The Simple Genius of Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin grew up on Long Island obsessed with music — arena rock at 13, punk by high school, then hip-hop when it was still a street movement you could only hear at one club in New York City. The records coming out didn't sound like the club. They were made by professionals who didn't go to the club. So at 18, while a freshman at NYU, he made one himself — "It's Yours" with T La Rock. It sold 100,000 copies in 18 months. He put his dorm room address on the sleeve. This launched Def Jam Recordings. LL Cool J's first record came next. The Beastie Boys after that. His credit on those records didn't say "produced by." It said "reduced by" — a theological statement as much as a job title. His method has never changed: strip everything down until what remains has no place to hide, then protect whatever magic appears. He's applied it to Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eminem, The Strokes, Metallica, Kanye West, Tom Petty, and many other top artists. He describes himself as a lazy workaholic. The Zen exterior is real. So is the guy who spent the first 25 years of his career in a dark room 16 hours a day, seven days a week, waiting for a miracle to show up. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/rick-rubin Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Deel: https://deel.com/senra HubSpot: https://hubspot.com AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra Rick Rubin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rickrubin X: https://x.com/RickRubin Tetragrammaton: https://www.tetragrammaton.com The Creative Act: https://a.co/d/05FKl59a Substack: https://rickrubin.substack.com Chapters (00:00:00) Less Is More But Harder (00:02:00) Def Jam From The Dorm Room (00:04:00) Capturing Club Energy On Record (00:06:00) Going Deep On Influences (00:12:30) Why Reduced By Rick Rubin (00:14:00) Beatles Structure Meets Rap (00:16:00) The Ruthless Edit (00:19:30) Eminem: The Most Obsessive Artist (00:22:00) Lazy Workaholic (00:25:30) Protecting The Moment Of Magic (00:29:00) Dana White And Becoming A Podcaster (00:32:30) Professional Listener (00:44:00) Fishing And Showing Up (00:47:00) Johnny Cash And Constraints (00:55:30) Church Business vs. Banking Business (00:58:50) Run On Intuition Alone (01:01:00) Jay-Z vs. Eminem Process (01:04:30) In Service Of The Artist (01:09:00) Work As Diary Entries (01:13:30) Four Ways Success Destroys You (01:16:00) How To Sustain Success (01:21:00) The House On The Mountain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Five years ago, I read this biography of you. It's called "In the Studio." You and I were just talking about it before we started recording. One of my favorite ideas that I took away from that book, that I think about probably every week, is this concept that you have that less is more, but to get less, you have to do more. Can you talk a little bit about that?

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you're stacking a lot of things on top of each other, each one of those things becomes less important. So if you have 10 things, each one of them is 1/10 as important as one by itself. So if you're making something and you want the least amount involved, those things have to be really critically curated because they're doing the work of everything and nothing is hidden. It's why it's not as easy as it sounds to do less. But when you see it, you can get the personality.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  I'll give you an example with guitars. A lot of recordings are made where a guitarist plays and then they double it and triple it and they create this like wall of guitars. And when there's a wall of guitars, you hear guitar, but you don't hear someone playing guitar. You just hear guitar. It becomes more generic. When one person plays it and you can hear their fingers on the strings, it's got more personality. It's more human. And I tend to look for those things where it's the singular essence shows through.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Well, I'm always surprised about people that do great things. I think especially from people on the outside. It's like the amount of volume that goes into it before, like before you're presented with their finished work. I know you're obsessed with music when you're a teenager. You start Def Jam in your dorm room. You're like 18 years old. What was the first example? Was it LL Cool J? Like, who was the first example where you're like, wow, there's a lot more work that goes into making a great piece of art, great product, great album than I ever knew?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  I never thought about it because it was like a mission and a love. And I didn't think of it even as work. It was just what I wanted to do is make these things. So the fact that it took a lot of work wasn't even in... It wasn't in consideration at all.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  When you were eighteen years old, nineteen years old? It was just all music all the time?

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just, um, as a fan, I listened to music all the time. I fell in love with it. I wanted to be involved in whatever way that I could. Hip hop was just starting in New York City. It was still a totally underground movement. So the only place you could hear it was at one club downtown where I, where I was going to school. There was only one club that you could hear hip hop, and that was once a week. But other than that, it was only in, it was in the Bronx. It was in Brooklyn. But really just in like community centers and outdoor parties. It was underground and not well thought of kind of music. It was street music. And, um,

• 3:19Speaker 01

  and I would go to this club every week and hear the music. And at that time, there would be a few hip hop records coming out. Twelve inch singles, no albums, only twelve inch singles. And there'd be maybe one new record every two or three weeks. And that's all there was. And I would go to the club every week, hear the music there, and then I would buy the one single that would come out every few weeks. And the singles didn't represent what the energy in the club was. And I wanted to feel that energy of the club. So I started, the first record I made was called It's Yours. And the purpose of that was I was just trying to capture the energy of the club

• 4:04Speaker 01

  on record. And I didn't know anything about recording. I wasn't a professional. I was a kid. The fact that I didn't know what I was doing allowed it to be true to what hip hop was. Whereas all of the records that were coming out, the few and far between, twelve inch singles every few weeks, they were made by professionals who made other kinds of music. They weren't made by hip hop people. So an outsider with experience was making what they thought hip hop was.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  But if you went to the club, you knew what it really was. And the club was very stripped down and it was scratching, breakbeats, drum machines and rapping. And that's what the records were.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  The ones that were produced by people producing other or making other genres of music, was it like too much polished, too, was it like fake? How would you describe the difference between what you're hearing in the club? So this is like your opportunity, essentially your way into this.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  The records are like the documentary of this scene that was going on. And all of the other documents of that period weren't representative of the scene. They were representative of something else, some profession, professional, the professional, like the Hollywood version of it. But that's not what it was.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  Is this the first like signal you put out? It sold like a hundred thousand copies or is that the same one?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like that. It sold a lot, I mean, for, for a record in that world, it took a long time, probably took 18 months to sell a hundred thousand. But over 18 months sold about a hundred thousand. And it was a hit, as much of a hit could be in something that would never be on the radio and, and the kind of music that nobody listened to or liked. As a matter of fact, back then, most people who were not hip hop fans didn't even acknowledge it as music. That's how far it was.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  What did they think it was?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Don't know. It was same thing though with Elvis and rock and roll. Like the grownups didn't acknowledge that as music. It was just some other thing that they didn't know what it was. That's how foreign it was.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  When you were 18, 19 years old, were you already studying older versions of music? Did you, you already going back?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I always listened, anything I liked, I wanted to hear. Everything that the person that I liked, everything they listened to that they liked. I always wanted to understand.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  I do the same thing with biographies.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  So I want to know more about this, but I'll find somebody that, you know, like Steve Jobs, for example, I find him very interesting. I'd read a biography of him and then every single one of these books, they'll talk about like half a dozen, maybe a dozen people. And I'm like, who's that? I don't know this guy. And I'll go in the bibliography and usually find books about the, their inspir, the people that inspired them.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Same.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Do you remember the first time you did that? Like who were you like, I'm really interested in this band or this artist? Let me find out who they were inspired by.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  It's always been the case, or the other version of it is, it's like it, where I would hear something for the first time. I can remember the first time I heard the MC5. Which is a band from Detroit in the 1960s, kind of a proto punk rock band. They're before punk rock, but it has punk energy. And I heard that and it was really cool. And then I remember going to a used record store because the used record store had all the cool, older stuff and they knew the most about music. So you spend hours in used record stores and just talking to the people who work there. Same like you've heard Quentin Tarantino working in a video shop and just there's so much information around the people who really love this thing.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  And I remember they said, well, if you liked MC5, you might want to check out Iggy and the Stooges. And then I listened to the Stooges, like, oh, I love this too. And that was another, also Detroit, same timeframe, same scene, and it was great music.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  So it would either be music like the music that I found that I liked, or music that inspired the music that I liked. Both of those were things I would always pursue.

• 7:59Speaker 00

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• 8:42Speaker 00

  massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp and you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. I always think like the motivations, I always wanna know why people are doing what they're doing. I think the motivations of what they're doing, the reason that they go into their like chosen profession is really important. You thought music was gonna be like a hobby, like you were gonna have to get a day job and then just do music.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  I didn't know it was possible to be a job.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, can you talk about that?

