Jimmy Iovine

Legendary music producer Jimmy Iovine returns to Tetragrammaton to reflect on the pivotal moments that shaped his path from young engineer to industry visionary. He recounts early lessons learned while working with John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen, and the creative spark that led to the founding of Beats with Dr. Dre, which redefined headphone culture worldwide. This journey inspired the model behind the USC Iovine and Young Academy, an interdisciplinary program designed to merge art, technology, and business for the next generation of creators. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.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.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  When I first got the gig with John Lennon, I walked in and I got to work with him for two weeks in the very beginning. I'm living in my mother's house in Brooklyn, Red Hook, Brooklyn. I said, "Dad, you're not gonna believe this. I got to work with John Lennon." He goes, "Lucky him." I said, "What do you mean, lucky him?" He goes, "He's famous. Where's he gonna find a good person? You'll be loyal to him. You're honest. Where's he gonna find somebody like that?"

• 0:51Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  I mean, and by the way, I never got a weird ego because of it.

• 0:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  I just always felt like, "Oh, I belong here."

• 1:00Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  I never felt like I don't belong. And like, that's why I never breathed my own exhaust. So I don't think like, "Oh, wow, I had a hit record." I'm like, "Who doesn't?" You know what I mean? It's like, I never, I was always like, "I'm here, this is what I'm doing." And it turned out good. Now, I'm insecure of my life completely. I was, but I'm never insecure about where I am with my work.

• 1:23Rick Rubin?

  What are you insecure about? It sounds like you have self-confidence.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Now I have self-confidence in my whole life.

• 1:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  But growing up, you know, I was a little guy in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where the currency, well, I'm psychoanalyzing myself. I watched the Martin Scorsese documentary the other day. I felt like I was watching myself.

• 1:42Rick Rubin?

  Same story.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  You know, little guy, tough neighborhood, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The currency in my neighborhood was athletics and physicality. You know, if you were a tough guy. I never be the one. Then what happened was in sixty three, music became a currency. And I went all in on that. And that's how I ended up where I am. But those other two things stay with you. You know, you become insecure about girls, because that's who the girls go out with. Right? You want to be a football hero, right? So I'm making, I'm making this up right now. I went to a lot of psychotherapy in my life. I think that's where it's coming from. But then eventually I started to get more confidence about myself and I feel really good now.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  But, but I've never, I never felt I was going to go somewhere, somebody wasn't going to like me. I, I know that sounds weird, but I know people feel that.

• 2:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  People feel that they go to a party, they go, oh, my God. I go to a party, I figure, you know.

• 2:41Rick Rubin?

  Life of the party.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  Let's go, right? You know what I mean? Okay, it was party. John Lennon brought me to a party once. He brought me, it was him, Ringo, Harry Nielsen and me and Richard Perry. We went to Roman Polanski's party.

• 2:58Rick Rubin?

  What was that like?

• 2:59Speaker 00

  It was out there. It was everything you think it should and shouldn't be.

• 3:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  So I went there, but I remember I didn't feel like uncomfortable. I was only nineteen years old.

• 3:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  But I was looking around like, oh, wow, look at this, you know? And because the worst thing you can do in life, if you have some success, is breathe your own exhaust. It is so fucking boring. And it reads, when people see you, they read it.

• 3:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  They read it. I don't know how to fucking do half the things, ninety percent of the things I do. I get people that know how to do them and I help them. That's it, you know? I'm not Steve Jobs, I'm not even Marty Scorsese. Well, he's a genius, he's brilliant, but I'm saying I'm none of those characters, right? But part of that comes from thinking that you're comfortable, so you're not defensive, right?

• 3:51Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  So one of the things I wanted to tell you about is, is the journey from Interscope to Apple, to my schools, where we are now and the why of it. So. Two thousand three, American business hits turbulence. I'm not interested. I'm not working on tech or anything like that.

• 4:12Rick Rubin?

  Is that like when Napster happened?

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I figured that the labels need to do something else. The A, to offer the artist, or else why would artists want to do that, right? And also, the boat was leaking furiously. And all the labels were suing everybody and stuff like that. So I get a call from Doug Morris, who was running Universal, said to me, "Go up and see Eddie and Steve, Steve Jobs and Eddie Q about iTunes." So I go up there and I met those guys and it just was so fascinating to me to see what they had going, both technically but culturally.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  You know, when Steve, you had a guy who understood not just overall culture, but understood popular culture. He was kind of like, you know, you're too young, actually. Like a Morita kind of guy. The guy who founded Sony. You know, he, look, he had The Walkman. He bought Columbia Records, the compact disc, you know. He had it, right? He was a tech company that had popular culture. He was the first that looked like that. Actually, I think Steve got a lot of it from him.

• 5:29Rick Rubin?

  I think so too. I think he said that that was like one of his inspirations.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it had to be.

• 5:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  So I go up there and I get completely infatuated with the whole ecosystem of music to digital distribution.

• 5:45Rick Rubin?

  At that time, were we still selling CDs?

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:49Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. But I found a new love. The way I fell in love with music. I fell in love with the idea of this ecosystem. It just felt natural to me. And it felt culturally relevant. It didn't feel like a machine. And that was a lot to do with Steve Jobs, who, you know, we spent most of our time together talking about Bob Dylan and John Lennon, you know, because he loved the Beatles and he loved Dylan, you know? And we helped him EQ iTunes at one time and, you know, whatever. We just helped wherever we could. I felt the party was at his house. You know, I felt that that was a direction and it could be a really good direction.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  And I didn't have any interest or thinking that it was possible that we could build our own iTunes. That was beyond my even comprehension, which I later realized I was just not sophisticated enough yet, right? So the power of MP3s and the whole thing just kept getting bigger and bigger. So I realized, okay, if we're going to be a record company, we have to do more than just this. If we're not going to distribute our own records, we're not going to, we have to create other businesses. Of course, part of it, I saw what you guys were doing in hip hop.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  Russell, Puff, these guys were all doing very entrepreneurial things. And I said, that looks really smart, you know, because they bring a lot to it. They bring fashion, they bring taste.

• 7:25Rick Rubin?

  It was the whole movement. It wasn't just the music.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  That's right. So we tried a bunch of things and the great story of me and Dre running into each other because Dre was really upset with the earbuds.

• 7:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, the white wired free headphones that came with the iPod.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  And the iPhone. And it was so powerful, the reach of that thing, that every kid in the world was walking around with that thing. So Dre says to me, my kids are listening to music on their computer and those earbuds.

• 7:55Rick Rubin?

  Sounds terrible.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  I spend all day doing it. I spend every day and it sounds horrible. He said, there's got to be a solution for this. What is it? Then about six months later, I ran into him and he told me that great story. I mean, it is a great story now. He said to me, you know, my lawyer wants me to sell sneakers. And I said, no, no, no, Dre, speakers. Because remember what you said, right? And I said, okay, headphones. Oh, oh, okay. And he said, we can do that? I said, I think we can do this because I was hanging out at Apple. I was hanging out at Apple a lot. I would go up twice a month, three times a month.

• 8:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, because it was the future. You saw it was the future.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 8:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  I'll tell you what it was. Maybe you have the same thing, and I think you do. I was never cool as a kid. So I wanted to be around cool. And music was cool. I realized that music, not the music, but the whole thing of a record company, was feeling dated. And this was now cool. So I could recognize cool. I know I may not understand what they're doing, but I know it's cool.

• 9:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Especially their lead singer, Steve Jobs, right? I said, okay, this is, this is, this is it. So I aimed my boat in that direction. And I remember Dre and I decided we're going to do headphones. Then we put the company down. I went to Steve and I said, Steve, why don't we do Beats with you? He said, I don't want to sell headphones. He goes, you sell headphones. I said, okay.

