Dave Eggers

David Eggers is an author, publisher, and founder of nonprofit publishing company McSweeney’s. He first became widely known for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and went on to write acclaimed books including What Is the What, A Hologram for the King, and The Circle. Beyond his writing, he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit organization that provides writing and tutoring programs for young people. Most recently, he released Contrapposto in June 2026, a novel about friendship, love, and the lifelong pursuit of art. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Anthropic https://Claude.com/tetra ------ AG1 https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Lectio 365 https://Lectio365.com ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

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

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  I almost always know how it ends because it feels not at all fun if I don't know where I'm going at all. You know, like you're saying you're going to Alaska. It could be any which way you get there, but this is our destination. So I don't outline in any traditional way, but I'll jot some stuff down and then I'll write scenes. So to me, it's always set pieces and scenes. And I don't write in order. So this new book, I wrote a scene. The first thing I wrote is now, I guess, in page 100, I think. And it was a scene I wrote because I wanted to write it. And then I knew generally where it would fit. But it becomes a patchwork that you stitch together later.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  I've never been able to write linearly and I find it really boring to do that. And also, if you're stuck with something, you're just stuck. You're stuck right there. Whereas you could just go just around that barrier, keep going. You know, you've got to fix something here, but just keep going. But I do know a few writers, older writers, that write straight all the way through. And that's where I think you get this idea of writer's block and the person pacing around the room and throwing crumpled up pieces of paper into the corner. I think it's because they're just, they've structured their work in such a way that they can't go around the obstacle.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  But it is harder in the end to stitch everything together.

• 1:53Rick Rubin?

  Do you ever change the order?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure, especially when it's like memories, flashbacks, that kind of thing. Those could occur anywhere. You have options. And this, this new book is the first one, I think, that's structured sort of strictly linearly, where it starts when the characters are eight and nine and then it ends when they're 74. And it's like... To me, that was not the kind of book I read when I was young and experimenting. It has a little bit more of a traditional structure. And so I was really, used to be pretty much more interested in the form than I was the story. I never read mysteries because I didn't care who did what to who. You know, now I really love them, but at the time I was like, I don't know.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  We know this didn't happen. Why do I care? But so I was always interested in like, well, how are we breaking the form? How are we reinventing what happens on the page? And that was what I was interested in. And that's what a lot of what Nick Sweeney's did. We always welcomed formal experimentation, even if it failed. Like, the problem with that and conceptual art or anything is that much of it, in retrospect, it doesn't age well. But in the moment, you're like, oh, that's interesting. That's something new. And then you look back on it and something has superseded it and now it looks a little embarrassing. But we did a lot of that. And only, you know, just in the last 15 years or so, I'm much more interested in,

• 3:23Speaker 01

  and invested in just the storytelling and just going as deep as I possibly can into the characters. And especially in this case where it's two that are just like entwined for 70 years. But it's a really different place where I am now from where I started.

• 3:41Rick Rubin?

  Are the characters you write all rooted in something familiar?

• 3:46Speaker 01

  What's funny, my wife had to talk about this a lot because on a purely like living in the world's level, if you base something on someone in your life and they know it, then it makes a very awkward interactions with your friend or your neighbor, your colleague or your relative. So you get to the point where you You're so determined to go far afield of anyone you know so that nobody is confused. And if anything, you borrow, or I do, borrow a few things from my own life. Like, I went to art school for a little bit, and this guy went to art school. So you borrow one or two things that you might know about. But all the other secondary and tertiary characters, and down to their names,

• 4:30Speaker 01

  you get to the point where you know a thousand people in real life. You can't use any of their names even. You run out of names. So these two are Cricket and Olympia, two names I've never known anyone in real life. But it becomes a challenge because you do want to be able to just move through the world and not have anyone mistakenly think that they're in your book.

• 4:51Rick Rubin?

  Has anyone mistakenly thought they were in your book?

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, books, movies, for sure. And it's always the person that you never had a moment's thought about. Like, I know that elf character that you wrote in Lord of the Rings. That was based on me. I mean, it's always something out of left field. And you worry about your next-door neighbor growing up misunderstanding something. And it's always like your cousin Ted, who is sure that the whole book about the cowboy in New Mexico in the 18th century is about him. It's really strange. But it hasn't happened in a while. Because I think you get a little bit better every year at making sure that there's no, nothing remotely close.

• 5:35Rick Rubin?

  But I would think that knowing that can happen.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:37Rick Rubin?

  That would free you up the other way to just use anything you want.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Well, for sure. That's how most novelists work. And, you know, most novelists will, for a given character, there's, it's an amalgam of 50 people. So they'll borrow a note that they just saw at the beach about how somebody walks. They'll map that on to the way that their uncle dresses. And then they'll map that on to the speech pattern of their college professor. So not any one person is a majority of that character. But you, drawing from life for these bits is key. Because if you make it all up out of whole cloth, then like, you end up in a far less naturalistic or believable world.

• 6:19Rick Rubin?

  Starts feeling more like AI.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Right, thank you. That's actually what it would be like. It's just like milquetoast, like nothing specific. Everything's sort of borrowed and generalized. So when I taught writing to high schoolers for a lot of years. The first thing we would do is I'd say they'd come in. This is in the Mission District of San Francisco. I'd say, pair up with somebody and go out and interview anybody on the street, the most interesting person and the person you're least likely to talk to otherwise. And then you're going to write a story that has aspects of that person in it. And they would come back just like aglow because they'd never had a reason to talk to some stranger in a bookstore or cafe.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  And then they would write something far better than whatever they would just imagine. Because they're using specific details of actual humans, how they look, what they talk. And also their contradictions. So there was a street busker that used to play all the time on Valencia Street. And leather and studs everywhere and boots and like. And turns out he was like, he was a Republican and lived with his mom. And like all these things that they found out in minutes from this guy. I was like, that's the contradictions of actual humans. But you got to talk to them and you have to observe. Because they're far more complex than generally what we're just going to come up with from scratch. Especially if you're 16 and you've only met nine people in your life, you know?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  So being able to just bring a notebook out in public and write a few things down and catch those details.

• 7:55Rick Rubin?

  Are you always paying attention in that way? Are you listening for a phrase that you think, I'll bank this for some later date?

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so I have a garage. And then the garage I have just dozens of sets of drawers that I bought from like Restoration Hardware type, but much cheaper. And each has a piece of paper, you know, a strip of tape that says what that is. Details, conversations or ideas for this book that might never come to be. And I usually just write on loose leaf copy paper and that sheet goes into that drawer. And at the end of the day or in the morning after, you know, I'm writing stuff at night. I have to file everything. And then, once that stack is a certain half a foot or so, then maybe you're on to something.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  And that, like contrapasto, this book was like 20 years of taking notes. And finally, it was like, all right, it's time. To make something of this. But it can be a burden, too. You really want to turn off sometimes and not have to listen or remember this thing. Or, God, that's good. And, you know, just, there are a lot of times that you do have to be like, I've got nothing to write with. We've got, we're gonna let this one go. I can't tether to this responsibility at all times. Like Susan Sontag, I think when she finally stopped writing, she called it like the, you know, described this incredible liberation because she was free of the burden of converting her life

• 9:28Speaker 01

  or what she saw into prose.

• 9:32Rick Rubin?

  It's truly a full-time job. The way you interact with the world.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:37Rick Rubin?

  To have the material that can then someday turn into something else.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's just like this relentless nut gathering. And you, you think, well, I've got a tree full of nuts. I've got, I've been saving for, you know, 20 winters. There should be plenty. And then you're still like, oh, that's a really good one. I'm gonna cross this highway to get it.

• 9:58Rick Rubin?