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought I would have a regular job. I didn't, I didn't know anyone who did music professionally, or I couldn't imagine it. I didn't have any, no one in my family was an artist. So it wasn't a realistic expectation. So I thought I'd love music the way I always have. I could participate and make music if I want, but I would have a job to support myself. So I didn't think that that was possible to, for music to support my life.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  You were in a band, right?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  You played, I think guitar.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Guitar. In a punk rock band. So it was very rudimentary.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then DJ. I'm still a little confused. Can you try to explain the path that led you to this very singular position that you, that you have now?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just always followed what was interesting to me at the time. So when punk rock came along, well, first before punk rock would be heavy metal. Heavy metal at that time was really more like hard rock than what we think of now as heavy metal. So it would be Aerosmith, AC/DC, Ted Nugent. Those are kind of the mainstays of what arena rock was like when I was 13 or 14 years old. And I loved that music. And then I got a guitar and tried to play along. And it didn't, it didn't go well. But then when punk rock

• 10:40Speaker 01

  came along, I could, it was easier for me to play along because it was more basic music.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  But how do you go from that to, is DJ the next route in?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  The next thing that happened was...

• 10:55Speaker 01

  In my interest in hip hop in high school, there were some kids, no one in my high school liked punk rock except me. But there were some kids who liked hip hop. And this was again, in the very, very, very early days of hip hop.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  I think that's an understatement. I mean, the beginning of hip hop. Cause I remember reading about the early founding of Def Jam. And then I was, I always like, when I'm reading books, I like write out the year that I'm in. And then I look up what year that person was born. It's like, okay, how old is Rick at this point that's happening in his life? And what was remarkable is like, when I was reading your book, I had read, this is after I read Jay-Z's book, Decoded. And Jay-Z, 10 years after you're starting Def Jam, is talking about the early days of hip hop when he got into it, which is a decade after you got into it. And he says something that's really great. He's just like, I definitely couldn't tell you that I was gonna, I could get rich from rap. I just knew that hip hop was gonna get a lot bigger before it goes away. That's a decade later than where you're at.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  And where I was, I would not have said it'll ever get big. I was in the stage where I'm gonna make this and the few people who like this, we'll all like it and that's it. There was no upside. There was no thinking anybody else is gonna like this. That's how underground it was.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Is LL Cool J the first person you produced?

• 12:14Speaker 01

  The first hip hop record I produced was T-Loc, It's Yours.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  It was one single.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  That's the one that sold 100,000 copies in 18 months.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  And then LL's first record was the first record after that.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  But which is the one where you put reduced by Rick Rubin on the sleeve? And then your dorm room address?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think all of them probably had the dorm room address because that's where I lived. And reduced by, I probably said it for the first time on LL's record.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  This is the thing that I'm fascinated with. It's like this less is more, but to do, to get less, you have to do more. This stripping away of everything that's just like, almost like religious devotion to simplicity and like timeless ideas. You were 19, 18 years old when you put that on his record.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Well, I thought about the idea of produced by, and I thought the word meant to build up. Like I think of production as building. And really what I was doing was taking apart and reducing. I thought maybe reducing would be reduced by is more accurate in this case. And that's, that's how it happened.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  So he brings you a song and you, there's just too much like, can, what are you, what are you taking away?

• 13:29Speaker 01

  In those days, it weren't, he didn't, it weren't songs. It would be, um, he would just have notebooks of lyrics. And they weren't in song order. It was just rhymes. And, um, we would look at all the lyrics together and say, is there something here that could be the basis of a song? Like, I need a beat, for example, that could be a repeated phrase that ends up being a hook. And, and the reason, like, many of the hip hop records before the Def Jam records were, somebody would start rapping and then they would rap for a few minutes and then they would finish rapping. It wasn't like a song, it was more like a monologue.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Almost like spoken word to a beat?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Kind of, but, but it was still in a rap style, but it wasn't in a song structure. It was like Jamaican toasting. But the fact that I grew up on the Beatles and loved the Beatles and my understanding of music is based on the Beatles. And the Beatles were the greatest songwriters ever. And the structure of their songs are really organized and tight. So based on what I knew about, from listening to the Beatles, I applied that to rap music so that it would be structured more like a Beatles song instead of like a monologue or a Jamaican toasting record.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Okay, so there is four decades separating when you're working with LL Cool J and today. How similar or different from what, like if you're working with an artist today, how different is what you're doing with that artist today compared to what you did with LL four decades ago?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Probably not so different. It's, it's probably pretty similar. Just, it, it depends on the artist. Like because LL was a solo rap artist.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  And he didn't have a band or make music. I was responsible for making the tracks. And my version of that was a very stripped down, minimal thing. But now I get to work with bands sometimes that have a big sound and there are a lot of players. I'm looking for the essence of each of these artists. And the essence tends to be stripped down, but it's stripped down to what they are. Just finished a new album with the Strokes and they're a band of five people. So it sounds like a band of five people. It doesn't sound less than that. It sounds like what they are.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  You have this idea of ruthless edit. I've heard you talk about it a few times on podcasts. Can you explain what that is?

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Sometimes for the sake of the whole work, removing things about it that you really love is part of the process. And instead of if you have, if you have a hundred percent and you know at the end you want to have seventy percent of what you have, like you have thirty percent too much. Instead of whittling down that thirty to get to the seventy, I would say reduce it to forty percent, let's say. Force yourself to get to forty percent. And then add back what's, what's needed to get to the seventy.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  And it, it works in a different way. You, you have a better understanding of the work after the ruthless edit. Because you find out, especially with a group, because in a group, everybody votes. So with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we'll record for an album, we might record forty or fifty songs. And then all of us vote on A, B, or C. And then if everyone picks it as an A song.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  That's gonna be on the album. If it's really divided, it might not be. You know, it'll be, it'll be a democratic process until we get down to like, what is everyone together think is the best thing that we can make? That's a ruthless editing process.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  And you're just looking for the essence of what you think could be great? So like in that case, you're recording, let's say 50 songs.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  And you say the album wants to have 10 or 12. Well, what about, there's like, there might be three that we can't live without.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Is that the thought process?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  It helps to get to that point of what are the ones you can't live without? However, few it is and build from there, build out from there.

• 17:55Speaker 00

  What other interests you have outside of music? Like, are you into like architecture or like, is there anybody? The reason I ask you that is like, is there anybody else in different domains that you still have a passion for that you see that use similar ideas that you do?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  In every domain, there are people who to make beautiful things. I like people who make beautiful things.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  But like, are you seeing that their thought process? You find similarities, you seen their thought process and their approach?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  It's all the same. I think most of what I do is not really about music. I happen to work in music, but it's not about the music. Does that make sense?

• 18:28Speaker 00

  It does, but say more about this.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  You're at Changrila and you walk through the space and you see it doesn't feel like other places you've been.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  It, it has the same aesthetic as the records I make or the things that I work on, the things that I like, things that I buy, you know, the objects I buy would have the same aesthetic. So it's all fitting into a, I'd say worldview.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I feel this way too, because like, I mean, we talked right before we started recording about, you know, podcasting. I think we're both, I have the same obsession with it. And I've had my first podcast for over a decade and it started out just me reading biographies of people that build businesses. But over time, I realized like, this same personality type, it's like the artist, the entrepreneur, the filmmaker, the musician. I've done podcasts on all of these kinds of people. And I'm like, I don't see any distinction between them.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the same.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  It's all the creative spirit.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  I want to like, they have a bunch of like selfish things I told you I want to talk to you about because there's just some people that have made massive impacts on my life. I told you like, I grew up listening to hip hop. It's all I listen to this day. I listen to more podcasts than listening to music now, but like, it really gave like a, put it a voice, like a words to a feeling I had, even maybe in my subconscious. Eminem was the first one that like, I was, I heard his first album and I was like, this is how I feel. I didn't grow up in a trailer park in Michigan, but I know exactly what you're talking about with certain things with your family or certain things of like just becoming, you know, coming of age. I heard you say one time, I'm like obsessed with, I want to spend time with him and hopefully get him to record a podcast. I know that's be very difficult, but especially for you who've worked with, you know, the best, the