• 9:25Rick Rubin?

  Did he say why?

• 9:26Speaker 00

  He's brilliant, but he wasn't always right. No one's always right, right? He felt that no one would pay for audio anymore on headphones. And people thought these were cool enough. He said, but if you want to do it. So we're at lunch at a Greek restaurant that had one of the, you know, when you bring your kids to a restaurant, they have the crayons on the paper, right? So he tells the waiter, before we were finished lunch, tells the waiter to come over and take everything away. And he said, do you have a marker? We got a marker. And he drew out, I wish I still had it. He drew out manufacturing, distribution of hardware.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Right?

• 10:10Rick Rubin?

  Because you had never done that before.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  I had no idea, right? But I knew I wanted to start a headphone company.

• 10:15Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  And so we started Beats. And Beats obviously worked, right? It was an incredible thing because what we did was, we harnessed the popular culture that we were able to harness. And the way I work is, everybody who walks in my office, I showed the designs to. It's like I play them records, you know? So I showed Pharrell, I showed Gwen Stefani, I showed a lot of people the designs and asked them which ones they like. And Dre and I are always collaborating on it. And we came up with that incredible design, you know? And what we did, see, I gotta rewind to hip hop

• 10:59Speaker 00

  because it's just kind of how I approach everything. When I met Snoop and Dre, I just said, this just needs to be marketed properly. Everyone in the world needs to hear this shit. And if Interscope did anything, it helped with that, right? We spent the money, we knew how to get the platforms on it, MTV and that radio and all this stuff and worldwide and whatever. But I felt the same way about headphones. The only headphones anybody knew anything about was Bose. And their advertising was, we're gonna put you to sleep. I'm like, come on. Right? I said, we can, we can do better than that, right? And the whole thing was noise cancelling.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  But we had noise cancelling as well. But what I did was, I got as many videos as I can and I put the headphones in the videos.

• 11:53Rick Rubin?

  In music videos?

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:56Rick Rubin?

  So anytime one of your artists made a music video, you'd show them wearing the headphones?

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Oh, they were in the headphones. The artists didn't want to do it, we didn't do it. But most of the time, everybody agreed.

• 12:07Rick Rubin?

  So it's almost like product placement for visibility?

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, Beats, we had some money, so we put money in. You know, it was, it was cool, you know? And, and it really worked. So then...

• 12:20Speaker 00

  We're still on this thing of Bose is banging noise cancellation. And we said, well, we have noise cancellation. What we're gonna do is we're gonna keep a different kind of noise out. So we made a commercial with Kevin Garnett, the basketball player. And he pulls up in the bus for the game in Philly, which is the roughest crowd in the world. He gets off the bus. And they're throwing eggs at the window and all this stuff. So he takes the headphones and it's called Hear What You Want. And he put it on his head.

• 12:59Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  And that was it, right? So that took us from go to sleep to no, no, no, you're not going to sleep. You're gonna put on music and hear only what you want in the world. And that's the way, that's what music does to you, right? So I was producing a movie, More Than a Game, with LeBron James and Maverick. Carter. So Maverick was in my office and I had a box of Beats there. I gave them to Maverick. And Maverick went home, gave them to LeBron. And LeBron's a big fan of Dre. And they called me back and they said, can we have 15? We're on our way to Beijing for the Olympics. And I want to, I want to give it as a gift to the Olympic team. So I said, LeBron, do me a favor.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  When you get off the plane, have the guys wear it when they get off the plane. So I have no idea the impact that's gonna have.

• 13:52Rick Rubin?

  It's televised all over the world.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  All over the world.

• 13:56Rick Rubin?

  It's unbelievable.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  So the dream team is coming off the plane and they all have the headphones on. Some around their neck, some on their head. So then what we realized is.

• 14:08Rick Rubin?

  And that really did come from Maverick being in your office and you giving him headphones. It wasn't like

• 14:14Speaker 00

  No.

• 14:14Rick Rubin?

  a marketing plan of like, let's figure out how to get it to the players at the Olympics.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  No, that came later.

• 14:20Rick Rubin?

  But still, it happened in a very

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:23Rick Rubin?

  organic way.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 14:25Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  So now what we took from that.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Was, oh, sports. Nobody is doing headphones in sports.

• 14:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  No one. Some football players had headphones, but no one, that was the drive of their marketing. So then we get Dre and LeBron, and we put them in a gym together. And we implied that if you wear these headphones, you could work out harder. Cause music's gonna inspire you to work harder.

• 15:01Rick Rubin?

  Wild.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  And then, we had a guy named Omar, who was our marketing guy, was terrific. He figures out a way to find all the equipment guys on all the teams. We didn't go to the people that owned the Giants. We went to the equipment handlers. And we put, in everybody's locker, we put headphones. So now, all of a sudden.

• 15:24Rick Rubin?

  Just like a gift.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  You turn, yeah, you turn on the NFL, and these guys all have the headphones on in practice. Right? So, we had LeBron, and then we had this infiltration of the NFL first. So we moved kind of away from music a little bit, and went heavy into sports.

• 15:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Also interesting, cause at first he wanted to make sneakers, which is what was for the sports.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:52Rick Rubin?

  And then you do headphones, cause that goes with the music.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:55Rick Rubin?

  And it ends up coming back to sports. Very interesting.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  No, it's crazy.

• 15:59Rick Rubin?

  Crazy story.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  It was crazy. So, simultaneously, I still was bugged by distribution. From the early 2000s, I wanted to have a streaming service. As a matter of fact, even earlier than I met Steve, I had a little bit of an attraction to it. We started this TV show, me and Doug, right? It was supposed to be a streaming service, but when Spotify started, I said, okay. So I bought, me and Trent and the people at Beats and our crew, we bought Mog. It was a family sort of streaming service. We bought it because my dream and Trent's was that you make the music.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  You put it out, you distribute it, and then you have the instrument that people played on, right? Which was headphones, right? So.

• 17:01Rick Rubin?

  You could also make sure it sounded good through that whole chain.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly, exactly. You know, Trent wasn't involved in Beats, but he was involved in Beats Music. And he was extraordinary in Apple Music as well, I'll tell you that. So we have it, and I've always seen everything in one place. But now what's going on is, I didn't know this. What we were doing, which was unusual for the day, was really multidisciplinary behavior. Where tech, you can't get any more different than building hardware than to making music. You know, people's always saying, well, you guys, you and Dre are recording engineers. Of course you build a headphone. I said, Bruce Springsteen's a guitar player.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  If you gave him two pieces of wood, it's not going to come out as a guitar, okay? Period, or anybody, you know, Keith Richard, any guitar player, right? So now we sell to Apple.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  I realized that.

• 18:03Rick Rubin?

  Did you sell the headphone company first? So it's the music streaming service, which is now Apple Music?

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:10Rick Rubin?

  And the headphone company?

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Yes, same time.

• 18:13Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  But I realized that all these companies, at the time at least, Google, because I visited them, and Microsoft, they were really engineering societies. They really were. Where I learned that engineering and design and everything else that falls underneath that, you know, art and creativity, they're siloed when they learn and they're siloed when they come out.

• 18:44Rick Rubin?

  Narrow expertise.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, siloed.

• 18:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Right? So then I wanted to bring social into streaming.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  When I was at Apple, right? And Trent and I wanted them to buy Musically. It's now called TikTok. They changed the name.

• 19:05Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:06Rick Rubin?

  Musically became TikTok?

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. Musically was a social app.

• 19:10Rick Rubin?

  Oh, music dot L Y.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:13Rick Rubin?

