Dan Brown

Dan Brown is the bestselling author of the Robert Langdon thriller series, including The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, The Lost Symbol, Inferno, and Origin. His novels have sold 250 million copies worldwide. Brown’s work has defined a modern genre of high-concept, research-driven thrillers that fuse art, history, religion, and science, and several of his books have been adapted into major feature films. His latest book, The Secret of Secrets, released in September 2025, returns to the Robert Langdon character in a new contemporary thriller. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

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

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  I love to write about people who do the wrong thing for the right reason. So I like to find a big topic, ideally one that I want to learn about, that has that moral gray area. It might be civilian privacy versus national security. It might be AI is going to save us or AI is going to kill us. It might be the future of human consciousness, whether learning about how our minds work is a good or bad thing. And so for me, really, it's choosing a topic. And after that comes location. And last of all, come the characters.

• 0:54Rick Rubin?

  Are there other topics floating around for potential future books?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  That's funny. Yes, there are, but the bar has gotten so high, having just written about human consciousness and before that AI. There are plenty of things that interest me, but it's very difficult to find something that I think resonates on the level of the influence that AI is going to have or the influence that understanding human consciousness is going to have. I do have some new ideas that I'm sketching out, but at the moment, I think I'm pretty tired. This book took eight years.

• 1:24Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  It was by far the most ambitious thing I've ever tried to write. And I also happen to think it's the most fun. But maybe that's just what every author says when they finally finish a book.

• 1:33Rick Rubin?

  I'm about midway through and it's a roller coaster ride. I can't remember going on a roller coaster ride as fun in a long time. So it's working.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Thank you. That from you, that's very, very kind.

• 1:45Rick Rubin?

  You said someone who does the wrong thing for the right reason. Now, when someone does the wrong thing for the right reason, would that person be a hero or a villain?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Well, that's the question. And you get it. Those are the interesting villains. I wrote a book called Inferno, where somebody believed that overpopulation was going to kill us as a species and decided, really, the only thing to do was to stop overpopulation by cutting the population in half to a very creative way. And it just asked this question of, if you could save humanity by exterminating half of the population, could you do it? Could you pull that lever? And that's just a fascinating question. It's funny, when I was researching AI, this is sort of along the same lines of the right thing for the wrong reason, I went to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, talked to a specialist in AI. And I said, I don't understand why everybody's so afraid of AI. We're writing these programs.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Can't we just write one line of code at the bottom of everything that says, okay, AI, do whatever you want, but it has to be in the service of humankind? And this man sort of laughed. He almost patted me on the head like a child and said, well, it's a little bit more nuanced than that. Let me tell you what's going to happen if we add that line of code. And AI is going to take a look at all of the resources on the planet Earth and say, well, I see you have resources for about 4 billion people. You currently have about 8.5 billion people. Let me take care of that for you. And then that's when I kind of realized that I was approaching them from a very naive point of view and that the problem really is nuanced and subtle and difficult.

• 3:15Rick Rubin?

  Where did you end up on AI personally after doing all the research?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  You know, the same place I come out with all technology. Humankind has never created a technology that we have not weaponized, whether it was, you know, controlling fire or the wheel or the computer, airplanes, like we've always found a way to use it as a weapon. And AI will be no different. There will be people who use it for the wrong reasons. But I think the important thing to remember is that 99.9% of the usages of AI are going to be affirmative and positive and creative. They're going to let us communicate and solve really serious problems in the same way computers have. So I'm optimistic. The question is whether or not our... Humanity and our morality can keep pace with our technology. You know, you've got technology advancing at an exponential rate because every piece of

• 4:02Speaker 01

  technology becomes a tool to create new technology. So you get this exponential growth and, you know, I kind of feel like our philosophy is more of a linear, linear growth. And so you get this increasing divide, meaning are we mature enough to use the tools that we're now creating? And that really is the race, I think. And we'll see what happens. But in general, I think technology is an incredibly positive, productive phenomenon that we keep creating.

• 4:32Rick Rubin?

  Walk me through the eight years of the book. What happened at the beginning of those eight years?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  You know, I had wanted to write a book about human consciousness, especially because, I mean, it is, it is the lens through which we see reality. It's the lens through which we see ourselves. And the amazing thing to me about consciousness is we don't understand it. We like literally scientists cannot agree on a definition. They don't want to talk about it and they literally call it the C word. Like nobody wants to talk about it. And so what kind of really interested me was this notion that, okay, we have, we have a theory of consciousness. It's called local consciousness. It is that all of your hopes and dreams and fears are the product of chemical processes in your brain. In fact, that is how it feels. That's how we're taught. And the feeling is that your brain creates consciousness.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Well, that's great, except for the fact that there are an enormous number of anomalies and phenomena that we're outside what we would call normal paranormal phenomena, things like sudden savant syndrome. A kid in Arizona gets hit in the head with a baseball, wakes up speaking Chinese. There is no way a baseball can impart all of the Mandarin language into somebody's head. So that, so we just say, well, we don't know what that is. We're going to set that aside and not really think about it because it's very upsetting. You've got precognition, which has been observed and proven in a lab. You've got ESP, which has been observed and proven in laboratory settings. So it's funny, there was a time in human history when we believed the earth was at the center of the solar system. That's how it felt to us. That's what we believe.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  That was our truth. And Copernicus comes along and says, you know, that's fine, but there are a lot of anomalies. You know, that this star is out of place, this planet's rising at the wrong moment. I think we need a new model. And he put the sun at the center, changed everything. And all of a sudden, all these anomalies disappeared. I personally believe, as do a lot of physicists, that we are at that exact moment in human history with respect to consciousness, that this model of local consciousness is eroding. There are so many anomalies that we simply can't explain them anymore. There's too much outside of normal. And the amazing thing is, is that the equivalent of placing the sun at the center is saying, well, maybe the brain doesn't create consciousness. Maybe it receives consciousness.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  And if we can make that leap intellectually, the amazing thing that happens is these anomalies evaporate, which would imply this is a much more accurate model. And I personally believe that within 10 years, that's the way we will see consciousness. And what's exciting about that is that it has enormous implications, not only for how we live our lives, but also for the nature of death. And you asked about the beginning of this book. I started writing about consciousness. And right as I began this book, my mother passed away from a long illness. And it was really in that moment that I started wondering about the relationship between consciousness and death, and asking the question, what happens when we die?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  And that really became the crux of this search for non-local consciousness. I'll just add that one of the difficult parts of writing the book and doing all this research was making sure that my desire for non-local consciousness and life after death did not color the way I was interpreting the data. And if you had asked me eight years ago, what happens when we die? I'd say, nothing happens. It's death. It's the end, it's blackness. We're computer cables, you know, we're computers whose cables have been cut. Eight years later, having talked to noetic scientists, physicists, a lot of people who had near-death experiences, I've come out with a very different view of what happens when we die.

• 8:15Rick Rubin?

  And you're probably happier and will likely live longer because of those beliefs.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Well, it's quite possible. I mean, that's what the data says. I mean, you haven't gotten there in the book yet, but there's a point that Catherine Solam in The Neuistic Scientist points out, a lot of data that says, listen, our shared fear of death, the fact that we all fear death, no matter where we are in the world, that is the catalyst for a lot of bad behavior. Things like really not caring about the environment, or nationalism, materialism, all these senses like, well, you know, I have to gather everything I have as quickly as I can, because it's all gonna end. And when we start to understand that this life may be one stop on a longer journey, a lot of that bad behavior evaporates, and we actually become a more enlightened species. And I should add that my change of heart on this

• 9:05Speaker 01

  topic, or change of mind, is I did not have a religious experience. I had no paranormal experience. My mother didn't talk to me. I had no brilliant flash of lights. This was all based on the science.

• 9:18Rick Rubin?

  Why do you think the powers that be are so resistant to the idea of a new paradigm?

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Because we always are. You know, I wrote this book called The Da Vinci Code that just quietly said, like, hey, you know, what if Jesus isn't literally the Son of God? What if he's just a great guy with a lot of super ideas? It rubs people the wrong way when what you have believed for generations is questioned. And, you know, you don't have to look any farther than Copernicus and Galileo and Bruno to know that, hey, you know, if you question the way things are, even if your new model makes perfect sense, there's a lot of people that aren't going to be happy. I've already experienced that, even with this book, which should not be controversial in any way, but scientists, particularly materialist physicists, who've spent their entire life looking at the world a certain way, writing

• 10:08Speaker 01

  about the world a certain way, you know, they've won awards based on what they have decided the world looks like. And they really don't like people coming along and saying, actually, what if, what if it's this way? I mean, even if it's just some random novelist, and I mean, not a particle physicist, just some guy who says, there's a lot of evidence to suggest this. So that's been kind of an interesting journey to talk to materialist physicists who, who aren't thrilled.

• 10:30Rick Rubin?

  Has any of your work ever been either censored or banned anywhere in the world?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yes. Da Vinci Code was banned all over the world. That was pretty serious, actually. It was banned and burned and... It was kind of an interesting journey because I, my first three novels sold no copies. They were commercial failures and I wrote Da Vinci Code and it found an audience very, very quickly. Just really, just the stars kind of aligned. It wasn't anything particularly special about that book. Because the other three books all went to number one after that. It didn't change a single word. And I've had people say, oh, Deception Point, that second book you wrote, that, I like that better than Da Vinci. So it was just one of those things that it landed at the right moment in the right way. But I was not used to people hating me, threatening me, feeling like I defended them.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  I did not, it didn't occur to me that that was an offensive concept. And I guess that was naive because I, I've certainly known a lot of very religious people. I wrote it in a, what I thought was a respectful way. But it really wasn't received that way by, by a certain portion of the population. Although the most mail I got was from Catholic nuns saying, thank you for reminding the world of the sacred feminine. Thank you for reminding the world that we used to have, live in a world of goddesses. And now women are unfit to stand behind the altar or give communion, even if they've quite literally married Jesus and given up their lives. And so that really resonated in a positive way for, for women in the church.