• 20:09Speaker 00

  best of the best people over almost half a century. And for you to say that he might be the most obsessive artist?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  They've ever worked for. It was like, I literally screenshot of that and saved it on my phone. I look at it all the time. Why did you say that? Can you just tell me about what it's like working with him?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  It feels like his entire life is centered around writing words. He's totally preoccupied with that. So he always has a notebook. He's always making little notes. He writes tiny and tiny letters. And he's always making notes. And at one point I asked him, because he's got notebooks and notebooks and notebooks. And I said, are you working on a new song? He's like, no, I'm just like, keeping active, keeping active in the skill set. And I said, are you gonna put those in a song? He's probably said 90% of it will never be in a song. He's just writing, just writing. And that's what he does. He writes.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Does he apply that to like other elements of making a song though? Just not just writing? Because he does a lot of his own production, right?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  And I would say the same type of obsessive is what makes him great. He's obsessed.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Have you come across anybody that you consider great that hasn't, that's not obsessed?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  I'm sure there are. I have to think about it, but it's, that's not the only way to do it. For some people, it happens in a more natural way. And for some people, it's more of a, work ethic is always a part of it. But for some people, work ethic is the reason they are who they are. And there are other people who are just incredibly talented and have enough work ethic to get over the finish line.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  What do you think it's for you?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  I don't like to quit. I like to see things through. When I start something, I like to see what it can be.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  From the outside, uh, cause you know, you have this whole like very relaxed, like zen vibe.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  But I, I swear, I think underneath is like a workaholic.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  For sure. I'm a lazy workaholic.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  Lazy workaholic. You know, you gotta say more about that.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  That's what it is. Like, uh.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  Cause it doesn't feel like work? Explain.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I have to force myself to do it, but I do force myself. My demeanor would be to do nothing.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Rick, I don't believe that.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  No, you love this too much, though. What do you mean?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  That's the point. So I love the beautiful thing. And it takes a lot of work to get to the beautiful thing.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  You like the end result?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like, I like to get there. I like to get to the point where it's like, okay, press the send button and share it with the world. That's a great feeling. Like, I, I like it enough for you to get to hear it.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  But all of the work up until then, it's like, oh my God, I have to go to the studio today.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  That's surprising to me.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  I thought.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  It's such a beautiful day. Wouldn't it be nice to just go out and have lunch with friends? But my whole life has been, you know, most of my life was in the first 25 years was in a dark room for 16 hours a day, seven days a week in New York City, working on music.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Now you'd be rather be out here barefoot, butt naked in the sun, I think.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Now. But I, not then, not then. But, but I'd rather, you know, I like being outside. I like having fun with friends. I like hanging out with my family.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Do you like making podcasts more than music now?

• 23:34Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's I like it more. I like the people I get to meet. And I'm interested in learning about people. I like learning how people think, their vision to make something, how they follow through to make it and learning the, the, uh, the roller coaster ride, that journey of building things, how it worked, where it didn't work, what ideas they thought may have worked that didn't, when they were surprised in the process. So interesting to me.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  I wanna like pull on this for a little bit, if you don't mind.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  So I heard Billy Eilish's brother, who I think they have a close collaboration with. And he, so he was describing the difference between him and Billy. He said that he enjoyed the process of making music. She enjoyed having made the music.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  So are you more like Billy in that case? Like you like that it's done?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  I think so. I'll say I like the moment of revelation. So we're working on something. It's just okay. It's boring. I'd probably rather not be there. That's how it feels. But then something happens and it's like magic. Like something appears. It doesn't, it's not like we made it. It's like something

• 24:56Speaker 01

  comes up in the process.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  It's conjured in the process. That's like a miracle. And that's the thing that's addictive. That feeling when it's like, it's not good, it's not good, it's not good, it's not good. We try this, we try this, this doesn't work, this doesn't work, this doesn't work. And it could be a mistake. The machine could not work. We can hear something, other machine broke. But what you hear, but what we're listening to is really cool. All of a sudden, that's the feeling, that, that moment of discovery where it goes from nothing to something really good. And then the whole rest of the process after that is protecting that because it's, it's super delicate. When it happens, it's like this miracle happened and this magic thing happened.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  And now we have to protect it through the rest of the process to not ruin it. When it comes together, let's say a band is playing and doing take after take after take. When it's really good,

• 25:58Speaker 01

  we all kind of look at each other like as they're playing, it's like, it's scary because you don't want it to end, like you don't want it to stop. Because we know if it stops, we can't control it, we can't do it again. It's not like that. It's this moment in time where something magical happens. So we spend a lot of time waiting for those. And I can't say that's fun. It's not fun. It's, it's just like, takes a lot of patience.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  You have to force yourself to do it.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Have you ever just like, I gave up in that moment, just walked away for a little bit? So you, okay, so you do have this like, this really-

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Good work, work ethic.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  You have work ethic and discipline.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  Okay. But it would still be, if you could-

• 26:43Speaker 01

  It's frustrating and boring and takes a great deal of patience. It's like waiting for paint to dry, just waiting, waiting, waiting. And trying different things and nothing works. Until something either works or something happens and it just comes together. And, and I can't tell you why.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Explain like what people do to kill these special moments though. You kept saying like, we have to protect this, we have to protect this.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Once you're aware of it, it's harder to protect. Like in the, in the process of it happening,

• 27:21Speaker 01

  if you realize this is it, it's like, it's like, um, what is it in golf, the yips? You know, like when, when you're playing golf, if you, like, if you start thinking about it, instead of just being in it, you can't do it anymore.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  So it's almost like you have to get out of yourself

• 27:45Speaker 01

  to allow it to happen. Maybe not me, but for the artist, the artist has to get to this place where it's like, they don't even know they're doing it. It just happens. It's not a performance. It's something else. It's, it's a,

• 28:02Speaker 01

  it's just like a real moment happens and it's thrilling.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  I think you're speaking to my soul right now because there's a, something I heard Steph Curry talk about one time where they're like, what do you think of when you're taking a shot? And he goes, absolutely nothing.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  And so like when I read books for a living, essentially, before I started this. And you know, people, I've had authors reach out to me after I did their book. And they're like, how did you get to the essence of it? Like, what were you thinking? What are you thinking of when you're doing this? And I was like, nothing. I just read. And if something sticks, jumps out to me, I don't think at all. I just underline it. And then I'll go back through if I, when I reread the highlight. If it's still interesting. It was interesting the first time. Now it's interesting the second time. It's probably interesting.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  It's interesting.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  There's 10 million me's out there. I'm not unique.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Same.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  And there's no way I read this line twice. And if I read it on a podcast, that somebody else is not going to think of it's interesting. He's like, if I overthink it, or if I think of, oh, this person might hear it, or this kind of, this many people are here.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  It's in the way.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Nothing. I'm thinking of nothing.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  That's really interesting. So let me, let me ask you this, though. So you're fucking Rick Rubin. You can do whatever you want. Why are you choosing to spend so much time podcasting then?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  I like meeting the people. And even before the podcast started, I would still, if someone was interesting to me, I would reach out to them, want to spend time with them, hang out with them, and just learn from them, really. I can remember the, the one where it became obvious to do the podcast was Dana White. Someone introduced me to Dana White.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  We're recording with him next week.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Great. He is great.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  He's incredible.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  And I said, he actually reached out to me. He's like, anytime you want to meet, I'm down. I was like, great, let's do it. We met, we sat at my house. We sat outside, we talked for about three hours. And at some point in the conversation, I said, do you mind if I record this? Because I feel like I'm not going to remember what we're saying. And I'm really liking this story. And that was sort of a breakthrough of like, this is kind of what doing a podcast is like. I'm, I already do this in my life. I don't record them. But I meet the people that make things that are interesting to me. And I spend time with them and I listen to what they do. And I ask a lot of questions because I'm curious. So it really is an outgrowth of my normal lights. So I like doing that.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  The founder of 11 Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, "We built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories and ideas to every corner of the world." Deal is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com/cenra. That is deal.com/cenra. We were talking before we started recording, like I may be the person's most successful podcasting in the world. I listened to thousands of episodes. I was listening to your podcast, Broken Record, back in the day. I was like, "This is incredible." And you were heavily into interviewing musicians back then.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  That was the format of that show, was just talking to musicians.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  And then Tetra Grammaton, you took, in my opinion, to another level. And you're talking to all kinds of incredible people. I listened to, I just had a conversation with Toby Luque, founder of Shopify.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, amazing.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  I used one of your episodes to prep because he's such a unique mind. One of the most interesting conversations I had. But I analyzed people, like, you know, there's a handful of podcasts that are really great. There's a couple million in the directory, only a handful are really great. Yours is really great. And I'm like, "Why the hell? How, it's unfair. This guy is gifted at music and now he's gifted at podcasting. Why is this the case?" And what I came up with, and I started analyzing and thinking about what you do in your day job, what you've done for over four decades. And I was like, "He's a professional listener."

