and ideas.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Everything.

• 25:03Steven Bartlett?

  Oh.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  Everything. Deeper understanding.

• 25:08Steven Bartlett?

  People often hear that meditation in various forms is beneficial. Very successful people sit here all the time and say it's so, it's so central to why I've been able to do what I've done. And then there'll be people, you know, that think, well, I was sitting there for 10 minutes. My brain is very, very busy. I've tried it once, it didn't really work. And then they move on. And then I study some of the greats, some of the great creatives in the world, the great visionaries, people that I thought could see round corners in an atypical way, like Steve Jobs. And there's always a practice, a meditation practice, well, so often at the very heart of of their brilliance. So I've, I don't currently have a meditation practice. My wonderful fiance does. She does it every morning for 20 minutes. She's a breath, breathwork practitioner. So I mean, it's her whole world.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  And tell me what she says about it.

• 25:51Steven Bartlett?

  She says it unlocks a deeper level of calm. And I don't mean calm as in like stress. I mean, a deeper level of like groundedness. And she says, she feels more connected. Now, in her context, I think that's more of like a spiritual thing. She feels more connected to the universe and and others.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  As far as the creative experience goes, a spiritual connection is a big part of that. It's just the nature of, it's the nature of how it works. It's not an intellectual process. It's a spiritual process.

• 26:27Steven Bartlett?

  What is the mechanism that is causing these results that you see? What, from a biological perspective?

• 26:33Speaker 00

  I couldn't answer that in the way that you would hope. But I will say, I think it, it allows you to let go of all of the ordinary concerns. I also have a question, which is if you live with a person who says this practice is so impactful on her life, I'm questioning why you at least haven't tried it with her for a month to see.

• 27:02Steven Bartlett?

  It's a great question. You're going to get me in a lot of trouble. No, it's a good question.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:07Steven Bartlett?

  I have no good answer for it.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because it's what it has to do with it. It's, you're not looking for cues from the outside. You're looking for cues on the inside. What lights you up? What are you excited to play for your friend? Not what are you excited to play for your friend of like, what do you think this will do? You're playing it for your friend like, wow, can you believe something like this exists in the world? How cool is that?

• 27:32Steven Bartlett?

  The distinction that I'm trying to make is often, if you read business books or entrepreneurship books, when they're talking about innovation, when they're talking about the great companies like Amazon or, I heard Sebastian, who's the CEO of Klarna, say the day who's a tech founder. They spend a lot of time thinking about the customer, the customer's problem, and they work backwards, they call it, to the answer. So they'll zoom in on Rick's world and say, Rick has these problems. He's da, da, da, da. And they'll work backwards from there to a answer. That's how Amazon say they built the platform. And and one of the quotes that's quite famous with Jeff Bezos is, he bets on things that he knows won't change. He says, no one in 10 years is going to come up to me and say, I wish my package would take longer. So he can double down on that solving a customer problem.

• 28:17Steven Bartlett?

  Does that sit in contrast to what you're saying? Or is it the same thing? Or is it a different type of work?

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Well, I'll start by saying, if you look at the history of Amazon, it was, it lost money for probably 20 years. It was considered one of the worst investments until it wasn't. They kept doubling down on what they believed in. It wasn't working. The audience showed it didn't work. The model showed it didn't work. But they stuck to what they believed. And it changed the world.

• 28:47Steven Bartlett?

  So it's, it's the same thing.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  It's, it's doubling down on what you believe in when all of the metrics are showing you it's not working. That's the story of Amazon.

• 29:01Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think people have different levels of their ability to, you know, if we take practices like meditation aside, it just seems that through history, some people are better at cultivating that, well, listening to that internal voice than others. Obviously, I sit here and interview these, like, some of these great founders. And it appears that some people are just like inherently more creative than others. Some people are in the analytical part of their brain and they need one plus one to equal two all the time. I'm wondering if, you know, there's other ways, if you think there is an inherent difference in creativity.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  I think that creativity is beaten out of us over the course of our lives. I think we, we go to school, we're told to repeat back what we're told. We're told to sit in a chair all day. We're, we're, our spirits are broken by institutions. We're not taught to be free, creative thinkers. We're taught to follow rules. The rules are not there to help us. The rules are there to control us. I'm suggesting we break free and be free and express ourselves freely. And that's our purpose here on the planet is to express ourselves freely. That's why we're here.

• 30:13Steven Bartlett?

  What you're saying links to something we're talking about earlier, which is at a very young age, we're taught that the things we make are a means to a particular end. And that end is promotions, pay rises, capital, success, job titles.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:24Steven Bartlett?

  In the creative process, are you saying that it's never productive to talk about how we'll measure success and to try and optimize for that measurement?

• 30:36Speaker 00

  In the creative process, I would, I tend not to think about those things. I can't think of an example where we would want to use data. I think it's, it's much more about this internal feeling. And then the feeling we have when you play it for someone, when you share it with someone, whether it lights someone up, you can tell when someone really resonates with something. Sometimes the numbers don't show, the numbers can't reflect that. You know, you can have two things that are kind of on equal footing commercially, yet one of them lights you up.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  And the other one is, well, this gets a job done. They're different. And long term, chances are, the one that lights you up is going to have more value to you and you'll be more willing to support that thing over time.

• 31:38Steven Bartlett?

  In your book here, The Creative Act, A Way of Being, you talk about the things that block creativity. Thoughts and habits not conducive to the work. Believing you're not good enough.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  That's a big one. Someone, at some point in time, you were singing and someone's like, ah, you can't sing. And when you're a kid, and that gets lodged in you, singing is not something I can ever do. Or you're a terrible cook. Or you're not smart enough. So often, the gifts that we have are stifled and smothered. We're all creative. We may not choose to embark on a creative, make creative choices. But that's, it's on us. We can, we just have bad information. We, we're told we're not good enough and we believe it. And it's not true.

• 32:36Steven Bartlett?

  When people say that, oh, you know, Rick is a creative and Stephen is, so they say Stephen is not a creative. What are they actually saying? What is that like in our culture to be a creative? What, how like we misunderstanding the definition? See what I'm saying? Because we do, we go creative. They do a little bit of art and music stuff, creative, not creative, Excel documents, creative.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:56Steven Bartlett?

  What are we actually saying there?

• 32:58Speaker 00

  I think it's a way to um, try to simplify the world. The world is complicated and I think all of us can do anything. I'm not saying all of us could do everything to the best of our ability, better than anyone else. That's a big part of it is the idea of competition. Like if I want to play baseball, I know that I could get better at baseball. That doesn't mean I think I could get good enough to play on the Mets. But I know I could get better. And I know I could train anything that I'm interested in and get much better at it. And as soon as we're not capable of playing for the Mets, we think it's not for us and we shut that off. We're not doing a service to ourselves.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  We're not becoming our best selves or really uh, living up to our full potential as humans.

• 33:51Steven Bartlett?

  It feels like a natural human instinct to compare in order to understand the value of anything. I feel like we do it when we go to restaurants, there's three steaks. The expensive one's probably a bit bougie. The cheap one's probably not good. I'll go for the middle one. Seems like a hu, a hu, a way that humans take shortcuts, but we do it with ourselves as well. So I know that the thing I've made is good as if I look over at your thing and mine is ranked better or mine is prettier or richer. Are you saying for us to get out of the business of comparison?

• 34:21Speaker 00

  Yes, because I'm saying it's, it's always apples and oranges. If, if, if you were to ask, who's better, Michael Jackson or Prince? I would say, Michael Jackson's much better at being Michael Jackson. And Prince is probably better at being Prince. But you can't compare what the two of them do. They do two different things. Before you mentioned Kanye West and and Drake. There's no competition there. They do two totally different things. What you get from each of them is totally different. I wouldn't want from Drake what I get from Kanye. And I certainly wouldn't want from Kanye what I get from Drake. It's, it's pointless.

• 35:03Steven Bartlett?

  Is either more creative?

• 35:05Speaker 00

  That's for you to decide. That's for you to decide. There's no, the, the whole idea of competition between artists is, it's such a weird thing. Again, it's back to who has a better diary entry. It's ridiculous.

• 35:17Steven Bartlett?

  Feeling you don't have the energy it takes. These are all things that are not conducive to the work.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have that one sometimes. Feeling like I'm not up to it too much. I flew here yesterday from London. I'm tired, I'm a little jet lagged. I didn't show up and talk to you. Maybe it won't be good. Maybe it's better just to lay down, relax and recover. But I'm here, I show up.

• 35:47Steven Bartlett?

  You've referred to yourself as a, a lazy workaholic.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Yes, it's true.

• 35:53Steven Bartlett?

  What is a lazy workaholic?

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Often, most days, I would rather not do any of the things that I'm scheduled to do. And I schedule the things and I show up. And I do what needs to get done.

• 36:08Steven Bartlett?

  Do you ever settle with creative work? The, the deadline for the record label is approaching. The work is not yet done. We'll finish here and we'll send it.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  I tend not to do that. I tend not to work on deadlines until we're past the point. The first time we would ever establish a deadline is when we already know. We've cracked the code. We know what this is going to be. We can see it. It may not be completely finished, but we have a good idea of what it is and how it's going to work. And it's maybe 90% done. Then we might set a deadline for that last 10% of finishing it. And that last 10% probably won't make or break the project.

• 36:49Steven Bartlett?

  Part of what you accept when you pursue the creative process you've described, where it's really about like, do I like it? Do we like it? Is you will create things that are at some, some points just absolutely legendary and unlike anything else that exists. They are not the same. But part of the risk you take is you'll make things that other people just don't like.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's all there is in this process is you have an idea. You build it. You may learn along the way that the idea was maybe not the best idea and it turns left and you make, I'm, I'm starting out to make this blue statue and it turns out to be this red painting. You don't know that going in, but you discover it through the process and it could take a long time. Other times, you'll think, I'm going to make this blue thing. You make it in five minutes. There it is, done. And and we can't, you can't calculate that. You can't anticipate what's going to happen. But if I wasn't doing this experiment here, I would never get to the better thing. It happens all the time.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  And then sometimes you build it and it doesn't work for 20 years. And then it becomes Amazon.

• 38:01Steven Bartlett?

  I've thought a lot recently about how time horizons change the work that you do. And that's kind of also what I'm hearing there because in that example you gave of this blue statue thing, if you were under a time horizon, you wouldn't have the space for that exploration you've described. And actually, in all of our lives, we, I think, apply time horizons. We say, this part of my career is going to be five years. And in, in those five years, I want to achieve these things. How do you think about setting personal time horizons, but also like creative time horizons?

• 38:30Speaker 00

  One of the things I talk about in the book is that there are different phases of creativity. The first phase is the seed phase, then is the experimentation phase, then is the crafting phase, and then is the finishing, completion, editorial phase. And you can't set a timeline early in that process. In the seed phase, you have to try a lot of things and it's going to take as long as it takes. And in the experimental phase, which is where you're taking the seeds and seeing what they want to be, that takes time. And then in the crafting phase, the third phase, it still takes time because now you have the seed, you see what it wants to be, you've given it time to gestate, you see how it grows.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  And now in the crafting phase, the third phase, you start trimming it and making it the way you see it.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  All of that has to happen before there's any idea of a timeline. Because until that time, you don't really know what you're making. It's a dream. But once you've gotten gone through these three phases and you have this thing in front of you, it may not be finished, but you see what it is. You see it and it's good. You're excited about it. When I say it's good, I mean, it's good to me. That's it. That's where it ends. It's good to me. I like it enough that I'm willing to show it to you. If I like it enough that I'm willing to show it to you, I like it enough to show it to everybody.

• 39:58Steven Bartlett?

  People will hear this as creative advice. I was hearing it as life advice. I was hearing the seed phase of my life, experimentation phase of my life, the crafting phase.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  It's the same. It's all the same. And that's why the creative act started with this idea of how to make things. And it turned, what I realized through writing the book is it's how to be in the world. That you, you either live your life to allow these things to happen or you don't. And if you live your life to allow these things to happen, then you're an artist. Even if you're a businessman, or if you're a chef, or if you're a mother,

• 40:37Speaker 00

  you're living your life as an artist. You're embodying it.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  And it's coming from you and it's, I want to say it's who you are. It's not who you are, but it's who you are in that moment. I'm showing you this beautiful thing as a reflection of how I see the world today. Now tomorrow, I may see the world differently. That's fine. But when I share it with you, this is the best it can be in this moment.

• 41:05Steven Bartlett?

  The reason I was asking this question about the, you know, sometimes they, the world might not like what you give it.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:11Steven Bartlett?

  Is because, because of this word failure, which you talk about in the book as well, and how to deal with failure. I guess a lot of the reason why people won't take the risk to listen to themselves, to what they love, is because of the word risk. And with that comes, I might lose money, I might lose friends. If I quit this job and pursue that violin hobby and go to Peru and violin up in Peru, I'm gonna lose friends, people are gonna think I'm strange, so I'll conform.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I'm saying, you have to do all of those things, lose the friends, take the risk. And I'm, and I'm also saying, I'm not saying that, that a hundred percent, if you go move to Peru and be the violinist, it's gonna work. And you may want to have an actual job to pay the bills while you're doing that. That's okay. The idea that it all has to be one thing. I have to do my dream thing and it has to be my, it has to be my hobby, my love, my profession, the way I support myself, doesn't have to be. When I started making music, I thought I was gonna have a real job and I'd make music and it would be my hobby. I would do it forever.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  I would do exactly what I was doing, but I thought I would have a real job to support myself, to do these things that I want to do. Luckily, I was able to, it turned into its own thing by nothing that I did. Had no expectation that, that it could be a profession. I had no, it couldn't be. It was a ridiculous idea. I did it because I loved it. And while I was going to school and while I was probably gonna go to law school and I would have a regular job, day job, and I would do music as the love of my life. That's what I would do. Luckily, I didn't have to do that. But that's what would have happened.