  I remember.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Where you get a song, you make a video, and you put it up and everybody, your kids could become involved. They dance and all this other stuff. I liked the social aspect of it. I always wanted music streaming to breathe in and out. So people can react. So people can communicate with the artist. I didn't want it to be an ATM machine.

• 19:37Rick Rubin?

  More of a sense of community around the artist.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Yes. Rather than an artist having to go Instagram, now TikTok, Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon. Right now, because of that sideload mentality, none of them have social. None of them, none of the streaming services. I don't know, they feel they can't do it. I don't know what they feel. They really think I'm wrong, right? Because I told all of them. But it led to me realizing that there's a breakdown of communication between technology, design, and any form of the arts. So I left Apple.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Not because of that, but that was, it was, I had, I had an idea. And Apple's an incredible company, and they treated us really well. But it was just, I just, I ran out of time. I ran out of personal runway. I was 65 years old. I said, you know, I'm not going to do this anymore.

• 20:40Rick Rubin?

  And you also took it very far.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:43Rick Rubin?

  Like you, you made it happen.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. But I didn't finish the thought.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  So because I'm a good top line guy, but a lot of times what goes underneath it, I need a lot of people for, and I need a lot of cooperation. Before we went to Apple, this is why I noticed the thing at Apple because I had it at Beats. I couldn't get engineering to communicate with design. And then I had these other 200 creative people around us and no one knew how to communicate. And what would always go on and I think a lot of people-

• 21:17Rick Rubin?

  Almost like they were speaking different languages?

• 21:19Speaker 00

  And sometimes on purpose.

• 21:20Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, a lot of time engineers do it on purpose. You can win every argument if the other person thinks he sounds stupid, right? And he goes, oh, I don't understand this stuff, you know, it's a hell of a power, you know, to have. You're the only person in the room that knows how it works.

• 21:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Right? So that's very literal and very simple, but that was, that's what I thought was going on. So I said, what really needs to happen, and I told this to Dre, is education should not be siloed. You need collaborative innovation at these companies. We needed it at Beats. We couldn't find people that knew how to work together, how to collaborate and really communicate. And it was causing a lot of breakdowns. And when I went to Apple, I realized, well, that goes on here too. It goes on in most companies now because most companies now need to understand tech. So they need to understand the fundamentals of tech.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  So what Dre and I did, which was probably crazy, I'm going to mention a number because I don't want to be, it's in public, but I just want you to know how insane it must have been. We went to USC and we said, we want to build a school that people could collaborate, innovate and collaborate, different disciplines. And there was a guy named Max Nikias, who was the president, who just, it hit him like lightning. He goes, I'm an engineer. You're right. He brought in this woman, Eric Merle, who was the Rosky School, which was the art school. She came in. Dre and I wrote a check for $70 million.

• 22:59Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  Right? That's a wow, right? On nothing but a top line idea.

• 23:06Rick Rubin?

  Yep.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Interdisciplinary learning. This is 2013. Everybody at USC thought we were out of our minds. All the others, not all, most. And we had to, with Eric and Max, navigate our way through that.

• 23:23Rick Rubin?

  Figure out what that looks like.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  And it's called the Ivan Young Academy. And it's been open for 12 years now. But my whole life, whatever business I do now, whatever I do now, it's all based on interdisciplinary. I think every engineer in the world should understand different disciplines. And I think that design, et cetera, should understand the language and the discipline of tech. Right? And communicate. And it's what's really crazy is that a lot of these companies think they have that. And they don't have that. You know, and everybody...

• 24:04Rick Rubin?

  They have different departments.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Understand each other.

• 24:07Rick Rubin?

  That do each of those things.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  They don't understand each other.

• 24:10Rick Rubin?

  Understood.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  You have to know the why of someone. I talked to some of the greatest engineers in the world when I were doing this. They didn't understand that what I do is not fungible. They don't understand that. I had one of the engineers tell me one day, we were doing video. He says, "I love television. I know how this should end." That means you don't understand the why of Steven Spielberg. Right?

• 24:39Rick Rubin?

  It's also why Apple wasn't Dell.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:43Rick Rubin?

  You know, or Apple wasn't IBM.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 24:46Rick Rubin?

  Apple was different than all.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  If Marina doesn't die.

• 24:49Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Sony could be Apple. Because then they got some people in that didn't understand that.

• 24:55Rick Rubin?

  And there's some question now whether the people at Apple understand that still.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Again, no one is Steve. But I know that they're doing it, they're trying, but I still think that the basics, nothing to do with Apple, the CEO, or the CEO of Microsoft. It's got to do with education. Siloed learning, we felt was over in 2012, 2013. So we started this school. Now, a lot of schools are doing this.

• 25:24Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, MIT's put up a hundred million dollars to build one of these schools.

• 25:28Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Because it makes sense.

• 25:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  What happens to a kid that grows up today? They grew up with multiple disciplines. They have to understand tech, or they can't communicate, or can't do anything. They don't understand the fundamentals. Kids were just a remote, put it on and change the channel. Life's more complicated than that now. They understand, especially kids from being in a city, understand the soul, and the music, and art, and they understand design. All kids understand design, have a feel for design today. They're in it at 18 years old, and you go to college, and they take all of that away from you.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  And all you're doing is engineer, lawyer, accountant, right? And whatever else exists today, you know? So we felt that when you're learning, you need to learn multiple disciplines and collaborate. So what we have is we have a thing called the garage, where we'll take a kid who, at 19 years old, wants to be an engineer. And we'll put him with a nineteen year old that wants to be a designer. And one wants to be an entrepreneur. And one's a creative musician or whatever. And they have to build a project together. So now what they learn is, I see why that person's important. And they learn the language and to communicate.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  And everything I do now is kind of built around that accident. Or not so much of an accident of Beats. An apple. I didn't invent it. Steve Jobs and Merida are the first people that really did it, right? I just saw and I said, oh, okay.

• 27:17Rick Rubin?

  And you still see that it's still not all the way there.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  It's not all the way there, not even close.

• 27:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  Not even close. Not even close. And when you deal with these institutions, you know, the engineering societies, they don't want to hear it. You know, they don't want to hear it. They think that they know, you know, and I have a lot of engineers that are friends, but they're like that. So I just felt really early on, especially after I met Steve, that all these tech companies were going to buy all the media companies. That was just obvious as anything to me, you know? And then all of a sudden, what you see, Rick, you're going to jump around a bit, but what you see is Netflix comes out. It's not just the music business.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  You see Netflix. Netflix comes out, what do they have? They have a checkbook. They have no catalog. They have nothing. They have Lilyhammer, Little Steven Show was their first show, right?

• 28:17Rick Rubin?

  Really? Is that true?

• 28:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:18Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  You should watch it. It's hilarious.

• 28:21Rick Rubin?

  I bet.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Right? So what do they do? They write advances and they buy the distribution of all those companies. All of them. Warner, all the companies. They would license their stuff to Netflix. Netflix took other money and made their own show. So now they have their shows and their own shows. That's sexy. They build a audience. Now their stock is five hundred billion dollars. And Warner might sell for forty billion. Warner Pictures.

• 28:56Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Right?

• 28:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  So. How many times you gotta get hit with the stick, right? The record business. Spotify is worth 160 billion. All the labels together is not worth 160 billion.

• 29:12Rick Rubin?

  And Spotify owns nothing.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  They own nothing.

• 29:16Rick Rubin?

  They're a distribution channel.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. By the way, I didn't add Apple Music and Amazon in there yet, or YouTube.

• 29:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  If you add those together, probably goes to 300 billion, 400 billion, who knows? Who knows, right? Because there's that mystery of what is tech? Whoa, that's not me. But yet, the tech companies are going, oh, media, that's me.

• 29:40Rick Rubin?