• 32:35Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  I don't, he's listening to the guest. He is in the moment with the guest.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  And it's like, that is why, one of the reasons why, obviously you're, you have a lot of interesting things to say, but one of the reasons, in my opinion, that you're so great at podcasting.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Well, I think in real life... People like to talk and they don't like to listen. And often in a conversation, you'll be with someone and they'll be saying something. And you'll be thinking about, okay, this is what I'm going to say in response to that. You're not really, not really present back and forth. That's what it is, like two people waiting for their turn to say what they think. And um, this is different. And it really, I think it came from listening to music because I listen to music in a very deep way. I close my eyes, I really pay attention. It's not, it's not wallpaper. It's like I go into the music.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  In some ways, I think my relationship with music allowed me to never drink or take drugs. Because listening to music for me is totally psychedelic experience. I can feel the music and I can be transported by the music, not whole music, but good music. So I close my eyes, I feel it. And then at the end of it, I open my eyes and I'm surprised where I am because I've, I've been gone when I'm listening. So I listen deeply and I want to know, I really want to understand things. So I'm comfortable asking questions and I really listen to what someone's saying. And if someone says something I don't understand, I'll ask a question to clarify so that I can understand it.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  I also don't have any judgment. I don't, I don't think that I have a way that like my way is the right way. And I'm not comparing what's being said to me about what I think. What I think is not part of it. I'm just, I just want to truly understand what's being shared with me. And if someone says something that's very different than what I believe, I want to know more. It's like, how did he get to that? Why, why, why do you think that? Because maybe I'll learn something, maybe, maybe I have it wrong, you know, like I don't, I don't know anything. I want to know more. So through talking to people and really listening, you really get to meet people. And, and as a, as a professional listener, I found some people,

• 35:02Speaker 01

  it's disarming to talk to someone who really listens because it's so rare. Most people don't listen.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  When I listen to your podcast, I feel you have this combination of like sincere interest.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  True. In the other human being.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  And a desire, I think you just said this, but the way I think about it is the way I think about you when I listen to your podcast is like a desire not to form an opinion, but to understand.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  That's it. That's it. I just want to understand.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  I want to understand to broaden my scope, to see the world. I want to see the world through your eyes. You know, I want to see the world through, someone made something that's beautiful to me. I want to understand how they see the world.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Someone makes a great discovery. I want to know what was the process that allowed that to happen? I'm curious.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, there doesn't seem to be an end to your curiosity either.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  I'm interested. I've always been interested. I, I think of myself as a researcher. I've always, like when the internet came along, anything that I'm interested in, I'll go forever, going deeper and deeper and deeper into a topic just to get any glimpse and to re-deposing opinions and go deeper and deeper and deeper and just try and understand. I'm curious.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  You think of yourself as a researcher?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's what I do most of the time is research.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Okay. I don't know about this. Tell me about this.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Well, not a researcher in a professional way, but anything I'm interested in, I want to know everything about it, whatever it is. And even mundane things. If I drink coffee, I want to taste a million coff- I want to find the best coffee. I want to read what every person who knows about the best machine says about every machine and then test every machine. And it's just a fanatical devotion to finding the best version of whatever it is.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Is it all consuming for you when you, when you find these, these pockets of interest?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  I'd say so. There's no end. I don't get to an end to that process.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  I admire people that do things for a very long period of time. And you can tell a lot about people by what they admire. It's like, I want to do these kind of podcasts till I die. Like, what's your strategy? What's successful in five years, in 10 years? One, that I'm still doing it. And two, I'm just making things that I'm proud of.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  There's no fucking download number. There's no how many ads I sell. It's just like, that's it. And I'm terrified that one day, you know, I'm going to wake up and be like, I don't want to do this anymore.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  No, but the only reason that would happen is because something else would take over that you have to do. And that would be fine, too.

• 37:42Speaker 00

  Still terrified of it.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  When I was nine years old, I spent a lot of time practicing magic, like card magic in front of a mirror. And that was really fun. And there's a whole community of musicians, magicians. And I was just a little kid, but like grown up magicians. And if you're truly interested in magic,

• 38:02Speaker 01

  there are all these meetings and they get together and talk about stuff. And if you're an outsider, everything's a secret. But if you're a magician, they love sharing. So it's a really cool community to be part of. And that was my community from nine until probably 16. Those were the people I hung out with and that were the people that we shared this interest. And I just wanted to learn. And then music became more and more popular in my life. Like, music became a... And then at some points, like, I can't do both. They're both... These are both full-time occupations. And when I say occupations, I don't mean jobs. I mean something to occupy my time.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  I can either devote myself to doing magic or devote myself to doing music. And at some point, music won.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  But that wasn't a loss. I didn't lose anything.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  That's a beautiful way to think of it.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  It's like, I let go of the thing that I loved for this other thing that I loved that just took on this new life. And I've done music for a long time and...

• 39:12Speaker 01

  I like making other things too. And if it became, if my life became about making other things more than making music, that'd be okay. It's more about the making that excites me.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  This is why I kept asking, like, do you think you would, like, making a podcast, like, we can have a conversation, we could be doing your show right now instead of mine. And at the end of this hour or two hours, like, we have, it's done. We have something, we can do it again tomorrow. Like, the, the, the amount of time from, you know, creation to output is so much shorter than an album or even a great song.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  True.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  And if you're, what you're saying, I think you call yourself a lazy workaholic. I was saying lazy alcoholic, lazy workaholic. Like, it's almost like, this isn't work, this doesn't feel like work to me. I feel like, I was a little surprised with the way you described working in music that does feel like work to you.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  For sure. It's also work because I have to show up. If you commit to be somewhere at a certain time, that's work. Because that morning I might wake up and think, I don't really want to do that today. But it's agreed to with other people. I'm going to be at this place and we're going to do this thing, so I have to show up. But most days, I don't want to do the things that I'm scheduled to do. Now, at the time that I choose-

• 40:29Speaker 00

  That's shocking to me, though.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  At the time that I choose to do them, I want to do them. I, I know I want to do them, but still, it's really nice not to have to get out of bed. Or it's nice to go for a walk on the beach.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  So I, I think I might be well positioned. This is, I'm just now getting advice from you because I'm a huge fan of you. And I respect the way you think anyways. I just did another podcast on the, the book you wrote, Creative Act, by the way. And there's so many ideas that you put into words that are in my head that I didn't have words for in there. So if I, right now, I feel like this is, I don't work a day in my life. I feel like I wake up and I'm like compelled or like, I don't even know the word to use it. Like, then there's no doubt that I'm just on the right path. If I was sitting here and we weren't recording and I was just seeking your advice. Like, I don't feel it's at work at all. The only time it feels like work is when I have to edit, which I fucking hate, but I do it anyways because I think it makes it better. But that's the only time.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  That's a good example. That's a good example. There are parts of it that are not always fun. And when you're committing time, like time is our most valuable resource. And when we're committing our time to doing something in advance, which we do, we pre-schedule. The day of, you don't always want to do that thing.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  But I feel you have complete control over your time and your life.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  How are you still?