• 43:01Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of people at that age are told to follow their passion, find their purpose, which sounds like this, you know, because the word passion is a singular word. And also the word find means I have to go, go out there and actively pursue the thing. A lot of people listening now would, would say, you know, I've been told to find my passion. And when they look at their job in the factory or wherever it might be, whatever they're doing, they go, okay, this isn't it yet, but I will get there at some point later.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:27Steven Bartlett?

  And I will jump. So you're saying, don't jump necessarily.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  There are realities of life that you have to deal with. I'm not saying ignore the fact that you get, you have to pay rent. Or, or say, I'm happy living in my parents' house until, until it works. That's fine. I'm saying there are realities of life that have to be dealt with. Don't put the pressure of, of that on your art. Because then you won't make the best decisions. You'll make short-term decisions based on real world issues that you have to deal with in that moment that won't support the long-term benefit of the work you're doing, the real work you're doing.

• 44:05Steven Bartlett?

  I'm sure you've sat there in those moments where you're trying to persuade an artist to follow themselves and what they, no?

• 44:11Speaker 00

  I don't try to persuade anyone of anything.

• 44:13Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 44:13Speaker 00

  No. I don't, I wouldn't use that word. I wouldn't use the word persuade.

• 44:18Steven Bartlett?

  What word would you use?

• 44:19Speaker 00

  We talk about it. I, I ask what are your, what do you hope to accomplish? And then I'd support that process.

• 44:27Steven Bartlett?

  Can we role play? I pretend I'm an artist that wants to write an album. So, okay, so I am actually learning to DJ. I've been learning for like four years. And what would you say to me? So I could come to you and say, Rick, I want to make an album. What would the first questions be to me?

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Play me the, of all the things you've made, play me your favorites. Let's talk about it. I would listen to it and then we would talk about it.

• 44:46Steven Bartlett?

  So I play you, let's say it's a house song. I play it, I said, this is my favorite.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  I would tell you whatever I think about it, honestly.

• 44:54Steven Bartlett?

  Honestly? Even if you thought it was terrible?

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I probably wouldn't say it in a, in a unpleasant way, but I would probably ask more questions around it. Get, ask, you know, to explain to me what it is that you like about it? How did you get to that? What equipment did you use? Was it fun making it? Was it a good experience? Have you played it for other people? What's it like? What's the experience like? What's the feeling you get when you, when you're making it? What's the feeling you get when you play it for a friend? Have you ever played it in a club? What's that like? I would listen to what you say and then we would talk about it. Often an artist will come to me, they'll tell me exactly what they want to do. And then say, I have no idea what I want to do. Can you help me? It's like they can't, they can't hear themselves.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  There's a, we, we all have this barrier between, it's, it's a little bit how therapy works. If you go to see a therapist, you might talk, they might not say anything. But through the talking, you start understanding what you believe, what you think, what's going on in your life. You might have epiphanies just because someone's listening. Most people are not used to being heard, really heard, deeply heard. Often you will say something to someone and they're thinking about what they're gonna say next. Like what, what they're, they're not really hearing what you're saying.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  And I find if you really are there and listen to what someone's saying,

• 46:26Speaker 00

  they tell you what they want to do. And then my job is to just help remove the roadblocks that they're putting in the way of themselves to get there.

• 46:37Steven Bartlett?

  And when they say what they want to do, but then ask you what they should do.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:40Steven Bartlett?

  Is that a lack of sort of self-trust? What, what is?

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, but yes, but that lack of self-trust is what is the condition of the world. That's what we're, that's how we're indoctrinated. We, most people don't trust themselves. And it's a fine line because there are the few people who might seem to really trust themselves. And you think, oh, there you go, maniacs.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Usually when someone really comes off as wildly egotistical, it's usually hiding some insecurities, really. It's like a mask. So that's dealing with someone who's insecure and dealing with someone who's overconfident. It's often two sides of the same coin. And we're really looking for this middle place of reality. It's like not what you're afraid of about yourself, but, or what other people are gonna think, but where are you really on this? I often describe it as tasting food. Like if I gave you two pieces of pizza and say, taste the two pieces of pizza, tell me which one you like better. It's not a hard question. You'll probably say, I like this one much better than this.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  And when I ask you which tastes better, you wouldn't say, well, I think this guy's gonna like this pizza better. You would say, this one tastes better to me. That's the goal is getting to that, this one tastes better to me. Simple. We don't believe that it can be as simple as it is. And it is simple.

• 48:16Steven Bartlett?

  If you were to bet on an artist, being one of these great artists that you've worked with, because they have a set of characteristics or a perspective or a humility that is conducive with what you've seen, results in exceptional work. What are those like similar attributes? As someone that does a lot of investing in entrepreneurs, I was wondering if there were similarities even there? Because some of it sounded the same.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  I'm sure there are. I asked a friend of mine who is a venture capital guy about when he's picking things to invest in, is it the premise of the business? Or is it the founder? And he said, it's always the founder. Doesn't matter what the business is. He said, if I believe in the person,

• 49:02Speaker 00

  I'll back them.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  And I suppose it's, it would be the same with artists. It's like, it's, it's the artist, not like, well, they wrote a great song. The great song is more like the great product. It's like, maybe they could do that again. But if you see that the way that they see music, the way that they innovate in the things that they make,

• 49:31Speaker 00

  that's a good sign. Tell you a story, the band The Strokes. I produced their new album, just came out maybe a month ago. And they had asked me to produce an album for them, maybe,

• 49:42Speaker 00

  I want to say 15 years ago. And I listened to the demos and I didn't hear it. I didn't, I didn't, I'm not saying it couldn't be good. I just didn't see the way in for me. It's like, I don't think I should do this. I don't, I don't feel it. And then they asked me another time, maybe 12 years ago, and I listened to the demos and I didn't hear it. I couldn't, I just, I don't see how to do it. So I passed.

• 50:11Steven Bartlett?

  I didn't see how to do it. Give me some color on what that means.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, um, when I hear something and I know I can see a path, I can hear a thing, doesn't have to be good, but I could hear something in it of like, I understand what this is and I can, I'm, I want to see what this can become. I didn't feel that the first two times. And then on the first album we worked on together, which came out about six years ago, they sent me demos again. They were probably the worst demos they ever sent. But I could hear what it could be. And some, one of the demos might be a 20-second voice note. Whereas in the past, there were these produced demos of like, here's our great new songs.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  But in this 20-second voice note, I could listen and think, I really want to hear this whole song. Whatever this is, this seed of an idea, this is gonna be good, has the potential to really be good.

• 51:12Steven Bartlett?

  How'd you know?

• 51:13Speaker 00

  Feel it. There is no knowing. It's, it's, it's a knowingness. It's like, I have a knowingness. I couldn't explain it to you. It's a, an internal experience. One of the things is again, you tend to want to lean forward, not lean back. You tend to want to listen again, not skip to the next one. It generates curiosity, it generates interest.

• 51:39Speaker 00

  And I want to know more.

• 51:41Steven Bartlett?

  Do you set goals in your own life?

• 51:43Speaker 00

  None.

• 51:46Steven Bartlett?

  You strike me as someone who has a, who is okay with uncertainty in a world where most people need certainty in order to take forward motion or take an action in a direction.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  I know uncertainty is real. I had a house in Malibu that was my main house with all of my possessions that eight years ago burned in a fire. And when that happened, you very quickly see, like, I thought I would live there forever. When that happened, I realized, hmm, impermanence is real. I thought I was gonna live there forever. It's gone now. It's, it's a lot. It's a, a dirt lot. So I, I don't think that we can know anything. We just kind of move along and make decisions based on the information we have at the time and life unfolds.

• 52:37Steven Bartlett?

  I guess an analogy would be sat nav in the car. You get in the car in the morning, you, you know, put your seatbelt on. Then you set your sat nav and say, this is my goal. This is where I want to go. And then you drive. So you put action towards that goal. What you're saying sounds more like you just drive.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, all the time.

• 52:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I used to do that. I remember, it's funny you bring that up, but there was a period of time

• 53:03Speaker 00

  when I worked a lot in the recording studio, a lot of hours, many sessions. Sometimes I made eight albums a year and I'd be working on different projects at the same time. And then I would have a day off on the weekend and I wouldn't make any plans, but I would just drive and just listen to music in the car and drive. And I might end up somewhere, but I might just drive for a couple of hours and relax. And it felt good.

• 53:27Steven Bartlett?

  You might get lost though, and that's the risk.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  It's okay.

• 53:31Steven Bartlett?

  That's why we have goals in our life. That's why we make a five-year plan, a New Year's resolution.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  I've never done any of those things. Couldn't imagine it.

• 53:39Speaker 00

  Seems like a terrible limitation. As good as it can be, I could never imagine that.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  I would have much more ordinary understanding of the world than what, what actually happens. Then seeing the impossible become possible on a regular basis. I certainly couldn't plan for that. Now, because it's happened so much in my life, I accept that's how it is. And I'm on the ride.

• 54:08Steven Bartlett?

  You accept the unknown and the uncertainty?

• 54:11Speaker 00

  The unknown.

• 54:13Steven Bartlett?

  Is that something that we can all do? Or is that a privilege that you have now that you're so successful in that?

• 54:19Speaker 00

  We limit ourselves in so many ways. I can remember a very successful artist who was going through a really hard time. Went out to dinner at this restaurant in Malibu, I remember specifically what it was. And I remember thinking, this person might commit suicide. That's how I could feel their energy was so

• 54:45Speaker 00

  unbalanced and so conflicted and they were suffering.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  And I remember saying, you know, you don't have to keep doing this. You know, you've done a lot of great things. You've had great success. You can afford not to do this. And anytime you want to, you can say, you know what? I'm gonna move to the other side of the world and live on the beach. And just eat good food, play in the water. You're not obligated to continue doing what you're doing that's causing so much conflict in your life. You've done enough. And I found out years later, I didn't even know that the person really heard what I was saying because they were, they were really in a hard place.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  But years later, that person said to me, remember what you said? You said I could go, I could check out.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  And he did, I, he didn't do it in the way that I imagined. I didn't know that that's what happened, but he did that.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  I know several people who committed suicide and I have one friend, a good friend, who unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide. All of them, in those moments, it's like, they feel like the choices I've made have me boxed in and there's no way out. And when someone thinks that the, the

• 56:20Speaker 00

  inclination to commit suicide is the person knows something needs to die.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  And they think the body needs to die. But in reality, that, those choices that they made, that lifestyle in that moment, that career path, that relationship, that's what needs to die. And they can go and start a whole new life. And we, we don't see that. We, we get very locked in, thinking this is all there is. And this is not all there is. This is what we have chosen. And we're going along on this path. And at any time, we say, you know what? I want to do it all differently.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  I want to start a whole new life in a whole new way. And you, and that doesn't take a lot of money to do. It might take less money to do because you can move to somewhere in the world that costs nothing to live. Beautiful places where people are happy. It's just a choice. It's almost like we're playing a game. It's a game of chess. You can get up and leave the table and not play anymore and go on and play a different game and have fun. It's always available to us. You could press a button and it all goes away. And it doesn't mean you have to die for that to happen. Just that scenario has to stop. And you go on, find a new one.

• 57:52Steven Bartlett?

  I've seen a lot online, again, about how to find your flow, that feeling when everything just clicked, distractions disappear and suddenly you're operating at your very, very best. But most of us treat flow like it's something that just happens randomly. But when you're operating at the highest level, you can't just leave that to chance, or at least you don't want to. Bad days are expensive and you need to be able to zone in on demand. That's the idea behind our sponsor, Ketone IQ, a company I've invested in and become a co-owner of because I've seen for myself the profound impact it has on me as a podcaster. Sometimes I'm here with an investor or a business person or a philosopher or someone talking about menopause, whatever it might be. I need my brain to be sharp. Ketone IQ is a premium focus field for your brain and delivers sustained mental clarity and focus. So you can be more intentional about creating the conditions for focused work.

• 58:36Steven Bartlett?

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• 59:19Steven Bartlett?

  It lets you plug into top-tier AI specialists for the strategic work that usually requires serious in-house expertise. That could mean building custom AI tools. It could mean automating complex workflows or creating something that off-the-shelf software simply cannot do. Because at the end of the day, it still comes down to human judgment, knowing what's worth building and what good actually looks like. So if you want that kind of leverage in your business, check out Fiverr.com. That's Fiverr with two Rs, dot com.

• 59:47Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of the, um, the prison that I think,

• 59:52Steven Bartlett?

  I almost hear you sort of inferring to that we've kind of built, that makes us feel boxed in, is our identity. This word identity. I am a lawyer in Manhattan and a father and a, and I took that identity. It's almost a bit of a trade I made. I, I accepted it, which meant that at cocktail parties, people were impressed by me.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:00:13Steven Bartlett?

  And so, you know, we traded something for something else and now we're boxed in. And now a lot, you know, I hear a lot from our listeners on this show, like they feel stuck.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  We're free. We're free. We just have to choose to take advantage of this human gift of freedom. And we can start over. I remember the one close friend who tried to commit suicide and didn't luckily lived. I went to visit him in the hospital. He was laying in, in a hospital bed and he was seemingly catatonic. He hadn't spoke since this happened. And I was standing in the hallway. And there were a series of his friends coming to see him. Everybody would go into the room one at a time. And I listened to the two people who went in before me.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  And they were crying and they were acting as if he had died. Now, he's laying there, he's in fetal position, he's not saying a word. And I'm just thinking, this, this is really weird. This is, it's really, the whole scene is weird. Never seen anything like it before. And my first thought was, the people who are going in there and talking to him, they have no idea how to act. None of us do, because this is an unusual such, unless you've been in it, which I hadn't been before, you'd have no idea what to do. But I knew from listening, this is not the best. What they're doing is not the best situation. There's a better way.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  And I was the next one in and I went in. And I looked down and I said, again, I don't know where this came from, but it came. I said, this may be hard for you to see right now, but you're in the sweet spot. And I remember saying that. And he looked at me and he looked at me like I was insane. But it was the first, the first time anyone, the first thing he reacted to was that. And I said, you just hit the reset button. I said, all of the things that you hate to do, that you feel obligated to do, that you feel committed to do,

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  that made you want to not be here anymore. You just hit the reset button. You never have to do any of those things again. And now you can do anything you want. You're free to start. All of those old ideas, none of those obligations are hanging over your head. And we ended up having a really nice conversation and he got up and he got dressed and he was like himself. It was an amazing, an amazing experience. But that, that's how boxed in we feel. But it's all just a story. It's not true. We are free.