  It's a habit.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Especially when you're finished with something. In this case, like, I finished this book about eight months before it's coming out, which is like a big, long time for me. It's usually a much tighter window. So I've been a little bit more on mental vacation, I guess, than I usually am. And in general, you just get a little bit less hyper about these things. And, um, and then there's just like a backup. There's too many, too many things and books take a long time. It's not like, I'm so jealous, not to say that writing a song is easier, but I do have a lot of friends that have written a song in a day.

• 10:39Rick Rubin?

  We have friends who've written songs in 10 minutes.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 10:42Rick Rubin?

  I don't know anyone who's written a book in 10 minutes.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  That's why I love, for me, drawing is that. So I like to be able to finish something in a day or even an hour. And they become like, like a riff, you know, or a quick melody. And you can put a figure on a page and be done with it. And maybe somebody wants it, some, maybe somebody doesn't, but it's done. And that's a palate cleanser for me when I'm working three years on the same book. It's feeling like you can finish something. It's necessary because I have a lot of friends that spend eight, nine, 10 years on a book. And it's really tough to think about like you hope that that was worth the 10 years,

• 11:27Speaker 01

  but some fatal flaw could say, you know what? Brilliant language. Characters are fantastic, but there's something that's not working. And all of that time, you might have been applying clay or whatever to the wrong interior structure. And there's something that's wrong about it. And I've had that experience where you're like, it looks like a book. It reads like a book, but somehow it doesn't take off.

• 11:54Rick Rubin?

  Do you think it's something that could ever be figured out? Or is there a magic aspect to it?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. For every kind of art, every masterpiece is an accident, everyone. I think in the middle, sometimes you know you might be on to something, but then there's this like alchemy that happens where it's like, I have no idea why, why that song after this, or why this particular book is resonating with people? And this one isn't. I think a lot of it has to do with letting it breathe, letting light into it, like through it, you know, like not trying to overstuff something. And I think sometimes you think that you can make it work by overworking it, you know?

• 12:36Rick Rubin?

  Muscle through it.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Muscle through it. And more words are gonna fix it, you know? Like, well, if I just explain a little bit more and add another 100 pages. Whereas Great Gatsby is like basically a short story. It's novella. It's 120 pages, maybe. It's incredibly rich, but short. It's gestural, doesn't overexplain anything. It doesn't have to build an entire world in some way that people feel necessary to do now. So you do have to let the weird, odd take be part of it. The unfinished thought be part of it. Something that you don't have to connect certain dots and explain it to people. There's no more participatory art form than reading.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  You're the cinematographer when you read. You're the narrator. You're doing all of this work. So that's where you really.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  You can't control it. You don't know how it'll play in someone's mind. And you really have to chalk it up to luck sometimes that somehow the assemblage of words and the way you structured it and a few happy accidents have led to this thing connecting with people. But you also know when it's not. And I'm trying to tell students now, like, if your response to your work is quite muted, and you show something to the reader who you really want to, you know, boy, this book is about surfing. I'm going to show it to my surfing friend. And you get this kind of muted, kind of reserved response, like, well, this is respectful. Or I see that you put sentences there.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  The grammar looks good, or whatever kind of. Then you got to listen to that, too. It means you have work to do, maybe.

• 14:26Speaker 02

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• 15:11Speaker 02

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• 16:19Rick Rubin?

  How do you know if an idea is going to be a book or a short story? Or do you know that before you start?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Well, before I start, I do.

• 16:26Rick Rubin?

  How do you decide?

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Well, I think it depends on how many sort of themes can fit into that vessel, you know? I'm writing a short story about hang gliders and Kitty Hawk right now. It's just something I researched, and I didn't know what I was going to do with this research. But I know it's a short story because there's only so much about it that I'm interested in. But for a novel, I mean, let's say, pull a number out of that air and say, maybe there's like five major themes in a short story, like a novel you're talking about, 25. You know, there's a scale and a scope of it, for me at least. But then you do have that blurry line between short stories, novellas, short novels.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  But at this point, I'm working on a series of books that are called The Forgetters. They're like short stories, but they're part of a much larger thing, like thousands of pages eventually, that all get all in place and nobody will read it. But for me, I know the mosaic, I can see it.

• 17:29Rick Rubin?

  And they work as individual pieces?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't have to know anything about the rest of it to make it work.

• 17:34Rick Rubin?

  Is that the case in the new book, when you're writing in sections?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:39Rick Rubin?

  Do each of those sections stand alone and work?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 17:42Rick Rubin?

  Cool.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  That was the hope. The hope was that, obviously, you get to know them when they're eight and nine, and so when you are reading about them when they're 50, all of that history is part of your... Your understanding of them, but if you were to pick up and start on page 300 and when they're however old, I think it would make perfect sense. You don't have the benefit of all of that sort of like that shared history, but I do really like that, the jumping ahead. So it's like 10 years, you have to fill in the gaps and where would they have been in between, but that's the pleasure of being participant in it. As a reader, I can't tell you exactly where they were and it doesn't matter to me, but like you can sort of fill

• 18:27Speaker 01

  in those gaps. And we all know that we do so many drastic things, most of us, I think in our lives, like more and more I meet older people. I have so many friends in their 80s that are just have reinvented themselves who yet again, and they have like Gary Burden, I was talking about this art director, album designer. He told me one time, he was like, I think he was 30 or 40, and he said he'd always wanted to be a cowboy. So he just like decided one day, like he grew up on military basis, but he went Montana or wherever, worked as a farmhand cowboy, and that's what he did for a handful of years. And I love more than anything, the people that will just make a hard break and do some drastically

• 19:12Speaker 01

  different thing just because they want to. I mean, I would love to have been a cowboy at some point, stunt man over here. And so I gave Cricket in this case, like every time we re-meet them, he's in a really drastically different place. Like he's a ship breaker in the coast of Turkey and, you know, gets a call from Olympia, his old friend, and she needs him back in the US. Cause he comes from rural Indiana, is that possible? But of course, like, and the number of like, really distinct and drastically different stages of our lives that so many of us have, especially if you're a little bit of a wanderer like he is. So it was satisfying to kind of give us, give it that scope.

• 19:57Rick Rubin?

  Would you ever jump over a period of time in a character's life? And during that time, something really significant happens that you know about, but you never say what it is and you never talk about it?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Not even mentioned, not alluded to?

• 20:11Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Well.

• 20:13Rick Rubin?

  You know that it determines a lot of things going forward, but you don't explain that.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  That's interesting. I haven't done that, but it's almost like when you hear about actors writing a whole history of their character that's not in the script. And I really, I totally get why you would do that. And I don't think an actor can over prepare. I feel like all of that helps. And so I really admire when an actor will take a character infinitely further than you even wrote on the script, because it's theirs now. But for me, I guess, you know, there are all kinds of scars and things that happened to these two. And every time they come back together, they come back with all of their baggage and scars from in between. But most of it is at least alluded to, even if we don't get a full recounting of it.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  But it's so funny how quickly you can just gesture at something and be like, well, that was that time, you know, that stretch when I was a junkie. And like, you can pick up everything from that. And if you trust the reader, which you always should, they want that too. They don't want it to be over explained and talked down to and have it like, all right, now we're gonna go through what it's like to, you know, fall into a heroin spiral and whatever. It's like, especially these two talk to each other with a real topspin and a real like, it's quick and banter that you have with somebody you've known all your life. They can't get away with anything with each other, which is the case with, you know, I've had the same friends since grade school

• 21:45Speaker 01

  and there's no pretending on anything. They know you inside and out.

• 21:51Rick Rubin?