• 41:49Speaker 01

  I choose it. And I have to acknowledge, I made this, no one's forcing me to do this. I said I would show up. I have to show up.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  But in your day to day, that still feels like work.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  I'd be happy not doing anything. Well, I don't know. I don't know if that's true.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  There's no way.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  It's never been the case. I've always.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  Because you could have stopped working decades ago.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  And I think you're addicted to making great shit.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Yes, and I'm lazy. It's a real part of it. I'm telling you an honest piece of this, which is every day, it's not like, let's go. Every day it's like, oh no, I gotta go work.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  You're disappointing me. I'm sad. But it doesn't feel like, it feels like out of almost anybody in the world that gets paid for being them.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  Is you.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  And you're saying that's not the case.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  No, I'm me. I'm definitely me. There is a part of me that doesn't want to show up for anything. And I have to overcome that every day. That's what I'm saying.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Did you ever spend any time with Tony Bourdain when he was alive?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Never have.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  Were you ever a fan of any of his?

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Okay, so I read all his books, watched all his shows. And in his book, I was shocked because that guy.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  First of all, like, in his book, he describes what it's like to be a heroin addict, which is insane. And the amount, what you realize when you read Kitchen Confidential, is like the same work ethic he used to score drugs as a junk, as a broke junkie. Once he broke that habit, he just applied it to writing and building TV shows. Like, his work ethic was the same. It was just directed at the worst thing possible, being a fucking heroin addict. And then he directed in a positive, generative direction and he took off. But he said something very similar to you. He's like, somewhere deep inside me is this guy that just smokes weed and lay in bed all day. And he goes, I had to fight, his writing is beautiful. He's like, I had to fight that guy every single day.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, what's, what's also true, I do have to fight that guy to show up.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  And there are parts of the job that are just like watching paint dry, waiting for something good to happen. But that moment of magic, when something good does happen, is the thing I'm addicted to. That feeling of it wasn't good, it's not good, oh my God, it's good. And it's like a miracle because nobody knows how or why that happened. It's not in our control. That's the other thing about it. It's really, it really is magic. So I'm addicted to the magic part of it, but I'm not addicted to everything leading up to those magical moments. I'm patient, I'm patient enough to wait forever for that thing to happen. But it's, it's not fun.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Like, some people really look forward to fishing. It's like fishing. It's like you can go out and spend a whole day fishing and not catch any fish. It's like that. You can work in the studio for a day or for a week and nothing good can happen. That's happens. It's out of our control. But when the good thing happens, it's like, ah, there it is. That's why we're here.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  That fishing analogy is really important to me. I've heard you say this a few years ago.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  It's true. It's, it's, it's the best example.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  I heard Akon one time describe, uh, working with Eminem. And he shows up into Detroit and he gives them a call. He's like, all right, I figure we're gonna do a night session. You know, these guys are usually nocturnal. Calls them at like 7:00 PM and Em's like, yeah, I'll, I'll see you tomorrow. And Akon's like, tomorrow? Like, what are you talking about? Shows up and doesn't realize that he treats it like a job. Shows up at 9:00 AM.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  Right? He's in the studio writing, like you're saying, recording verses. I think it's like, let's say noon. He literally be in the middle of a verse. And like, oh, I'll be right back. I'm gonna take lunch. And he's like, what? Goes, comes back at 1:00, goes back to work at 5:00 o'clock. Says, all right, I'll see you next day.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  And people like misunderstood what Akon was saying. It's like, he doesn't wait around for inspiration.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  He shows up every day knowing that if he does the work.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Then it will come.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  It's exactly what you're saying about fishing.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And inspiration is a real thing too, but it's both. Like, if you only wait for inspiration, it won't ever come. Like, you have to work and be there and show up. If you're not, if you're not in the practice of allowing the thing to happen. It won't happen. Doesn't mean it will. Just because you do show up, doesn't mean it will happen. But if you don't show up, it won't happen.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  Brian Halligan founded HubSpot 20 years ago, and he has this line about AI that I keep thinking about. He said, "Most companies are using AI to make their teams more productive, but the companies that will thrive make the company itself the intelligence." And that is exactly what HubSpot does. HubSpot gives you AI that works, AI that actually knows your customers and your business. Your AI needs to know what you know, your actual customer conversations, your sales history, what worked last quarter and what didn't. HubSpot connects AI to your real customer data. So when it writes an email, it knows this customer asked about pricing three weeks ago. It knows what campaign brought them in, and it knows that they already contacted support twice this month. And that's when you start seeing actual results. Visit hubspot.com to learn more.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  That's hubspot.com. You got me into Johnny Cash, who is a couple generations before me. And not only was the music great, but I loved you describing like the what went into making it. We can talk about that, but there was something like the way I would like still down what you were saying is like constraints are actually your friend.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  If you don't, like you can't do everything. So if you if you artificially constrain yourself, you it forces you to be more creative. Can you talk about this? I feel like you've used this a bunch in your career.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like the idea of creating a palette. And the albums that speak to me most are ones when you hear them, you know, if an artist has 20 albums, but you hear a song, you know, oh, that has to be on that album, that seventh album, because that's the only album that sounds like that. Even though the band always sounds like the band, this group of songs sounds different than all the rest. And it and it may be that there's some it was either recorded in a different way or all the songs are about a particular thing or they're using different instrumentation than they used to use. I like it when an album like stands alone outside of an artist's career as a defining moment in time.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  It's not just more of the same.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  But how is that tied to these constraints that you put on the work?

• 48:24Speaker 01

  That happens by coming up with like a

• 48:30Speaker 01

  A series of rules that only apply to this project. Those are the constraints. So that could be.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  In the Johnny Cash example.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Johnny Cash's case, the first one was, I didn't know that it was going to be a, an acoustic album, which it turned out to be. But that was something that through the process of recording, I learned. The most interesting version of this to me is when he's singing alone, which is really the demos in my living room, him singing me songs. That sounded better than when we went into the recording studio with musicians and played them with a band. It wasn't as interesting. I didn't know that in advance. That wasn't a premeditated idea. And then in terms of the material that he would sing.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  I grew up with this image, what, what spoke to me about Johnny Cash was this image of the man in black. And the man in black is a mythical character. Yes, Johnny Cash, but it's not just Johnny Cash. It's like the mythical Johnny Cash, the Johnny Cash who's the man in black. And the man Johnny Cash could sing a funny song. The man in black probably wouldn't sing a funny song.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  So the material that we picked was always through the eyes of what's something that man in black, the legendary mythological character, what would he sing? And those are the songs that we chose.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  And so in this case, the constraints are you, Johnny, a guitar. I think he said he didn't even use a pick. It was like his fingers. Every, every guitar, every time he strung the guitar was his fingers.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  And you guys in a house.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but a big part of it too is the choice of material. That's a big part of it for, for those albums.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  And it's looked at through the viewpoint of not a funny song, but a man in black would do this.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Not even just a, not even just a funny song. It had to have a certain amount of gravitas to fit the, a mythical character singing it.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  When I think about everything I've read about you and as much as I've heard you speak, it's like, I feel like you would agree with the statement that like, great things can't be made by a committee.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Correct. It would be unusual for that to be the case.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  In many cases. Is it's just it could be banned.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Tends to water it down. It tends to water it down.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Is it? So this is the case in companies, since obviously my main focus on entrepreneurship.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  It's like, even if there is a group, there's usually like a main person. Is that the same thing in bands? So they're always like one deep, like, there might be four guys in the band or five guys in the band. Is it usually the stronger personality that has more influence?