• 1:03:21Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a step one in that direction for people that want to hit the reset button? Is there a first step?

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  Well, I would try to see what are the things in your life that really you want to change? And then think about what's the, what's the cleanest way to change them? Leaving a job, leaving a relationship. You know, the, the reason these things happen is we make commitments with good intentions. And then when it's hard to keep the commitment is where it starts feeling boxed in. Now, I think commitments are a good thing, both to make and to keep. That said, there can be a point where it becomes life and death. It's like this commitment that I made was a mistake and it was, and or something changed. Maybe the person that I married became an alcoholic.

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  And it's really hard living with an alcoholic. And it's not fun. This is not what we signed up for. And I can do everything I can to help this person, but maybe nothing works. And at some point, it's okay to hit the reset button and say, you know what? You're not doing any favors. If you're, if you're locked in a situation, I have a lot of friends who are in relationships and maybe the relationship has gone south, but they stay in it because both, both sides of the couple feel like this is the life we signed up for. And in reality, you're not doing any favors for the person being unhappy in a relationship.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  It's the nature of love is it's a two-way street. Or the same, the same, I can say if someone is in love with someone and the other person, unrequited love, the person's not in love with them. There's no really such thing because the nature of love is, it's like a negative and a positive magnet pull, pulling towards each other. You can't have one side of the magnet in love. It doesn't work. And it's just a fantasy of what, you know, it's, it's a beautiful fantasy of what you think like as an optimist. It could be so beautiful.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  But if it's not there, it's best for everyone involved. Sometimes I have some friends who feel like, well, I don't want to break up with them because it'll, it'll, um, it'll destroy them. It's not true. It's better for everyone involved, if it's not working, to find the new beautiful life. You can do that. It's okay.

• 1:06:00Steven Bartlett?

  I imagine as well, there's some people who have lots of small misalignments. None of them are huge issues on their own, but now they have a life full of a hundred small misaligned things. Could be anything. And so their life feels really fundamentally misaligned, but it's actually just, maybe they struggled with honesty across many little areas of their life.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  And maybe those could be worked on and maybe it could be fixed. But in either case, don't let it just linger, you know, repair them.

• 1:06:24Steven Bartlett?

  It's hard conversations though, Rick.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of people aren't good at that, you know, people pleasers and there's a through line here with creativity generally, I think, this idea of like people pleasing the difficult conversation. And I've obviously seen from some of the things you've mentioned through this conversation, like you'd be willing to tell people like, this isn't for me. I imagine you're offered a lot of money a lot of the time as well.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Steven Bartlett?

  How do you sort of pass through that if you're offered a ton of money to do something, but at some level it's not aligned with your principles or values or?

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  I want to make good things, like I want to make something good.

• 1:06:57Steven Bartlett?

  Have you turned down large numbers of, in, in terms of money or other incentives? Because you didn't feel something was going to be good or was aligned or?

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm sure I have. I can't think of examples, but I'm sure I have. I, I don't think about the stuff, like I think about the things I do. I don't think about things I don't do, you know?

• 1:07:16Steven Bartlett?

  Does it matter to you, the money part of it?

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  I want to be in success. I want to participate in the success. I think that's right. That feels right to me. I never make a decision for a financial reason. That said, if we make something successful, that's valuable.

• 1:07:40Steven Bartlett?

  And in your own life, and we're talking there about mental health, through your early thirties, you had a depressive episode yourself.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Steven Bartlett?

  Was there a causal factor? And how, how important was that in shaping how you think generally about the world and the art and the creativity? Cause I know it, I've heard you say on Newsday that it changed you permanently.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  It did.

• 1:08:00Steven Bartlett?

  Take me into that part of your life. You're 33 years old, my age.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:05Steven Bartlett?

  What, what happened?

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  What happened was I had been an only child. My parents really loved me, really cared about me, always supportive. I went to school, I started making music as a hobby. It ended up taking on a life of its own and becoming a business. And had great success for all those years. And then at 33, for the first time, it got called into question. I had a business relationship with a big company. The person who I was in relationship with was one of the, probably the top person in the whole music industry, well-loved, beautiful person, one of my mentors.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  He got politically forced out and a new person was put in who I didn't have a relationship with. And that person called me and said, I read your, I read our agreement. Because he had adopted the agreement that I had with my mentor. He's like, I don't like it. When you come back to California, we should talk about it. That was it. That was the whole conversation. Now for me, I, I didn't, I didn't know, because I'd had so much success for so long. I never, I never had to deal with any instability in my life in that way. I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. And I had, started having panic attacks and couldn't sleep. I got really sick.

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  And again, for, for almost anyone else, the exact same scenario would have been, okay, we'll deal with it when I get there, no problem and move on. But I didn't have the ability to deal with it because I never had to deal with anything like that. I didn't have the musculature to deal with that issue. And it felt like the rug was pulled out. I didn't know what to do and sunk. And then it ended up going on for years, even after the problem was solved. I ended up leaving the company, starting a relationship with a new company. Everything was fine. But some, it's like, it was like a, it was like I was a balloon that got burst in that moment.

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  And I'm still not the same person as I was before. Now, maybe now I'm more rooted in reality, which probably sounds funny after a lot of the things I've been saying. Before that, I would say I never questioned anything. It was just like, everything was always rolling in this one direction. And that was the first time that it was questioned and I, it sunk me and took years to get out of it. What I will say though, is that because of that, so many of the artists I work with deal with a lot of personal issues. And before that, before I was 33, I probably didn't understand how they felt

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  as much as I do now. Because now I've had an experience where I feel like the bottom fell out. I would say it has helped my understanding of the artists I work with.

• 1:11:15Steven Bartlett?

  On your desert island discs, you said, it wasn't anything that I understood. I thought I was dying.

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Steven Bartlett?

  The essence of this is a, it was your first sort of big professional, dare I say rejection?

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah?

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. I was wrapped up in that, in who I was. And that questioned who I was.

• 1:11:38Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  For the first time.

• 1:11:42Steven Bartlett?

  And you went to therapy?

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  Yes, went to therapy and ended up using an antidepressant drug, which I tend not to be a drug person, but it was bad enough for long enough that that was the final, it was the, it was the last thing. I was seeing a different therapist, probably a therapist or a healer, at least one, five days a week. And every time I would wake up and go and just thinking, maybe today it's going to be better. Maybe today it's going to be better. And it wasn't better. It was really a tough time.

• 1:12:20Steven Bartlett?

  What was, what was going on under the surface of this? Cause it, cause on the surface, one would say Rick got a professional rejection.

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Steven Bartlett?

  And it resulted in him saying that he thought he was dying. That's what we see on the surface.

• 1:12:31Speaker 00

  Well, it was totally, it, it always happening on the unconscious level. Couldn't sleep, was nauseous all the time, didn't want to get out of bed. It was like, it was a, I felt it in a physical way and didn't want to do anything.

• 1:12:47Steven Bartlett?

  What, what is this? What, what was that?

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  Well, I've heard it described as like being shot with a poison arrow in a, in a philosophical or a psychological way. I was shot with a poison arrow.

• 1:13:00Steven Bartlett?

  Cause I've, I've looked at your, um, your earliest years. I've looked at, you know, two wonderful people there.

• 1:13:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:06Steven Bartlett?

  Your mom and your dad.

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:08Steven Bartlett?

  And sometimes, you know, when I interview people that are anomalous in some way, I find that their upbringing had some sort of trauma and they had a chip on their shoulder. But with you, I had very much the opposite, that you had two parents that really, really loved you.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  Really loved me. Could do no wrong. But that was part of what it was. It's like I'd been raised believing I could do no wrong.

• 1:13:29Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  And then in the real world, making music, the success showed that I could do no wrong. Until someone decided, you know what? I don't like, I don't like what you're doing. So I just had no, I just didn't have context for it. No way to deal with it.

• 1:13:51Steven Bartlett?

  Sounds like a horrific season of your life.

• 1:13:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Steven Bartlett?

  Would you, if there was, um, if there was a button on the table now that would allow you to erase it, would you press it?

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  I would not.

• 1:14:01Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:14:02Speaker 00

  Um, I feel like every event that I've had in my life, positive and negative, has brought me to where I am now. And I wouldn't want to change a thing. I wouldn't want to change anything.

• 1:14:19Steven Bartlett?

  What did it give you?

• 1:14:22Speaker 00

  It gave me a different perspective. Again, I think it brought me down to a more realistic view of the world. Still one who believes in magic and that the impossible is possible on a daily basis. But, but before I might've felt more like Superman and I don't feel like Superman anymore.

• 1:14:38Steven Bartlett?

  What do you feel like?

• 1:14:40Speaker 00

  Uh, tired.

• 1:14:41Steven Bartlett?

  Tired. I am, you know, as, as creatives, I want to go back to this question I was asking you earlier on about the similarities you see in these great artists. I heard on one end conviction and then I also had humility, which kind of seemed like opposing forces. Is there anything else that you see in the similarities between the Jay-Z's, the Kanye's? The list of people that you've worked with is endless.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  It usually has to do with a point of view, seeing the world in a way that other people don't see. Now, maybe something that everybody sees, but no one has pointed out before. They notice the world in a different way. It's what a great comedian does. Great comedian says something and you laugh at it because you relate to what he's saying. It's like, of course, so funny, so ridiculous. That's what we do. It's the same. It's, it's seeing another layer of what's possible. Understanding the world on a deeper level than we think we see it. And with art, we get to experience all these emotions that are happening to someone else.

• 1:15:49Speaker 00

  But because we're humans, they resonate and we get to feel, you can hear a, a song of heartbreak and you don't even have to be heartbroken, but you feel, you can feel it. You can see a movie that can really impact your life. And art has this incredible ability to widen our perspective and see things from different angles that we couldn't see before.

• 1:16:16Steven Bartlett?

  Do great artists work hard?

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  Very hard.

• 1:16:20Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  From the outside, you'd think, you check into the recording studio and make something and put it out and then you go on tour and everybody screams. It's a grueling job. Everything about it is hard. It's wildly competitive, not because you're competing with other people, but because a lot of people are trying to do it. And, and you can be tremendously talented, but if you don't have the work ethic to go with it, it's unlikely that anyone will ever hear what you do. So it's this combination of really diligent work ethic, doing whatever it takes. And some

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  interesting perspective, an interesting point of view, an interesting view on the world that someone else looks at and thinks, hmm, I never saw it that way before.

• 1:17:13Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a way that you know to make my perspective on the world more interesting?

• 1:17:20Speaker 00

  It sounds like you spend a lot of time looking at business and self-help material. And I would say maybe you look outside, look at the great things outside of that area and see how they rhyme or how they resonate or how they relate. Often we get great ideas from something having nothing to do with what we're actually interested in. We'll see some new thing. I would say start going to museums, you know, go to museums, look at the art, take the walking tour with the headphones, listen to the stories. Read the great literature.

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  When I say the great literature, it's not one single list, but if you ask around, you'll find out. And if three people recommend it, definitely read it. See the great movies, ever see the great movies, the, you know, the greatest movies of all time.

• 1:18:16Steven Bartlett?

  It's funny because when we're told how to become a good insert occupation, we're told to go study that occupation, be a good lawyer, go study law. But oftentimes it appears to be the case, even with someone like Steve Jobs, that they have these sort of rare things in their skill stack, like his love of design and typography. No one at university would have told him, okay, you want to be a great computer programmer? Go do typography design.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it's usually, what makes you good at what you do is not that you do it the same as everybody else. So if everyone is reading the same books, they're going to have the same perspective. I would go outside. I would also recommend reading old books as opposed to new books. Ancient wisdom is the best. Start very old.

• 1:19:03Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, I've got some books here.

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  Yes. Good choices.

• 1:19:09Steven Bartlett?

  You're a fan of these books?

• 1:19:10Speaker 00

  I love these books.

• 1:19:11Steven Bartlett?

  Why? What did they give you?

• 1:19:12Speaker 00

  I first read the Tao when I was, I had just moved to California. It's probably thirty years ago. And I read it and I felt like this is different than anything I read before.

• 1:19:29Speaker 00

  It speaks to me on so many levels. And then I remember reading it something like six months later, and it was an entirely different book. And it's the kind of book that every time you read it at different points in your life, you will read an entirely different book. And this was the inspiration for The Way of Code. And The Way of Code is essentially an adaptation of the Tao for vibe coding.

• 1:19:55Steven Bartlett?

  Oftentimes, books can be summarized into a sort of a lesson. Is there a lesson, a central lesson that you got from that book?

• 1:20:03Speaker 00

  Maybe I would use one sentence like that the soft overcomes the hard. That would be a good, that would be one. Things that seem counterintuitive, that non-action is often the best action. Now, that seems crazy.

• 1:20:21Speaker 00

  But that really is where it's at. You know, there's a story about Napoleon that when someone would come to Napoleon during all the warring stuff that was going on, they would come with an emergency, you know, you're the only one who can answer this. Here's the problem. It's an emergency. He would always say, bring it back to me in two weeks.

• 1:20:46Speaker 00

  And the idea was

• 1:20:49Speaker 00

  ninety-nine percent of the problems that need your immediate attention in two weeks, we resolve themselves. And if it's still a problem in two weeks, he'll deal with it.

• 1:21:00Steven Bartlett?

  Might try that with my fiancee.

• 1:21:02Speaker 00

  See how it goes.

• 1:21:05Steven Bartlett?

  It's an interesting idea, though, that, what was that phrase you said, the soft?

• 1:21:09Speaker 00

  The soft overcomes the hard.

• 1:21:10Steven Bartlett?

  The soft overcomes the hard.

• 1:21:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like the idea of water dripping on a rock. That eventually the water will eat through the rock, slowly dripping. Water's soft, the water's totally pliable, malleable, soft.