• 11:59Rick Rubin?

  Have there been any other Christian groups that rallied around the book?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Sure. You know, it's funny, I was in Boston shortly after that came out and I was on one side of the street. And I saw a priest looking across the street and he came across the street and said, you're Dan Brown. And I thought, uh-oh. He said, listen, I just came over here because I've got to thank you. I thought, okay. He said, every Thursday night we have Bible study and every Thursday night I've got the same 12 people who come. And last week I said, we're going to talk about the Da Vinci Code. I had 409 people show up. We had to move into the sanctuary to talk about it. He goes, this isn't how I imagined talking about these topics, but your book gave me a platform. I don't agree with it, but it gave me a platform to talk about it and it's gotten people excited. And asking that all important question of why do I believe what I believe?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  You know, and I've said this many times, that we worship the gods of our parents. And that, you know, if, if I could speak to a room in Boston, Massachusetts, predominantly Protestant or Catholic and say, look, if we'd all been born in Tibet, you know, we'd have a very different idea of religion.

• 13:08Rick Rubin?

  Of course.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  You know, this is our culture. It's not the absolute truth.

• 13:12Rick Rubin?

  In Rome, there were Da Vinci Code tours where you could see all of the famous sites that took place in the Da Vinci Code, and it feels like people are celebrating it.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, certainly, there, there are a lot of people who celebrate it. I mean, we, we've made motion pictures, we've made TV shows, we've, there were 100 spinoff books, there are tours. It's interesting. It's one of those books that even people who don't read much have read. And the interesting thing now is that the book's over 20 years old. And there's an enormous part of the young population who has never read it, who are now rediscovering it. And I talk to young people all the time. They said, when did this get written? Because this feels like it's right now.

• 13:52Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Except for the fact that there are no cell phones.

• 13:54Rick Rubin?

  All of your books feel like right now. Digital Fortress is about what's happening today. Every one of them feels current.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, you know, I was talking to my publisher when I turned in this, this new novel, The Secret Secrets, and he handed the manuscript to a scientist to read. And the person said, you know, the, the word he used was, was prescient. It definitely isn't prescient. It's written about what's happening beneath the surface right now in consciousness. It's absolutely happening. There's, you know, all, all of the, all of the experiments and things in the book are real. And they, they've all happened. And just because they haven't happened in a wide scale, public way, doesn't mean that, that this isn't happening. And it really is happening very quickly.

• 14:37Rick Rubin?

  Because you're writing fiction, you could make up whatever you want. So why do you decide to always have all of both the places, every scientific discovery, every experiment, all of them are real? Why do you make that choice?

• 14:57Speaker 01

  I should answer that by telling you that I don't read fiction. I read all the time, but I only read nonfiction. I like to learn and I really feel like the fiction I would want to read is fiction that informs me about something in the real world. And as you know better than anyone, when you're a creative person, all you have to guide yourself is your taste. You write the novel you want to read, you mix the song you want to hear. It really is that simple. And so I write the kind of novel that I want to read and then I just hope people share my taste. And you and I are fortunate in that people share our taste and we're able to go on and do the next creative thing.

• 15:38Rick Rubin?

  So eight years ago, you decided the new book's going to be about consciousness. Was there something that triggered that event?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  It's something I've been thinking about for a long time. I wrote a novel a while back called The Lost Symbol, in which Catherine Solomon, who's a character in this book, also appeared. And she is a noetic scientist and she was sort of an ancillary character in that book. And I was writing about noetic science and consciousness as sort of a tangent for what the real plot was in that book. And I became so fascinated with what I was learning about consciousness that I thought, wow, consciousness has to be its own book. And I thought it was going to be the next book I wrote, but I just didn't know enough to write it. So I wrote another book and said it'll be my next book. I still didn't know enough and I was reading all the time. And finally, two books later, I said, okay, I think I'm ready to write this.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And the funny thing about taking eight years to write a book in a world where technology moves as fast as it does, is that you're just trying to outrace the clock. And you'll hear about something in year four and go like, oh, wow, I need to go back and rewrite chapter three. In fact, I need to add 3.5 and 3.6 in between. And that was inspirational and also a little terrifying to constantly be reading, you know, please, please don't, please don't publish anything about this. This is so cool. I want my readers to read it here first. So it was kind of fun.

• 16:59Rick Rubin?

  So you have the overall concept. Do you know the whole story in advance? Where do you start?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  So, okay, it's going to be about human consciousness. And the next thing I do is I say, where is it going to be set? I like to write locations as characters. And really, as soon as this was going to be consciousness, I knew it had to be Prague. Prague is the mystical capital of the world and has been ever since Emperor Rudolph II invited all the mystics and alchemists and scriers and seers. Said, "All come to Prague, help me talk to the great beyond, so I can be a great leader." And that's where they all came. And that really Prague, you know, I'm sure you've been there. It's a very mystical kind of feel to it. And it also is, um, is the home of a character that we can talk about later, about the Golem, who plays a role in this, who really is a beautiful foil for a lot of what's happening in the world of consciousness.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  It is a, uh, a monster made of clay that a Jewish rabbi brings to life using Kabbalistic magic, writing Hebrew words on his forehead. And this monster was a protector of the Jewish people. And he turned this monster on and off, kind of like a radio, kind of like a receiver, kind of like the consciousness was being received and he was turning it on and off. And that had real implications for this book, as well as this character being a protector, is a foil for another character who sees himself as a protector. So between Prague being the mystical capital and beautiful and also having the Golem, I just knew it had to be Prague. And at that point, I said, "Okay, how do I make human consciousness, which is a very

• 18:34Speaker 01

  ethereal subject, urgent, understandable, concrete? And how do you turn it into a thriller?" And one thing I learned pretty quickly is, you know, if you write a novel where you put an antimatter bomb in the Vatican and, you know, kill cardinals on every hour, the book pretty much writes itself. You try to write a book about a concept, very spiritual and scientific concept that specialists can't even agree on, it might take you eight years. Yeah. And, and that was not eight years, just sort of fooling around now and then. That was eight years, seven days a week, often eight hours a day of trying to get this right.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  And with every book, there is a moment, and I don't know if it's the same way for you in, in music, but there's a moment when you just suddenly understand how to do it. And in this book, that breakthrough was realizing, okay, Catherine Salin has written a manuscript about all of these advanced theories. And then this manuscript disappears and she disappears. And that gives me an excuse for Langdon to constantly be trying to figure out what's in this book. And that was how I made consciousness relevant to the reader. And without it, it just is sort of a chase with a bunch of lectures attached. And that doesn't work for anybody. So that was really the breakthrough that let me write the book.

• 19:59Rick Rubin?

  Did that happen before you started writing Word One?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  No, it did not. I, it's funny, I always write the ending first. My mom was a musician and I grew up a musician. I played piano since I was a little kid. I've written music and I'm amazed how similar creating music and creating novels is. You really have to understand structure. This gets to your point of what you do first. You can't write a piece of music without understanding structure. And you also can't write it without understanding things like thematic material that appear and disappear. They repeat at just the right moments with some space in between. You've got to understand dynamics. You can't write three car chases in a row and you can't write, you know, three fortissimo, two T sections in a row.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's just a lot of crossover. A good melodic line, asks a question, gives an answer. A good paragraph, asks a question, gives an answer. So when it came to writing the structure for this book or any book, I kind of look at it as just writing the final measures of a song. Or, you know, whatever your piece of music is. And you may get there at the end and say, oh, this actually has to be a little bit different. But at least tonally and rhythmically and sonically, like you have some idea where you're headed. And then you try to rewind as far, in novels, you try to rewind as far as you can away from that. So you start at point A and end up at point B, and there better be a lot of trouble in the middle, a lot of obstacles that can only be solved

• 21:31Speaker 01

  in creative, interesting ways. You know, I don't know if you've read Ian Fleming. I mean, we've all seen the Bond movies. You don't watch a Bond movie to find out if he, you know, diffuses the bomb and gets the girl. You're pretty sure that's what's gonna happen. You watch to find out how, how is it gonna happen? And so that really is what you do when you're writing novels. You come up with creative hows. The what is a foregone conclusion. Your hero survives, the villain is dispatched, and he gets the girl. And 99% of the stories that we tell as human beings and have been telling since we sat around fires.

• 22:06Rick Rubin?

  Is it obvious how many beats there are gonna be between this beginning that's as far away from the end and then the ending? Are there gonna be 10 events? Are there gonna be 50 events? And when do you know? And what shapes those?

• 22:23Speaker 01

  That's a great question. The answer is, all you have is your taste. When people say, "How long's the novel?", you say, "It's as long as the ribbon is to tie up the package." Da Vinci Code was 130,000 words. This is almost 200,000 words. This was a bigger story, had more characters. And I will write too much and then trim back in that sort of way. It's easier to use the delete key than it is to create material that isn't there.

• 22:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  And oftentimes, you think material is going to work. And in some ways, it does work. But when you take it out, it's even better. So it really is a question of write too much and then just run a comb through it, run a comb through it, and make sure that everything that's on the page serves the story and serves the reader. That is my job, to make the reader's experience seamless and make sure that everything that's on the page has to be there and isn't there because I randomly happen to think it's interesting. It has to serve the story.

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• 24:53Rick Rubin?

  Does having more characters make it easier or harder to write it?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Much harder, actually, because they all have to be moving in parallel. And it's basically polyphony. You know, it's harder to write polyphony than it is to write something that's homophonic. Everything has to make sense on its own, but it also has to make sense as part of the ensemble. And so I would say that is much harder. The more parts that you have, the more difficult it gets. But also, the greater the payoff, and the more dissonance you can have, which is fun, where you say like, "Wait a minute, what do these two things have together? They're kind of clashing. I don't understand why they're in the same place." But I trust the writer, I trust the composer, that this is going to make sense.