• 51:08Speaker 01

  In a band, what makes a band great is how the different musicians hear music and play together. And it doesn't have to be a single point of view. The Beatles are a great example because John and Paul really were very different people and wrote different kinds of songs and approached music in different ways. Jagger and Richards, same. There's opposition there. That's goes against exactly what you said. It's a different model. But then, like in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Tom Petty is really the

• 51:45Speaker 01

  the flag bearer of the band. And everyone lines up behind Tom. They're all great. And they all can play great things and they all add incredible things. But Tom is sort of the final word in what happens in that band. In a band like U2, it's democratic. Everybody in the band has to like it. If three of the guys like it and one of the guys doesn't, it doesn't happen. And that's another model that that works for them.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  So if we go back to this designing in constraints, your work with Johnny Cash is very simple. Go back all the way 40 years before that. I'm reducing. I'm not producing. I think in 2023, I listened to, I don't know, 600 to 700 individual. Probably listened to two or three podcast episodes a day. So, I don't know, 700, 900 episodes. I think the single best podcast episode that I listened to all that year was your episode on Tetra Grammaton with Jimmy Iovine. There was a story that you told in there that was very fascinating because Jimmy's like, I think, 10 years older than you. Kind of like 10 years.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Almost exactly 10 years old. We're a day, we're, our birthdays are a day apart.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you tell this phenomenal story on the podcast of one of the first, maybe it was the first time you met Jimmy Iovine. He said something that was so strange. You go to play something you're working on.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  And he goes, I wish I could still make something that simple.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  And your response was, I'm sure you can.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. What do you mean?

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Explain why he said that and what's happening, what happens over time.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, because he, he was a producer. And as you learn more of what you can do, you tend to do that. You tend to, they tend to get bigger. At that point in time, I hadn't done it enough. It was my first record. So it was, that was the, the Cult Electric was my first rock record.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  This is after almost a decade in hip hop or half a decade in hip hop?

• 53:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  No?

• 53:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  When was this?

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Same, like same time.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is like nineteen.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Is this when you moved to California?

• 53:46Speaker 01

  No, this is still in New York.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  Oh shit, okay, so give me the.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  I'm still living in the dorm. I'm still living in the dorm at NYU.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Oh my god. I thought this is, okay, so this is the very beginning. So it's as simple as it gets because that's all you can do.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was doing what I was very simple, but I stayed true to that as much as I can. There've probably been a couple of examples along the way where I may have,

• 54:10Speaker 01

  I may have not stayed true. Very few, if you look at my whole recorded discography, there may be two or three examples where it got out of control. Or where the artists that I'm working with just had a very different vision, which does happen sometimes. And usually we end up not working together again. And there've been one or two occasions where we end up not even finishing a work because it's just too, we just see it in a different way. I had that experience with Joe Cocker. We went into the studio to record and I had a specific vision of how I saw Joe Cocker and what I thought was great about Joe Cocker. And he really had a vision of it being something different than that. And we weren't on the same page and it didn't job. So it never happened.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  I'm curious your perspective since you've known Jimmy Iovine for so long, because he has a very, another singular career where he like kind of in music the whole time, but jumped around. Yeah, different job from, you know, engineer to producer to record company owner to then building businesses with his, his artists.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  Like, what do you think is special about him? Like, what's unique about him? Why was he able to do what he was able to do?

• 55:19Speaker 01

  He's got good taste and he's got a great work ethic. Those are the two.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  To me, in my mind, you two are very, almost before this conversation I'm having with you, almost at opposite ends of the spectrum. Where I felt like you were just like drawn, you know, like a moth to flame about what you want to do. Where he's like, it was always work. I never liked it.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  It was always a job.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  But I like certain parts of it, but I just, he essentially just forced himself to do it.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  He said something really interesting that I thought really summed it up, which was Jimmy is in the banking business. These are his words. He said, I'm in the banking business and you're in the church business. And that's the difference.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  Explain that. I love this.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  It said, I'm doing a, a passion and belief. And he's doing a bottom line, what's going to work? What's going to be good for business? And it's just two different things, two different mentalities.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  There's a great line in the Defy Ones where he hears, he's producing Tom Petty and he hears a song. He goes, this is house music. And Tom goes, what do you mean? He goes, he goes, find me, you know, whatever. It's eight more albums. He goes, that song's going to buy you a house.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that it's, we have a different, we have a, we're different in that way.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  And Tom goes, I've never heard somebody describe music that way. This is going to buy me a house.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  There's a bunch of stories that Jimmy tells in that podcast with you about the crazy things that you see in the music business. You know, where I think he tells, started like the Phil Spector coming to the studio with like a butcher's, in a butcher's outfit. And he's got like guns strapped to him everywhere. And David Geffen's in the studio and John Lennon's getting drunk. Do you have any like things that stand out from you? I've never heard you hear, tell any of these like stories of stuff you've seen inside the studio.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  I can remember doing a session with ODB, Old Dirty Bastard.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Wu-Tang Clan.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  From Wu-Tang. And I remember being nervous because I'd never met him before and his reputation preceded him. So I didn't really know what I was going into. And, um, and I thought, I'm going to, I'm going to bring my dog. I had a Pooley, which is a dog that has dreadlocks. And.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  And that would be, whatever's going on, if you see a dog with dreadlocks, it's interesting. Like it, it, it doesn't, it's fascinating in its own way. And I had a friend of mine also filming everything because I thought, well, if there's a camera and if there's a dog, it's gonna be okay.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  What was his reputation for you to do this, though?

• 57:52Speaker 01

  All kinds of crazy things, like.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Violence?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Could be violence, could be a lot of things that would not be good.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  And just things I wasn't really prepared for. But I loved him, you know, I was a fan. And I remember we walked in and he looked.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  And he pointed at the dog. And he said, he's okay. And then he pointed at the camera, he's gotta go. It's like, okay. And then he went. And then the session ended up going pretty well.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  We mentioned Toby Luque earlier. And in the conversation I had with him, that was very fascinating. He said something where he's just like, there's not like one right way to do things. There's probably a hundred, which I think you would agree with. And he's like, you just find the one that fits best for you. And just do that. And you would think this like computer, German computer programmer engineer would be like very rigid. But when you talk to him, he essentially just runs his life by all intuition.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  You were all intuition.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  All intuition.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  Like, explain, like, why you, essentially, your entire life is just, is, in my opinion, like managed or run by your intuitive feelings.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've always been true to what I feel. And it's worked out. I suppose if it didn't work out, then maybe I would have to try something else. But it's, the fact that I've stayed true to what feels right to me. And luckily, by the grace of God, it has resonated with other people. It allows me to continue doing it. But I suppose if that didn't happen, I would just make things for myself on a small level and keep doing it and have a real job.

• 59:33Speaker 00

  Is this your guided by intuition tied to? I feel you have a skepticism of human knowledge. I think you say like, I think we know very little about everything.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Thomas Edison has this famous quote where he's like, we don't know one one thousandth percent of anything.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe that. I believe we don't know anything.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, so if you believe you don't know anything, then what is the only other thing you could do is be guided by your intuition?

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and to try things and see what works. And and just because one thing works doesn't mean that's the way that that's the way it happens. That's a way that happened to work in that case.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  I found one of my all time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform, Axon. Axon connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. Axon allows you to capture undivided attention. Axon ads are full screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. You can launch on Axon in minutes. You set the goal and Axon achieves it.

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and Axon scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all your competitors are on Axon. And you can do that by going to axon.ai/cenra. That is axon.ai/cenra. I I heard you one time compare and contrast the approach of Jay-Z to Eminem.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  You've worked with both of them. Can you talk about just how different they are?

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, M is much more.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Well, he writes down the lyrics and he's really studious in the way that he works. And he'll also record take after take after take after it's written and try different things. Jay is much more spontaneous. It all happens in his head and then he'll get up and say it once or twice and that's it.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  What's the energy when you're in the room with both of them, though?

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  M is totally involved in every aspect of everything. And Jay is like,

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  play me a bunch of stuff. If I hear something I like, I'll think about it. And if not, I'll see you tomorrow. It's like Jay will only be there when he needs to be there. And if you hear something that sparks an idea, he'll sit and just say, play it over and over again. Play the music over and over again. And he sits in the back and you almost, it's, it goes on long enough. We forget he's even there because he's just silent in the corner, listening, sitting on a couch, listening over and over again. Thirty minutes, twenty five minutes later, it was like, I got it, jumps up. He runs into the room, hit record, and he does the whole thing just from his head. It's amazing. He's the only person I've ever seen do that.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  I think a lot of people know that he did Magna Carta Holy Grail, essentially in two weeks. Like he did the whole album in two weeks.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Most of his albums were made very quickly.