• 1:21:27Steven Bartlett?

  And what about this book? Is there an essence?

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  Well, I like, I like Carl Jung, and this is probably his most mystical book. But in general, his ideas of archetypes and looking into dreams and synchronicity are beautiful ideas, and I think that they're, I think that they're really how the world works. So

• 1:21:53Speaker 00

  I find comfort in reading him because it's different than what we're shown in math and science, but maybe closer to how it really is.

• 1:22:04Steven Bartlett?

  I'm gonna have to ask you to elaborate, especially on this point of view, saying that synchronicity is actually more so how the world works.

• 1:22:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we don't know how anything really works.

• 1:22:16Speaker 00

  I think the world is much bigger and more interesting than we give it credit for. And most of the things that we think we understand maybe are not so accurate. Like, one of the things about science is that science is the understanding of how things are now until the next scientific breakthrough comes and negates everything that was before it. It's like this ongoing interest. And I think maybe there's an inner knowingness, like, we don't know why. You meet somebody and you really want to spend time with them. I don't think that science can explain that. And you meet someone else and you feel like, you know what?

• 1:23:01Speaker 00

  I don't want to be around this person. There's something going on energetically here that's not for me.

• 1:23:09Speaker 00

  I think that that's the kind of wisdom that probably has more impact on our lives than anything that you can, any data can show us.

• 1:23:21Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking about how believing what you've just said might change my life.

• 1:23:26Speaker 00

  Yes, it would.

• 1:23:28Steven Bartlett?

  In what ways do you think it might change my life?

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  It's like you would take the shackles off of feeling like it has to be this narrow way or thinking, well, if these numbers look like this, then it means this, and this is what's gonna happen. When in reality, you know, many times you've looked at the numbers and then acted accordingly. And then three years later, realize, hmm, it didn't really work out the way I thought. That's the real world. Like, that's one way of looking at things, you know, the Moneyball approach is one way. And then the other way is when you met your wife and you felt like, I want to be with her. That's different. There weren't any metrics you could use to calculate whether that was a good idea or not.

• 1:24:12Steven Bartlett?

  It's like an invitation to trust ourselves more as well, because you're talking about energetic feeling and.

• 1:24:18Speaker 00

  And doing things that would make trusting yourself make more sense. That's the other part of it. It's like if you spend so much time not trusting yourself,

• 1:24:30Speaker 00

  then that antenna, to be able to tell what's going on, might be a little rusty. So anything you can do to start using the antenna as often as possible and letting it dictate you. There was a time when I was surprised by the miracles that I would see, and now I'm not surprised. It's still surprising, but it happens enough where it's like, yeah, that's what happens. Look at that. Can't predict it, can't bet on it. But when it happens, like, hmm, it seemed like that's what was gonna happen. Happened. Look at that.

• 1:25:13Steven Bartlett?

  And you think there is a higher force taking actions on our lives?

• 1:25:18Speaker 00

  I think there's a higher intelligent, creative intelligence that

• 1:25:24Speaker 00

  I'll say, lives the world, like the thing that

• 1:25:29Speaker 00

  allows plants to grow. There's some generative force. I don't know that it's like aiming particularly at you or me, but there's some energy that like life wants to live.

• 1:25:45Speaker 00

  And you can ride, same like catching a wave, you know, you can,

• 1:25:50Speaker 00

  you can catch the wave. The wave is there. There's a lot of waves beyond the ones in the ocean, and you can ride those waves. You can't always see them, but you might be able to feel them. You might be able to, over time, you start to recognize them. And for some reason, it seems like the universe wants us to know about this. It's what I talked about, paying attention and about the, the way of code, like, it was a ridiculous thing. It was indefensible. But I listened to this feeling. It's coming from a lot of sources. Didn't make sense to me.

• 1:26:31Speaker 00

  But it felt like, hmm, I'm being asked to do something here. What could it be? Let me try to participate.

• 1:26:38Steven Bartlett?

  What I hear from a lot of what you're saying is, it's making me think about how like rationality as an idea, being rational.

• 1:26:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:45Steven Bartlett?

  Can be a bit of a curse. I would consider myself to be quite a rational person.

• 1:26:48Speaker 00

  I would say rationality is overrated. The rational world is very small. There's much more, there are much more interesting things going on than the rational world.

• 1:27:00Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, that's exactly what my fiancee would say to me. What she has been saying to me. I think, I think we go together. Funnily enough, you're talking about pluses and minuses, because she is someone that helps me break outside of rationality.

• 1:27:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:27:13Steven Bartlett?

  And when, when she, when she speaks to me about these ideas she has, about these, you know, bigger ideas she has, I always listen very intently, although at some level I am, I guess, rebuttling them.

• 1:27:22Speaker 00

  But do you see how they impact her life? Do you see what they do to her?

• 1:27:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:28Speaker 00

  Does it feel like it raises her vibration like?

• 1:27:30Steven Bartlett?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:27:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like there's, that counts. You know, the way she feels, that counts.

• 1:27:39Steven Bartlett?

  Her vibe.

• 1:27:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Steven Bartlett?

  One of the.

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  Enough for you to want to be around her all the time.

• 1:27:46Steven Bartlett?

  I feel like I'm, yeah, leeching off that vibe to some degree sometimes. What you talked about higher intelligence and you talked about a generative force, which is the perfect segue into the big subject of the moment, which is artificial intelligence. Kind of links to what you're saying about vibe coding as well. For the first time ever, I was saying yesterday, I got a message from my, one of my friends who isn't involved in technology, saying like, I'm concerned. I don't know what this technology is, is it gonna take our jobs? I'm concerned. And that for me was the bat signal that, that this is really getting down to everyday people. This week, there was an anthropic researcher who also worked at ChatGPT, OpenAI. Say he thinks it might be the, the end of the human race, or at least there's a more than ten percent chance of that.

• 1:28:33Steven Bartlett?

  AI is a broad subject. Sure, you've got lots of thoughts on it.

• 1:28:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's a, it's a wildly powerful tool. And I'm curious to see what it can do. Like any powerful tool, it could be really dangerous. It could be used for bad or it could be used for good. Fire burned down my house. I wouldn't say we should ban fire. Fire cooks our food, does some good stuff, heats our, heats our houses. It's one of these things, like the internet changed the world. It does some really good things, probably does some really bad things. Very powerful. The printing press, when it came along, the church tried to ban the printing press. They didn't want that. They didn't want books to be able to, they didn't want information to be able to be for everybody.

• 1:29:22Speaker 00

  Good came from that and probably some bad.

• 1:29:25Steven Bartlett?

  Can it be creative?

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  I don't know. I'm curious. I don't know. I feel like everything we've talked about today, about what creativity is, has to do with point of view. And AI doesn't have a point of view. AI is

• 1:29:43Speaker 00

  the collected ideas that already exist. It doesn't have, it doesn't see it from a particular angle. And if you ask it the same question several times or several days in a row, it may give you a very different answer day after day. So it's not like it has, this is how it sees the world.

• 1:30:04Steven Bartlett?

  If I asked an AI to make ten million different tracks.

• 1:30:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:08Steven Bartlett?

  Would it, theoretically, it would at some point make a hit, even though it doesn't have a, a point of view per se.

• 1:30:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, it's hard for me to say what a hit even is. But I would say it could make ten thousand tracks and you might like one or two of them, or you may like five percent of them. You might. And that's interesting. And I could see like, there was a time when we would sample records, when we were doing hip hop records. It was called crate digging, where you'd go to record stores, find old records, listen to them all the way through and find one little part. It's like, ah, this little breakbeat, let's use that and make a new song out of it. And, and you change the context, make something new. So if AI was playing music constantly in the background, and then all of a sudden I heard a little clip, oh, that's a good sample, we can make that into something. That would be a use.

• 1:30:57Speaker 00

  I, I, I think the idea of it doing the end to end of replacing the artist, I don't think it, I, I can't imagine doing that. I'd be curious to see if it could. But I think what we want from an artist has to do with point of view. And I see AI maybe as a tool that could help the artist and maybe even help the person who doesn't know they're an artist be an artist. So I can't draw, I can't play any instruments, I don't have any talent. I have no way to express my creativity. But I could talk to the AI and maybe I could prompt the AI into making something beautiful through iteration and prompting.

• 1:31:39Speaker 00

  So maybe more people will get to be creative using AI, and I think that's a beautiful thing.

• 1:31:45Steven Bartlett?

  This is such a recurring debate. You hear it probably on every panel everywhere at the moment, which is, can AI be creative? And I've thought a lot about, like, I've sort of tried to interrogate the question itself, because you first sort of need to define what creativity is. And then I think what people are saying is when they think of creativity, they actually think of good creativity that sold well or that was number one. So oftentimes, I remember one of my friends was saying to me the other day, I don't think AI could ever make, and then he like named a great song.

• 1:32:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:14Steven Bartlett?

  AI could never make that. And even when I look at that great song, what's making him think it was great creativity in hindsight was actually, as you use the word end to end, an end to end process of having the meeting with MTV, building up distribution and reputation. Maybe people being, following that artist's life and therefore that being part of the point of view. People have followed Olivia Dean. So when she makes music, something else comes with that, a story comes with that. Olivia Dean's signed to a record label, so maybe there's some support there that's done. And in hindsight, we go, amazing creativity. But what we're actually saying is there was this long process, which resulted in this, me experiencing this thing. And so I consider it creative.

• 1:32:56Steven Bartlett?

  Now, AI might, like, I was trying to think like, okay, AI could help with, be the tool that you described. But isn't the whole process part of what we look back on and say, that was great creativity?

• 1:33:07Speaker 00

  I would say the whole process. I also think it's even beyond the process, like the things that we make are the reminders that we're creative. They're just the output. The real creativity is the idea that allows this thing to be made. If you look at Alfred Hitchcock, his movies, he works out his whole movie in advance and he storyboards the whole movie. And if you look at the storyboard, he doesn't even really need to make the movie. The whole thing is there, just in drawings. Exactly, frame by frame, the whole movie is there.

• 1:33:48Speaker 00

  Wes Anderson makes his movie frame by frame in advance before there are actors. So he could watch the whole movie

• 1:33:57Speaker 00

  like a mock, a mock-up of the movie.

• 1:34:02Speaker 00

  And then with the actors is where he executes the idea. And I think AI is, it could be a great tool to like assist in this mocking up. But it's the prompt, the prompt is where the creativity is.

• 1:34:20Speaker 00

  The prompt is what Wes is using and what Alfred Hitchcock is using to tell the, the artist what to draw in each frame. The creativity is there. It's not in the drawing. It's not in the finished movie. It's in the prompt.

• 1:34:40Speaker 00

  So the, I feel like now using prompts, anyone can prompt, and you can get better at prompting through experimentation.

• 1:34:53Speaker 00

  So someone who thinks of themselves as not, not creative, the idea of learning how to prompt, it's pretty easy.

• 1:35:02Speaker 00

  It's really like the barrier of entry is very low. And I think that's a good thing.

• 1:35:10Steven Bartlett?

  In a world where the barrier of entry is so low to creating,

• 1:35:16Steven Bartlett?

  what, what becomes the distinction? What makes a great artist from a, a not so great, great artist?

• 1:35:21Speaker 00

  Well, the same thing now, it's the same thing as now, like the, the reason you love the artist you love is they make something that changes your life, moves you. You want to listen to it a million times, you want to see the movie over and over again, you want to read, you want to read their books. I don't know if it,

• 1:35:40Speaker 00

  if the AI itself could write the book that you want to read over and over again. I don't know if that's a problem, if that happens. I don't see any indication that that's gonna happen. But more good art doesn't seem like a bad thing.

• 1:35:59Steven Bartlett?

  Me and my business partner out there, Georgia Gibson, we were on Spotify and we listened to this song, we really liked it. And about two months later, I figured out it was AI. The only reason I figured out it was AI was because I went to get more from the artist. And as I clicked through, I realized it was AI. And then the other thing that happened around the time is, there was these two songs from this Spotify artist, I guess. And one of them disappeared. And so I, that's when I went on Google and was looking like, what, what happened to that song?

• 1:36:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:30Steven Bartlett?

  And it turns out it was an AI artist. Something interesting happened when I realized I was listening to an AI song.

• 1:36:35Speaker 00

  What happened?

• 1:36:35Steven Bartlett?

  I didn't like it as much anymore.

• 1:36:37Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 1:36:39Steven Bartlett?

  And so when I think about, again, creativity, I wonder if there is a sort of an irreplaceably human element, because it resonated with me, because there was this story that it came from this woman who was singing, and she was talking about this subject and it meant something to her. And then when I found out it was none of that, it, the song lost something.

• 1:36:59Speaker 00

  If you think about Andy Warhol's art,

• 1:37:03Speaker 00

  Andy Warhol started as a commercial illustrator. So he would draw shoes for advertising, let's say. And then he came up with what essentially now what we call pop art. And pop art was a Brillo box or a soup, or a Campbell's soup can. And maybe the first Campbell's soup cans, he drew them and painted them. Those were the first ones. But then over time, he did a series of images that were screen printed. So like Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, really famous, the most famous Andy Warhol images. He never painted anything, he never touched anything.

• 1:37:44Speaker 00

  He said, we're gonna use this shot of, of Marilyn and we're gonna treat it in this way. And he prompted the, the people in the studio to screen print these things. And they're not less Andy Warhol. The art's always in the ideation. That's where the art is. It's not who put the paint on the canvas.

• 1:38:14Speaker 00

  There was a time, even, even going back to the Renaissance, so many of the painters had studios and you'd see Rembrandt. And Rembrandt might have painted

• 1:38:26Speaker 00

  seventy percent, he might have painted thirty percent of that painting. But it was his vision for the painting and he would have the guys in the studio, you guys do this. I'm not sure if Rembrandt's the best example of this, but could be. It was, it's a normal thing that artists who had studios would have other people, other painters, disciples, who would do a lot of the work.