  You know, another reason that I think that this happened this way is that the record companies were always so adversarial with each other that

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:49Rick Rubin?

  they couldn't be the ones to say, let's group together and sell our stuff online because they hated each other.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  That's one of the reasons, but the fundamental reason is they felt from the beginning, Warner Music sold MTV.

• 30:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  That's not what they thought they did. How crazy is that?

• 30:10Rick Rubin?

  They didn't understand.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  MTV was more valuable in the record business.

• 30:13Rick Rubin?

  They didn't understand it.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  Okay, right, exactly. You just, it's not their, their thing, right? I mean, those two examples of Netflix and Spotify I just gave you are now, at least Netflix owns all their content now. And also, Disney, Warner, Paramount have started their own streaming services. I get it.

• 30:37Rick Rubin?

  It's hard, though, when, if you had to subscribe to all of the different labels for music, it wouldn't work.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  You don't have to. You don't have to, Rick. What you need to do is Let's say hypothetically, you build a streaming service. Not today I'm talking about, this is 15.

• 30:58Rick Rubin?

  Could have happened.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you all distribute through it. You could have your own distribution. You can. You could have, you know, Hulu was Fox and NBC or something. You could do it, you know? And at one time, you would have said, no way is somebody gonna subscribe to Prime, Disney, HBO, Netflix, Paramount, Peacock. If you wanna watch football, you need four streaming services. So people, you could build a model around the record business where people would either get the music from the label or from a combined distribution.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Because if you control the distribution, you can deal with the communication between your customer. What these people refuse to have is customers.

• 31:52Rick Rubin?

  They were always wholesalers.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  And I think this is all changing in both television, movies. I think this guy, David Ellison, I met with him once, he seems to have a really interesting take on it. And I know that the people at UMG, I don't know the other labels, I know the people at UMG want a more progressive sort of relationship with the customer and stuff, you know? That's what this whole complex thing is. This whole complex thing is for artists to be able to have everything in one place, you know? And it's doing really well.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  And like everything else that we always do, so everybody thinks you're crazy. But I don't think we're crazy. I think we got something going. But the school, I mean, think about, I'm thinking 20 years out, which I probably won't be around. But to have an engineering society that truly understands the other disciplines will make the world, this is what I do, I do entertainment. I'm not a doctor, I don't anything, anything about any of that shit. I understand entertainment. And it'll make entertainment a better place. It'll make the instruments we use better. Remember, because Steve understood it. And the iPhone is still the most powerful thing in the world.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Right? It's the most powerful instrument. But he understood it. He could communicate it. And that's our little goal. That's why we built this school. And it's a great model. And we want, this is one where we want everybody to copy us. And by the way, we know nothing about education.

• 33:36Rick Rubin?

  You just see what's missing in the picture.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's how we operate.

• 33:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  You know? I didn't know how to build a headphone, neither did Ray. But we got it built. And, and we made the number one headphone company in the world. You know, we were number one in Germany. And Son Heiser was number two.

• 33:56Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  We were number one in Japan, and Sony was number two.

• 33:59Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable. Crazy.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Right, so that means we could do this. That's all I mean.

• 34:06Rick Rubin?

  I thought you were retired.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  I am retired. What I've done is I took the bit out of my mouth. And I found individuals that had that same drive. And I asked them to take the bit.

• 34:19Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  And so, like a day like today, I have nothing to do. I'm talking to you, and then I'm going to the Dodger game. And I'm not going to the Dodger game, taking my son in law. I'm not going to talk business, you know? But I do have Zooms and stuff and meetings. Where I kind of set the tone for what I think we should do.

• 34:41Rick Rubin?

  Hey, you have a vision for the future, and you want to see it happen.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  I have a vision for what it shouldn't be. Then I fall into what it should be. And I know it shouldn't be the way it is right now. I just don't believe it, you know? I talked to Lucian Grange a lot about this. And he really wants to get it right. He's been great. And, and I'm starting to reach out to other people. But we got something going on. And it's all one thing to me. Everything is one thing. I don't see things siloed. I think everything is, should be in one place. I know that sounds impossible, but it's not impossible.

• 35:29Rick Rubin?

  Of all the groups on Interscope, who were you most surprised by their success?

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Surprised. I was surprised at the scale of Black Eyed Peas.

• 35:44Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 35:44Speaker 00

  How big they could become. Because they came to us as an alternative rap group. I have others that I'll mention, but Black Eyed Peas, what happened with Black Eyed Peas is a fabulous story that you'll love.

• 35:56Rick Rubin?

  Tell me.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  So I'm with Vono and Edge in France. And they were on Interscope at the time. And...

• 36:07Rick Rubin?

  Still, though?

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. But they're trying to do something. And I always...

• 36:14Rick Rubin?

  How did they end up not being on Island Records? I've never understood that. They were Island Records.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  Well, Chris was gone.

• 36:21Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Chris was gone. Who's another person they liked? Me.

• 36:25Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  So when we sold to Universal, Vono went to Doug and said, I want, I don't have anybody here that I know. Like, I know Jimmy and I knew Chris. And Doug said, yes. Doug, it made sense to Doug. And the first thing we did together was Beautiful Day. And it was fantastic. I didn't write it, but you know, we all made it happen, right? And then I brought Vono to meet Steve. And we put their songs in the commercials and all that stuff, right? So, anyway. So, Black Eyed Peas was one, definitely. No Doubt was another. I believed. But they came a long way in their songwriting after five years. You know, we had a lot of artists.

• 37:02Rick Rubin?

  And they were an alternative rock band.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Scar, yeah, scar.

• 37:05Rick Rubin?

  And they turned into a pop sensation.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:08Rick Rubin?

  You can't plan that.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can't. Because when they start out as something else and then maybe cross over to pop, that's always interesting. You know, like,

• 37:17Speaker 00

  there were some real hard rock bands that made a real penetration, like Helmet.

• 37:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  That was very, very aggressive. And I thought, you know, I thought they'd be niche. And they became much more than niche. But I would say that, you know... I'm such a cheerleader and I'm so optimistic. I wake up every day, I'm completely optimistic. So, I think anything could be anything.

• 37:41Rick Rubin?

  What do you think at Interscope you did differently than what other record companies were doing? You were coming from outside of the music.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  No, I came from where you're coming from.

• 37:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, you came from making records.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:53Rick Rubin?

  To running a record company.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:55Rick Rubin?

  Most of the people who run record companies came from working at a record company.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Because when I was broke, the first freedom, I call it freedom, independence, the first apartment I ever got was from a singer. I run the room with this really smart person, and I went in the room with three of them in a row, which was John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, and Patti Smith, and my life changed. So I said, "Okay, I need these people," and they taught me culture. They taught me everything you could possibly need to know about popular culture. I mean, that I could have possibly comprehended at the time. So, when I went to Interscope, I applied the same rules. I said, "This is where the answers are.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  The answers are not in me and not in the people that work here. The answers are there. The answers are with Dre. The answers are with Trent. The answers are there." I didn't care how much money we spent. I didn't give a flying fuck. It was all my...I didn't care. When I met Snoop and Dre, I didn't understand hip-hop, but they reminded me of Mick and Keith. How Mick and Keith hit me when I was 12 years old. I said, "These guys, that's who these guys are." I went to MTV, I said, "Never play another Interscope record if G-Thing doesn't work on video." And they put it on and, you know, boom, right?

• 39:22Speaker 00

  So, that was my different...because I knew, like you know, I knew how to work with artists. But I really knew how to work with artists.

• 39:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  I spent 20 years in a recording studio. No one spends 20 years in a recording. I'm not a businessman. I don't like business. I hate business. I still hate it.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  But I had to learn it for defensive purposes.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  It's truth. I mean, I still don't, I still not, you know, I'm not anywhere near the business people that I know. But Interscope, it was a different kind of label because we did things we shouldn't do.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Especially financially.