  You mentioned the writing exercise that you gave to high school students.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:55Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about writing exercises.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Well, I took no creative writing classes in my life outside of one in high school. I was a painter and then journalist. And so I'm like weirdly ignorant about how regular college or MFA programs work. But I taught, we have this center called eight two six Valencia. It's like a writing and tutoring center in San Francisco and we publish student work. I would work with high schoolers every week and I was always trying to give them assignments. I guess I would want myself. And the other thing that we'd do is interview people in the outside in the community. But then the other one that I'd broken classes with is like interview each other.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Base a character on each other or you can do an exact portrait of your peer. And these were all volunteer students doing this as an elective in evenings. But when they're 15 years old, they would write these exquisite miniatures of each other. And they would read them out loud and you could see kids like go, you know, flush red, kids crying like just their jaws on the ground. And you realize that for most people, you never have anyone notice everything about you and write it down artfully. And they would learn what it's like to listen to somebody, what it's like to sublimate

• 23:22Speaker 01

  your own writing to like honor somebody else or exalt somebody else. Do them justice, right? Get it right. See things about them that are unique and beautiful. And then for the recipient, for most people, that might be the most detailed written account of who they are outside of a diary.

• 23:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Because there's so few opportunities to just really listen and then also make art from it. And so we do a lot of oral history too, where kids interview their parents that might have immigrated here from elsewhere. And when you see that process where they get an excuse to really listen, there's an oral historian, Dave Isay, says, listening is an act of love. You know, we're in a position where we get to interview people and talk to people a lot. But most people have very few opportunities. And then, you know, with the idea in an oral history that it will be a written account and it'll be edited into a linear form and maybe published. You see kids that know their grandparents came from Cambodia, that fled the Khmer Rouge.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  That's the vaguest thing that they know, just a little bit. But now give them six hours to do a real oral history. It's just like, it's the most important thing in their high school years. They all say the same thing. And their estimation for their forbears is just like, goes through the roof. They see them as a hundred feet tall. And we really have to find the space and to have those moments. I always think the very first week in any class at every grade should be about writing your story of who you are now.

• 25:01Rick Rubin?

  Great idea.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  And every teacher gets to know every kid that much better, even if it's a page. Here's what I love, here's what I want, here's what I'm afraid of here. And there's a calm that comes over kids when they've written their truth out and they get it just like, you know, if you're angsty at the middle of the night, you write it down, it goes away. In the chaos of childhood, if you can fence that within the boundaries of a printed page, you're much more calm and at ease. You've gotten it right. And then you can move on and look around and... But if it's all contained and nobody's listening, then it's just like having these rabid, feral beasts all over within you.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  You gotta let them out, put them on a leash or let them out of you. And so I think even as adults, there has to be chances to do that. Put it in a linear form, all the chaos of your life in your mind. Put it in, put it in linear form. Have it make sense.

• 26:02Rick Rubin?

  Do you think most people know themselves well enough to be able to do that?

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Not at the start, no way. But you work it out.

• 26:12Rick Rubin?

  Has to start somewhere.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to start getting it down. And I think you do get more skilled at. I've taught a lot of memoir writing to older, you know, to adults.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  And most of what people write is not for a mass audience or any audience. It's for them. I don't want to say that it's a cliche that it's therapeutic, but it is. It's like you could, what you get down on the page, half the time is as good as a hundred therapy sessions with a professional.

• 26:38Rick Rubin?

  Well, it's a cliche for a reason, because it's true.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you understand things.

• 26:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  In some cases, like writing an angry letter that you keep in your drawer. Nobody has to see it, but it does need to get out. And if you don't take it that next step and make art from it, then, you know, that's a whole different set of issues. I had an ancestor named T S Hawkins who went across the plains from Missouri to founded the town of Hollister and wrote a book called Some Recollections of a Busy Life. And he published 200 copies just for family. And all of us that are descended from him have a copy. And it unites us all and it's a great book. But without him having taken the time, none of us would be connected. None of us would know anything about what he went through.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  And also all of the particulars of that time. But I think for your descendants, for your family, for your own good, everybody should get it down, even if it's 10 pages, you know, like just put something down and get it right, or in what you consider to be right.

• 27:45Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the story of McSweeney's from the beginning. Where did the idea originate?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Well, McSweeney's, I was, I came up in the indie magazine world and that's where I would get all the free CDs, which was like one of the points of having a magazine is you get everything sent to you for free. Every album that ever came out came through us. And we reviewed some of them and kept the rest and I still have them all. And then we, we all went broke doing that. That was a magazine called Mite, never made a dime, but.

• 28:16Rick Rubin?

  M I T E?

• 28:17Speaker 01

  M I G H T. Like the Rolling Stone of Gen X. That was our hope. Didn't happen. We went broke. But we all got jobs for the first time in our lives in our late twenties. We all were offered real jobs at real magazines. And I took one in New York and very corporate, had to wear certain clothes, had to be there certain hours, all these things I'd never done before. And I realized I was not meant to. Live this way, nine to five. So I quit and we started kind of the anti corporate magazine, which was just me and a few friends in my Brooklyn apartment. And we just did this little magazine that we printed in Iceland.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  I found a printer in Reykjavik and I thought, oh, you're kidding me. I thought it was a joke, but it was a real, really a printer in Reykjavik. I thought that would be perfect for this because it was kind of an outsiders magazine. And then from then, you know, now we're on 27 years that we've been doing it.

• 29:18Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  And I thought it would be four issues. And then new people come on, they have new ideas.

• 29:23Rick Rubin?

  What was the original gonna be?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  It was a home for rejected stories from other magazines.

• 29:28Rick Rubin?

  So if you got turned down somewhere else, this would be the place.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  If your thing was too long or too short or too weird, we were the island of misfit writings, you know?

• 29:38Rick Rubin?

  Always about writing, that was the focus.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was mostly fiction. Sometimes interviews with like strange scientists, like, but it was all just all text. There was nothing else. It was black and white too. But very like a precious, pretty object. And then we started putting more and more time into the objectness of the book. Every issue is a different form. So one will be a giant hardcover. One was a lunchbox recently, designed by Art Spiegelman. We'll have issues that are connected by magnets, you know, is we'll try to break the form every time. So that people care about the tactile, the object in your hand. And then the subscribers are surprised each time. And so if you make it pretty, if you make an unusual object,

• 30:25Speaker 01

  then all the writing inside might have a chance to survive too. Whereas if you make a cheap or an ugly book, I think you're doing a disservice to whatever work went into that writer's task. And so the fact that we've been around this long is, I mean, now we publish books and, you know, is a shock to me because I saw it as like a one year experiment. And so, but you know how it is when other people join the troupe.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  They keep it going. They carry the next stretch and they re-inspire you even when you're tired.

• 31:02Rick Rubin?

  It also shows that even a good, small idea

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:06Rick Rubin?

  can end up being a big idea that goes on for a long time.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  It's always more likely because you need to incubate it among a small group of people than you just please your trio of friends. But if you seek to make something for a mass audience, boy, that's tough.

• 31:20Rick Rubin?

  Was there a moment in McSweeney's history that was like, it got big in a way that was unexpected and things changed? Or was it just a slow, steady build forever?

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, literary journals have a very low ceiling in terms of if you have 10,000 subscribers, you're like the biggest literary journal on this planet, which is just means that we're all very small. But there's small devoted audiences and all you really want to do, I mean, this is how I feel like with any art form. If you're able to continue doing that thing, meaning our subscribers pay $100 to get four issues a year, which is like a lot.

• 31:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  But that sustains the staff of five and, you know, and then the writers that get paid. And, and if you're allowed to just keep doing it, that's 99% the measure of success is.

• 32:10Rick Rubin?

  You get to keep doing it.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Get to keep doing it.

• 32:12Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  And I really, same thing with writing books. If somebody's willing to, you know, kill a bunch of trees to put out your book and say, yeah, we'll do the next one too. That's like the greatest gift you could ever have. And that sense that they'll be with you even if you write a book about a wayward Catholic priest. And the next one is a sci-fi octopus mystery, you know, like if they're gonna give you a long leash, which I think is the, the way of things in publishing, it's a very lucky business because there just was never going to be anyone that tells you what to do or how to do it.