• 1:38:50Speaker 00

  Happens now in the studio, so many records, you'll hear a, it can be a band, but then the band isn't playing on the record, studio musicians are playing on the record. It's normal, it's just part of the process, but doesn't make it less good, it's just a different thing. It's fine.

• 1:39:10Speaker 00

  It's the ideation is where it comes from. And I don't know that the AI's ideation

• 1:39:17Speaker 00

  is interesting to anyone. We'll see.

• 1:39:20Steven Bartlett?

  I always think with like the F1, if they removed Lewis Hamilton from the car, I wouldn't watch the F1 anymore, even if the cars drove faster and beat their times, because there's something in me watching a human being experience those emotions of competition and anger. And, you know, you can kind of see by the way they're driving, how they're feeling. And you can relate to that, go, I felt like that in work once.

• 1:39:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it does seem less interesting if it was just a car, automated car doing it.

• 1:39:46Steven Bartlett?

  So what, what has been removed is kind of, I guess, what I experienced with that Spotify song I was talking about is like resident, human relatability and resonance and me too and connection.

• 1:39:59Speaker 00

  But it's interesting that you liked it before you knew. And that's interesting, you know, that's interesting to me. And I wonder, would I be against something because of the way it was made? It doesn't make sense to me. You either like it or you don't.

• 1:40:23Steven Bartlett?

  It's, we're living in interesting times.

• 1:40:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:40:27Steven Bartlett?

  You used the word miracles earlier on, which I found to be an interesting word.

• 1:40:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31Steven Bartlett?

  And I wondered if you had experienced miracles through the creative process of working with great artists.

• 1:40:36Speaker 00

  All the time.

• 1:40:37Steven Bartlett?

  What are those? Is there a miracle you could share?

• 1:40:41Speaker 00

  There's an Avet Brothers song called, um, No Hard Feelings. And they were playing it in the studio and it was okay. It was fine. Wasn't great. They played it a few times and then finally they played it one time and again, I don't even remember if we even said do anything different. Might have even just tried again. You know, it could have been that. Nothing changed. And for some reason,

• 1:41:09Speaker 00

  while they were playing it, it was like time stopped. And this incredible thing happened. I don't know why. No one involved knew why or how. But after, I, I remember about a minute into the song, I remember thinking,

• 1:41:27Speaker 00

  there's this feeling, it's scary because it's really good. We don't know how or why.

• 1:41:34Speaker 00

  I hope they can get to the end of the song because if they don't get to the end of the song, we don't have it. And we, maybe we can never get back to this. That's what it's like. It's like, so as soon as you realize in the process, if you happen to realize, okay, something shifted, something magic is happening now. Sometimes you don't know it right away. Sometimes you know it after. I've made an album with Neil Young where we recorded for a week.

• 1:42:02Speaker 00

  It was not good. The band, it sounded like the band not only couldn't play the songs, but would never be able to play the songs. That was a feeling in the first week.

• 1:42:14Speaker 00

  And at the end of the first week, Neil said to me after, he's like, don't worry, next week's going to be better. We're going to, they're going to be able to do it. It's like, okay, okay. Like I'm, nothing showed me that, but let's go, I'll listen. And then the next week, Neil said to Ralph, the drummer, he's like, uh, okay, let's play whatever, the third song again. And Ralph's like, well, we already did that last week. And he was like, oh, let's maybe we could beat it. And Ralph's like, no, I really think we got it. And now last week, we thought not only did we not get it, but that we may never get it. And then we tried playing it again. It is no better. And then Ralph says, put back, put on the one from last week.

• 1:42:56Speaker 00

  And he puts on the one from last week and he says, well, turn down the, um, turn down the bass a little bit.

• 1:43:04Speaker 00

  Maybe turn the piano up. And we listened to it again and

• 1:43:10Speaker 00

  it seemed like it still had problems. But the magic was there.

• 1:43:19Speaker 00

  Kind of, it had a lot of mistakes, but forgetting the mistakes, the feeling, the feeling was there. And then our job was just like

• 1:43:32Speaker 00

  doing little bits of repairs here and there, or a little ducking a sound or featuring a sound or adding another vocal or doing little things and turned, almost a whole album turned out to be recorded that first week when it seemed like it would never happen.

• 1:43:52Speaker 00

  So that would, that felt like a miracle.

• 1:43:54Steven Bartlett?

  The question that's front of mind, when you talk about these moments where great art was created, everybody wants to know how to make it repeatable. How do we repeat that process?

• 1:44:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's not, none of this is repeatable.

• 1:44:05Speaker 00

  No, the thing that's repeatable is you show up and you keep going till it's great, whatever it takes. That's the thing. It's like, and sometimes you listen back. Like you'll make a demo or you'll do a little sketch and you think this is, this is a great idea. This is beautiful. Now I'm going to make a big painting. And you work on the painting for months and months and months. It never really comes together. But then you look back at that original drawing that you made in five minutes. Like, you know, that's actually it. Happened on the first album I made with Johnny Cash. We recorded all these songs in my living room of him singing and playing guitar. We weren't recording for an album. We were recording,

• 1:44:46Speaker 00

  it was the way that we got to know each other. I asked him to play me all of his favorite songs, songs he liked, he remembered from growing up. Songs that mean a lot to him, or I might say, can you try playing this song? Let's just see what it sounds like. More like trying to understand what sounded good when he sang it. We were doing this exploration. And we did that with the idea of we're going to test a hundred songs this way. And then maybe we'll find 10 and the 10 that we like best will go into the studio with a band and we'll record them. And we did that and recorded with a great band. And it was interesting, but it wasn't better. And then we did it again with a different band, same thing. Wasn't better. It's like,

• 1:45:24Speaker 00

  I guess those recordings from the living room, which we had no thoughts of ever, anybody ever hearing, they have something that the real recordings don't have. And we ended up putting out those. So, but again, that we didn't go into the process to do that. We discovered it through the process. And sometimes it's the opposite way where you may, you have a clear vision of what it's going to be and you do it all the way. And it, it tells you through that process, it wants to be this entire other thing.

• 1:46:02Steven Bartlett?

  It wants to be.

• 1:46:03Speaker 00

  It wants to be.

• 1:46:04Steven Bartlett?

  You're saying that as if it's got a mind of its own.

• 1:46:07Speaker 00

  It does.

• 1:46:10Speaker 00

  Well, I'm only saying it does because it shows you,

• 1:46:15Speaker 00

  no, what you think is wrong, try it like this.

• 1:46:20Steven Bartlett?

  You're sort of personifying, you're sort of.

• 1:46:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm personifying. It doesn't say it in words, but it's clear. The indicators are clear. What we get back is, hmm, we thought it was supposed to be this fast. When we listen to it, it's clearly much too fast. We have to play it slower. We thought it was going to be a loud electric song. Turns out it wants to be a really quiet song. We didn't know that.

• 1:46:46Steven Bartlett?

  Has there been a time where you thought something was just the most amazing thing ever? And then when it went out into the world, the world didn't subjectively think it was amazing.

• 1:46:57Speaker 00

  For sure. It probably happens often.

• 1:46:59Steven Bartlett?

  And how do you rationalize that on the basis of?

• 1:47:02Speaker 00

  As soon as I decide that I like it enough to share with the world, I'm done. I move on to the next thing. I can't, the, what anyone else thinks doesn't really impact it. It's fun when people like it. I love it when people like it. But that's total bonus. The real work is I like this enough to put it out into the world. My name's on the back of the record. The artist's name's on the front. They like it enough to put it out. I like it enough to put it out. Here you go. What's next?

• 1:47:36Steven Bartlett?

  And what comes of that? You're treating like none of your business.

• 1:47:39Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:47:42Speaker 00

  Cause anything that I think of past that is going to totally undermine the creative process. The creative process is a pure,

• 1:47:54Speaker 00

  uh, delicate process to be protected. And if you're thinking about what happens next, totally undermines it. The house of cards crumbles. When we're working in the studio and something starts sounding good and someone, one of the artists might say, oh, this sounds like it could be a single. It's like, we're not talking about that. That has nothing to do with what we're doing.

• 1:48:22Steven Bartlett?

  What are you doing?

• 1:48:23Speaker 00

  Making the best thing we can make.

• 1:48:26Speaker 00

  We, we're making the best thing we can make. And I always use this, I always thought of it as greatness, like we're working towards greatness, timeless greatness. Didn't know what it meant. And more recently I came to realize we're making it as an offering to God. And if we're making it as an offering to God, things like the numbers, that's much, that's insignificant.

• 1:48:51Speaker 00

  This is, we're doing our best as an offering. There's nothing deeper than that. There's no metric that competes with that.

• 1:49:04Speaker 00

  I didn't always know that, but it was always the same.

• 1:49:10Steven Bartlett?

  Was there a point when you realized that?

• 1:49:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, a few years ago. And it felt good when I realized it was like, ah, of course. You know, 35 years in, oh.

• 1:49:23Steven Bartlett?

  Do you remember the moment?

• 1:49:26Speaker 00

  I have a vague memory. I don't remember the specifics. I remember I was sitting on a lifeguard chair in Hawaii. And, uh, and I remember thinking about it there, but I don't know if that's the moment where it struck me. But I remember it was like, it was a total epiphany, even though it was only, you know, for me, it didn't apply to anything else. It was just like, I realized what I've been doing all this time without understanding it, it just became clear. It's like, ah, that's what it is.

• 1:49:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. It was a great, it was a great feeling of like, now it all makes more sense.

• 1:50:07Steven Bartlett?

  Do you mean in the literal sense, you think that you are making offerings for a higher power, very, very literally?

• 1:50:13Speaker 00

  I'm saying God.

• 1:50:19Steven Bartlett?

  And God defined as the higher power.

• 1:50:21Speaker 00

  We can call him the Father.

• 1:50:23Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. And you're literally, so the art you make, the music you, you make, he is actually the customer in some respects.

• 1:50:31Speaker 00

  No, because it's a gift. So he's not, it's not a customer. He's the beneficiary, but he's not the customer. And it's like a, I want to, I want to show you my best out of love and thanks gratitude. Here's the best I can do.

• 1:50:54Speaker 00

  That's what it is.

• 1:50:57Speaker 00

  This is my best.

• 1:51:00Speaker 00

  If anybody else likes it, great. But if not, we're good.

• 1:51:06Steven Bartlett?

  Does he ever get feedback?

• 1:51:09Speaker 00

  I want to say that when other people like it, I might, I might take that as a good sign, but I don't know. I, I don't really think about it. But I feel like when a lot of people like it, it's like the energy of it is positive all the way around.

• 1:51:28Speaker 00

  Interesting to think about. Fun to think about.

• 1:51:31Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think that's why we're here? Cause, cause I'm now trying to figure out why there would be such a relationship with God where we were offering gifts and how that links to our maybe higher purpose.

• 1:51:41Speaker 00

  Well, I think we're here to show who we are. We're here to self-express. I am here. I'm here to tell you, this is me. This is how I see the world and say to you, show me who you are. Tell me how you see the world. And the way we make sense of it is we discuss that. And we may, in some areas, we may line up. In some cases we may differ, but that's how we figure it out. And everything we do is, this is how I see the world. And then other people say, I never saw it that way, but yes. I'm on board with that. And other people are like, no, that's not for me. And that's fine.

• 1:52:22Speaker 00

  But we are here. Our purpose is to self-express.

• 1:52:28Steven Bartlett?

  Through several different means through.

• 1:52:30Speaker 00

  Any different way, any self-expression comes in a lot of, in a lot of forms.

• 1:52:37Speaker 00

  But the best version, it's never because they did it this way. That's not self-expression. Copying that, they were successful and I'm copying them. That's not self-expression. That's a different game. That's not what we're here for. You can do it. It's fine. It's fine. But I don't think that's why we're here.

• 1:53:00Steven Bartlett?

  I sat with a, uh, someone who is an expert on consciousness. He's a physicist who just, you know, is very spiritual. One of the things he said to me, which has really stayed with me is he was positing that potentially consciousness itself is God has divided consciousness into lots of little pieces, into my French bulldog Pablo, into Rick, into someone in China. And he set us all off to go and explore and understand the world. And by doing so, consciousness is seeking to understand itself. Very strange idea. And then I went to, I think Malta and I was driving down the road in Malta and I looked and I saw these tourists. And with that idea in mind, that consciousness has divided itself to go and understand itself into these pieces, into a fish. So he can go check the bottom of the ocean. I saw these tourists and they were all just looking up at this mountain.

• 1:53:44Steven Bartlett?

  And like with, in the abstract, that's, it looks like a very strange thing that we're like fascinated by the novel. And so I started to think, maybe that is true. Maybe this thing called consciousness is this exploration to understand itself. And it's turned, some consciousness has gone into Rick and Rick is experimenting and creating to understand and to, and kind of what you were saying there reminded me of it because it sounded like you were talking about consciousness itself and the self-expression of consciousness. So.

• 1:54:11Speaker 00

  It could be. It's a beautiful idea.

• 1:54:14Steven Bartlett?

  Strange idea, isn't it?

• 1:54:16Speaker 00

  Not strange to me.

• 1:54:18Steven Bartlett?

  Not strange to you?

• 1:54:19Speaker 00

  Not at all.

• 1:54:21Steven Bartlett?

  Nothing is off the table.

• 1:54:22Speaker 00

  Nothing's off the table.

• 1:54:24Steven Bartlett?

  One of, um, one of the great artists you've, uh, you've worked with, we talked about is, um, is Jay-Z.

• 1:54:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:54:31Steven Bartlett?

  And you have this wonderful eight part documentary.

• 1:54:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:54:34Steven Bartlett?

  Coming out with Jay-Z, which I was fascinated enough to, uh, I found fascinating to watch. It's out on the 18th of September and one of the clips that I watched from it just had us run down.

• 1:54:49Steven Bartlett?

  It's the story of, um, this brand.

• 1:54:51Speaker 00

  Ah, yes. Ace of Spades.

• 1:54:53Steven Bartlett?

  I found it really fascinating, the story that Jay-Z told about this brand Ace of Spades.

• 1:54:59Steven Bartlett?