• 40:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  You know, I would go 25 million dollars down on somebody, no problem.

• 40:15Rick Rubin?

  Do you ever miss leaving Interscope?

• 40:17Speaker 00

  No, not for a second.

• 40:18Rick Rubin?

  It was the right thing to do at the right time?

• 40:19Speaker 00

  No, no, no, I made headphones because I couldn't take the people anymore.

• 40:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  They don't talk.

• 40:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  I just said, I can't do this anymore. It was starting to get too much for me, you know, it's a, I feel everything is a young man's sport. You know, I feel like you grow out of every, that's why I grew out of running companies. I feel that at a certain age, you know, I just, I just don't do it anymore. But I never feel funny about leaving the record business. As a matter of fact, I'm very happy I left the record business. I wish I had left at 10 years earlier. Because I did it and for what? For one more hit? You know what I mean? I'm gonna one more hit record? Great, you're not making the music, you're making the music. You're like Jasper Johns.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  You sit there, you come in here, you paint and you go home and you put it out, right? They, somebody puts it out.

• 41:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  Like I told Bruce Springsteen, when I retired, he asked me, man, why are you retiring? I said, man, I went to your show last night in Milan, 80,000 people yelling Bruce. If they were yelling Jimmy, I'd still be working. I said, I talk to scumbags all day.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  I said, fuck this.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  Not everybody, but a lot of them, you know? It's like, okay, enough. I, you're the man, you're this, you're Illuminati, whatever the fuck that bullshit is. I like, no, I'm a record producer at heart. I'm an assistant engineer at heart.

• 41:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me the story of A and M Recording Studios. How'd you get involved?

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Okay, um, it was 1985 and

• 42:05Speaker 00

  My father just died, which was devastating to me. It's still the worst day in my life. And you know what? Every now and then, I have a horrible day. Forty years later, still, that's how close we were, right? And Jerry Moss and Herb Alpert wanted to remodel the studio. Because that place was built by the people that Lincoln Center, and it was all iron and everything. So it sounded kind of...

• 42:35Speaker 00

  Sounded good, but it was out there, and Herb knew it.

• 42:37Rick Rubin?

  I think Lincoln Center has problems with sound.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that's...

• 42:40Rick Rubin?

  As well, seriously. It's a known fact that it's...

• 42:42Speaker 00

  The same guy.

• 42:43Rick Rubin?

  It's like one of the great concert halls that just doesn't sound good.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  Same, same people.

• 42:47Rick Rubin?

  That's interesting.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Right. So, we meet with Jerry and Herb, me and my engineer, and they like us.

• 42:54Rick Rubin?

  How long do you know them?

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Not long at all. I met Jerry because of this.

• 42:59Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  So, we go in there and they...

• 43:03Rick Rubin?

  And you're a record producer at this point. You're not a...

• 43:04Speaker 00

  That's all I am.

• 43:05Rick Rubin?

  You've never owned a recording studio?

• 43:07Speaker 00

  No.

• 43:07Rick Rubin?

  You've never built a recording...

• 43:08Speaker 00

  I worked at a recording studio.

• 43:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  You know, I worked at a record plant, and Shelley Akas was my engineer, and he worked it there, and he worked there. So we kind of understood all the way around.

• 43:15Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  So they said, "We want to remodel A&M Studios. Will you guys head it up and do it?" I said, "Wow, that sounds like..." I went to the lot and I fell in love with the lot.

• 43:26Rick Rubin?

  The lot's super cool.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  Lot's beautiful, right?

• 43:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, Charlie Chaplin's lot.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  If you were at a different time in your life, you would have bought that place.

• 43:33Rick Rubin?

  For sure.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  You know?

• 43:34Rick Rubin?

  I heard John Mayer just bought it.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, John Mayer just bought it with the McGee.

• 43:37Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  So, we go in there, and we tear the studio apart. We literally practically brought it down to its studs. It was a really great project, and we gave ourselves the time to finish. The first record that was cut there was Angela Harlem on U2's record. And we designed the studio to record that band. So there was... Two of the studios, the two main, A and D, they had the big studio part, and then they had these big, open booths surrounding it with glass doors. So you could put the drums in there, you could put a guitar.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  It was all about not needing blankets. And what people don't understand is when you record, a lot of people put blankets and baffles and all this stuff. But we didn't like that, so we tried to build, if you wanted isolation, you could have it, but the instruments can still breathe. If you go to that studio, you'll see that. They changed A a little bit, but, but it was a lot of fun. So now, during that, which is something I did want to talk about. Like I said, my father died in 85. And I was at my sister's house, literally, sitting on the floor, because I just couldn't get up. And Springsteen called me and to tell me he was sorry that my father died. And it was Christmas. He died the week after Christmas.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  And he loved Christmas. And we were very, very close. And we used to always do some great stuff at Christmas. So I, as I'm talking to him, I said, Bruce, you know, I want to make a Christmas album for my father. If I do that, would you help me? Would you be involved? He goes, absolutely. I said, OK, great. So I get off the phone, and I go on a mission. So I stopped producing records for a little while, and I go into that. And we made a deal with A and M, but my former wife took me to a party at the Shriver's house, where Sergeant Shriver and Eunice Shriver were there. Because I didn't want any money.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  I said, I got to get money out of the way here. I want to give all the money to charity, right? So they had a charity called Special Olympics.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  And they took me to New Jersey. So there was fake Hulk Hogan and all these fake stars. And I said, why don't you have real people here? Now, I don't know if anybody was involved, but not the one I was at.

• 46:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  So I said, you know what? Let's do it here. Let's do it for these people. And they were fabulous. And they had a son named Bobby Shriver who jumped in. And we went on the road and I produced this album, right? It took me a year and a half. It was called A Very Special Christmas. It had U2.

• 46:38Rick Rubin?

  Had a Keith Haring cover, if I remember correctly.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it earned $100 million for Special Olympics.

• 46:45Rick Rubin?

  Incredible.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  In 1987.

• 46:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. That's amazing.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, and.

• 46:51Rick Rubin?

  Who was on the first album?

• 46:53Speaker 00

  U2, Springsteen, Whitney Houston, Bon Jovi, The Eurythmics, The Pointer Sisters, Sting.

• 47:03Rick Rubin?

  All doing Christmas songs.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  John Mellencamp, all doing Christmas songs. I recorded a lot of the album myself because I went on the road. And I just, like, for example, Whitney Houston. I went to North Carolina. She did a show there and she met me in the studio on the way to soundcheck. Let me tell you something. I didn't know miracles existed until I recorded that woman's voice. She walked out there. She sang the song in church. It was Do You Hear What I Hear as a kid. She knew the song. She went out there. I can't explain this to layman, but you didn't need a microphone or tape. It was so powerful and extraordinary. Sang it in one take.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  She comes in and says, what do you need? I said, I'm not gonna tell you this, but she said, I'm gonna sing it one more. Sang it one more time, did all the backing vocals. She was gone in an hour. And it was so inspiring. If you get a chance, you should listen to it. It's Do You Hear What I Hear.

• 48:05Rick Rubin?

  Let's listen to it right now.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  That'd be great. When you hear this, it's gonna blow your mind.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Do you hear what I hear?