• 32:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  They might say no, but for the most part, that no one has any of that sort of nudgy input. There's no managers. There's nobody in between you and whatever you do.

• 33:02Speaker 03

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• 33:46Speaker 03

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• 34:28Speaker 03

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• 35:04Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about working with an editor. What's that experience like?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Well, I had a book called The Eyes and the Impossible, which is an all ages book a couple of years ago. And it was with an editor named Taylor Norman, who I'd known before. But there's a certain point where they recognize something in it. You know this as a producer. You're seeing, hearing something. And if that artist, or in my case, it starts to doubt it, you have to be like, no, do not touch this. It's our, don't touch it.

• 35:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  And my wife is a novelist, and we both reach a point with each other's books where we have to tell them, like, don't touch the keyboard. You will mess this up. And Taylor was that kind of editor, where she saw what I was trying to do, made everything that I was trying to do better. And then she also saved me from some mistakes. Like, took taking out this whole one thread. It's like taking out, like, the one song that isn't working and is messing up the song cycle. She took out this thread and made it better. It cut 15 pages or so from the book. At a certain point, I stopped rereading it myself. And I just completely gave myself over to her vision of it. It was pretty far along.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  And then that person, even after it's published, that person is still your champion. You know Jamie Bing, who, he's my publisher now in the UK. And he's that platonic ideal of the publisher that's more excited than you are about whatever you've written. And so he takes that baton. You're finished. He takes it and starts telling the world about it. And that's a really lucky place to be, where you have an affirmation from that person that you're done, that it's right, that it's good. And then he's the one that can go spread the gospel.

• 36:54Rick Rubin?

  When Taylor suggested taking out that 15-page thread, what was your first instinct when you heard that idea?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  No way. This is essential. I worked on that. I feel like we need this thread.

• 37:09Rick Rubin?

  How did you come around?

• 37:10Speaker 01

  You sit with it, you walk with it, you ride your bike around the coast for a day or two. You're trying to, even before you respond, because you don't want to angrily say, no, you're wrong, whatever. I knew at that point that she knew the book Inside Now, knew what was best for it. So I was like, geez, I really don't think she's right here, but in my bones, I was like, she's probably right. And so, you know, after a few days, I was like, all right, that's fine. And help me do it. What's weird about novels is that everything is threaded so many places that if you pull one, like, it takes a couple, three people to sort of make sure that everything else is intact when you pull some character out of the book.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  So you'll sometimes read a book, a printed book, that will have somebody's name on page 238 that doesn't exist. And it's because they changed the name or they pulled that character. But this vestigial name is still there. Nobody, nobody, nobody caught it.

• 38:08Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your relationship to books in general over the course of your life.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  I had teachers that made us make them, first grade, fifth grade, eighth grade. So I have all these books that we made, wrote and illustrated and bound. And then got into desktop publishing when the Mac was new and stuff. So that made me a publisher was the ability, because I didn't know math, I couldn't do computers in any other way. But the Mac, it was for people like us that weren't engineers. And so I fell in love with just the whole process of assembling a bunch of stories, laying them out, using desktop publishing. And then we were publishing pretty basic things for a while, but then I went and saw, I went to Reykjavik and walked the floor of the printing plant.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  It's all these blond men with blue jumpsuits. I mean, it was like a Oompa Loompa type of thing. But I could walk around and I'd see, they printed all the bibles in Iceland. And I could see like the gilt edges and foil stamping and a leather cover and a ribbon marker and all these beautiful add-ons. And I was like, how much does that cost to do? Two cents. How much does that cost? Three cents? And you realize that all of these things that make books really beautiful. Costs pennies to do. And how it's such a shame when somebody's not spending that extra six cents. Yeah. To make, to take it from a cheap looking thing to make something really beautiful.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  And so we became determined to just invest in cloth and color art inside and foil stamps and all of these things that all the printers are ready to do and willing to do. Foldouts and pop-ups and munchboxes, you know, anything that you really can imagine. Some printer will be able to do it. Like we just redid, we made this new issue as a Trapper Keeper, which is a plastic three-fold but ring binding in the middle. You just sent it to our printer and said, can you create something like this? Well, of course, all these methods are still out there. They're still all. The last book I did was

• 40:21Speaker 01

  made of bamboo. So we have a bamboo cover for Eyes in the Impossible with the die cut with the the words and the art cut through the bamboo. Totally affordable, totally doable. It's such a beautiful object to hold. And the printers are only too happy to be given the chance to experiment a little bit. And I think if we're gonna have physical books survive, you do have to take that extra step. You gotta make these things radically better than looking at a screen. It's an existential moment where if we don't do better, then you know, bit by bit, people will choose screens because everything is channeled through one object

• 41:05Speaker 01

  as opposed to having to hold all of these different things and pay for them. But books so far have resisted the digitization. We haven't had the pirating that other industries do. People are still holding the American hardcover market up, which is really lucky. We're the only country in the world that still prints the number of hardcovers that we do. We go to Europe and it's quite rare to see hardcover books, which is really too bad. So I collect old books. I collect old bibles in particular. I'll buy a book just for the spine if I see something really unusual. Anytime I see any kind of really clever book craft,

• 41:49Speaker 01

  you know, or like a parallelogram shaped book, or a book with a Z-shaped spine, or anything that that took handwork, which really means that somebody by hand is doing that, I always buy the buy these things. And then we'll bring them into McSweeney's and the art director, whose name is Sunra Thompson. We'll look at it together and see how we could apply it to something with McSweeney's. And then usually these things, they might percolate for a year or two, and then finally we find the right format. We did one recently with like woven fabric as the cover, but it's done by machines, but it looks like it's hand done. But anything you want to do, they can do. Our Icelandic printer had, when I met them,

• 42:34Speaker 01

  they had just printed a limited edition of books with shark skin, like actual sharks that had washed up on the shores of Iceland.

• 42:42Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  They wrapped them around hard covers. They smell terrible, but you can do it.

• 42:48Rick Rubin?

  What was the first book you published at McSweeney's?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  It was Jonathan Lethem called This Shape We're In. And he was a very well-established novelist at that point. But it was a weird book that he gave to us because he was always supporting us. And so we published. And then after that, Lydia Davis's Samuel Johnson is indignant. And Lydia was like a hero to all of us and said we could bring her to a new audience. And so she she went along with us for the ride. And I found all those old proofs just the other day. Like I got to design her cover. And and it was a David Byrne photograph that we used for her cover. And so that is just like the dream of dreams. Like you get to publish your hero

• 43:34Speaker 01

  with another hero's work on the cover, and nobody's saying no. And you get to go to Reykjavik and check proofs on the printer floor and then come back and get these boxes of this thing that you made. And you know how it is, like it's more fun as a publisher or a producer, I think, in a way, because you get an unadulterated pleasure of helping somebody else's work and be the presenter of it, as opposed to all the complicated feelings of your own stuff, right?

• 44:04Rick Rubin?

  Oh, absolutely. And we get to do it more often.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:07Rick Rubin?

  But you can't write as many books as you can publish.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Right. No, my dream, honestly, my wife knows this, we've said this for years. When if some sort of version of another life for us would be combination movie theater where we get to show everything we want in a recording studio. Where, you know, it's affordable and we get to sort of pop in and just watch the process sometimes. Wouldn't that be, and but but we wouldn't have to work.

• 44:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Like you're just wandering throughout like a ghost. Because I love seeing iterations in music studio. I think it's far more interesting as a fly on the wall than being like on a film set, which is, I think, if you have nothing to do, it's the most boring place to be in the world. If you don't have a job, but I think being in a music studio, things move a lot faster, I think.

• 44:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, miracles happen every day in the music studio. See things go from really mediocre to really great. And you don't know how or why.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:07Rick Rubin?