  For many reasons, but it also, it rhymes with some of the things you're saying about integrity and how you feel. And his decision to, um, abandon another brand and at a cost, at a near term cost against his near term incentives and pursue launching his own.

• 1:55:18Speaker 00

  Yes. And what's interesting, what was most interesting about that story, and it's not, we don't make a lot of it. It's just a passing remark. But what happened was he decided not to support a company going forward.

• 1:55:36Steven Bartlett?

  Cristal?

• 1:55:37Speaker 00

  Yes. Which he had made very popular in the hip hop community. He was the first person to drink it. Nobody knew what it was. He talked about it in, in records, in songs, and it became a very popular drink in the hip hop community. And the person who ran Cristal said some disparaging remarks about it. About hip hop people drinking Cristal.

• 1:56:02Steven Bartlett?

  I can't get them to stop drinking it.

• 1:56:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And Jay was insulted, rightly so. And he said, you know what? No more. I won't do that anymore. Now, he, that didn't happen. And then he thought, I'm going to go start my own. That's not what happened. That happened and almost immediately someone came to him and said, I'm thinking about starting this brand. Do you want to do it with me?

• 1:56:29Speaker 00

  And all they had was the bottle, which he loved the shape of the bottle. And he loved that it was a gold bottle.

• 1:56:36Speaker 00

  And

• 1:56:38Speaker 00

  it's like the universe allowed. First he gets this negative comment. He reacts, following his belief, stood for what he believed in.

• 1:56:50Steven Bartlett?

  Removed it from his clubs.

• 1:56:51Speaker 00

  Yes. And this new opportunity that he was not looking for arrives. And it's like, you couldn't write the story. I mean, you could write the story, but it seems almost unbelievable the way it happened, but that's how it really happened. And that's again, like the miraculous nature of Jay did the right thing. And in response for doing the right thing,

• 1:57:19Speaker 00

  he ended up owning a champagne brand.

• 1:57:22Steven Bartlett?

  Do you believe that's how the universe is working?

• 1:57:24Speaker 00

  Yes. I know it.

• 1:57:28Speaker 00

  I know it.

• 1:57:29Steven Bartlett?

  Is that karma? Well, what is that?

• 1:57:31Speaker 00

  Well, that's part, you could call it that. It's like there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of names. There's a lot of labels, but you can call it karma.

• 1:57:40Steven Bartlett?

  When he took that action, he wasn't thinking about how he might benefit.

• 1:57:45Speaker 00

  Not at all. All he knew was these guys are insulting this movement. And I'm not going to have anything to do with them anymore. After I was telling everybody, this is the best stuff. They insult us.

• 1:58:01Speaker 00

  They're, we crossing them off. They're not for us anymore. We will not give them our business. He wasn't thinking about starting a business. He wasn't, he wasn't thinking about that at all.

• 1:58:13Steven Bartlett?

  But it became a great business.

• 1:58:15Speaker 00

  It became a great business, but it's, it's, the universe filled the void. This is another thing we could talk about. It's an interesting idea.

• 1:58:24Speaker 00

  You're in a, you're dating someone.

• 1:58:29Speaker 00

  You think maybe this is not, this is not right for the long term.

• 1:58:35Speaker 00

  But you're going along with it and then you think, well, maybe I'll meet someone while this is happening. And then if I like that person more, then I'll get out of this relationship for that relationship and switch. A lot of people do this. I feel like it's not the way, I don't, I don't think that's the way it works. I think

• 1:58:54Speaker 00

  when you know that something isn't working and you end it and you create that vacuum, you create that space. The good thing that you're looking for can come in to fill it. Jay wasn't looking, in this case, he wasn't looking for a good thing to fill it, but he did create a vacuum in his life. There's a thing that he's out there representing. And now he decides based on their action, I'm not going to represent this anymore. And the universe steps in and says, you know what? You're doing a good job of representing that thing. How about representing one for yourself that you can feel good about representing?

• 1:59:35Steven Bartlett?

  It's funny, what you were saying there, um, about creating a vacuum. We in culture, like generally in society, we celebrate starting. So like, you know, you start a new job, you start a new thing, but obviously from what you've just said, logically, you can't really start anything big in life without first doing something which none of us really glamorize. Actually, it's the opposite. We say never quit. Don't quit. But that is the necessary first step to starting, to starting a brand, which in Jay-Z's case, went on to be worth $630 million at the time when he sold his stake.

• 2:00:07Steven Bartlett?

  We have a weird relationship with quitting. We need certainty. I need the branch.

• 2:00:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, I think that's, it's an empowering thing. It's like taking control. I just had a conversation about this recently with someone who's a

• 2:00:23Speaker 00

  very high up person in a very high tech company who is, um, who's decided to step down and he's stepping down for the right reasons. And he's concerned that people, the perception will be he's being fired. That, that'll be the outside world. But he's really stepping down because he doesn't like what's going on there. And usually people don't leave jobs at that level. So it's an interesting, it's an interesting moment in time when that, when that happens.

• 2:00:52Steven Bartlett?

  So that's what you were saying about getting artists to step outside of their genre, to quit their genre.

• 2:00:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:01:01Steven Bartlett?

  This is something that I've made for you. I've realised that the diary of this here audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learnt is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this in our team, the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries. And we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back,

• 2:01:46Steven Bartlett?

  but also to introduce some new colours and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below.

• 2:02:10Steven Bartlett?

  I hear you used to make music with one of these things here.

• 2:02:13Speaker 00

  I've never used that particular device, but it looks beautiful.

• 2:02:18Steven Bartlett?

  You know, if I came to you, Rick, and I went,

• 2:02:22Steven Bartlett?

  I love that.

• 2:02:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:25Steven Bartlett?

  And clearly, I mean, objectively, it wasn't great.

• 2:02:28Speaker 00

  I don't know, it could be great.

• 2:02:30Steven Bartlett?

  But if I, if I was like, Rick,

• 2:02:36Steven Bartlett?

  I want to put that out.

• 2:02:37Speaker 00

  Do you really believe it's great? If you really believe it's great, I support you putting it out.

• 2:02:41Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 2:02:42Speaker 00

  If you really believe it's great, yes.

• 2:02:46Steven Bartlett?

  Would you interrogate?

• 2:02:46Speaker 00

  You're giving me this hypothetical of like, what if this thing that's bad, if I tell you I think it's great? It's like, you don't believe it's great.

• 2:02:55Speaker 00

  I trust when you tell me, I really love this thing. I want to play it for people. I support that.

• 2:03:02Steven Bartlett?

  Even if you, it doesn't matter if you.

• 2:03:04Speaker 00

  Doesn't matter. And if I don't like it, I'll say, you might want to try these things.

• 2:03:10Speaker 00

  But I always support somebody who makes something that they love. That's beautiful for the world.

• 2:03:15Steven Bartlett?

  Is there an example of that with artists you've worked with, where they presented you with something and you didn't really get it? You didn't feel it, you didn't like it. They put it out and it was a huge success for them, but also for the audience.

• 2:03:28Speaker 00

  I can think of one, but I don't really want to talk about it. But yes, I could think of one. It has happened.

• 2:03:35Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything you can tell me about it without identifying what the song was or the person was?

• 2:03:42Speaker 00

  I was working with an artist and there were lots of good songs. And there was one song that I felt like this one doesn't fit with all the rest. It feels like it doesn't go with the others. And the artist chose to include that one. And it ended up becoming a big hit.

• 2:04:01Speaker 00

  Wasn't the first single, but it did become a big hit.

• 2:04:06Speaker 00

  And it's any time I give my opinion. This isn't, this is a really interesting idea, this idea of I'm asked, how do I have the confidence? Because when I say I don't like something, I really mean it. It's like, well, how could you have the confidence that it's not good? It's like, well, I have the confidence that I don't like the pizza. It doesn't mean more than that. You know, it ends, I was asked to produce Guns N' Roses' first album and I turned them down because I went to see them live, played in a little club in a basement, maybe 30 people there. And they were, they were a hairband at the time with makeup and stuff. And I just looked like, I don't really get it. Now, they went on to become Guns N' Roses.

• 2:04:52Speaker 00

  It's good that I didn't work with them because if I would have worked with them, it might have turned into something different than what they did without me.

• 2:05:01Speaker 00

  So it wasn't the right, it wasn't the right fit.

• 2:05:06Speaker 00

  Do you know what I'm saying?

• 2:05:07Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:07Speaker 00

  It's like, it's,

• 2:05:11Speaker 00

  I'm honest about what I see and it's true, but it's only true for me.

• 2:05:19Steven Bartlett?

  I'm wondering if you can be at the inverse of that, if you can be a great creative and never be commercially successful ever.

• 2:05:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely. For sure.

• 2:05:29Speaker 00

  For sure. Probably more often than not. That's probably the, that's probably regular.

• 2:05:39Speaker 00

  Because becoming successful has so much to do with other things beyond being talented. Like the talent is a piece, but then the stars have to align. Like for, for anything to break through and get successful,

• 2:05:56Speaker 00

  so many things have to go right. So many, totally out of your control.

• 2:06:06Steven Bartlett?

  You must have worked with a lot of artists where you thought, I know this person is so talented.

• 2:06:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:11Steven Bartlett?

  But for whatever reason, they, they just didn't.

• 2:06:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it happens.

• 2:06:15Steven Bartlett?

  The world wasn't.

• 2:06:16Speaker 00

  It happens. And that also could be a karmic thing. Like there could be, maybe for some reason, this person is good as they are. That's not their path on this life. Maybe success is not part of their life path.

• 2:06:32Speaker 00

  Who knows? That's a, it's a different, that's a different question, you know?

• 2:06:37Steven Bartlett?

  You co-founded Def Jam when you were a very young, young man. I think you were 21 years old when you co-founded Def Jam.

• 2:06:44Speaker 00

  Probably.

• 2:06:46Steven Bartlett?

  Through that process, you, you got to meet, you know, some incredible people. I've got some of the albums that you produced around that time and published. But one of those people through, throughout your career and then thereafter was Jay-Z. What was special about Jay?

• 2:07:00Speaker 00

  Jay wrote in a way that no one else wrote. All the other rappers that I worked with spent a lot of time writing lyrics. And I never saw Jay write lyrics.

• 2:07:12Speaker 00

  And when I got to work with him, I got to see him not physically write lyrics. And when I played him the beat for 99 Problems, he said, okay, just keep looping it, keep playing it over and over again. And he sat in the back of the room and it went on long enough that I almost forgot that he was there because I was talking to the engineer and the song just playing over and over. And he's silent in the back. On occasion, you could hear him mumbling or humming.

• 2:07:38Speaker 00

  And then after 20 or 30 minutes, he's like, okay, I got it. Ran into the other room and did the first verse. Totally, the whole thing. No, nothing was written, just,

• 2:07:51Speaker 00

  he just remembered it. And he did it, he did several takes and each of the takes, the words were the same, but the cadence was different. Like almost as if a saxophonist was playing a solo and you know how the solo goes, but every time you play it, you play a little different. That's what it was like. Like it had emphasis in different places and the cadence was a little different. And one word might be featured in one version, whereas in the next version, that word just kind of went by less important. And then, so he did, let's say, three takes. And then he came in, he'd listened to them. He's like, oh yeah, I think the second one's good. And then he's like, okay, keep playing it and I'll, and he sat back down and he did the same thing again.

• 2:08:35Speaker 00

  About another half hour later, he's like, let's do the next one. Till he was ready. So he just, it just happens in his mind.

• 2:08:44Steven Bartlett?

  What is that, is that taste? Is that?

• 2:08:46Speaker 00

  I don't know. It's a, it's a real and unusual skill set. Very unusual. I don't know how we, how we can remember because it's complicated. It's not like in a rock song, there might be four lines in a verse. Pretty easy to remember. But rap songs have a lot of words and it's complicated. But, so that was, that was the first thing that really, I would say, separated him for everyone else from me is that his process was totally different than anyone else I ever worked with.

• 2:09:15Steven Bartlett?

  Which is interesting because other people might arrive at the same outcome, but take a different journey there. They might, you know, write lots of things down and.

• 2:09:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:09:24Steven Bartlett?

  So there's not a correct process?

• 2:09:26Speaker 00

  No, there's not. With all of these things that are, there's never a right way.

• 2:09:32Speaker 00

  What, what works for one person doesn't mean it works for someone else. And that's one of the real dangers of getting advice from people is someone tells you, I wrote it this way and it was really successful, so this is how you have to do it. But that's not true. That it might work, but that might be the way that it works for that guy, not you. So always be wary when getting advice because again, people give you advice with the best intentions, but they're giving you advice based on their story, not your story.

• 2:10:05Steven Bartlett?

  So where do we get advice from?

• 2:10:08Speaker 00

  I would say listening to a lot of stuff. It depends on what, what the sub, like what, where, where, what, what medium we're working in. But I would swim deeply in that medium, whatever it is. And then really listen to what's going on in you. It, it has to do with you.

• 2:10:31Speaker 00

  How you see it. It's an internal, it's an internal compass that tells you where to go.

• 2:10:40Speaker 00

  And I'll also say, there may not only be one answer. There may not even be a right answer. And that's where it really comes down to like this internal feeling of, I would take as, I would hear as much information from as many people as possible, hopefully conflicting. And then really check in and take as much time as it takes to internally get to a point where you know what, you know what the right answer is. You know what the right answer for you is. There is no right answer, but you know what the right answer for you is. And that's what you always want to get to. What is the right answer for me?

• 2:11:22Steven Bartlett?

  How do I know?

• 2:11:24Speaker 00

  You'll know it. And if you don't know it, you don't have enough, there's not enough, you haven't done enough research yet because you, it has to come from you. It has to come from you of,

• 2:11:38Speaker 00

  I've gotten to the point, I've done enough homework

• 2:11:42Speaker 00

  of conflicting information

• 2:11:46Speaker 00

  where I can listen to myself and I feel good about it.

• 2:11:51Steven Bartlett?