• 25:37Rick Rubin?

  I think describing it in that symphonic way... Really makes a lot of sense and it helps me understand your work in a way I never understood it before. So much happens in such a short period of time and that the only way that's possible is a lot of things are happening at the same time and that's what happens in a symphony.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. One of the reasons I parallel plot lines is for the reason that symphonic composers have different movements and different arrangements. You might hear a theme that's got everything in it and then you go into something that's wait, I just went from minor key to a major key and this is all sort of soft and fun and oh, now I'm going back to this other thing. It's what makes huge pieces listenable because it's always changing. And nothing sounds better than a big section after a small section and nothing sounds better than a small section after a big section. We like change.

• 26:35Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  And that's why it's so nice to cut from a scary, you know, basement in Prague to a glittering skyscraper in New York. It just feels like, ah, okay, now I'm here. And in a minute, I'll be ready to go back there, but at the moment, I'm getting a little break.

• 26:51Rick Rubin?

  So, once you decide Prague is where it's going to take place, do you physically go to Prague?

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:59Rick Rubin?

  How much time did you spend in Prague?

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Uh, I went maybe four or five times, a total of, I don't know, a couple of months, maybe. But I also have a great Czech editor who really helped me be efficient, helped me get to the right people, see the right things. So, I mean, before I go, I read everything I can about Prague and say like, okay, so what are some of the locations I absolutely need to show readers? Well, Prague Castle is the biggest castle in the world. Well, we gotta go there, obviously. And the drip stone wall, that is a location that people absolutely have to see. And so I might come up with a list of eight or nine of these must-have locations.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  And then I gotta come up with excuses to use them. Why would anybody go to the Driftstone Wall and sit there? And I won't give it away for you, but you know, in, in one version of this book that was deleted, it became a place where there was a, a drop, a spy dropped something for another spy. And it didn't work and I used it for something else, but it really is a, a question of saying, if this is the location and location is a character, what are the character traits? The virtues and flaws that I need to reveal about this city? And you have a list and you just sort of say, okay, there's Petrin Tower. There's a two third scale model of the Eiffel Tower in Prague.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Not many people know it's there and it's kind of scary, especially for somebody who has claustrophobia like Langdon because the elevator is tiny and you go up there in the winter and that thing moves in the wind. And I said, okay, I don't know how I'm going to use it, but I'll figure it out. And that's, that's kind of the second step is to say, where are the tent poles? As far as locations that are going to hold up this overarching canopy of a plot?

• 28:49Rick Rubin?

  Do you think of it in a cinematic way when you're describing it?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do actually. And when I'm there researching, I, I do take pictures and take videos, but mostly I write because at the end of the day, that's how it's going to be experienced. And if you take a picture or video, you may forget that the streets smelled a certain way. Or that there was a, this certain sound that you kept hearing or whatever it was. And you really have to capture the essence in words while you are there, because that's how you are eventually going to have to convey it to the reader. I am a very visual person and I write these books in a, in a very specific and intentional way. Some people enjoy it, some people can't stand it. That's just the nature of the creative arts, but I, I do see things visually.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  And a lot of people said like, wow, did you write these as movies? I said, no, absolutely not. It never occurred to me that there'd be movies. I was just literally trying to sell enough books to pay the rent. And just saying, well, this is the kind of book I like to read.

• 29:51Rick Rubin?

  Have you read Rupert Sheldrake's work?

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Some of it. I don't remember what.

• 29:55Rick Rubin?

  Okay. Because he talks a lot about field of morphic resonance, which is where. I can think something and you can be somewhere else on the planet and my thoughts somehow impact your life.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  I think he calls it entanglement, I think, and this notion that we are, we resonate at the same frequency. We are in fact connected to the same channel, if you will, and can influence each other. And you know, physics has known for almost a hundred years that, that human thought affects physical matter. I mean, the double slit experiment proved that a long time ago and we've proven it over and over. And there's something called the delayed choice quantum eraser. And it is the double slit experiment where you don't choose whether or not to watch until after the particle has chosen to be a particle or a wave. And every time it chooses right, it's just this bizarre, you know, how does, how does it know?

• 30:51Speaker 01

  And nobody's quite sure how it knows, but that's just another one of these anomalies outside the normal. And another reason that a lot of people are thinking that we need to look at consciousness in a different way. And certainly Sheldrake does, when the whole concept of frequency and resonance seems to be at the core of not only things like Tesla and even Fermi, but right back to the early religions. This, this notion of, you know, we created the world with a sound.

• 31:21Rick Rubin?

  When do the characters get names?

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Immediately. I mean, there are characters who are unnamed and that is my way to tell the reader, hey, don't worry about this person. He's either not coming back or he's gonna die or you don't, he's not important. Don't clog up your, your ram trying to remember who this is. When I name a character, I usually name the character in a way that, at least for me personally, conjures an image. There's somebody in this novel named Finch, who's ostensibly a dangerous character. We're not sure, but he's. Slight and kind of bird-like, and I named him Finch. I often name characters after friends or family, or in fact, in my, in Angels and Demons,

• 32:04Speaker 01

  I killed off most of my college professors, um, one, one by one, and, uh, which was, which was pretty amusing. In Deception Point, there's a, there's a geologist named Charles Brophy, who was my geology teacher at Emmer's College. And in the prologue, he is thrown out of a helicopter into a deep crevasse. And I got a, a note from him that, I, I think all it said was, is this because of the B- minus, or something along those, those lines. It was very, very funny. My, my assistant is in this book, Susan Morehouse, I call her Housemore, in this book. And I had to tell her that, you know, I've got good news, bad news. The good news, you're in the book, you know, there's some bad news too. Would you like me to take you out? She said, of course not. It would be a great honor to meet whatever horrible end you, uh, you have in store.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  So people tend to think it is, uh, a joke. They understand the joke and I, I never kill anyone I don't like, only people I love. So.

• 32:56Rick Rubin?

  And when you're creating a character, is it usually based on a person you know?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yes, but it's usually a blend of people. I grew up on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy, a prep school here in, in New Hampshire. And my dad was a teacher, my mom was an educator, and all of the, all of the adults around me were educators. They were all teachers. And so when it came time for me to write a hero, e- even in Digital Fortress, I wrote a teacher. And it's funny, when we made the movie Da Vinci Code with Sony Pictures, there was a, an arrangement, a legal document that said, Langdon cannot suddenly, in the movies, learn how to use a gun. He can't become a martial arts expert, or learn, you know, to, to drive cars like, like a lunatic and get away from things. He has to get out of situations using his head.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  That's his superpower and that's never going to change. You can't, he can't be violent. And part of that was to preserve the character, but also part of that is because I think readers like that. Most of us are non-violent people and we need to use our heads to sort of figure out all the obstacles that come our way in life. And you want to feel like, hey, I could be Langdon. I mean, I probably could have figured that out. That's what we want to feel as readers. And so for Langdon, I, I wrote. All the adults I knew as a kid that I respected were professors. And for, you know, if you've read my novels, you know Langdon's very lucky in love. At the beginning of every novel, he meets a beautiful, brilliant woman who has the exact

• 34:26Speaker 01

  skill set he happens to need to solve his issues of the day. And, you know, those are based on strong women that I've met and known and am amazed by and am attracted to. And all those things that you need in a heroine, you know, and when you read a story, you want to be attracted to the characters. You want to say like, wow, you know, I like Langdon a lot. I sure hope he gets this woman because this woman is amazing. It's his intellectual equal. And in fact, in this book, maybe even his intellectual best. So it's kind of an interesting dynamic to create these characters. I always write the villain first. That is because the villain defines the hero.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  And so I don't even get into who Langdon is in this book until I've fleshed out who the villain is, what he or she wants, and how he or she is going to challenge Langdon. I think that's a mistake a lot of young writers make is they don't pay enough attention to the villain. And the villain really is the only thing that makes your hero heroic. Otherwise, he's just, you know, resting on his laurels.

• 35:32Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the research part of the project in general.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the first thing I do is I read a lot of books. In the case of this book, I had to read an enormous amount about human consciousness such that I literally such that I got to the point where I knew what questions to ask specialists. I generally read first and then I get connected to people who are specialists in the field and I talk to them with questions that are phrased in ways that make them give me their personal experience and their personal beliefs. Because that really is where you learn the good stuff. You know, when you're talking to people, and I'm always amazed, people, people who've studied a certain field are very, very eager to talk about it. It's exciting to them to talk about what they do. When I wrote Deception Point, I called Martin O. Jeffries up at the University of Fairbanks,

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Alaska, the world's foremost glaciologist. And he talked to me for two hours about ice. Wow. And I thought like, OK, this guy likes ice. And so that really is the next step of the research, to find people who can make the subject come alive and make the subject clearer to me. And then from there, you know, I'll read more, I'll interview more. And all the research doesn't take place right at the beginning. That's the bulk of it to get me started. But really, all the way through, I end up having to do much more research. You know, you may create the structure of the book, but you may not know exactly what is going to happen in the middle. I sort of equate, if you're building a house, you lay the foundation, that pretty much has to stay.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  But as it goes up, you may say, oh, I thought, I thought there was going to be a wall here. But if we take it out, this room is much better. It's sort of like that. And at some point in the process, you may say, you know what? I just learned about this new thing that just happened a month ago. I've got to include it, which means I've got to do a lot more research. And I talked to this guy two years ago, who may be able to connect me to somebody who could tell me about this. It's that sort of sleuthing process. And it's a whole lot of fun. And it's important also that your research does not become procrastination, especially when you're traveling to exotic places, saying, well, I can't possibly write this conversation between Langdon and Catherine until I've had a couple of meals in the restaurant that they're eating in. You know, that sort of thing.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  At some point, at some point, just write the scene, you know enough.

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• 39:30Rick Rubin?

  How often do you start and then abandon a project?

• 39:34Speaker 01

  How often do you start and abandon a project?