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Save the little lamb to the shepherd boy.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Do you hear what I hear? Living through the night, shepherd boy.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  Do you hear what I hear? A song, a song, high above the tree, With a voice as big as the sea. With a voice as big as the sea.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Now, says the shepherd boy, to the mighty king.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Do you know what I know? In your palace, warm mighty king.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Do you know what I know? Oh, a child, a child, shimmers in the cold. Let us bring him silver and gold. Let us bring him silver and gold.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  To the king, to the people everywhere. Yeah, listen to what I say.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Day for peace, peace and people everywhere. Oh, yeah. Listen to what I say. Oh, child for the child. Sleeping in the night. He will bring us goodness and light. Yes, he will bring us goodness and light. Yes, he will. I know he will. Oh, yes, he will. Hear what I say. Do you hear?

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Do you hear? Hear what I say. Do you hear? Do you know? Hear what I say. What I know? What I hear? Hear what I say. What I hear? Do you know? Do you know? Do you know? Do you know what I hear?

• 51:39Rick Rubin?

  She makes it sound completely effortless.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  Really beautiful?

• 51:42Rick Rubin?

  Just comes out.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Well, she's a miracle. I mean, she's a miracle. What an incredible, incredible gift she had and she gave everybody else. I mean, you know, Rick, I owe so much to black culture. And when I hear that, I just realize that, you know, especially since Dre entered my life and all this stuff that I've been able to do since 1990, right? I owe so much to black culture that I'm gonna spend the rest of my life trying to... Just touched the debt that I owe, you know? And it's really hearing that just, I go back to that day.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  It was one of the greatest recording days that I've had in my life. I know, the instrument was just so awesome and intimidating.

• 52:34Rick Rubin?

  Makes it easy for you.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, she needs me like she needs a child. You know, I just, you know, I just went to North Carolina.

• 52:44Rick Rubin?

  Were these all songs that you listened to growing up?

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:47Rick Rubin?

  And this is still multi-track tapes. So you're carrying tapes to North Carolina?

• 52:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, me and my engineer, we went to North Carolina. Actually, it was Tom Finanzio.

• 52:59Rick Rubin?

  Great, so A and M Studios, they ask you to remodel the studio.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:04Rick Rubin?

  The first thing you record there is a U2 song?

• 53:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:06Rick Rubin?

  And it goes good?

• 53:07Speaker 00

  It went great, but then we lived there.

• 53:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  And that's kind of what got me not into producing records anymore. I'm still great friends with the band. I love the band, I was like, these guys are my family still. But I realized I have to pivot. I can't, I can't just do the same. I was doing, at that point, I was producing records for 18 years. And I just said, you know, these guys are all younger than me. And I'm gonna get older and the new bands aren't gonna wanna work with me, you know? So David Geffen had a record company, we talked about this last time. And it's okay, I'm gonna start a label.

• 53:47Rick Rubin?

  And it worked out.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  You know?

• 53:52Rick Rubin?

  Tell me a little bit about the inner workings of U2 as compared to other bands.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  Their process of writing songs is so organic, U2, and so spontaneous that there were times where I really felt like I was in over my head, you know? Brian Eno and Daniel Lenoir are an incredible act to follow.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  Those guys cover a lot of ground.

• 54:22Rick Rubin?

  So you worked with them after them?

• 54:24Speaker 00

  Well, I worked with them before on a live album, but then we made the studio album to Rattle and Hum after them.

• 54:29Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  We made some good music. I think they wanted to work with me because it was a very Americana kind of thing, you know? And I knew how to do that, you know? But I was with Brian Eno and Bono about three years ago in a room. I think it was Bono's house or in a hotel or something. And I looked at Bono and Brian and I said, you know, I'm the second best record producer in this room. You know, and Brian was very gracious, was very gracious, but those guys are really talented. And but they're, the way they produce is actually, it's painful. And actually, they give birth to music. It's not like somebody walks in and says, hey Jude.

• 55:12Rick Rubin?

  They don't come in with a song.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  Not all the time. Most of the times they don't. They come in with an idea and a rough. And then it forms in front of you and it's like, it's magical.

• 55:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  But.

• 55:25Rick Rubin?

  I think it can take a long time.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's really, it's really magical in what they do. Because they create magnificent music.

• 55:35Rick Rubin?

  And you work with a lot of artists. Would you say that the way they do it is particular to them?

• 55:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Tom Petty walks in with a song.

• 55:42Rick Rubin?

  Yep.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  Bruce Springsteen walks in with a song. Stevie Nicks walks in with a song. Stevie Nicks will walk in with a song sung over another song on tape, right? And they've got to figure out the arrangement and everything.

• 55:52Rick Rubin?

  But it's the song.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. So they, for example, when I was in Hawaii with them after On The Blood Red Sky. Because they do it all different ways. I went to a sound check in Hawaii with them. And all of a sudden, I hear Adam playing something, an Edge, Ken Larry. And I hear Bono humming.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  You know, and he's singing, he doesn't have the words really yet. In the name, you know, he's singing in the name. And I hear a sound check, pride forming. And I said, holy shit. That's why I so desperately wanted to produce the next album, which was.

• 56:36Rick Rubin?

  Even before they had words, you could hear.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:39Rick Rubin?

  It was magic.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah. That was, that song.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  And I wanted to produce the next album desperately because of that song. I would have done a good job on that song. As the rest, I wouldn't have gotten as good as Brian and Danny. So they didn't hire me, which crushed me. But they brought in Danny and Brian, who did a much better job than I would have done, much better. And it set them up for Joshua Tree, which Danny and Brian did as well. And then Joshua Tree, obviously, was Joshua Tree, right? But they're a different kind of band. They work more song edge and bono now, you know? I mean, they always wrote the songs, but again, I haven't been in the studio with them in a long time.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  But it's unlike anything I'd ever seen.

• 57:30Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the first time you met Springsteen.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  I had just finished working with John Lennon. We were gonna go in the studio, and he had a song called Tennessee Williams. And we were gonna go in the studio, and Sean, his son, was born. And we had the studio booked, I think it was for April, it was 1975. And John called me and said, "Come up and see me and Yoko." So I went up there.

• 58:00Rick Rubin?

  Did he play you the song?

• 58:01Speaker 00

  He played me the song at the record plant.

• 58:03Rick Rubin?

  So you've heard the song?

• 58:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:05Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  That's why I say it was Tennessee Williams, that was the name of the song.

• 58:08Rick Rubin?

  Because I don't think that song's ever come out.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  I think it has come out somewhere.

• 58:11Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  It's somewhere.

• 58:12Rick Rubin?

  Let me look, because I would love to hear it. I've never heard it.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  Look on YouTube.

• 58:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Or turned into another song.

• 58:17Rick Rubin?

  Okay, let's see.

• 59:01Rick Rubin?

  Did he typically write on piano?

• 59:02Speaker 00

  Both. So I went to Dakota and he and Yoko were sitting there and Yoko spoke and she said, Jimmy, John's gonna retire for five years.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  So it was funny, it was cute actually in a way, because Sean was just born. I told my sister I was going to John's house and she went to Tiffany and bought me a teething ring to bring as a gift.

• 59:26Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  I was 21 years old, I had no idea, gifts, what, children, I mean, you know, whatever, babies, so, anyway. So she tells me, John's gonna retire for five years and she opened this book and she started showing me his birthday and Sean's birthday, it's the same day and the thing and he's gotta, he's gotta stop for five years. So she said, what's your birthday? And I said, well, my birthday's March 11, 1953. She looks at it and she goes, you should stop as well. I said, yo, I started laughing, I said, Yoko, I make $10 an hour.