  One of the ways that that noise, that voice inside of us gets conflicted is we have our parents. I know your story, I know your parents, you know, they kind of thought maybe you'd be a doctor, but you didn't like needles, so they were like, okay, well, he can be a lawyer. A lot of people, they have that voice, my parents. And, and it's sometimes hard to untangle what voice is me and my wishes versus external.

• 2:12:13Speaker 00

  Yes. I remember when I first went to college and moved out of my parents' house, it took me probably a year to understand what in my head was me and what in my head was them. I was definitely confused, but had to create that space or lucky enough to create that space to allow it to happen. Again, I didn't go to college for that to happen. But in college, being outside of the house,

• 2:12:50Speaker 00

  I started to understand

• 2:12:54Speaker 00

  who I was and who they were and where we were aligned and where we saw the world differently. And it was fine, but it took time because I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

• 2:13:07Steven Bartlett?

  If you ask a lot of people who they want to be, or in your case in music, you know, what, what music they want to make or what their goal is, they will say things that they don't realise have come from somewhere else.

• 2:13:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:13:16Steven Bartlett?

  Happens a lot in my life. I'll, I'll interview someone, I'll say, what do you want to be? And they'll say something just arbitrary and big and fancy. And then oftentimes when you like ask more questions, there's nothing behind it. So they got it from Instagram or they got it from their parents. How, how, how can we cultivate a better understanding of, of our own truth? It's like when I played you that bad song, you started trying to, you went in search of truth. How can I, how can I know? How can I pass out what is me and my alignment and what is inherited from somewhere else?

• 2:13:49Speaker 00

  As I said before, I think you need to find some practices that ground you in yourself. Meditation is a great one. I'm sure there are others.

• 2:13:59Speaker 00

  But you have to get in touch with, with you. Maybe therapy works for some people. You got to get to where, who you are.

• 2:14:11Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a, it's a big job. It's a big job and it's not, it's not a quick, there's no quick fix. I remember the first time I ever was in a talk therapy session, I remember not knowing how to talk. I didn't know how I felt about anything. I didn't know how to talk. I didn't know about my inner state at all. And only through repetition and doing it over time and you start understanding. So it's just another skill set to develop. I never looked inward, even with all the years of meditation, I never looked inward.

• 2:14:47Steven Bartlett?

  Are you there now?

• 2:14:49Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 2:14:50Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know who you are?

• 2:14:52Speaker 00

  I think, I don't know that I could explain it, but I feel like, I feel like I am

• 2:14:58Speaker 00

  grounded in myself and I feel it pretty clearly.

• 2:15:02Steven Bartlett?

  What's the difference between when you weren't and now that you are? Is it a feeling or is it, is there a symptom? Is it happiness?

• 2:15:12Speaker 00

  I would say there's more of a, no, there was happiness there too. So it's, it's not happiness. There was happiness in,

• 2:15:21Speaker 00

  in the time that I didn't know who I was, I probably didn't know why, but I, I remember being happy.

• 2:15:29Speaker 00

  It's not happiness.

• 2:15:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it comes back to the word knowingness, just like

• 2:15:38Speaker 00

  you feel it.

• 2:15:44Speaker 00

  When you ask me something, I can tell you how I feel. I could tell you how I see it. I don't know if I was able to do that before. I'm talking about when I was young. I, I don't know if I could do that.

• 2:15:57Steven Bartlett?

  Are you telling me it's?

• 2:15:57Speaker 00

  I still liked the things I liked. My taste was still my taste, but I don't think I could,

• 2:16:06Speaker 00

  I don't know that I could access it as well as I can now.

• 2:16:12Steven Bartlett?

  Is happiness a goal to aim for?

• 2:16:14Speaker 00

  Well, I like happiness. I, I don't think it's a goal, but, but I definitely would rather be happy than not. Joyful is beautiful. I, I think maybe the word is peace. Getting to a point of,

• 2:16:31Speaker 00

  because peace, like resting in peace

• 2:16:36Speaker 00

  seems like a really good state.

• 2:16:41Speaker 00

  And I guess when things get, if things get too high, there's always the other side. You know? Like even if, if I, if I find myself in a really great mood, which does happen sometimes. Sometimes the next day I'm just in a bad mood and it almost feels like it's a, it's a, maybe it's a chemical thing. Maybe if you burn, if you really use the feel-good chemicals, maybe there's a deficit the next day. I don't know. I don't know how it works. But it feels like if everything's cool

• 2:17:17Speaker 00

  and if that keeps going, I like that.

• 2:17:21Steven Bartlett?

  An artist that is very familiar with the highs and the lows, one of my favourite artists is Kanye. And you've worked with Kanye. I want to ask the same question about what made him different? What makes him brilliant in your point of view?

• 2:17:31Speaker 00

  He's,

• 2:17:34Speaker 00

  I've said this to him. I'm totally fearless when it comes to art.

• 2:17:41Speaker 00

  He's totally fearless always. He's fearless in life. I'm not fearless in life. I'm a good collaborator for him when it comes to art because I am fearless in art and not everybody is. But he's always fearless and it's, it's really something to behold.

• 2:18:03Speaker 00

  Great strength.

• 2:18:05Steven Bartlett?

  It's rare to have that many successes when you're taking such big risk. That's what fascinates me about him.

• 2:18:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't agree with that.

• 2:18:13Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 2:18:14Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no. I, I think the risk and the success go hand in hand. It's only through the risk that the greatness is shown.

• 2:18:25Steven Bartlett?

  So it's not possible to sort of produce more of the same and still be considered a great?

• 2:18:30Speaker 00

  I don't think so. I don't know. It, it doesn't seem right to me. It feels like there's this edge. There's a tight rope and you're walking on the tight rope. And if you make it, it's really good. And if you don't make it, it's not so good. But the only choice is the tight rope.

• 2:18:54Steven Bartlett?

  The risk.

• 2:18:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:18:56Steven Bartlett?

  And then you will achieve greatness.

• 2:18:59Speaker 00

  Well, if you, if you make it, yes. If you make it, yes. But that's the risk and it's the risk that I, I wholeheartedly support. Wholeheartedly.

• 2:19:11Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 2:19:13Speaker 00

  Because that's where it's at. Like that's, if the goal is to make the most beautiful thing you can and to self-express in the purest way,

• 2:19:23Speaker 00

  it's a razor's edge walk.

• 2:19:27Speaker 00

  There's nothing ordinary about it. It's beyond ordinary. There's nothing normal about it. Normal is nothing to aspire to. Average is nothing to aspire to. If you're looking for greatness,

• 2:19:48Speaker 00

  sometimes eggs get broken. But that's just, but that's what comes with it. That's how it works.

• 2:19:55Steven Bartlett?

  We all cut out for greatness because it comes with a cost and walking tight ropes is not for everybody.

• 2:19:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think we all have potential. And when I say greatness, it's like we all have potential to be the greatest version of ourselves. You know, we, we can be, you can be the best version of you.

• 2:20:13Speaker 00

  I don't know what that is compared to other people who are great at other things. You know, I, I'm, it doesn't mean you'll be the best F1 driver.

• 2:20:23Speaker 00

  But your light can shine brighter than anyone else doing what you do. And I'm into that. I support that. I want to see that.

• 2:20:34Steven Bartlett?

  Were these great people, this big list of people that I have in front of me that you've worked with? I mean, it's just this endless, endless, almost unbelievable list. Everybody from like Justin Timberlake to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to helping, I mean Kanye on his, the record Runaway, which is one of the most incredible records of all time to, we've talked about Jay-Z and System of a Down and ACDC and Mick Jagger. And I mean, there's an endless list. When I look at it, I go, were these people all great?

• 2:21:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:21:04Steven Bartlett?

  And were they great from birth? Or, or is, are they ordinary people that made a decision?

• 2:21:10Speaker 00

  They're, I would say they're ordinary people who made a decision. Maybe some of them had some particular gifts.

• 2:21:18Speaker 00

  But others were ordinary and cultivated a gift. That list, they're not special. They're not the only ones like that.

• 2:21:29Speaker 00

  But they really rode that wave. I think of Eminem as a good example. Eminem is someone who's always writing. He's always writing because he wants to be able, he wants to be the best he could possibly be. And he's insanely obsessive about that. So his entire life is focused on sitting on a notepad, writing all day and all night. It's all he does.

• 2:21:57Speaker 00

  That's what makes him him.

• 2:21:58Steven Bartlett?

  Even if he's not publishing an album or?

• 2:22:01Speaker 00

  Doesn't matter.

• 2:22:03Speaker 00

  It's not, he's not writing. I asked him one point, looking at his notebooks, he's like, is all this gonna, you know, is, are all these for, he's like, no, no, no, 99% of this stuff no one will ever see. I just wanna be good. I wanna, I'm practicing, I'm, I wanna get better at what I do. He's in training, always. If you think of it like an athlete, you know, there are athletes who, there are some athletes who train in the off season and there are some who don't. And the ones who train in the off season are usually better and usually have a longer career. It's like that.

• 2:22:38Steven Bartlett?

  When we sat down, you asked me a question, you said, you said, Stephen, you're doing this podcast, have the guests changed you? And much of what I've shown here is how you've changed people's lives through being a coach or a producer or however you might define that. My question to you is, can you give me a couple of examples of artists that for whatever reason fundamentally changed you?

• 2:22:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. The first one I'll say is Johnny Cash.

• 2:23:00Steven Bartlett?

  Johnny Cash.

• 2:23:02Speaker 00

  Because I got to spend time around someone who was so humble and quiet and smart and didn't offer much. Like, like if you didn't, if you didn't draw him out, he wouldn't say anything.

• 2:23:20Speaker 00

  But anything you asked him about, he knew about and had a really incredible point of view. But he wasn't, um, he didn't have a need to let you know that. It was all going on inside and he was a beautiful spiritual person and I loved him. And I feel like my life was really improved getting to spend so much time with someone so, so inspiring. That's one.

• 2:23:49Steven Bartlett?

  What is the emotion there?

• 2:23:51Speaker 00

  Where's?

• 2:23:52Steven Bartlett?

  There was some emotion there.

• 2:23:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, he's a beautiful man. Beautiful man.

• 2:24:01Speaker 00

  Next one would be, um, Tom Petty, who was,

• 2:24:10Speaker 00

  he was the ultimate craftsman. So in The Beatles, you have John and Paul. And John was more of a raw nerve who

• 2:24:22Speaker 00

  tore his chest open and led with his heart. And then Paul was more of a, almost like a

• 2:24:32Speaker 00

  savant of music, like, like a crafts person. Paul could take anything and make it good. John was like a raw nerve who could just

• 2:24:45Speaker 00

  show his soul. And they're two very different skills. And together, that's what makes it The Beatles. Also, the fact that George and Ringo are incredible. I mean, even with, you know, even as great as, as Paul and John are, it's only The Beatles when it's the four of them.

• 2:25:05Speaker 00

  Paul is the craftsman. Paul knows all the parts. Paul knows how to put it together. He was the only one of The Beatles who knew how to do that, other than George Martin, whose job was to do that. But Paul understood that side of it.

• 2:25:20Speaker 00

  Tom Petty was like Paul. He could do, he could play anything. He saw all ways around it. He knew how to make it. And in addition to that, was a great songwriter. So he had kind of what was great about John and Paul both in him.

• 2:25:44Speaker 00

  So being around him was really inspiring. Also, as a record producer, I learned a lot from getting to work with him. I offered a outside perspective. I was younger, different. So I, I brought something to the table, but I learned a tremendous amount because at the time that I worked with him, I had only worked with artists who had, you know, made their first albums, like new artists. And he was a very established, brilliant studio recording artist. So I got to learn a lot from him.

• 2:26:18Steven Bartlett?

  What did he teach you? If there had to just be one lesson you pulled out?

• 2:26:21Speaker 00

  One of the things he talked about was everything always had to be in time and in tune. You have to understand every word of the vocals.

• 2:26:31Speaker 00

  Seems like an obvious thing, but so many records, you can't understand every word. And he would listen back and he's like, ah, this word, it's supposed to be plural and you can't hear the S. I have to re-record it or after, maybe we could punch in the S. Because if you can't understand it, it loses something in translation. You have to understand every word. So timing, tune.

• 2:26:57Speaker 00

  He also was another person who would work forever on it until it was right. He would, he was not at all lazy. He would never want it to be done. The first album we worked on together was called Wildflowers. And I think we probably worked on it, not every day, but we worked on it over two years, probably two and a half years. It's a long time for an album. At that point in time, especially, it was a long time. But there was no hurry. It was just like, oh, we're making progress. Let's keep going, let's keep going, let's keep going. And, um, so I learned a lot from him also about patience.

• 2:27:33Steven Bartlett?

  Some might say that's perfectionism. And people think of perfectionism as a form of procrastination and?

• 2:27:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was no procrastination in it. And I've been around both, like, I've been around procrastinating artists too. It's a whole different thing.

• 2:27:45Steven Bartlett?

  How do you know? How do you know if you're a perfectionist or a procrastinator? Is there a symptom?

• 2:27:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. The real, the real procrastinators get to the point, usually has to do with being afraid to put it out into the world. So there are some artists I know, famous artists, you, you know who they are, who haven't put out album, haven't put out an album for 10 years. I think the longer you wait, the harder it gets. In general.

• 2:28:13Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 2:28:15Speaker 00

  The pressure, like, the longer you wait, the more it feels like it can never live up to what the expectation is.

• 2:28:25Speaker 00

  It's a difficult position to get into.

• 2:28:29Steven Bartlett?

  And the perfectionist, their reason for delay is not to do with fear. It's to do with something else, is what you're saying?

• 2:28:37Speaker 00

  Hard to know. Hard to know. I don't know.

• 2:28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 2:28:45Steven Bartlett?

  So those are two artists that you've mentioned that changed you, Johnny and Tom. Is there any others that front of my?

• 2:28:52Speaker 00

  Let me see.

• 2:28:53Steven Bartlett?

  Adele.

• 2:28:56Speaker 00

  She's really good.

• 2:28:58Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, she's amazing. She's, I feel like everything she does is great.