• 39:37Rick Rubin?

  It's rare that they're truly abandoned. I'll start something and then it doesn't work, but then 10 years, 15 years down the road, it's like, hmm, remember that thing we were thinking about 10 years ago? Maybe that'll work.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's the same here. The difference with novels is you might get two years into it.

• 39:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  And it's, I've never abandoned a novel halfway through it. I've certainly felt like it and had to take a long walk and really do that mind exercise of, okay, so you go home and you call the publisher and say, hey, I'll give you all the money back, I'm not interested in writing this book. That call, in my mind, is generally far more painful than it is to write the book. And I just get back to work.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  So, I mean, not about the money, just about the failure. And, and I wouldn't have started the book if I didn't think it had promise. And it's just, it's, the devil is always in the details. It's always about the execution. And people come up to me and say, oh, my God, I've got this great idea for a book. And I always feel like saying, well, then you should go write it because there are a lot of ideas. It really is how you do it. It's just like if somebody came up to your party and hummed a melody and said, like, you got to make this into a song. It's, it's perfect. It's like, well, it's a little more complicated than having a melody or having an idea. There's, there's a lot of execution that goes into it.

• 40:59Rick Rubin?

  As you're working on the book, does it get easier or harder?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  It's kind of funny. The beginning is by far the most difficult because you're making a lot of big decisions that have repercussions over the entire novel. Who is the villain? Where is it set? What is the hook that pulls you into the story? There's a point, I would say about a quarter of the way through the book, where everybody's moving in the right direction. You've established everyone's motives. And then it's a question of just, how do you make it interesting? How, how do I get through these obstacles in an interesting way? That is the easiest part of the book.

• 41:35Rick Rubin?

  Interesting.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Because you've got everything rolling. And then you hit a point about, I don't know, three quarters of the way through the book, where you're like, okay, I've got, you know, 37 loose ends and plot threads that need to all be tied into this one concept in a way that nobody sees coming, in a way that's satisfying and intellectually challenging and fair to the reader. I'm not sort of bringing in magic in a book that has no magic. And that's when it gets hard again.

• 42:08Rick Rubin?

  Do you keep track of all of the loose ends?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  I do it in my head. I I know this book so well because it's all I do. That I really know where everybody is at every time. And I will make notes. I use a lot of color coding when I write. And I may just write a line in blue that I know is a note to me. That says, you know. Double check that this twist is explained later. Don't just take it for granted that. The reader is going to accept that this happened. You've got to explain it. So there are a lot of notes like that. But for the most part, I do know. Pretty much what's going on at all times.

• 42:50Rick Rubin?

  Can you let go of the story when you're not at your desk working on it?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Uh, you know. I I do write every day. That's the first thing I'll say. I've found that I can keep rolling the boulder up the hill. Through a single sleep cycle. I can wake up the next day and know where I am. A couple of sleep cycles starts to get tough. And if I take a week and and doing something else. You know, I've got to sort of read everything I've written saying like, okay, so who's the? It's about Langdon and where is he? He's in Prague, okay. So I do write every day. I've become pretty good at compartmentalizing. I work every day at four AM. That's when I get up.

• 43:29Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Even as a little kid, I got up early and I came down and I did the puzzles in the in the paper and.

• 43:35Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Really liked my alone time. So I I wake up at four. I don't set an alarm and I lie there thinking I really should get more sleep. But I'm just ready to go. So, okay, I guess we're going to work. And I. I go straight to work without checking the news or checking email or anything like that. And I do that because when you wake up from your second REM cycle, I mean, you've been dreaming. And your brain is in that mode where it's creating something out of nothing. And, you know, I I see you nodding. I I know that you must have the same sensation that what that your mind can be in a creative state or a non creative state. And so I really try to harness that creative state where your mind is creating pictures and stories out of nothing. Go straight to my desk and I sit down, I start working. The other thing I do is at the end of every writing session.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  If I finish a chapter, I will write the opening paragraph of the next chapter. Such that when I come down in the morning. The tone is already set. And I know that that transition from chapter to chapter will be smooth. I don't have to go back and read and say, no, no, what was I, what was the vibe here? I'll write whatever the right thing is to start. And then that way I come down and say, it's like setting the table for breakfast. You arrive and, and you know, the table's set. So those are, those are two things that I, I do consistently is write early in the morning and finish in a way that prepares me for the next day. And when I'm done work, which is usually around noon, I, I work at one end of this house and I walk the other way and I pass a piano.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  And I will sit down for 30 or 40 minutes and just play piano. And it's the way, I'm not sure what it is, maybe you can tell me what it is about making music, even just improvising, that brings my brain back gently to the real world.

• 45:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Uh, and then I can go out and, uh, you know, face actual people.

• 45:24Rick Rubin?

  That's a beautiful practice. I love hearing that you play piano after a session to reset. Beautiful.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  It works for me.

• 45:31Rick Rubin?

  How did you get into the habit of writing such short chapters?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I have always believed that my job as a writer is to respect the reader's time and to give them only what they need. And there is this sense of, uh, get in late and get out early. I don't know if there's a parallel in music, but I try to enter a scene as late as I possibly can. And the example is, you know, you might start a chapter with somebody going like, what? You know, that's ridiculous. Well, well, what's ridiculous? You know, what, hold on, you know? And the reader immediately is playing catch up. And it's interesting. You want, you want to know, as opposed to John and Bob were sitting there in a restaurant having a conversation and Bob said this and he said, well, that's ridiculous.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  So you, you cut off that first part and you start in a way that, that the reader's going to go, wait, wait. I gotta read the next sentence to find out what happens. What happened? What? And then ideally you get out early. You get out of the scene as soon as you possibly can. And it creates this craving for more. It's not a, you know, a Beethoven's knife ending. We're like, is it over yet? You know, it just, just keep, keeps going, keeps going, you know? You just want that feeling of, oh, I've got to hear the next thing. I've got to, got to see the next words. So those are two things I try to do, and that results in short chapters. I have a fairly short attention span.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  And again, you know, just getting back to writing the book you want to read. I like short chapters. It makes me feel like I'm moving quickly through a book. It challenges me and you're always getting something new. It's the reason I think MTV did so well. You know, if, if you don't like this video, the next one's, is up in three minutes.

• 47:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Did you learn that from anyone or it was just intuition?

• 47:24Speaker 01

  I didn't, I definitely did not learn it. I grew up reading the Hardy Boys, which were just kids thrillers, really. And because they were for kids, those chapters were fairly short. And when I wrote Digital Fortress, I just sort of said, this is how I think it should go.

• 47:42Rick Rubin?

  It works.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  And it was really a pretty naive thing to, it's, it's funny. I should tell you, tell you the story. When I, when I graduated from college, I had studied music composition and writing composition. And I said, I don't know what I want to do. I love them both. I want to do something creative with my life, should be music or books. And I decided music was going to be much more fun. So I, I moved out to LA, lived at the Franklin Regency, which is the armpit of America. You know, and I was a songwriter and I signed a production deal with a guy named Barry Fosman. I don't know if he was the British Record Producer of the Year at that time. He had done Air Supply and this is a long, long time ago. And we made a record that absolutely nobody liked.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  I shouldn't say that. No, nobody bought it. And it was right at the dawn of the rap craze. And nobody wanted another Elton John, or another Billy Joel, or whatever I was trying to be. Everything was changing, as you very well know. And I thought, okay, so that didn't go very well. Maybe I should write a novel. And I wrote Digital Fortress, just had an idea, wrote it. And the first publisher in New York who saw the manuscript bought it. And I thought, wow, book publishing is so much easier than music. The book came out, and about 10 people bought the book. I think five of them were my mother. And it was a commercial failure. And so I wrote another book, Angels and Demons, and that was also a failure.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Wrote another book, Deception Point, that was a failure. It really wasn't until I wrote Da Vinci Code that I had an audience. And I remember when I finished Da Vinci Code, and they published an advanced reader's copy. And I sat down and I read it. And I thought, okay, if this doesn't work, then I really am gonna do something else. And I was fine with it. I loved teaching. I said, I'm gonna go teach. I enjoy that. Because this is the book that I would want to read. And if nobody likes this, then they don't share my taste, and I really can't be doing this. So that was how close I came to not writing.

• 49:44Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And years later, I've gone back to music, and I've done a couple of music projects. And I still play piano and write every day, and it's just kind of in a hobby sense. And it's just a, it's a beautiful release. I love them both.

• 49:55Rick Rubin?

  Any clues as to why the Da Vinci Code connected when Angels and Demons didn't?

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yes, some of it was more than some of it. Almost all of it was the amount of support it got from the publisher. I got caught up in some politics at my publisher that had Angels and Demons, Deception Point, where the person who bought them was fired, and the new person came in and put no money behind them, and barely published them, like just very few copies, just enough for libraries. Nobody knew about those books.

• 50:22Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  And I changed publishers and went to Double Day at Random House. And I'll get in trouble for telling the story. I don't know if I've ever said it publicly, but my previous publisher, I presented a 100-page outline for the Da Vinci Code. 100-page outline.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Including everything. I mean, it was, it was the novel, basically. And a very humble letter. I found it recently and thought, I would love to publish this. Very humble letter saying, look, I'm not asking for the world. I just need enough to live for a year and a half to write this book. And I'm gonna need $100,000 to live for a year and a half or two to write this book. And they just said, who do you think you are? You've sold no copies.