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  Because I had that relationship with John, you know? I said, Yoko, I make $10 an hour. I said, I can't quit anything, I need more work, I don't need less work. So it was really a nice afternoon, that's the last time I saw him. So I go home and about a week later, I didn't know what to do because now I was engineering for John and I'd grown a little bit, you know, I had the three albums with them and I really had grown in my position and everything. So the owner of the studio called me, I'm still with my mother, it was Roy Saccol, and he said to me, I need you to come in, we got this guy Bruce Springsteen, another studio

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  just threw him out, we're slow and we could use the business and you're good at teaching other engineers how to use our studios. I said, man, I don't wanna do that, you know what I mean, I just don't wanna do it, right? And he started yelling at me and then he called my mother. And he said, I do everything for this guy, my mother starts yelling, you got, this is Roy, he's on everything, so I go to the studio, right? And it's Bruce Springsteen, John Lando, Michael Pell and the band. So I'm working with them, I'm showing the engineer how to do things in the studio, make them comfortable and the next day, he's gone.

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  So John looks at me and says, look, one reason or another, Louisa was a great engineer, said he had to leave. Can you do this? I said, absolutely.

• 1:01:37Rick Rubin?

  What was your feeling that first day?

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  Well, I walked in on him writing Thunder Road.

• 1:01:44Rick Rubin?

  Good day.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  It blew my mind. It was like, holy shit.

• 1:01:50Rick Rubin?

  At that point in time, nobody sounded anything like that.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  No, no, he was, he had a sound in his head, Rick. He had a sound in his head. And he didn't know how to get it out. None of us did. But he had a sound in his head. Sort of like what he calls it is Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Phil Spector. You know? And he used to play me like, um, The Good and the Bad, The Ugly, Ennio Marconi records when he wanted a guitar sound.

• 1:02:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. How old was he at that time?

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  He was 25, I was 22. And it was intense. We had a lot of fun, a lot of laugh, but it was intense. I learned the work ethic. Cause John, in this last album we did, he came in the studio after court, because he was being thrown out of the country with Richard Nixon. He used to come and we worked from 12 to 8, 12 to 9. And he went home, you know, because he began, now he's 33 years old. He's made 15 albums. This was like, from the day we started Born to Run to the day we finished, we didn't stop.

• 1:02:59Rick Rubin?

  And that was a long time.

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  No, it was all in 1975.

• 1:03:04Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  But it was so intense and so work intensive and so not settling, not compromising, not one fucking note. I really learned the work ethic in that room. Cause I didn't know.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  How to work. I worked hard and I worked a lot of hours.

• 1:03:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  But I didn't know why I was working a lot of hours. He showed me you work till you get it right. Which sounds simple. But if you're honest with yourself.

• 1:03:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's hard.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  It's hard.

• 1:03:37Rick Rubin?

  It's hard and it's exhausting. And when you're working a lot, sometimes it's hard to know when it's right.

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:03:43Rick Rubin?

  You get delirious.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  Boy, I'm telling you, man.

• 1:03:46Rick Rubin?

  Does that describe it properly?

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  When I was mixing Born to Run, I thought I was gonna die.

• 1:03:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  Of course, it's practical. But why is mixing always at the end?

• 1:03:57Rick Rubin?

  When you're too tired to do it.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  You know what I mean? You're deaf.

• 1:04:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Yeah, you've been listening loud for months.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  You've heard the songs over and over and over and over again.

• 1:04:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  So, but and for the relationship that we're still great friends. Me and Landau and Steven and Roy and Bruce. We're still all great friends. It's gonna be 50 years next year.

• 1:04:20Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Rick Rubin?

  Congratulations. That's a good anniversary.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, man, that was, it was really, really special.

• 1:04:32Rick Rubin?

  Last time we talked, you mentioned Stevie Nicks taking pieces of a Police song.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40Rick Rubin?

  And looping them up. Other times that you were in the studio where somebody did something that you hadn't seen before, like a new technique or a new technology or doing something in a different way.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  Well, because I'm so old, I was on a session one day I was producing. And there was a guy, a guitar player that was a session guy. And in between every take, he would not listen back to our playback. He had a little computer that he put headphones on. And he would go over to his own computer. And so I said to the guy, hey, man, what are you doing? The guy's name was Roger Lynn. And he says. I'm inventing a drum machine.

• 1:05:25Rick Rubin?

  The Lin drum?

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  Yes, I'm making a machine that plays the drums. I said, good, because drummers drive me crazy anyway. Which they do, right? And so few people can really play the goddamn thing. And with Roger Lin and...

• 1:05:42Rick Rubin?

  What was he playing on the session? He was a guitar player, you said?

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Guitar player, he's a guitar player, yeah. We just recorded Damn Torpedoes. And he asked us for our drum sounds from Damn Torpedoes. So the very first Lin drum sound had Tom Petty's drums as the sounds.

• 1:05:59Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:00Rick Rubin?

  Amazing. Any other times you could think of or technical stuff that was new?

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, we were lucky at Wreck-It Plant. Because we were the hottest studio. And we were around the corner from a lot of tech companies, like even Tide Clockworks and stuff like that. So we would get the first phaser, the first digital delay. If you listen to Walls and Bridges, you hear like hours, you hear delays all over the place. Because what happened?

• 1:06:33Rick Rubin?

  Because they were new.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  It was like when the Beatles discovered stereo, the drums are on the left, the vocals on the right. You were experimenting, right? So that's why I always was curious about technology. Because in those days, when you got something, you got so jazzed just to try it, you know? I also remember quitting producing when the SSL came out. Because I was just like, okay, I don't know how to handle this. This is too much for me.

• 1:06:58Rick Rubin?

  It's like a new language.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a whole new line that I had to learn. And I was just like, everything came to a head, you know?

• 1:07:04Rick Rubin?

  Tell me more about Bruce beyond the work ethic.

• 1:07:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:08Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the guy.

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  Very simple. Zero compromise factor about his art, his work, and his dignity, his morality, his life. Zero, zero compromise. You can't buy him, you can't sell him, you can't rent him. I was for rent.

• 1:07:28Rick Rubin?

  You mentioned something about they were gonna drop him.

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 1:07:31Rick Rubin?

  I don't know that story.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  After the second album, Columbia was gonna drop him. And I hadn't known them yet. And Mike Appel was the manager and producer at the time. And they had to really scamper around for studio time and stuff like that. And then... They started recording and the label heard it. And they got back interested. I think a song leaked or Born to Run leaked or something and he didn't care. This guy had nothing. But he didn't care. He's an all or nothing guy. He is one of the most just unbelievable guy. Remember, I walked into him.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  It's a very different place in his life than Lennon. Cause Lennon is what I knew. I did three albums. You know, he did three albums.

• 1:08:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, but he already had been in the Beatles. He was already.

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:08:27Rick Rubin?

  Huge, as huge as you could possibly be.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  And as a solo act.

• 1:08:31Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  Imagine. And he was being thrown out of the country and he had all the political stuff.

• 1:08:37Rick Rubin?

  And Bruce is a guy about to be dropped from his label.

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:41Rick Rubin?

  Twenty five years old.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Rick Rubin?

  And you got to see that work ethic.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  You got to see a hurricane form.

• 1:08:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  And you get to watch it up front and you just go, whoa. And my life was defined by that.

• 1:08:55Rick Rubin?

  In his success, did anything change after that?

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  No, he's the same guy.

• 1:09:01Rick Rubin?

  Same guy.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  He's gotten better, you know, he talks about it. Good thing about it, I would never talk about it if he didn't, but you know, depression and all that stuff. And he's worked through it, but the core of the guy, no. He knows who he is. He knows what he wants. He knows what he does. I'll talk to him about something and he goes, wow, I mean, you know, that sounds really good. Not for me.

• 1:09:26Rick Rubin?

  You mentioned last time we talked, passingly, that you mixed Evil Woman.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:31Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the story, how did that come to be?