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was always interesting. He was like, yeah, he recorded them in two weeks, but these ideas he's been refining. It's not like when he's not in the studio, he's not thinking about these. Like refining these ideas over a long period of time.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Some of them, it all happens in a weekend, the whole thing.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  As opposed to M, who will work on a song forever.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Yes. Very different, just two different styles, both amazing. But they just come at it from different, I, I think it's just different personality types.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  What do you think M's personality type is then?

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  I would describe him as obsessive, you know, he's really

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  perfectionist,

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  willing to do whatever it takes for it to be great. And

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Diligent, hardworking, and Jay's much more relaxed. Jay's, it just kind of happens for him. He's doing it, but it's just a different style.

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  Of the two, which one do you think your, that your working style is closer to?

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  I do a different thing, so it's hard to say. What I do changes according to who I'm working with. Like whatever, whatever the artist needs is what my job is. So in some cases, it's totally hands off. And in some cases, it's, well, we gotta start from the beginning and try to figure this out together.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  Oh, so you know what? I just, I'm thinking of like, it's kind of tied to what you were saying about being a professional listener, that you take a sincere interest in the person, whether you're recording a podcast with them or you're working with them in the studio. And so your goal, if I'm reading this correctly, is like, has really nothing to do with you. You, you feel your act of service to try to get them to be the best version of themselves? Is that the way you think about it?

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Yes. I'd say that's, that's accurate.

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  Do you have anybody that plays that role in your life for you?

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  I don't know if I do.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  I don't know if anyone produces me.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  Could they reduce you? I don't know if there's anything to reduce here.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know. Luckily, I have friends who, um, friends and family who are not particularly interested in what I do. So I have reality around me, a lot of just like, that's crazy. Don't, you know, like a lot of, that's a bad idea. And, and it's interesting for me because some ideas I hear, that's a bad idea. It's like, okay, maybe you're right. And so, and many ideas is like, I'll show you. I'll show you it's a good idea. I'm, I'm, I feel I have to do this, you know?

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I could see that you take a lot of input, but I think you would be resistant to.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  I won't change my mind, but I'm open to hearing ideas and definitely open to help. If, if someone suggests something that makes it better and I see that, it's like, that's the best. I'm not closed minded. Because someone offers information, even experienced wisdom, I might not always choose to use that information.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  Do you think you have a big ego?

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  You have a lot of self-confidence, though.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  I have a lot of self-confidence.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  But they even said, somebody met you when you were like 19. And like, that's the most confident, self-confident 19-year-old I've ever met.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  I think that's the mix. I think, you know, lucky I learned to meditate when I was young. And meditation's been a big part of my life. So it's never been about ego. It's never been about me, you know? It's, I'm confident in being able to share what I'm experiencing. I hear something like, that's amazing. And I hear something else, it's like, you know, it's not good enough. And nothing anyone can say will tell me otherwise. It's like, I, I know, I can feel it.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  So there's confidence in your own judgment? Because you were just saying, you can have somebody who has a lot of experience with them.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  When I say confidence in my own judgment in, this is how I see it. I'm not saying I'm right. I never say I'm right, or I know what's best. None of those things. This is how I see it. I see it clearly. This is how I would vote for it. If I get to vote, I vote for this.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  But it's not my way or the highway at all.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  What is your inner monologue like when you're making something? Is it positive, negative? Are you self-critical?

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  Depends. Like, I would say rarely critical. What it usually is, is it starts apprehensive when we start? Because it could be anything. So at first, it's scary. So I don't know what's gonna happen.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  Even today?

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Even today. And there's usually expectation, because I've had success in the past, that if I'm there, it's gonna be great. So I feel this pressure of like, there's expectation. And I know I can't control anything. It's gonna be the way it's gonna be. I know I'm patient, and I know I'll wait until it's great. And we start by experimenting and see what it could be. And as soon as there's a glimmer, as soon as I hear something that's good, then I relax. But until then, it's too open. You know, it could be too many things. But once something lands, whatever it is, I relax. It's like, okay, we have a, at least a direction to move in.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  It doesn't mean we stay in that direction forever. But having a direction is better than not having a direction. And when we start, we don't have a direction.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  So you would say you don't have a, you're a, a, a self, like a self critical inner monologue constantly playing in your mind?

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Never.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  It's interesting. The reason I asked you this question is because I was with a, an entrepreneur yesterday. Guy's worth $10 billion and he wakes up every morning at 5:30, just assuming he's going out of business and like, essentially paranoid. He lives like a paranoid life and that's why he thinks he's good. This is very common with like a lot of people.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  And I used to have a self critical, like kind of mean, I was fucking pretty mean to myself. And it's got to be Brad Jacobs. Yeah, I actually had him on the show and his, I've talked to him a bunch. And he used to have that too. And now he's in the sixties of like, it's counterproductive. It's not helping anything. And some, something, I talked about this on the podcast, you can hear me mentioning it over and over again for a few years. And just something one day just fucking snapped and I just don't do that anymore.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  And I went back and I was reading my notes on you. And I was just telling my partner, Rob, about this, this way I look at the work we're doing now. It's like, I like Rick's framework that like, if you look at your work, it's just like an entry to a diary.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  It's like, there's nothing to be critical about because like you did the best you possibly could have done.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  In that moment.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  In that moment.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:49Speaker 00

  And then that was 10 years ago and that was five years ago. And then what we're making today.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  And I might not do the same thing I would have done 10 years ago and that's fine. But I don't have any regrets about. Ten years ago, that's what I thought. That's real. Each of those installments are real. So it's always true. It doesn't mean that that's who you are forever. It's who you are in that moment. It's really freeing. It's helpful for an artist to think that way. Because usually, especially when we're younger, we think the thing that we make is this is my magnum opus, and this is going to define me for the rest of my life. And it's a daunting hill to climb. But when you realize it's like, this is just the one today, and we're going to make another one tomorrow.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  And hopefully, the one tomorrow is going to be as good or better than the one today. What's true today? What's the one? I usually say that if you are excited to share it with your friend, like if I'm working in the studio and before, you know, long before a record comes out, we're making something. And if someone comes and I'm excited to play it for my friend who has good taste, who I know likes good music, it could come out then. Like, if I want to play it for them, that's good enough for everybody. Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:11:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  But usually, artists will feel like, well, I'll play this for my boys, but it has to be a lot better before regular people can hear it. And that's ridiculous. It's like, as soon as I liked it enough to share it with one person, chances are, it's ready for everybody.

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  I've seen you talk to a ton of musicians and artists on camera. I just finished rereading this profile that was in Colossus Magazine on Josh Kushner. And it starts out with him coming to seek your counsel. There's a ton of people that come to seek your counsel. And I feel almost like you're hold up, like your modus operandi is like holding up a mirror. To them and just telling them to do what they know they want to do. But it's somehow more valuable if they hear it from somebody else. Does that make any sense to you? Do you resonate with that at all?

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  That sounds right. I mean, there are occasions where someone will come to me and say, I'm thinking about doing this crazy thing. And I'll say, I wonder about that. But more often than not, when people share their hopes and dreams,

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  that's all you need to know. It's like, these are my hopes and dreams, but I'm afraid of this, this and this. Most often, it's go with the hopes and dreams. Don't worry about any of that stuff because that stuff doesn't matter.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  What is the stuff that they're afraid of over here?

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  What someone's gonna say, uh, will I be able to keep doing it? Uh, my last one was successful. What do I do now? Success is a funny thing, you know, when you're young and you get successful quickly. No one's prepared for that. And it's awkward and uncomfortable. And you think that's the thing that you want, but when you get it, it's not like what you think it is. It's very different. And there are all these pressures that come with it that no one's ready for. And no one learns how to do. And it's not like whoever, uh, you learned good habits from over the course of your life. They don't know how to deal with it because they're, they never got, you know,

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  overnight famous or successful or like it's, it's a weird thing.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  So a lot of artists kind of implode in success.