• 51:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  The answer's no. So I went to a different publisher. And by that time, I had about 100 pages and I gave them 100 pages and they just said, this is gonna be huge. We love this. We just sat at around a boardroom table, you know, with 12 people who never agree on anything. And they all agreed, this is gonna be a popular book. And so when it came out, it got an enormous amount of support. And I had finished the book and I had gone down to Costa Rica and I was working on my next book. And my, my agent called and said, you gotta come back. Because Random House wants to put you on tour before the book comes out. I said, I don't understand. I've never been on book tour. I don't know what you're talking about. They said, all the booksellers love the book. They just wanna know you're not a jerk.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  So you've gotta go around and meet all the booksellers and just prove you're a nice guy. I thought, okay, well, I'll do what I can. And went on tour and met all the booksellers and by that time realized it was gonna be a big success. And it wasn't just about that. There was also a real distrust of the Catholic Church at that point. And it was not, it was just by luck. It wasn't, it wasn't designed in any way. But there was, there was a lot of, a lot of scandal, a lot of lawsuits, a lot of real ugliness. There'd been a couple archaeological discoveries that cast some doubt on a few things that were, that were kind of important to the church. And the book came out and the Vatican, for, you know, they just sent out a message

• 52:31Speaker 01

  to every single Catholic church saying, tell your parishers not to read this book. Wow. And, you know, it was, and like literally in my hometown, I drove to my town and in front of the Catholic church, they had a big sign that usually says, you know, Mass is this week. It said, the Da Vinci Code is all lies. Don't read it.

• 52:48Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  And I remember calling my publisher and saying, like, I'm heartbroken. He goes, are you kidding? Like, let's hope that's everywhere. I said, and, and that really was it. And my publisher, Steve Rubin, by the way, at Random House, said that all the other publishers called him and said, how are you getting the Vatican to do your publicity? Because they put me on trial, literally, they put me on trial in Vatican City in absentia, and found me guilty of crimes against Jesus or something. And so it was, it was a giant news story everywhere. And the feeling was, well, why is the church so worried about this? And then ABC did a big special with Elizabeth Fargus, where they did a lot of research and

• 53:30Speaker 01

  said, actually, this all looks like it's accurate. And there's, there's a lot, there's a lot here that doesn't make sense in the original story of Jesus. And there are gospels that weren't in the Bible, that were taken out, that showed Jesus in a much more human light. But the people who really enjoyed the book, or were challenged by the book, came to me and said, you know, the message was usually the same, just the story you tell of Jesus makes more sense to me than the story I learned in church. Yeah, it was just that simple. And some people say to me, I'm a rational, open-minded person, and this just makes more sense. And it doesn't undermine the beauty of Jesus' message. It just is a slightly different history that says, hey, he may have been in love and had a child, which is, you know, fairly normal thing for, for people

• 54:15Speaker 01

  to do.

• 54:17Rick Rubin?

  It's an amazing story. I didn't know any of that.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a strange time, a real change for me, from having, you know, had no success and being anonymous to suddenly being, you know, on the cover of major magazines and talking to major press outlets and having, I think a lot of people pretty upset with me. Yeah, there were places I could not travel, including Vatican City. Wow. When we made Angels and Demons, some of it was filmed in Vatican City, actually, not in Vatican City, but in churches that were owned by the Vatican, which are technically Vatican property. And literally, I had to wait outside the church because they were afraid if I stepped in, I might be detained.

• 54:54Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they were crazy times.

• 54:57Rick Rubin?

  Also, what's interesting about it is, it shows you, it's not purely about what's written, because after The Da Vinci Code, earlier books, which were not successful, all became wildly successful.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  They did. And it's really about, it's just about, I think, the way, the way I tell a story is a little bit different. And there are people who just like stories that are told that way. They share my taste.

• 55:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Everything has to reach a critical mass. You know, in, in your world, you know, there used to be, you know, used to do anything to get on the radio. Just because you needed a certain number of people to hear the song. And once you got that number of people, if the song was good enough, people say like, oh my God, play that again. And you're off and running. I had never reached critical mass with any of these books, not enough eyeballs had seen these books. To get over that hump where word of mouth starts carrying things. And really, the only thing that's going to sell books in any sort of real way is word of mouth. You can advertise all you want. It just, you're not going to buy the book until your best friend calls and says, oh my God, I just read the greatest book.

• 56:00Rick Rubin?

  Would you say that all the books are written with a formula? Is that a good or bad way to look at it?

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Well, I, I'm not sure. I mean, I have had people say, your books are so formulaic. I'm like, oh, I wish they were because I could write them a lot faster. I mean, certainly there are, there are recurring themes, you know, Langdon is challenged by a shadowy villain. He's got a love interest. There's a European city usually. And oftentimes whoever did it is not the person you think did it. Those are pretty common in most thrillers. I don't feel like there is a formula. And if there is, I wish somebody would just write it down and send it to me. Because, I mean, I struggle with all of these books. I really do. Uh, this one in particular.

• 56:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  So I, I, I see formula as a, I won't say an insult, but it's intended that way, I think, when people say it. Anybody could do this, just, you know, plug this in, plug that in, and you got your book. I don't see it that way, but, uh, you know, maybe, maybe I'm missing the forest for the trees. I'm not sure.

• 57:04Rick Rubin?

  In the wake of the success of your books, have there been copycats?

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, tons, tons. And my, my editor, Jason Kaufman, said after Da Vinci Code came out, every day he'd get, you know, the Bernini cipher, the, the Michelangelo conundrum. You know, everybody had an idea of how to turn, you know, one of these into a thriller. And there have been a few people who've done it with some success. Steve Barry's been successful. I can't really think of anybody else who, who has had a lot of success trying to do this. But yeah, there's a lot of copycats, for sure.

• 57:38Rick Rubin?

  How did you decide the Golem would be a character in your book?

• 57:42Speaker 01

  I've always been fascinated by that story. And I've written about Kabbalistic magic and Kabbalism. And it's always been something that's fascinated me. And I covered some of it in The Lost Symbol, something called The Ancient Mysteries that are tied to Jewish mysticism. So when I knew it was going to be in Prague, the first thing that jumped to mind was the Golem. And it was really then that I realized, wait a minute. This is a story about non-local consciousness. The Golem is being turned on and off. He's receiving this consciousness from somewhere. It's being infused in this pile of clay. And it's also a beautiful story about this rabbi's protecting his people. And this Golem goes a little crazy. It's a cautionary tale, but it's also a beautiful story.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  And I just knew that I wanted to use that piece of history in this novel. And it just fit perfectly.

• 58:32Rick Rubin?

  You mentioned model names or brands like Vanquisher Swim Goggles. Are these all products you use? Or do you think my character's going to swim? I'll research what a knowledgeable swimmer might choose.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's the latter. In the case of Vanquisher Goggles, I'm not a very good swimmer and certainly don't swim like Langdon does. And I literally called a couple of students over at Phillips Xer that I happen to know who are on the swim team. And they're fantastic swimmers. I said, listen, what would this guy wear? And they told me. And I literally gave them credit in the acknowledgements.

• 59:08Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Georgie Vensi is one of them.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  And that's how I do it. At the beginning of Origin, there's a billionaire technologist in the opening sequence. And I just wanted to show that he threw money around. I literally typed in the internet, what is the most expensive suit you can buy? And they said, it's the Keton whatever. And so that's what he wore. And when the book came out, I was touring in Spain. And I stayed in a hotel and right next door was a Ketan store with with that page blown up huge.

• 59:42Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  And I got to my room and there was a letter from them saying, we want to make you a suit.

• 59:46Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  So now I have a Ketan suit.

• 59:48Rick Rubin?

  Cool.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Which I insist, I paid for it.

• 59:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Because I none of these are paid endorsements in any way, and I want to be able to say that forever. Most of these people have no idea I'm going to use their product. A lot of people said like, why do you take so many endorsements? You use so many brands. I said, first of all, I take no endorsements. I use brands because we all use brands and it says something about who you are. What you wear, what you drive, what you, you know. And the fact that Catherine wears a or carries a Siana bag rather than than a Louis Vuitton bag. Says a lot. She doesn't waste money, but she has a sense of style.

• 1:00:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  It really is that simple. They they are specifics that carry a lot of information.

• 1:00:30Rick Rubin?

  They really do, and it makes it more real.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  I agree entirely. It's funny, they are a kind of symbols in a way. I mean, I write about symbols and I'm fascinated that two intersecting lines. You know, in the form of a cross can carry, you know, two millennia of information. You know, just those two lines you look at it and we it just conjures this huge picture. It's different for all of us. And brands really are the same way that a Nike swoosh carries a certain vibe or or a certain amount of information. And brand names just just do that. And that's why they are so incredibly valuable. And why companies spend an absolute fortune to make sure that your brand and and your logo is in front of as many people as possible.

• 1:01:15Rick Rubin?

  Do you ever write something and feel like I've gone too far?

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Sure. It doesn't happen often, but I usually pull it back. It's very rare that my editor will get something he says like, no, that that's just over the top. There is one scene in Angels and Demons that in retrospect, I'd probably rewrite just because it's a little over the top. But I would say of everything I've written, that really is the the only thing that I can look back and go like, huh. A little bit of a stretch. And what's kind of strange, we live in this post-truth world where where fact is stranger than fiction in many ways. I mean, I don't talk politics ever. I'll just say that from a creative standpoint. If a few years ago I'd written a novel about a bunch of militants who took over

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  the Capitol Building, my editor would go like, "That's ridiculous. That's insanity. It would never happen." And now writers are having to work twice as hard to write anything that stands out as interesting because what's happening every day is pretty interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, these are strange days to write fiction, and just because there's so much happening that feels like fiction, all over the world, not just here, everywhere.

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

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• 1:04:00Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your relationship with your editor. How does that work?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, he's become my very best friend. He and I are absolutely on the same page. We share the same taste. And we really bonded over The Da Vinci Code because it was a tough book to write and we both worked hard on it. And there was a moment when we gave it to the senior publisher at Random House. And this man said, "I love this book, but I need you to make a change." All of this happens in 24 hours, which is unbelievable. I need it to happen over the course of a week. And Jason and I looked at each other and said, "Not gonna happen. This is the book." So we went to him and said, "I'm sorry, this is the book." And he said, "Wow, okay. Here we go." It came out and it did pretty well.

• 1:04:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  And he took us aside and said, "Whatever you do, just do that."