  It's not like anyone had any good idea, just something happens and it changes and all of a sudden it's good.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  I was a big Elvis Costello fan and I remembered when they, he came back with King of America and they did some live tracks on that, like the, his original, The Attractions did a few songs and they were live and I was like, it became the, one of the first times I was really aware of like the difference between, what does this band sound live in the studio and as opposed to separate tracks and all that.

• 45:35Rick Rubin?

  Where do your musical tastes tend to run?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Well, so when we were kids, it was, we spent all of our summers listening to the Beastie Boys and Run DMC when they came out. We had all the videotapes too, we had everything. But then there was this parallel track of like English New Wave, like Elvis Costello and Echo and the Bunny Men, who I saw last week.

• 45:57Rick Rubin?

  Oh, great.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  You know.

• 45:58Rick Rubin?

  How were they?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  They're great.

• 46:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  They sound great.

• 46:01Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  It was the worst crowd I've ever seen in any concert in my life. No one moved.

• 46:07Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  It was like there was some kind of fog on it over everybody that had paralyzed them. And I felt like something, it was like a prank. It was 3,000 people without even, not even moving of the head. And I realized that they only knew a few songs, I think.

• 46:23Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  And it was like Lips Like Sugar came out and then they were interested and it was too bad. But they sounded great and Ian McCullough sounded great. But then I got into everything. So like your album with Johnny Cash came to our magazine when we were all young magazine writers. And that was like a reawakening to country music for me and an entry point. But, you know, I try to follow as much as I can. I wrote about music for Spin. I had a column for a while. It was called And Now For A Less Informed Opinion. Cause I didn't pretend to know anything outside of what I liked. So I get to write about Kings of Leon before they came out and Joanna Newsom. And I felt like I was, that's that great place where you get to hear a record three months before it comes out

• 47:09Speaker 01

  and maybe tell a few people about it. But I did that only for like a year. I couldn't meet the deadlines. So now I get to just be just a fan. Like I, I don't want to have to work at all for sure when I listen to music.

• 47:22Rick Rubin?

  Do you listen to more old music or new music?

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Well, I still have every record and CD I ever had and I write on a boat. So I have a little boat under the Golden Gate Bridge. It's just a sailboat. So I go down and I have all my CDs.

• 47:36Rick Rubin?

  How many people could fit on this boat?

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Three outside, one inside. So it just fits me in the underneath. And I have a little boombox crappy sound, but it's all I could fit there. And every CD I had from college on is there. And so that ends up being a lot of older music. And then I buy dollar CDs. People that I, like if I see a Mary Wells CD that I, it's a dollar here or I can experiment. Listening to a lot of Sinead O'Connor lately where it's like every last album she made was great. I can't, it's just impossible. And how, as well known as she was, she's, I don't think there's a better singer that ever was. I mean, it's just like, I've gone through just like endless deep dives, YouTube and everywhere else,

• 48:23Speaker 01

  seeing every last live performance and there's never anything but perfection and like.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  It's an otherworldly sound to her. She's the only person I think I can think of that I did feel like I knew her, but I didn't even, was never within 5,000 miles of her. And now I get to listen to like a lot of Jim James and My Morning Jacket and stuff because Jim and I worked with Gary Burden on a movie that was no dialogue, based on an old graphic novel called God's Man. And Jim made the music and I was gonna write whatever there was to write. And then Gary passed before it went too far, but he left us as friends. So that was a gift that we got from the ultimate hippie.

• 49:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, he's a great guy.

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• 50:42Rick Rubin?

  When you're reading books, do you write in books? Do you fold down pages? Do you do any of those things?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Everything. I abuse every book.

• 50:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I have a weird relationship. I'm afraid to touch them. Like, I'll read them.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:53Rick Rubin?

  But I really wanna protect them. I view them as these holy things.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it depends on... I've written in every book, I guess. I...

• 51:03Rick Rubin?

  Pencil or pen?

• 51:04Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter. They're teaching tools for me. So if I wanna remember how to do something, like how to do a really great character sketch in a short space, then I'll go to somebody who I know does that well, and I'll go back to that book, or I'll tear out the page or anything to keep it next to me. Have a stack of certain books near me on the boat if I wanna have them on hand. They're all beat up. They're all got saltwater and mildew and everything. And I do have a separate collection of like collectible books in plastic and stuff, but I buy a lot of like dollar or two-dollar used books so that I can draw and write on them and tear them up. Because I always think I'm gonna be able to find that passage or I'll look at it. And I'm like, nah, I gotta tear this out

• 51:49Speaker 01

  and just have it next to me, write notes on the back of it.

• 51:53Rick Rubin?

  Do you write on the boat?

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my office. So during COVID, we never had internet at home, so I can't write near the internet. So I had to get an office outside the house.

• 52:04Rick Rubin?

  Explain you can't write near the internet.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Well, like I have a flip phone, right? And so I can't be near the distraction, so...

• 52:14Rick Rubin?

  Do you write longhand?

• 52:15Speaker 01

  No. I do for all my notes, but when I compose, I compose on a... It's a 1998 MacBook Pro. So it's about 20 pounds. Big screen. And that's never been connected to the internet. So I bought it. All the software is original. Never updated it. Cracked screen, but it works perfectly. And I don't have to relearn anything. So I take that out to the boat, and I sit... Boat sort of shifts, you know, ten feet this way, eight feet that way. There's pelicans and sea lions.

• 52:50Rick Rubin?

  Are you at a dock or are you out in the water?

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Oh, no, it's on a slip in a dock.

• 52:55Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  But I have to be really away from any possible distraction.

• 52:58Rick Rubin?

  How much time do you spend in the boat?

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Like a writing day would be eight hours, you know? I mean, then I have to get up and there's no bathroom, so I got to bike around this bay to the port of potty on the other side of the bay, which is not a long bike, but that gets me out and about. I always had trouble with being indoors all day part of writing. This gets me outside. It's far prettier. And I don't have any possibility of any interruption. Nobody knows I'm there.

• 53:28Rick Rubin?

  Is most of your time writing or thinking?

• 53:33Speaker 01

  The first couple hours are journaling for procrastination. So I always have to spend two hours wasting time. And that's usually just writing.

• 53:44Rick Rubin?

  Is that also on the same device or do you write that?

• 53:46Speaker 01

  A little bit of both, but often just same device. And I pretend to write. I'm sitting in the writing position. You got to do that for eight hours a day for me to get maybe an hour or two hours of work done.

• 53:58Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  I waste a lot of time.

• 54:00Rick Rubin?

  You need that time in that space.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then there is always that thing where sometimes you're really composing, you're trying to get something done that day, or you've given yourself a crazy deadline because you're angry at wasting all that time. You're like, God damn it, just give me the, you know, let me finish this chapter. Sometimes there's a real deadline. But the being in there the whole time, sometimes like hour six, some crazy crucial breakthrough happens.

• 54:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Just because you were there.

• 54:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  And it's not going to happen in a crowded place or among all, you know, at dinner. It's going to happen because you gave yourself that huge expansive time. And maybe something, you know, I play music the entire time I work. So maybe something triggers it in the music. Maybe I procrastinate by reading a little bit and something breaks through there, but. I wish it were different and I wish I could be like one of these people that writes for an hour and a half a day and gets enough work done. I have never been able to do it. I need the entire expanse. Those days, I don't answer the phone, I don't do lunch, I don't see anybody. And at this point, I guess it's not gonna change.

• 55:10Rick Rubin?

  At the end of the day, do you feel tired from doing that or no?