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  Well, I just finished working with Lennon and Jeff Lynne was coming to Record Plant to work on Face the Music is the name of the album. And he asked for the guy who works with Lennon, so they just put me on it, you know? Talk about somebody who's self-contained. This guy Jeff Lynne, he came in. He wanted to do backing vocals. So I knew Ellie Greenwich, who was the woman who helped me. I knew this girl singer, Marge Raymond. I knew these girl singers that were fantastic. So I called Ellie, she put it together. And they came in and he all those backing vocals on Evil Woman. So we had some sub mixes, but we remixed like three songs.

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  And Evil Woman was one of them. And but Jeff, another guy, really technical, really knew what he wanted. Great arranger. I mean, the mix was there because his arrangement and his recording was so perfect.

• 1:10:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  It was all him. He was an unbelievable talent.

• 1:10:36Rick Rubin?

  Let's listen to the Evil Woman.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 1:10:38Rick Rubin?

  Haven't heard it in a long time.

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 1:10:39Rick Rubin?

  It's a good one.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  It's great.

• 1:10:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  It's great.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  You hear the girls come in, you know, listen.

• 1:12:04Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  Right, and you know, Rick, when I sit here with you, you're a record producer, you know, and I hear music and run recordings through you. You know, I don't ever want to go in one again. I haven't produced a record really in, I think it was 35 years. But I realized that I never liked business. I like music, I like, I like, I like getting ideas and doing them.

• 1:12:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Speaker 00

  But, but I don't like business. There's nothing about it, I just don't like it.

• 1:12:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, something you said about having to deal with people that you didn't like to deal with.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, convincing people, the worst thing in the world is having to convince somebody of something. It's a lack of freedom.

• 1:12:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Speaker 00

  That's what you're talking about. If I don't, if I could flip the therapy for a second.

• 1:12:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  Having to convince somebody of something is a lack of freedom.

• 1:12:55Rick Rubin?

  It's the worst.

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  It's the worst.

• 1:12:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  And.

• 1:12:58Rick Rubin?

  I never want to do that.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  That's the gift I gave myself when I left. Because, again, I don't know how to work without really doing it, right? So I call myself retired, but I'm retired from that.

• 1:13:13Rick Rubin?

  Understood.

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  I wake up in the morning, I get on a Zoom, I help my son with his company, I help my wife where I can, but I'm not driving.

• 1:13:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  The hook's not in my mouth.

• 1:13:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Speaker 00

  You can do anything, you can make money, but I had to spit the hook out.

• 1:13:33Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 1:13:34Speaker 00

  I couldn't take it.

• 1:13:35Rick Rubin?

  Great. How much better is your life now?

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  My physical numbers are 10 times better. Everything is better. It's just a better life.

• 1:13:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Is it just a question of less stress? Or is it something else? It's just less stress?

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. Because I turned that part of my brain off.

• 1:13:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  The drill bit part.

• 1:13:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58Speaker 00

  Because I used to scan for problems, especially ones that I couldn't resolve.

• 1:14:05Speaker 00

  And then go in and fix them. But if you're running a company, there's an unlimited amount of that.

• 1:14:13Rick Rubin?

  It never ends.

• 1:14:14Speaker 00

  So if I go into a company now that I'm involved in or I'm invested in, they got a problem, I can say, okay, try this, this and this. Then I leave.

• 1:14:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Speaker 00

  You know what it's like? It's like grandkids. You kids bring the grandkids over, you love them, you give them everything you want to do.

• 1:14:29Rick Rubin?

  And then they leave.

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  And they go home. Right? And you love your grand, I love my grandchildren as much as I love my children.

• 1:14:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  But I don't feel like I'm the only person.

• 1:14:38Rick Rubin?

  Not obligated.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  I'm not the only person raising them.

• 1:14:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Speaker 00

  He has a mother and a father that don't want me to feel like that, right?

• 1:14:45Rick Rubin?

  So what advice do you have for retiring?

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  Well, my thing was very important that I get myself out of the position of my name being on something and being my responsibility. Apple Music was my responsibility. Beats Music was my responsibility. Beats was my responsibility. Interscope was my responsibility. I didn't want that anymore.

• 1:15:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Speaker 00

  Because then, anything that's remotely wrong with it, I gotta wrestle to the ground personally. Because like, any company, you got three or four really good people, and the rest are good, but they're not gonna solve problems like this. So what they do is, your bell gets rung. Ding, ding, ding, can you, you know? And

• 1:15:34Rick Rubin?

  And you want it to be wrong because you want the problem to be solved. If they don't tell you, it's bad too.

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. So, I mean, there were good people at every company I worked with, but I'm saying there were those three or four unique people that you do the thing with, right?

• 1:15:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Speaker 00

  So, my recommendation is only do stuff to with people you like.

• 1:15:54Rick Rubin?

  Yep.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Only, gotta stick to that.

• 1:15:57Rick Rubin?

  Good rule.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  Right? And be in a position where you can always give it back. Say, you know what? If you agree with me, great. If you don't agree with me, great. You know, Patti Smith's, and I don't mean this about people that I work with, but she had one of the greatest lines ever. "People have the power. The power to dream, the power to rule, and to power to wrestle the earth from fools." You know, and I don't want to wrestle anymore. Whether I'm the fool or they're the fool, I just don't want to wrestle anymore. So, but if I had to really answer that question and rewind my life, I would have gone for therapy earlier so I could learn how to work

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  and be less obsessed.

• 1:16:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:45Speaker 00

  If that's a possibility. When I watch everybody work around me, even if they're cool and aren't obsessed, they have really worked hard, man. You know, if you're going to be successful, if you want to get to the top of the game, it's brutal, man. And then what is success to you? Right? What does it mean? But I knew one thing, and I'm so glad I did. When I had 65, I said, no más.

• 1:17:10Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  I just pulled the plug out.

• 1:17:12Rick Rubin?

  And you still get to do stuff and have fun.

• 1:17:14Speaker 00

  I'm doing the stuff that I love to do, meaning I get to do the creative stuff. And if I help people in business, I have instinct for business. I'm not good at business. I, I mean, everybody thinks I'm a businessman, but you know, I built companies.

• 1:17:27Rick Rubin?

  You're an idea guy.

• 1:17:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I know how to get ideas done.

• 1:17:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:30Speaker 00

  That's it, you know?

• 1:17:32Rick Rubin?

  If you've had enough success over your life, that if you didn't have whatever the last big win was, and the last big win was a huge win.

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Rick Rubin?

  Probably your quality of life wouldn't have changed at all.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  No, no, no. What you're getting at is what we see a lot with our friends and people we see from afar is nobody wants to give up the uniform. They are that uniform. They don't realize it, but it's seeped into their skin and they are that job.

• 1:18:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  And without it.

• 1:18:04Rick Rubin?

  They don't know who they are.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  They feel naked.

• 1:18:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  They want to go in that room and want people to go, oh shit. So that takes a lot of, for me, therapy as well. So, because I don't give a shit.

• 1:18:16Rick Rubin?

  We see it happen with musicians who've been on the road for 40 years. And then all of a sudden something happens where they can't do it anymore and they're completely lost.

• 1:18:24Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:18:26Rick Rubin?

  Completely lost.

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  That was therapy. I prepared for that. I knew, by, by the way, I started that 20 years ago. David Geffen said to me, goes, let me tell you something. I know you.

• 1:18:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  You are not your job. And don't let that happen to you. And I take great input.

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  I'm a sponge. So if somebody I respect says something,

• 1:18:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  I go do it. I said, okay, I'm not gonna do my job. And I'm not, and I wasn't. And it really helped me in life, you know, and I'm still figuring it out. But I like what I'm doing now. I only work with an idea. And if I have an idea, like, you know, I have my friends at Bruce, Dre, the guys that I work with still a little bit creatively. And I got this other business my son's working on and, you know, I'm helping out. And that's it.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

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