• 1:04:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  And we were never questioned again. And all of these books take place in increasingly compressed time spans. And it's one way to really challenge the craft, to challenge the form. How much can you pack into 12 hours?

• 1:05:04Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  And there was that great show, you know, 24, you know, that Grazer did. It just made everything feel urgent, like it's happening right now. And that's the way I write. And the funny story about how Ron Howard and Brian Grazer ended up with The Da Vinci Code to make the movie is Brian Grazer called me. I'd never met him. And he said, "I just read The Da Vinci Code and we want to buy it for a season of 24."

• 1:05:28Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  And I said, "What's 24?" And he said, "It's this show with Kiefer Sutherland and we want Kiefer to be Langdon and we're gonna change a few things, but that's what we want to do." And I said, "I doubt it." Called my agent. And they did and said, "John Calhoun at Sony Pictures has already spoken for it. It's being sold right now to Sony as a major motion picture." And Grazer said, "Then can we make it?" And that's how all that happened. And I think they also felt like the subject matter was so controversial at that point that if they... Got Ron Howard, sort of America's favorite son, and Tom Hanks. How could anybody complain about it? It somehow made it safer. Yeah. But the movie was still boycotted and all that. But it was a really interesting choice.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  And of course, you know, Tom Hanks is just such a great actor. He's somebody I like to watch think. And so that was kind of an interesting time. And I remember the first night on set, we were at the Louvre. And we were filming inside the Louvre after hours. We went in at eight o'clock when they closed and we were there until about 5 a.m. every night. And the first night we were there, two things happened. One is Rita Wilson, Tom Hanks's wife, said to me, Dan, have you ever been on a movie set? I said, no. And she laughed and said, just so you know, this isn't how it usually happens. Your first day on a movie set is not usually the Grand Gallery of the Louvre with Tom Hanks and Ron Howard. You know, usually you're you're out in Palmdale in the desert with, you know, somebody's in a bikini screaming because a giant snake is eating her or whatever.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  And it said, you know, you've sort of started at the top. This is this is a funny, you know? And I thought that was funny. But we were filming that night. And there was a moment when I just sort of wandered off. I'm sure you've been on movie sets. It's much less exciting than you would imagine, just same thing over and over. And I just wandered off and I found myself in the Salzatti with the Mona Lisa, all alone. Just standing there with the Mona Lisa. And actually, they had used that room as storage. It was just filled with gear. It was like, it was crazy. And there's the Mona Lisa. And I remember thinking, what a life moment this is. Amazing. And at that moment, sort of outside the door, an albino monk goes running by. And it was obviously the actor, Paul Bettany, that, you know?

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  And I thought, wow. A few years ago, I was sitting all alone in the dark and I just pictured this. And now I'm standing here and it's really happening. And that was that was a very strange thing for a writer to have all the things in your head suddenly. Right in front of you.

• 1:07:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Now, when you think about Langdon, do you picture Tom Hanks?

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  You know, I don't. I know a lot of readers do.

• 1:08:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  But I wrote a lot of books before Tom played Langdon, and I spend so much time with the books and so little with the movies. You know, Tom's great and all that, but I just, I still think of the same, same Langdon I had when I first started writing. He really hasn't, hasn't changed.

• 1:08:19Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember what the seed idea of The Da Vinci Code was, what got you started on the book?

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Sure. I studied art history at the University of Seville in Spain. I was one of my, I took a school year abroad. And went over, listened to a ton of flamenco and read a ton about art. And it was, uh, the professor who showed us The Last Supper and said, yeah, there's this crazy theory, but this is actually not a prophet. It's actually Mary Magdalene. And if you notice, it does look a lot like a woman. And, you know, there's a fair amount of evidence and there's this book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. So I was interested and I read Holy Blood and I thought it was interesting. And I just had it in the back of my head and then saw, saw a special about the sacred feminine. This idea that religion has become a male centric phenomenon everywhere.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  And that, that women really have been subjugated in a spiritual sense compared to where, where we all started. And I realized that there was this fusion of ideas there. And that was really where it came from, this, this notion of the sacred feminine, The Last Supper as, as a clue left by Leonardo, that women are in positions of power in, in his church.

• 1:09:27Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful. It's such a great story. I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail as well.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Yep. Well, it was interesting. That book, a little behind the scenes, that, that book had been out of print when Da Vinci Code came out.

• 1:09:39Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  And I, I mentioned three books in the novel at Lee Tebings House, Chateau Valette. There on the shelf is The Templar Revelation, something else, and Holy Blood, Holy Grail. And they were three books that were influential on me as I wrote the book.

• 1:09:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  And that was my sort of thank you to the authors. And the first two authors sent me thank you notes and flowers or something. And my attorney called and said, hey, we heard from the guys who wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I said, oh, is it chocolate or flowers? They said, it's a lawsuit. They're suing you.

• 1:10:13Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  I said, they're suing me. Their book's been out of print. It's at the top of the nonfiction list. They're making millions of dollars a month. What do you mean they're suing me? They said, no. And they sued me.

• 1:10:24Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  And yeah, it took a year of my life and I had to defend myself in the British High Court. And one, they were really just shaking the tree, hoping I'd fold. And I just said, no, this is absolutely in no way plagiaristic. And I mentioned you in the book, like, what are you doing?

• 1:10:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  In the UK, it's loser pays.

• 1:10:43Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  And yeah, they went broke on that lawsuit. It was, it was a really ill-advised thing. It was unfortunate. It was sad for everybody.

• 1:10:53Rick Rubin?

  Crazy. Do you think that art can predict the future?

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. I mean, art imitates life and life imitates art. And art is that place where we get to imagine. What if? You know, you get to imagine how it is. And I get to build a world that is based on reality, but it's not reality. It's some, it's reality with a little something else. And, and these books all seem to take place, you know, a year from now. That's sort of how I think of them. And usually that's because what I'm writing about that's real is part of an undercurrent. It's not really all that public yet. And, and all this stuff from The Secret Sequestration, I think, will be, become very, very public in the coming years. And I won't ruin the story for you, but yeah, there's a lot of, lot of interesting stuff in the second half of the book.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  You kind of go, wow, like that's happening? And it really is. It's, it's amazing. And all, I think incredibly positive. And it hasn't, I'm optimistic about the future.

• 1:11:51Rick Rubin?

  Besides waking up at 4:00 AM, are there any habits in lifestyle choices that you make that support your writing?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really believe there's a connection between mind and body. So I work hard to stay in shape and some of that. I've got an antique hourglass on my desk and every hour I stop and do pushups or situps or stretching, whatever, just to keep the blood moving. Cause I will often write six, seven, eight hours and that you can really just, you know, your heart rate can almost stop at that rate. So that's one thing I do. I try to eat very well. I start, I start the day with a spinach smoothie or something and just sort of try to give myself a little bit of brain food. I have been known to use gravity boots to hang upside down. I did that a lot when I wrote Angels and Demons, which has a lot of ambigrams that are things that are visible upside down and they, they read the same way. And that, you know, people say that's kind of strange.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  It's, you know, from a physiology standpoint, it does two things that are pretty important. One, it, it separates your spine and sort of helps, you know, the tissue between the discs absorb a lot of fluid. And if you sit a lot, that's helpful, but more importantly, it, it takes a ton of oxygen to your brain. And aside from that, you're seeing your environment from a totally different perspective. And that is just a recurring theme in these books that when you see something from a new perspective, it's actually a new thing. It looks totally different and you can often solve problems just by looking at it from a different angle. You know, hanging upside down and sort of studying my surroundings is one way I just

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  try to train my brain to look at things from every angle.

• 1:13:33Rick Rubin?

  What's it like seeing a book of yours turn into a movie?

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny. Before I signed a movie deal, my, uh, my entertainment attorney was a, it was a big powerhouse in New York, really great guy. He said, hey, before you do this, let me just tell you that the best you can ever hope for as an author, when you get into bed with Hollywood is someday you see a version of your book you hate. They said, that's, that's the best case scenario. Usually it dies in, in, you know, in production or, you know, development and all that. And it's kind of funny. I did not want to make a movie. When Da Vinci Code came out, a lot of people wanted to make a movie. And I said, I, I want to write a bunch of books and then make movies at the end because what happens, and we just talked about it a minute ago with Picturing Tom Hanks. The great thing about books is that they're different for every person. The experience is different because you're bringing your imagination to it.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  You picture a different Langdon than somebody else. And this happened with Harry Potter. Everybody pictured Harry Potter a different way until the movies came out. And then everybody pictured the actor from then on. I said, I don't want to do that. And I got a fax, that'll tell you how long ago it was. I got a fax at my home number from a very big movie producer. Not Ron and Brian, somebody else. This was right before that. Who told me, Dan, I know you don't want to make a movie, but this is such an important story. It's a touchstone of humanity and you need to, for the good of mankind. For people who don't read, you need to make this movie. And I, you know, read this fax and thought, yes, for the good of mankind, I have to. I have to make The Da Vinci Code into a movie. It was just a, absolutely playing on my ego.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  And I went and saw this, this man and we did not strike a deal. I didn't like him at all. And at that point, John Kelly at Sony had decided he wanted to buy it. But that was what pulled me in to making movies, saying, actually, there are a lot of people who don't read. And maybe this story is kind of important and it's changing the way people think about religion and it's challenging them to say, this is why I believe what I believe. And maybe we should make a movie. And so we did, but that was, it was, my first instinct was not to make a movie. And I always use this, a physics analogy, that when, when a book is turned into a movie, the, the wave collapses and all these potentialities cease to exist and it just becomes one thing.