• 55:13Speaker 01

  No. No, I mean, but you do feel like, and this goes for a lot of writers, if you haven't done anything, if you haven't written anything, if you have gotten nothing down, but you've pushed away your family and everything else to have that isolation. You've said no to some friend visiting from out of town, all of this stuff because you've just got it. And then if you don't get anything done, you just wanna punch yourself in the face like all night. So it makes it all the more reason why trying to honor that time. And maybe there's, you know, kind of a, there's a sense of guilt too, like, boy, there's other people that really work for a living, like, I really very lucky to be able to do

• 55:57Speaker 01

  this, so goddamn it, get something done. And, you know, I came up through newspapers and magazines where you really didn't have any choice. You had to produce something. So I do think that it's a really, it's a good training for any profession, but for a novelist to have had daily deadlines that were real and people counting on it and news counting on it and all that. But it is that, this is the happiest work environment I've ever had, where I'm just so content there. And it's, it's a cradle. I mean, it's called the cradle of my boat. So it, I renamed it, which you're not supposed to do, but I renamed it, but it's, it's

• 56:33Rick Rubin?

  Why are you not supposed to name it?

• 56:35Speaker 01

  You're not, it's bad luck to rename a boat.

• 56:36Rick Rubin?

  Oh, is that true? If you change the name of a boat, it's bad luck?

• 56:39Speaker 01

  They say it's a curse.

• 56:40Rick Rubin?

  I'd not known that. Wow.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  But because it rocks all day, it took me months when I was doing it. At first, I would go down there, get all set up and fall asleep immediately. I'm asleep for 90 minutes. Now I, I'm used to it enough where I can still, I can get work done. But it's so calm.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  It's so womb like.

• 56:59Rick Rubin?

  How long have you been using the boat?

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Maybe five, six years now. Different, I was on a different dock, but now this is the perfect one. It's this rickety old Popeye like dock under the bridge. And there's just me and a couple fishermen and that's it. Yeah, I mean, it's a shitty old boat.

• 57:16Rick Rubin?

  The setting.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:18Rick Rubin?

  Sounds great to allow something to happen.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it's worth it for anybody. Like, how do you really want to spend your days? Does it have to be in this kind of a environment, that kind of an office? How would you ideally do it? It makes me crazy that it took me this long to really think about it, you know? And seek out and create something that was a little bit more my ideal.

• 57:45Rick Rubin?

  Do you have a favorite bookstore?

• 57:47Speaker 01

  I can't say, there's too many up there. You know, San Francisco's like the, it's got the most indie bookstores.

• 57:54Rick Rubin?

  Could be anywhere in the world, doesn't have to be in San Francisco.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Well, let's go to Paris then. Then it's not, I don't get anyone in SF mad. Shakespeare and Company right there, Notre Dame is, uh, those are old friends of mine. And that's the bookstore of my dreams and maybe everybody's. That's sort of what we modeled our new international library of young authors on, like just bright colors and books everywhere and no hard edges and old wood and Persian rugs and cats and, you know, all of that stuff. I really don't love the new wave of library design and stuff where it all looks like an airport, you know? It's all like spare, there's only screens, you see a few books somewhere in the distance

• 58:39Speaker 01

  and then this vast expanse of sort of airport.

• 58:43Rick Rubin?

  Looks like an Apple store.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Like an Apple store.

• 58:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Not everything has to converge with tech. The things that are apart from tech need to stay apart. And I think there's always this mistake where libraries feel like, okay, we gotta be relevant, we have to look like an Apple store. And it's like, no, no, that's actually not why we go to the library. We go because we want something really different. And we want it to be screen free and for most of it, we want it to be quiet, we want it to be weird, we want it to smell like paper and glue and leather. And instead, all the new library designs have this airport look.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  And they hide the books in the basement and it's so sad. And what I love is that kids really want the tactile. They want soft edges and pillows and fabric and velvet and wood and typewriters. We have all these typewriters. It's the first thing they all gravitate to, the typewriters. This presumption, though, that, oh, kids love screens, so we're gonna give them more screens. It's such a strange impulse to sort of, to channel everything through this one narrow portal, as opposed to saying, painting will be painting, books will be books, tech is fine over here.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  We don't all have to merge with or be subservient to the tech overlord. We can exist separately over here. And I hope things are sort of trending the other way now that they realize the catastrophe of kids writing with AI and realizing just how bad that is. But let's see.

• 1:00:21Rick Rubin?

  Ever been in the Strand in New York?

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Of course, yeah, a lot of times. So I spent a lot of time in the Strand. Maybe that's the ultimate one in New York, probably. I go to a lot of, sort of, the ones adjacent, attached to libraries. You know, the friends of this library will have a bookstore. That's my favorite, because those are vast and really cheap. So because I thought libraries were tracking your, what you checked out, I was mistaken about this for a while during my privacy anti-tech era. So I stopped going, I stopped checking out books. I would go to the used bookstore adjacent, so I could buy the books instead and do whatever I wanted to them. I'm not a good library patron, because I abuse the books.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  I lose them, I don't bring them back. It's just like a weird genetic flaw. So I realized, I'm not good for you. I'm gonna save you from me, I'm just gonna buy the books instead. And then I'll go through them and then I end up donating them back a year later.

• 1:01:23Rick Rubin?

  How's your relationship to magazines different than your relationship to books?

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  I grew up as a magazine kid more than anything else. And I remember being 15 when I subscribed to The Village Voice out of Chicago suburbs. I think I know I was the only subscriber in my town. And that was just like access to a world I otherwise would never know. And then when Spin started, I subscribed to Spin and Rolling Stone. And I thought it was very cool. Like I was, I had a track where I was going to be a music writer. That was what I loved to do and get to see free shows. And I did it all through college and got to see all these bands in small venues when they were coming up.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  But these days, most of my favorite magazines, they don't exist or they're shadows of. I mean, there's a handful that are holding tight. But I will say like, we do have in our workshops, we have zine making classes now. So we have a whole section where it's like staples, glue, paper. Every week, every Friday, there's a zine making class. Dozens of kids, all ages. Zines are sort of completely having a rebirth among these kids that have too much digital stuff. They don't want to do blogs. They don't want to, I mean, some of them, I guess, do TikToks. But like, if you offer a zine class, it's so exotic to them that I think that these things,

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  sort of like vinyl, have a chance of coming back. Especially if you just, you just make space for it. Give them the paper, give them the staplers, have a copier, and you won't be disappointed.

• 1:03:06Rick Rubin?

  Do you have any rituals before you write?

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  So I wake up, I read for about an hour and a half with coffee.

• 1:03:14Rick Rubin?

  What might you read?

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Almost always books by dead people. It's just more calming for me, an old book. And usually something really off topic, like the history of shipwrecks on the Pacific coast. Like, that's my favorite recent book.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  And then after that, if I feel really... Ready, then I go down to the boat and put on, there's an album by Sinead O'Connor that's like Irish standards. That's my first record always. I have to listen to the whole thing. And write, journal, or whatever, procrastinate. And then I'm usually ready to pretend to try to get something done. And that's as much of a ritual as I've had. I've never been too much of a ritual person. But when I discovered reading in the morning, and I would recommend this to anybody, I would fall asleep at night, like reading at late at night. At 10 minutes, I'd be asleep. But in the morning, I'm sharp, coffee's coming on,

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  three cups of coffee, an hour and a half of reading, and you just feel like the most zen person alive. I wish I'd discovered that 30 years ago. I would have read a lot more. It puts me in the exact right frame of mind. And without it, in the last few weeks, I had an internet connection. It's a long story, but I usually don't. But I've had one in the morning, and I get online right away. It's been a fucking disaster. Just wretched. I'm a totally different person, wasting time, stupid forums about nothing that matters. Watching, at best, I'm watching old concerts. But it's just night and day. And we realize if you do that to kids too,

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  if you give them the choice or give them a connection with everything that's ever been in the world and every movie that was ever made, they're gonna, they're gonna go there. But if you set aside space and time and say, this is our reading period, or whatever, then they will use it. But we have to, gotta do this stuff thoughtfully.

• 1:05:23Speaker 05

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• 1:06:51Speaker 06

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• 1:06:57Rick Rubin?