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  Okay. So I want to ask you why you have not imploded over this, this, this many decades. One of the most interesting things, uh, that Jimmy Iovine told me, we talked a lot about this because like I'm obsessed with people that are just further down the line than I am.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  It's like, there's just the, the, the wisdom they gain from experience. Like I'll re, I, I got the book knowledge. I need like the stuff that's not in there that they can like tell you. And he was just like, most people cannot handle. You know, you guys have been around some of the most talented people, genius level talents that have completely imploded, maybe destroyed their lives, maybe died prematurely. And so he broke it down like four things for me. It's like, there's like, people can't help stress. And these are the pitfalls, David, that you should watch out for. One was drugs. Second was alcohol. Third was women. And fourth was megalomania. That, you know, it's really hard to get on stage and there's 80,000 people screaming your name. And over time, they just think there's some kind of like, they're not even human anymore, which you seem to be like, I'm not special. I have no, I know you say you have no talent, all this other shit.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  But like, I, I'm not special.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  I, you know, I, I think that's, there's a lot of wisdom to that. It's like, man, there's 10 million me's and 10 million you's.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  They, all over the world or whatever the whiz. Do you think Jimmy's perspective on that is like, the people that you've seen that were, had talent and had success and then destroyed it? Is there anything else that he's missing from there?

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  I think those are all of them. It's like, because the last one takes into account a lot of like, there's both the, the mask of overconfidence and ego, which is hiding insecurity. Or there's the insecurity, but they're, they're really the same. You know, they're just presenting in two different ways. Two different people have the same overnight success. One of them gets really boastful and I'm the greatest that ever lived. And the other one is like, oh my God, they're gonna find out that I'm not, it's that I'm really a fake.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  But those are both the same people. It's the same, they're two sides of the same coin. The, the megalomania is a way of hiding the insecurity. It's a, it's a brave face. They might not know this, they rarely know it, you know? It's different sides of the same imbalance.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  So that leads me to the question I hinted at, or maybe even said, like, have you sustained success, success over such a long period of time then?

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  I think the fact that I learned to meditate when I was young and always had a, a grounded, and I, and the fact that I know it's not me, that's, it's like those two things. Like I'm grounded and I know I'm lucky to participate in this magic that's happening. I get to be in the room when it happens, but it's not from me.

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  What do you mean it's not from you?

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  I'm in the service of it.

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  Is that, what do you mean?

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say that. I'm in the service of it. I'm devoted to setting the stage to allow it to happen. And I'm patient and waiting for it to come.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  It's not like when it's great, it's like I did a great job. It's not that.

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  No, I think the people that sustain greatness over time, even if they do something great, they don't like wrestle on laurels, they don't go to sleep on wins, they just make something great like, all right, try to do it again the next day. And they don't really think too much. Jimmy, I mean, I keep bringing him up, but he has that great line, he's just like, I don't have a rearview mirror and I don't have a trophy room. I'm just like, I don't give a, even when he did the show, it's like, I don't want to talk about the past, I want to talk about like what I'm working on in the future. They're all like that. I just had lunch with Jeffrey Katzenberg, same thing. He's just like, yeah, we do the show, but like, I want to talk about what I'm working on now, not just what happened at Disney and everything else. It's just very, very common, like staying in the moment, being present. Let me, tell me if you disagree with me, uh, cause again, like I have this interpretation of you in my mind, because I've been a fan of yours for a very long time. And going back to this like sustained success over a long period of time.

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  I talked to James Dyson, the guy that invented, you know, the vacuum cleaner guy. And he's a fascinating person to me, number one person I wanted to meet because his first autobiography, I think is so great. Cause it's all about like him just enduring to struggle and refuse to quit. And something I didn't understand, even though I read his first autobiography, five times, second autobiography, two or three times and his, he wrote an encyclo, this, I love obsessed people. He's an inventor, he wrote an encyclopedia while he's building his company on a history of great inventions. And he's, there's like fucking 200 dimensions in there. He's like, look at this little weird thing. And he's just like, complete.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Obsessed.

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  Obsessed. But what I didn't understand what was driving him, was he told me this great story on the podcast where he, he goes, this is his, his simple organizing principle. He's like, I pick up a product, right? Pick up product and exists, I go, how can I make this product better? Makes it better, puts it back down, waits a little bit, picks it up, goes, how can I make it better? Makes it better, puts it down. He goes, I just do that over and over again.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  I've been doing it for 50 years.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  So if I had to guess what your organizing principle was, that I think also influences the sustained success that you had, is you just making things that you yourself like.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  That's it. And sometimes I'll go into a friend's house and I'll think, hmm, the furniture in here isn't arranged in the best way, maybe I'll rearrange the furniture.

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  No, you don't.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  I've done.

• 1:18:59Speaker 00

  What did your friend say?

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Depends. Some are, you know, some are cool with it. Some are like, he's crazy, you know?

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  Okay, we could say more about this, like?

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  Well, it's just like seeing the possibility. Um, I've, I've worked on a lot of, um, a lot of living spaces and the idea of designing a house from scratch is a daunting one to me. I can't imagine doing that because it's too many options. But if there's a house that exists, I might be able to see, well, what's the best version of this thing that already exists? And that's what's same, same with music. It's like, I hear what's there? And now what's the best version of this? What can we do to make it better? What can we do to make it better? Same thing as James Dyson, exactly the same.

• 1:19:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I feel like you did this from the very, from the jump when you're like, well, I'm in the club. I'm obsessed going to the club. The hip hop club is incredible, right?

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Speaker 00

  But I like this stuff that's here. I go to the record store. I'm buying this stuff that I don't like.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  It's not real.

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I was like, why don't I just make what I actually like?

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:12Speaker 00

  And it wound up working out like fabulous.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. But again, I didn't know in advance it would work out fabulously. It's just like, this is what I want to hear. I'm making it for me.

• 1:20:20Speaker 00

  Which these are my favorite kind of people because you're, again, it goes back to like, why are you doing what you're doing? And you're doing it because you wanted to make it to the point where-

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  I want it in the world.

• 1:20:28Speaker 00

  You were willing to just make music at night and have a normal job just because you liked doing it.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It was never, I never thought of any of this as a job. It's never been about that. It's only a job because I'm committed to show up. That's what makes it a job. The actual craft of making things is what I like to do.

• 1:20:51Speaker 00

  What would have to happen for you to basically disappear and to not, and to stop, stop working with musicians, stop making podcasts?

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  I think I would just keep making things for myself. You know, I give the example in the book of if you were to move into a house on the top of a mountain that no one could ever come and visit.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  And you made that the place that you most wanted to spend your time and you really create curated it to your taste. That's the job. It's not about I'm making this to show off to someone else. I'm making this because I want to inhabit this. I make the music that I want to. I'm excited to listen to now it's ridiculous. It doesn't work out that way because in making the music, we work on it. We listen to it a thousand times and then when it's done, I it's fine if I never hear it again. I never put on music I worked on, which is funny because I'm making it to be the perfect version of what I want to hear.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  But in the process of doing that, there's so much listening involved that's not fun to go back and listen to it for me. I want to hear something new.

• 1:22:01Speaker 00

  This idea of the you the example that you use in the book of the house on the mountain.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  That no one can ever see, no one will ever see.

• 1:22:10Speaker 00

  Say more about the thinking behind that though.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's it's I just know for me, if I was, I don't decorate my home for to impress someone else. I decorate my home to be the best version of the house that I want to live in and it's not typical. I'm willing to go to extremes to make the thing that I want to inhabit. And it's not for anyone else, it's just for me. Now, often other people, if they do happen to come over like, wow, I'd love to live in a place like this. I've never been in a place like this.

• 1:22:46Speaker 00

  I think the metaphor that you're using there though, it's like almost like a a map for people to find their life's work if they haven't found it yet. It's like, what are you already doing?

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54Speaker 00

  For you.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  And what will you do no matter what? What won't you stop doing regardless?

• 1:23:02Speaker 00

  I always say it's like people say, oh, you know, if you love what you do, you would do it for free. And I was like, no, there's another level to loving what you're doing. If you love, if you truly love what you do, they couldn't pay you to stop.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:13Speaker 00

  I think it's excellent advice for helping people find their life's work. Rick, this was awesome. You've been a huge inspiration to me. I've used a ton of your ideas in my work and I hope this is the first conversation about it between me and you.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:23:24Speaker 00

  Thanks for doing this.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:23:26Speaker 00

  I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.