• 2:29:04Speaker 00

  When she sings,

• 2:29:07Speaker 00

  everything stops. And she can do it over and over again, and it's always great. It's not like some singers work for a long time, singing a bunch of takes and piecing them together to get the good one. She'll sing a song 30 times in a row and it'll be great 30 times. Might not be the same 30 times, but it'll always be great.

• 2:29:29Steven Bartlett?

  You produced her 21 album, about 10 songs in there?

• 2:29:32Speaker 00

  Some of that.

• 2:29:34Steven Bartlett?

  Did you know she was great when you met her? Was there something that made her distinctive from these other great artists?

• 2:29:41Speaker 00

  At a time when most pop artists at that time didn't write their own songs, she was more like a throwback to the seventies singer songwriters. So there was something about her, I also got to work with Shakira, who also writes her own songs. And there's something about those pop artists who write their own songs that it's different than someone who can just deliver a song well. So I feel like it's a little bit of an anomaly in a pop world where so much of it is more, I wanna say manufactured, meaning a bunch of people work on the song and then the singer sings the song. Adele, a key piece is that it always comes from her.

• 2:30:23Speaker 00

  And you can feel that in the songs and it's more personal. And I love that.

• 2:30:31Steven Bartlett?

  You can feel it. Seen her live as well. Feels like this is the first time she's ever sung the song, when you, we experienced her life. Rick, what is the most important thing we haven't talked about, that we shouldn't talked about, should have talked about, as it relates to creativity and the art of making great things or good things or whatever? The measurement stick might be?

• 2:30:50Speaker 00

  I think we've kind of covered it. The, the main idea really is, don't listen to what anyone tells you. Be true to yourself. Work hard. Never give up. Don't quit. And just keep going. And, and don't put undue pressure on your art. Find a way to live that doesn't put pressure on your art, so that you could be totally free in the things that you're making, for them to be the dream version. And hopefully, at some point,

• 2:31:26Speaker 00

  the dream version takes over and it becomes your whole life, not just your passion.

• 2:31:33Steven Bartlett?

  Why did you make this documentary with Jay-Z?

• 2:31:36Speaker 00

  Well, I had made a documentary with Paul McCartney a few years ago, that was six episodes. And the reason for that one was there were no, I never, I never saw any documentaries about either Paul or The Beatles, about musicianship. They were always about either the songwriting or about Beatlemania.

• 2:31:57Speaker 00

  And I thought, without the musicianship, there wouldn't be Beatlemania. And yes, you need, yes, the songs, you couldn't deliver the songs without the musicianship. So I thought there was this big void in the, in the story of Paul. If you were to make a list of the best bass players of all time, Paul belongs at number one, but most people wouldn't even put him on the list because you don't think of him as a bass player, you think of him as Beatle Paul.

• 2:32:24Speaker 00

  And I just thought there was an opportunity to shed light on something that I love.

• 2:32:31Speaker 00

  And through, I thought that was gonna be a more traditional documentary, but it turned into a different kind of documentary. Happened by itself, wasn't pre-planned. Turned into this interesting thing that was different than anything else that had been made with Paul or about The Beatles. And people liked it.

• 2:32:51Speaker 00

  It felt like a dream for me to be part of it. And after that happened, I was thinking about who else is, I wanna say misunderstood, because that, that's kind of what it is. Like, yes, Paul's great, everyone knows Paul's great, but people don't think of him as a great musician, they think of him as something else.

• 2:33:11Speaker 00

  And I started thinking about Jay-Z.

• 2:33:13Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 2:33:14Speaker 00

  Because Jay-Z is thought of today as this incredible businessman. And he's, you think of him as billionaire businessman,

• 2:33:27Speaker 00

  behind the scenes genius,

• 2:33:31Speaker 00

  married to a famous singer.

• 2:33:34Speaker 00

  Most of what we think about him isn't poet. That's not the first thing you think of.

• 2:33:42Speaker 00

  And even the people who like Jay-Z might not really know the depth of the writing. And I thought, it's an interesting story. Like, the lyrics are really intricate and really difficult. And it's astounding what he does. And he's famous, but, and, and that's the reason he's famous, but nobody knows it. People see him in a different light. So I thought shedding light on the poet, the lyricist, the artistry of Jay-Z was a really interesting thing. And luckily, I shared the idea with him. And when he, when I told him the idea, he said, he said, I like it a lot.

• 2:34:24Speaker 00

  I'm not gonna say yes, because if I say yes, we're gonna make it. And I don't know. So I'll let you know. He said, okay. And then we didn't talk about it again for probably a year. And then

• 2:34:41Speaker 00

  I called a friend of his and I said, you know, I shared this idea with Jay a year ago. We haven't discussed it since.

• 2:34:49Speaker 00

  What do you think? He's like, call him and ask him. I said, I feel like I already told him the idea. Don't you think he should just call and ask, tell me he wants to do it? He's like, if you don't call him, it's not gonna happen. He's like, just call him and ask him. And he'll, and he'll either say yes or no, but at least you could ask him.

• 2:35:07Speaker 00

  It's still, I heard that, that was good information given to me of what to do. And I probably didn't call for six months, eight months, just because like, felt uncomfortable. Really disgusted.

• 2:35:20Speaker 00

  And eventually, I can't remember if it happened in a call or if I ran into him or if I went to see him. Can't remember. But the next time we talked about it, he's like, well, let's do it. I said, okay. And then we did it.

• 2:35:36Steven Bartlett?

  It's stunning. It's stunning, I think, because it's different. It's a different, in a way, that's quite surprising. And so a couple of observations I had is, things are usually shot in a certain way. It felt like you had, again, once again, abandoned the rules of how to shoot something like that. Even like the color, the, the color grading, the like, sort of black and white color grade that I saw on the screen. And then some of the angles were a bit off. I'm like, that's not how you shoot an interview. But for some reason, it felt like I was spying on a personal conversation.

• 2:36:09Speaker 00

  That's what it was. It was a deeply personal conversation. And

• 2:36:16Speaker 00

  in all the years of seeing interviews with Jay-Z, he doesn't do so many, but the ones that you've seen, he's never like that.

• 2:36:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:26Speaker 00

  He's never like that. So, and this is really who he is. Like, you really, after you watch this, you'll really know who Jay-Z is, which is incredible. It's an incredible privilege to have that point of view of a real intimate view into someone so great.

• 2:36:44Steven Bartlett?

  Clearly, he felt very safe with you as well, because you do get that real side of Jay-Z that I think is really rare. Speaking of incredible things, this book is also an incredible thing. I know that in part because so many of my guests have come here and talked about it.

• 2:36:57Speaker 00

  Really?

• 2:36:58Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, so many of them. And so many people hold it up as their favorite book on creativity, I think because it's challenging. Uh, I think, which is the essence of Rick Rubin in some respects, is to be a challenging coach. This book, I think, finds itself being the same, which is a very challenging coach. So I think it came out in 2023. I'm gonna link it below for anyone that hasn't got it. If you haven't got it, I think it might be the challenge you need. And I don't necessarily think it's a book necessarily about creativity. It's, it's really just, I, I consider it to be a philosophy book, dare I say.

• 2:37:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:37:26Steven Bartlett?

  Tarot cards. Some people noticed, I think that you have, is it 73?

• 2:37:31Speaker 00

  78.

• 2:37:32Steven Bartlett?

  78. Do we call them chapters?

• 2:37:35Speaker 00

  Areas of thought.

• 2:37:36Steven Bartlett?

  Areas of thought in this book. And that tarot cards have 78. Is there a link?

• 2:37:42Speaker 00

  There is and there isn't. I'll tell you the link and it's a pretty funny story.

• 2:37:49Speaker 00

  Originally, there were, I wanna say 60.

• 2:37:56Speaker 00

  I think there were 63 areas of thought, when I first thought of areas of thought and giving them names. There was this period where the book wasn't separated into the ideas and it was just a lot of pages of ideas. And then tried to move them after years of unsuccessful

• 2:38:17Speaker 00

  organizational methods. Got to the point, again, through a lot of failed experiments and some successful experiments,

• 2:38:28Speaker 00

  moved from 1,400 pages into a little bit of a shape with the, when the areas of thought came to be. And there were, I'd say, I think there were 63. I have them, they're handwritten and I, I have a photograph of them in my phone, the original 63 areas of thought. And then, once we separated all the ideas into the 63, there ended up being more. And I think there ended up being something like 80, 82 or 83, 84. They were in the eighties. And then the book was done and there were 80 something of them. And I have a collaborator named Neil, who is a friend of mine who lived in my neighborhood, great writer, who wanted, who helped me from the beginning, although not in an official

• 2:39:12Speaker 00

  capacity until the end. He, he was involved the whole way and I was working with another, another writer and it just didn't work out. And then we got to the point where there were these 83 or 84 areas of thought and it was all done and everybody was happy. And I remember calling my friend Neil and saying, okay, book's done. We have 83 areas of thought. I'd rather it be 78. He's like, what are you talking about? What do you mean? I said, well, I want it to be related to something. The tarot cards are 78. If we had 103, I would say, let's make it 108, to get it up to 108.

• 2:39:55Speaker 00

  Because that's another, there are certain numbers that are good numbers. 78, 108, 144 is a good one. It's some good numbers. I want it to have a reference to something else in the world of a number. And he, and he's like?

• 2:40:13Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 2:40:14Speaker 00

  That's just, that's how I feel. That's how I want it.

• 2:40:19Speaker 00

  And I remember him saying, he's like, you're insane. He's like, you've been working on this book for eight years. Now you want it to be randomly 78 instead of 83. It's good. Be happy, it's good. Be done. I said, we have to get it, figure out how to make it 78.

• 2:40:38Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 2:40:39Speaker 00

  Just a feeling. So listen, what happens next? I have an assistant at that time named Dylan.

• 2:40:47Speaker 00

  And we work on the 83 sections independently. So they're almost like separate essays. And when we would work on it, we would work on, let's work on 37, whatever it is, whatever the title is, and just work on that section. We'd work on each section independently.

• 2:41:06Speaker 00

  And I said, okay, put them all, here's the order. Put them all in order. And he put them in order. And the next day came, we were in Italy, I remember. This is the day after the conversation with Neil, where he told me I was crazy. And he says, weirdest thing, I put them in order and there were 78 sections. I said, no, there were 83 yesterday. He's like, now there's 78. I said, where are the others? He said, there are no others.

• 2:41:35Speaker 00

  That happened.

• 2:41:38Steven Bartlett?

  So did somebody miscount or something or?

• 2:41:41Speaker 00

  Don't know. Nobody knows. But we were sure there were 80 something. And it turned, and I wanted it to be 78. And the next day, there were 78 and nobody did anything.

• 2:41:54Steven Bartlett?

  Someday, Neil's gonna find four chapters and not mention it.

• 2:41:58Speaker 00

  Maybe, or maybe he'll call excited, like, I told you, you were crazy.

• 2:42:03Steven Bartlett?

  Rick, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. If you could make a phone call and you had 60 seconds to call anybody and it had to be an apology, who would you call and what would you say and why?

• 2:42:20Speaker 00

  It's a hard question for me to answer for several reasons. One, I almost never make a phone call. And I'm not really a phone person. So the only reason I would call somebody would, it would have to be some sort of an emergency situation.

• 2:42:39Speaker 00

  And I feel like

• 2:42:42Speaker 00

  there are not a lot of outstanding apologies to make.

• 2:42:47Steven Bartlett?

  What about a thank you?

• 2:42:49Speaker 00

  A thank you would be great. I could call anyone and thank them.

• 2:42:52Steven Bartlett?

  If you could only make one last phone call to say thank you?

• 2:42:55Speaker 00

  A one last phone call? I would probably call Muriel, my wife, and just thank her for being in my life. And maybe either her or my child to just thank them for

• 2:43:12Speaker 00

  bringing so much light into my life.

• 2:43:16Steven Bartlett?

  How did that change you?

• 2:43:20Speaker 00

  It's, it's different, totally different.

• 2:43:28Speaker 00

  It's beautiful being in a relationship. We travel as a pack, we go everywhere together. We've, we've never been apart, I don't think. I think maybe in the 15 years that I've been with my wife, we've maybe spent three nights apart in 15 years, something like that.

• 2:43:45Speaker 00

  And we're, everything we do, we travel together. This, this is a long time that I'm away from them. So I'm looking forward to getting back with them.

• 2:43:56Steven Bartlett?

  And becoming a father.

• 2:43:58Speaker 00

  It's just so much fun. He, I, I get to see the world in, uh,

• 2:44:05Speaker 00

  I get to see the things that he's excited about that remind me of things I was excited about. And

• 2:44:14Speaker 00

  I get to show him things that I like and sometimes he likes them. And sometimes he says things that I, I can't imagine how he, how he knows them. There's a real wisdom that's, uh, it's baffling. It's just fun.

• 2:44:33Steven Bartlett?

  You talk in the book about how children are the great reminder of what, you know, creativity might be at, at its essence.

• 2:44:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:44:39Steven Bartlett?

  Before we fuck it up.

• 2:44:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's, it's the thing is that when you're a little kid, you haven't yet, no one has told you what you can and can't do yet, how the world works. You really look at things with wonder. And that's the perspective of a great artist. They're, they're walking around in wonder, in awe of things that maybe seem ordinary to everyone else. But the, the world is filled with just incredible beauty. It's breathtaking. It's breathtaking. People are amazing. Talk to anyone. It's interesting. People are interesting.

• 2:45:26Speaker 00

  If you just slow down and really listen.

• 2:45:31Steven Bartlett?

  Rick, thank you. Thank you for the inspiration and the wisdom and for being a challenging coach to many millions of creatives all around the world and being fearlessly yourself. This is a fantastic book. I'm gonna link it below for everyone that hasn't yet read it. But also the HBO documentary with Jay-Z, the eight-part documentary we referenced, is out now on HBO, comes out on September 18th. So if you're watching this after that, it's already out. Thank you, Rick.

• 2:45:55Speaker 00

  My pleasure. It's on MUBI and the rest of the world.

• 2:45:58Steven Bartlett?

  Rick, thank you.

• 2:45:59Speaker 00

  My pleasure.