  When you sit down to write, do you expect a certain outcome at the end of the day or no?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Usually I have something I'm trying to do, you know, like there's writers that have a word count they're shooting for just to keep themselves generally on pace. So you might say 500 words or 1,000 words, which is really not that much. Sometimes you give a deadline to a friend to give back to you.

• 1:07:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  So you say, or I'll say to my wife, like, I'm giving you this chapter at the end of the day. Force me to do it, hold me to it, yell at me if I don't get it. So you're often employing friends and family to keep you on target. And that goes back to the community part of it. It's like, you know, so much of writing is actually talking. You know, you're not always alone. And if you're stuck, you call up a friend or you go for a walk with somebody. You say, I'm working this out. Does this make any sense or am I onto something here? And or if you're writing a novel, you give chapters as you go to. A receiver, I call them, somebody that's dedicated.

• 1:08:06Rick Rubin?

  How many people do you have like that, that you could share a chapter with?

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Maybe ten, fifteen.

• 1:08:11Rick Rubin?

  That's a lot.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Been around a while.

• 1:08:12Rick Rubin?

  That's great, though.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  All the people I came up with, and we all do it for each other.

• 1:08:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Like, I'm stuck. Can we trade for a few months? And you give me yours and I'll give you yours. But that's where you lean a little bit on somebody. And they're going to see things that you won't see. They're going to push you through a rough patch. They're going to say, no, just keep going. You're not stuck. Keep going. Just keep doing exactly what you're doing.

• 1:08:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  That's how I finished my first book. I gave one section every few weeks to my editor, this guy Jeff Klosky. And he's like, you're making sense, keep going. He never edited a word until the end. And I so recommend that to everybody. It's my first bit of advice for anybody trying to finish a first book. Have a receiver, somebody that's just there, reads it, doesn't judge. And unless it's catastrophic, says, keep going. And you'll get to the end that way. Much more so if you're just alone.

• 1:09:06Rick Rubin?

  Spinning.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  On a hilltop somewhere like, like the Unabomber. Like, you, you really need to be in conversation with people and let them pull you through.

• 1:09:17Rick Rubin?

  Do you write every day?

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Every day that's a writing day, I write. Today is a non-writing day. But on a writing day, I don't see anything, I don't do anything.

• 1:09:28Rick Rubin?

  How many writing days are there in a year?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  These days, probably two hundred and fifty, you know?

• 1:09:35Rick Rubin?

  Could amount.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. It wasn't that way. I used to write in the middle of the night because I was working during the day. But these days, because I can do just that and I'm not needed and my kids are older and all that stuff. Yeah, it feels. Beyond luxurious, you feel crazy guilt sometimes.

• 1:09:53Rick Rubin?

  When it goes good, do you get excited? Do you have a good feeling?

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  The rest of that night is euphoric. You rush to work the next day. Or if you show something to a trusted reader and they're like, this is really coming together. Then you're just, that's jet fuel, you know? And that's another reason why you include people. Because if they get excited, that redoubles your own energy, your dedication, your confidence in it.

• 1:10:20Rick Rubin?

  Is there a momentum that builds as well? Like if you have a couple of good days in a row, is it easy to ride that?

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 1:10:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Famously, Ray Bradbury down here in LA. You know how he finished Fahrenheit 451? He was broke and he had a family and he was had some job, but they had public typewriters at the LA Public Library in the basement, I think. 10 cents for an hour. And he had just enough to like put in two hours a day, maybe of typewriter time. And because he was on the clock and he was broke, he wrote that thing in like two weeks, you know?

• 1:10:56Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  And the momentum, and that's why you read it. It's like a really furious, passionate book, but some of that is the driven by that urgency and the limitations of this typewriter. So sometimes, some of the books that we love the most were written in short spans of time because you're capturing a real moment and there's a like even a fury of of energy that you get, that you don't necessarily get if you're you can get it, but it's a lot harder if you spend seven years on something. Because to capture

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  the lightness that comes and that sort of the the coherence that comes from art made in the crucible of a short amount of time and a high, you know? Even a mad kind of period of your life, sometimes those things, the best art is made as opposed to, you know, they say, write drunk, edit sober. Have you ever heard that?

• 1:11:55Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  So true. And you have to be able to go on on these wild flights and then recognize that you need to leave that alone. Fix the grammar, but let it be. Because what really connects with people, I think, more than anything are those flights of just untamed stream of consciousness or passion or and the stuff that's most risky and most embarrassing. And the stuff that you or maybe a timid editor would would say, you really shouldn't put that on paper. Like, that's that's the stuff you have to leave.

• 1:12:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:12:29Rick Rubin?

  Do you only work on one thing at a time?

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Oh, no, always many things.

• 1:12:32Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, until the end, when I'm on the finishing stage, then it's the one thing. But I'm taking notes on many things every day. Like, I'll see a bird, I'll be like, well, that's that. I was writing a picture book about a bird like that. I just had an idea that'll go in the bird. And then, once you're getting to the very end, the last six months or so, then it's pretty much just the one.

• 1:12:57Rick Rubin?

  I do. Is there some part of the craft of writing that you had trouble with that you feel like you're getting better at?

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Knowing if it'll make any sense at all. Maybe the first six, five, six books, you have no idea that you'll it'll cohere. There's no lesson, there's no structure that you can count on. It's not like a verse, verse, chorus, verse. You know, there's no, it's every novel is wildly different from every other one.

• 1:13:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  And especially when nonfiction, it's really unpredictable, whether you have something or not, or you can make some something compelling out of something that happens, some moment in in time. But now, having been through it, 12 novels or whatever I'm at, you get to a point of it's not a mastery, but you're closer to knowing the path, you know, before you start. But then again, to make a really interesting book, you're starting over. You're doing something drastically new. I have to be interested in the form of something new, something that I haven't done before.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  So I'm working on something now that has a really different structure than something and anything I've done before. And it could be terrible. But I know better that I could finish it no matter what. I don't know if it'll be any good, but at a certain point, you know how to finish almost anything, let's say.

• 1:14:28Rick Rubin?

  How much of your first draft will end up in the final book?

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  The raw material is all there, most of it. But you've ideally fixed every sentence, you know? My first drafts are not, are very rough.

• 1:14:43Rick Rubin?

  Are they longer or no?

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  You know, a really good writer, your final draft is shorter than your first, right? Because you've distilled. You ever hear that phrase, like, I didn't have enough time to make this shorter? And it's like, if you're doing your job well, you are cutting out the fat. You're making it lean itself. I did just finish a book for all ages where I cut 100 pages in three weeks. And it was so much better. And it was a gift to the poor reader that was gonna have to slog through this overlong book. But other people were ready to sign off on it. And I read it late in the game and I was like, this just, it's undisciplined. And you know how it's such, no one teaches you that.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  If you see real discipline in film in particular, and really tight editing, it's just such pleasure. And then if you see it, something drag, or a little bit lazy, or a little bit too forgiving of some long, languorous take, thinking like, why am I more bored than I've ever been in my life? Just because this one take is like, you know, a minute and a half long? And, but the discipline, it's a gift to your audience to say, I respect your time. I'm gonna make this tight. It's like, not God isn't in the details, but there's, there should be some equivalent phrase that's just like the gift of a very tightly edited work of art.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  It seems at odds with the loose hippie magic of art to spend so much attention on constraint and discipline and leanness, but it does really matter, right?

• 1:16:25Rick Rubin?

  Makes a difference.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Rick Rubin?

  If you have a story in mind, can that story be told in many different ways?

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  This is the eternal question every day. Honest to God, I've got, let's talk about like this. I went to Kitty Hawk, I love flight. I love experimental flight. I do a lot of different like weird stuff. And I love experimental flyers. People that will invent a new jet pack or whatever. So I went to Kitty Hawk to pay pilgrimage to the Wright brothers and and the Kill Devil Hills and the dunes. And I met this guy that teaches hang gliding and I learned some hang gliding. And I just had so much, such a rich culture there. They call themselves doonies. All the teachers and these young men and this, and he's the elder statesman. And he teaches them how to teach others.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  And they're all hanging out on these dunes with these beautiful brightly colored kites. And if have you ever hang glided a little bit?