• 1:15:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  And I didn't want to do that, but in the end we did and it was a great life experience. In fact, I don't hate the movies. I have come to understand that they are totally different tellings. And I had a cameo in The Da Vinci Code. And so I was going to be talking to a talk show host, and I can't remember his name. He was on set by chance. And we were all set to have this conversation on camera and we were walking to set in full makeup and he had one of the first BlackBerries and he was looking down it and he walked into a piece of scaffolding, hit him right in the forehead and knocked him out. So they'd bring him back, you know, time is money on a movie set. They're like, hey, we're waiting. And he said, I'm fine, I'm fine. They put on some more makeup. We did the scene, but he was just dingy. He couldn't. The scene was terrible. And I wasn't really any better.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  So when Ron called, he said, hey, you'll notice that your scene isn't there. You know, it's because it was too long, that the movie's just too long. We're trying to cut it down. I've had, I had to tell my dad the same thing. He's not in it. So that was kind of a funny moment. But when they showed me the first cut, it was three and a half hours long.

• 1:16:49Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  And I was living in New Hampshire and somebody flew out with a, with a briefcase. In it was their own DVD player. I remember the briefcase being handcuffed to him. I doubt it was, but that's sort of my memory. It was sort of that sort of thing.

• 1:17:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Came in, super secretive. They played a three and a half hour cut. And then he broke the DVD and took the pieces in the DVD player and left. And I called Ron, he said, what do you think? I said, it felt like 1% of the novel. Like, where's the rest of it? You know, it felt like it had just glossed.

• 1:17:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Through all of these. And you wait till we get this down to two and a half hours. And that, that's the experience that is just, it all happens so fast. And you also have no control. It's, it's a much different experience. As an author, you are in control of all things. Literally every single aspect of this artifact is because of you. You make all the decisions. And the movies, there's the guy who cuts Tom Hanks's hair, who made a decision. There's, you know, Jean Reno who decided how to deliver line, the line, you know, it's a scar on the face of Paris, uh, which is one of my favorite lines. And I didn't like how he delivered it.

• 1:17:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  You're not gonna tell Jean Reno how to deliver a line about his own city.

• 1:17:59Rick Rubin?

  Of course.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  Uh, any more than you're gonna tell Tom Hanks how to act, or Ron Howard how to direct. And so you learn quickly that you're a tourist, really, on set. And these guys were great. And they, you know, they made me feel relevant, whether or not I was. But it was, it was a very fun life experience to, to watch all that come to life.

• 1:18:18Rick Rubin?

  And I imagine more people read the book after the movie.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, most likely. That's generally the, the effect. It just, it reaches a different audience. And people say, oh, that's what that's about. Maybe, maybe I'll read that.

• 1:18:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  They say that when you put your book into the movies, it's sort of like sending your child off to college. You know, when they come back, you just kind of hope you recognize them on some level. So, and that was the experience. But it was a really positive experience. And I know that one thing I did learn is how hard people in the movies work to create what they create. And seeing what it took to make The Da Vinci Code, I am much more forgiving of movies that I don't think are any good. The fact that you even got this made is remarkable.

• 1:19:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  And the fact that there are scenes that work. Maybe the whole thing doesn't hold together as well as, you know, somebody might wish it did. But, you know, it's just, it's an impressive phenomenon to see all of these creative people in all these fields come together with this singular goal. And the thing that really struck me was at the end of a day, and it's about a million dollars a day to film a giant movie in the Louvre. At the end of the day, there was a truck with two security guards in it and an escort that drove the film, we did this on film, down to a developing lab somewhere in the south of France to have it developed. I realized all these people came together and all we have is this one reel.

• 1:19:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  We just have this, this reel, like, like that's it. That's all we have after this whole day. And it was just sort of, wow, I hope, you know, I hope it goes okay. That, you know, that the developers don't screw this up because, you know.

• 1:19:56Rick Rubin?

  That's it.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:20:00Rick Rubin?

  In Angels and Demons, it was, among other things about the Illuminati, through making it, did you ever get to meet any members of the Illuminati?

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  I did not. The Illuminati is kind of a catchphrase for, you know, it can be everything from, you know, the invisible college of, of days of yore to, you know, the Bilderbergers or the, uh, I don't know, there's just so many groups. Or just a bunch of conspiracy theorists who believe that there's a, you know, secret cabal running the world. And when I get asked about conspiracy theory, I, I always want to point out that conspiracy theory comes from the same place that religion comes from. The human mind despises chaos. We really much prefer that there's a reason. We don't like anything that's random. And when I was a kid, one of my friends died at seven years old. I was seven and this friend of mine died of leukemia. And I went to the church service and the priest said, it's part of God's plan.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  And in a weird way, it made me feel better. It felt like it wasn't just random, like it, oh, I mean, I hate the plan, but if this was gonna happen anyway, okay, I feel better about it. And that is, in many ways, the function of religion. If you're on a bus, you wanna know somebody's driving the bus. You don't want it just sort of hurtling along, going in random directions. And it's the same with conspiracy theory, that we like to think that things happen for a reason. We don't like to think that things are random. And so we come up with stories to explain whatever it is we don't understand. And we've been doing it since the beginning of time. We don't understand why the sun rises. Well, there's this guy named Helios in a chariot and he's riding across the sky. That's what's happening, trust me. And you go like, oh, okay, now I feel better.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  I understand what's happening.

• 1:21:42Rick Rubin?

  Do you have a spiritual practice?

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  I do, you know, I, I, I've been a meditator, a TM meditator for, for many years. And I'm, I don't wanna say I'm religious about that, but you know, the term.

• 1:21:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  I am consistent with that. I don't have a place in my life for organized religion. And, and I've just grown away from that. I grew up very, very religious. And at some point, you know, had, had learned about Adam and Eve and, and Genesis and ended up in the Boston Museum of Science and heard all about evolution, the big bang and asked my priest, hey, which story is true? And the answer I got was, you know, nice boys don't ask that question. So that was not, not the answer I really needed to hear. And I moved immediately into science. My dad was a mathematician or is a mathematician. He's 89, still super sharp.

• 1:22:30Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  And I moved and studied a ton of science, studied physics, cosmology. And started to learn in college that the deeper you go into things like physics, the more spiritual the, the discussions start to become. You start going full circle and you've got uncertainty principles and margins for error and numbers become imaginary numbers and all gets very, very soft very quickly. And my mom had a great way of saying, she said that science and religion are really just two different languages attempting to tell the same story. And I always thought that was a beautiful way to look at it. So in some ways, I see a passion and an interest in science as spiritual. My dad has always said mathematics is beautiful.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  He actually is a bestselling author himself. He's written 13 bestselling mathematics textbooks. And jokes that my books keep people awake and his books put them to sleep. So we've got a perfect father-son synergy there.

• 1:23:28Rick Rubin?

  How did you come to learn TM?

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  I, this is a crazy story. A fellow writer, Harlan Coben, he and I were fraternity mates at Amherst College. And he likes to go on talk shows and say, not only am I not the bestselling author in my university, I'm not the bestselling author in my own fraternity. And he has a lot of number one bestsellers. So he's a good guy. I was golfing with Harlan and he said, I practiced TM with this guy named Bob Roth in New York City. I said, I've tried to meditate and I can't do it. And they laughed and said, just go see this guy. So I went to New York for a week and studied with this guy named Bob Roth and found out, wow, meditation is not only easier than I thought, but it is exceptionally rewarding.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  And this sensation that you get when you're not meditating is that that level of calm is right there anytime I need it. I can just reach out and grab it. And so even when you're not meditating it, it creates a level of calm in my life that I really like. I will add, I used to practice in the morning before I wrote. And it really disrupted the writing process. It is the opposite of what you want to do when you're being creative. It clears the mind and I write from a place of not stress, but just creativity, just a lot happening in my head.

• 1:24:49Rick Rubin?

  Very interesting.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  So I meditate after, I meditate in the afternoons and have much better success with that.

• 1:24:57Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful. How would you say meditation has changed you?

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  I would say, overall, it has made me a calmer person. And in a weird way, has informed a lot of what I wrote about in this book. I've never had an out of body experience. But a deep meditative state, as I'm sure you're aware, feels out of body. Your body will disappear. I don't have a point of view outside my body. I just feel like it's just... Your consciousness is sitting there or hovering there without a physical form. And having had that physical experience, to me, it helped me believe a lot of these people that I talked to who've had near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  They say like, "No, no, I was awake and thinking, but my body wasn't there." It's like, yeah, I've had that experience every day. And I've actually practiced trying to get outside my body, trying to have an experience outside my body. I've never been successful. But it's an interesting sensation.

• 1:26:04Rick Rubin?

  Do you pray?

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. I think I do. But it's usually just in the form of gratitude.

• 1:26:12Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  I don't remember asking for anything. I remember just instinctually wanting to be thankful to, whether it's some power that I don't understand or whether it's just the luck of the universe for all the wonderful things that have come my way in life. And yeah, there have been challenges. But overall, I just feel so fortunate every day. And I think that, for me, is just sort of looking up at the stars and saying, "Thank you", is my form of praying.

• 1:26:40Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about codes and maps.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  Well, I love them both. My parents decided not to have a television when we grew up. No TV in the house. They wanted us to read books, learn music, and play games. And the games were often codes, puzzles, word games, math games. And so, I grew up in a world where those sorts of things, codes and puzzles, were recreation. They were fun. On Christmas morning, we would come down to get our presents, and there'd be no presents under the tree. There would just be an envelope. And you open the envelope, and there would be a poem inside that was some sort of puzzle, a riddle. And I remember one, one year, it had something to do with where you would keep the letter T. And we figured out it was in the kitchen in the tea container. And you open

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  it up and there's another code and blah, blah, blah. And so you would follow all of these codes and eventually find your presence somewhere. And that's where I fell in love with treasure hunts. And so these books, all of them on some level have elements of a treasure hunt. My dad, I found out years later, he went to University of Rochester, then went to Harvard grad school in mathematics and ended up being recruited by NSA and decided not to work as a code breaker, but to work as a prep school math teacher, which was his first job and his last job. And he was there, I don't know, decades at Phillips Exeter and loved it. But mathematics, codes and ciphers became a really, really big part of my life from a, from a very young age. And I'll also say that mathematics is

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  a symbolic language and music is a symbolic language. They both are very, very explicit and very descriptive, using no words at all, which is pretty interesting.

• 1:28:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  You know, I'd say when I was growing up, my parents, you know, had no TV. And we had, my mom was a professional organist and had her masters in sacred music. We had no radio. We just had a record collection. And so for the longest time, I thought music was classical music. And that's all we had. Well, actually, we had Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. That was as far away from, from classical as we got.

• 1:28:46Rick Rubin?

  Good choice.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  And yeah, it was great. Peaches and Cream, that was, that was the album that I remember loving. But at some point I heard the Beach Boys. And a whole world just opened up to me and, and I just became really, really passionate about pop music and listened to tons and tons of it. But when I was really little, I listened to classical music and read picture books. That was my recreation. So I have all these fond memories of reading Richard Scarry or Dr. Seuss and listening to, you know, 1812 Overture or whatever. I used to like big, whatever was loud with a lot of timpani. That's what I liked to listen to. And so a few years ago, I decided I wanted to create a children's book, a picture book with classical music that went with it.

• 1:29:27Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  And so I wrote Wild Symphony. And just had a great time doing that. And there's so it's a it's a kid's symphony with has 22 movements. I think each one inspired by an animal. They're short like the chapters in my book. They're all three minutes. And there's a picture book that goes along with it. And it it was just this incredibly cathartic project to be able to really reconnect with my youth. And I forgot how much I love creating music, the process of writing it. And then, of course, the process of recording it with an orchestra and hearing all the things you hear in your head.

• 1:29:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  Come to life. That was an enormously inspirational project that I really enjoyed doing.

• 1:30:05Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful. How different is the music you hear in your head versus the orchestra playing it?

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I it's kind of funny. I try to orchestrate this stuff myself, you know, in Logic Audio. I now write the violin parts. I'll write all this stuff. I have a sort of a MIDI version of what it will sound like. And then I go to a professional orchestrator who says, hey, you know, this is nice, but a bassoon can't do that and flutes can't actually play that high. And the choir is going to kill you because you gave them no time to breathe. So, you know, they they take it up to a level where it can actually be performed. And then, when you sit down and listen, I would say it is markedly different because of the humanity that professional players will bring to every single line. You know, the the sum of the parts is the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  in some strange way that I that I mean, that's one of the magic magical things about music. You can take your favorite song and pull down all the faders and listen to every individual track. Oh, here's the bass track. Not that good. Here's here's the backing vocal. Oh, jeez, you know, not that great. And you put them all up and it's perfect. And that is, you know, I wish writing books were a little more like that, but it isn't.

• 1:31:18Rick Rubin?

  Do you break any of the rules that you taught when you were a teacher in your novels?

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. I'm sure I do. Actually, I did a masterclass for masterclass.com. And I remember they called and said, "We want you to do this." I said, "The only way I'll agree to do this is if I actually have content that would be helpful." I'm not going to do a masterclass that says, "You know, just stick with it, keep going, you know, right from the heart." I said, "Give me a week. Let me see if I can come up with a curriculum." And I thought, "Wow, I've made so many mistakes along the way and learned so much that I actually could teach a masterclass in writing." And so I did, and it was a great experience to really start to catalog and understand all the things that you do instinctually at some point. But there's actually a rule that I'm following here. Let me just write that down and share that with other people.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  I would say that the one rule that I break now. When I was teaching English, which I did before I was writing, I was paying the bills as an English teacher. I told people to follow the action, and you write what you know. And I said, "You know, pick something you know and write about it. Don't write about what you don't know." And these days, I say the exact opposite. I said, "Don't write what you know. Write what you want to know. And pick that thing that's fascinating to you. Go out and learn about it, and your passion for learning this will come through in your writing. You'll want to excite your reader about the things that are exciting you." And that has become my mantra. All these books are about something different. I didn't know anything about AI or, you know, vector viruses

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  or National Security Agency. All the things I've written about are things that interested me, that I went out and learned about. And then when I wrote, my passion for learning about them came through in the writing.

• 1:33:04Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful. Tell me something you believe that most people don't believe.

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  Wow. Eight years ago, I did not believe in life after death. I believe now that some element of our consciousness does survive the death of the body. I guess, in simplest terms, I believe consciousness is non-local. Most people really don't believe that.

• 1:33:27Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your media diet.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  My media diet? Well, let's see, after all day writing and reading for research, I do not read for pleasure. I find pleasure in reading as research, but I do not read for pleasure. So I do any number of things at night. I mean, on an ideal night, I'll have friends over and we'll, you know, have a, you know, wonderful dinner out around the fire and just, just talk about life. Or I will consume streaming shows. I love storytelling and I like to see how other people do it. And there's so much great television, so many great movies. And you even learn from the bad ones? I remember I was down in Angola once and walking the beach and I ran into a woman in Esther Newberg, who is a famous literary agent. And I said, how weird is it that we meet on this deserted beach?

• 1:34:12Speaker 01

  And we got talking about what shows we were watching. And she said, how weird is it? We used to say, what are you reading?

• 1:34:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  And now we all say, what are you watching? And she said, I just finished a show called Breaking Bad. I said, oh, what is that? And she said, she basically described, you know, tumbleweeds and methamphetamines. And I was just like, yeah, I'm, I'm good. I don't, not my thing. She said, just see the first season. I said, I'm not gonna see the first season. Watch the first episode. I said, Esther, I'm not gonna watch the first episode. She said, watch the first five minutes. I said, okay, that I can do. I went home, watched the first five minutes and four days later I was on season eight. Or whatever it was. Absolutely addicted. And I, I just thought, that's a masterclass in creating suspense.

• 1:34:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  And it was, it was that simple thing where, you know, it's just one hour earlier. That's it. When you show a crazy situation that you can't imagine how anybody got into, and then say one hour earlier and show somebody in a very stable situation. You say, okay, all right, what happened?

• 1:35:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  I gotta know.

• 1:35:12Rick Rubin?

  Gotta know.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  And that is what we were talking about earlier, just sort of writing the ending and just rewinding to as far away as you can get. And then the reader just says, okay, tell me how you got there.

• 1:35:23Rick Rubin?

  Do you think of yourself as a storyteller or a writer?

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  A storyteller, for sure. Yeah, writing is the process by which you tell a story. And I try to make the writing as transparent as possible, such that you read every sentence once. You don't have to go back and sort of figure out what I was trying to say, because I've used an elegant syntax or a giant word. Or the writing is really just the way that you impart the information. The information is what's important. And that's, I mean, there's many kinds of writing. There's literary fiction, which is, you know, where the craft itself is part of the art form. And that's, you know, a beautiful thing and fascinating. That's not exactly what I do.

• 1:36:07Rick Rubin?

  How has the process of writing each of the books been the same? And how have they been different?

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  I have always believed that you can't do something as much as I write without getting better. You would hope that whatever you do in your world, you just get better and better at it. And so with every book, I try to set a higher bar. And by a higher bar, I mean, write about something that is more difficult or compress the timeframe or add more characters or have a twist that's even tougher to pull off. And this book has quite a twist that was very difficult to pull off and also very, very gratifying when I finally figured out how to do it. So they're all the same in that you are at the core trying to get somebody excited about a relatively esoteric topic.

• 1:36:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  Cryptography, artificial intelligence, the ancient mysteries, the history of Jesus, you know? That's what's the same. And what's different is really the structure gets more and more complicated with each book.

• 1:37:14Rick Rubin?

  Secret of Secrets is a great title. When did that come to you in the process?

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  You know, what's fascinating is when I was writing The Lost Symbol, I was really struggling with it. That was the book that followed The Da Vinci Code. And I remember sitting down and for about a month, I really struggled. I was very self-aware. And everything I wrote, I thought, oh, my God, millions of people are going to read this. Is that good enough? And as you know, as a musician, you cannot be self-aware when you're being creative. You can't think about how to swing a baseball bat or how to play a guitar lick or how to write a book. You have to sort of fall into that zone where it's just sort of happening. And I'd become very self-aware and I was crippled by it. And at some point, I realized like, wait a minute. All of these books have gone to number one and I just, all I did was write the book that I wanted to write.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  So just do that and you'll be fine. And then I was fine. I was writing the book, but it's a pretty difficult topic. And somewhere along the way, while I was writing The Lost Symbol, I had to convince myself I could do it. And I didn't have the title The Lost Symbol yet. So what I did is I, I just took a novel of somebody else and put a book jacket on it called The Secret of Secrets. That was the title of the book I'd decided, The Secret of Secrets. And every morning I would just hold it and look at it and say, okay, this exists in the universe. I can feel the weight. The book exists. I just have to go find it. And it was just one way of, I don't want to say tricking myself, but really sort of tying into that, that universal feeling of, of, of hey, everything's been done.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  Time, time moves in two directions. It's really there. You're just going to go find it. And it was called The Secret of Secrets. And so I have a book in this library, actually behind me, called The Secret of Secrets that is, oh, 19 or 20 years old. And I did not call that book The Secret of Secrets, nor the next book, nor the next book. And I always knew I'd write the book, The Secret of Secrets. And now I have.

• 1:39:11Rick Rubin?

  I love that story.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  And I should tell you also, I also have, in that book, The Secret of Secrets, I printed a New York Times Bestseller list. Photoshop the Secret of Secrets in on a certain date. And the date is 20 years ago. And I have that. Secret of Secrets is number one. And next to it now, I have The Secret of Secrets number one on the New York Times from today, 20 years later. And they're sitting side by side. And whether you want to call it, you know, hard work, manifestation, precognition, I don't know what it is. I mean, to me, it's, it represents hard work. But it is kind of eerie to look at them side by side and feel two decades having passed. And in my mind, I held this image very, very clearly of a book called The Secret of Secrets

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  being a number one bestseller, and now it is.

• 1:40:24Speaker 05

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