• 1:17:26Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  Easy and safe to do it just on a hill. It's just a kite, no machinery.

• 1:17:32Rick Rubin?

  And it's silent, yes?

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Silent, heartily silent. And you feel it's the closest thing to being a bird, even for 20 feet of just being aloft. And I was like, is this, is this a novel? Is this a movie about, is this nonfiction piece about this culture of people? Is it a short story? So some things arrive, you know, right away. That one, I've sat for five years now. I've gone back twice, done a tandem flight, you know, all the way.

• 1:18:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Where you, a plane pulls you up and then lets you go 3,000 feet up. Still don't know what to do with this.

• 1:18:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  And I take notes.

• 1:18:09Rick Rubin?

  And just from your experience, will there be a breakthrough moment where it's like, aha?

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  It should be.

• 1:18:14Rick Rubin?

  I know exactly what to do now.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Where the fuck has it been?

• 1:18:16Rick Rubin?

  It's just waiting for that.

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, waiting for it. So that's like contraposto of this book. 20 years of notes, waiting for the structure to arrive.

• 1:18:24Rick Rubin?

  What was the key?

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  I think just like I wanted it to be about their whole lives, but I was bored thinking about having to describe every year, every, you know.

• 1:18:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Allowing yourself to jump 10 years each time was just such, it's such a simple thing, but I hadn't, hadn't occurred to me.

• 1:18:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's always a simple thing.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  I know. I felt so dumb when it popped into my head. It's not like no one's ever done it before, but it liberated me. Suddenly all the baggage was, you know, it's like a hot air balloon where you dump the sandbags off and you're alone.

• 1:18:57Rick Rubin?

  So great.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  And I think so much of the time you are, you're losing things as opposed to putting more in.

• 1:19:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  The solution often is less.

• 1:19:08Rick Rubin?

  Do you always want there to be a moral at the end of the story?

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  No, and there are themes and ideas and all of these things woven into a novel. But it's a, it's a form where these things come and go in the flow of, of a vast, meandering river that you're, you're traveling down. And you don't get out of the river and say, oh, I know, I should always be barefoot now. You know, like some, but these days, there is a little bit more that's been sort of entering into the, what do you want readers to take away? It's just like, it's everywhere now, especially when, with picture books. I write books for kids too.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  And Maurice Sendak was a guy that Spike and I used to work with. And he was so adamant about that books should not have morals and for kids too. Even though he did some that had kind of some messages, but it's a different form. I don't think that a moral and a work of art are sort of like, can coexist.

• 1:20:19Rick Rubin?

  When you're sitting in the boat, do you feel like you're making it? Or do you feel like you're finding it?

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  I would say they're both everyday occurrences. You definitely know sometimes I have to flesh out this character. This is the, I'm doing this today no matter what. And in doing that, you realize like, oh, they had this stepfather that they used to live with. And he was a merchant marine. And this thing just like pops into the page all of a sudden. And there's nothing better, really. I know the characters in this new book that I had not planned on at all. That like, they're there suddenly because I'm typing. I'm really not a mystical, like, I'm not superstitious or anything. I really feel like generally we're in control of what we're doing there. But sometimes things, you are catching up to what's going on in your head

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  and you can just barely type it fast enough. And those are really fun. And those, those characters actually become really different in your mind and kind of more beloved because they arrived unannounced and without much of your own doing.

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• 1:22:13Speaker 02

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• 1:22:27Speaker 02

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• 1:23:09Speaker 02

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• 1:23:45Rick Rubin?

  Have you had any mentors?

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  Always. So I've been looking through all these old papers and I had a high school teacher named Peter Ferry, who was just like my favorite guy, really funny guy. You know, the teachers that liked Monty Python? When you are obsessed with Monty Python, like forever, that's your guy. And so we stayed in touch. And even when I started writing books, I would send him each book before it came out, so he could grade it.

• 1:24:14Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  I found all my manuscripts from Peter Ferry the other day. And he'd write all these notes and he'd always tell the truth and he was hard on me here and there. He was always like firm about things. At that point, he was writing his own books. He wrote a number of novels that were published. And then he would do something that I recommend to anybody. He would write down all of his favorite lines from the manuscript.

• 1:24:36Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  And give it back to you. And through his eyes to see what he had noticed. And then the love that took him to like, put it all back in handwriting. Somebody, a peer of mine, did this a couple of days ago in an email. And I was like, oh, my God, I haven't never had anyone but Mr. Ferry do this.

• 1:24:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  But everybody should do it. And it made me think, I have to do this with friends too, because it's different than just saying, good job. It makes it 10 times better. You're like, oh, yeah, I forgot that. I did that. So he did that until, you know, he passed away a few years ago. But I still have a few of my old teachers in my life and including my fifth grade teacher who was, made us write a book. And I'm going to see her in Chicago in about a month.

• 1:25:18Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  So it's mostly teachers that I stayed close with. Especially when my, when my parents passed, like they became some of the crucial adults in my life that kept in touch on purpose and were sort of careful to present that continuity with home. That's one of the reasons why we have these organizations that are teacher supporting organizations. We try to give more volunteers in the classrooms to help public school teachers in our era.

• 1:25:48Rick Rubin?

  Have you ever read something you wrote a long time ago? And realized that it means something different than you thought it meant when you wrote it?

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or you don't remember it at all.

• 1:25:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it never happened.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  I found stuff that I don't remember. I have no recollection of writing it. I mean, from my twenties and thirties. No recollection of writing it, no idea what I was writing. I don't know where it went. I don't know what became of it or why I abandoned it. But there was some good stuff.

• 1:26:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  So sometimes, you know, you do borrow things from these abandoned drafts. But at best art, you don't always know what you're getting at. And if it's coming from the deepest, most subliminal kind of bone deep place within you, then you get into like dream storytelling and you know, the kind of stuff you do when you're. When you aren't awake.

• 1:26:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  And then that's, that's some of the most interesting stuff. And why is it that I'm writing this scene that takes place underwater? And it's a, you can't question it sometimes.

• 1:26:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  And sometimes that's the storytelling that I think is most resonant with people. Then that's why David Lynch, he's the perfect exemplar of this. I'm sure he has no idea why he did certain things. And it wasn't coming from the intellectual part of himself. It was coming from like, I don't know, there's gonna be this black lacquered box. And then there's a key and I guess.

• 1:27:09Rick Rubin?

  And he can describe it perfectly.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  Perfectly.

• 1:27:12Rick Rubin?

  But has no idea why.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  And then there's tiny people that are behind the diner and they come out like, these are all dream things that he didn't question, that he realized in three dimensional space and on film. And we know exactly what he's doing. He's the only sort of real dream artist, I think, out there on film. And why is it everybody else constrains it and puts it into a more rational form?

• 1:27:36Rick Rubin?

  Maybe even well prior to him, you know?

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  For sure. You know, why is there a dead person in the, in the restaurant over there? Like that kind of stuff, but in a dream, every day, a dream will give that to you. So I think, you know, when you're, you, you've gotta allow that.

• 1:27:54Rick Rubin?

  You don't have to know why.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Don't have to know why. And I was telling, I speak to high school kids. I was in a class last week and they were like, well, so what kind of philosophy guides you as you wrote The Circle? This is a book about like a tech dystopia. He said, you know, like Stoicism or, you know?

• 1:28:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  And I said, no, that's, don't ever believe when you go to college or whatever. There's no, we're not being guided by some theory. It's not on a grid, you know? If we, if your college professor tells you that this story has a lot of red in it because he was influenced by a grandfather that was a Soviet dissident, no. He just, he just put red in. He has no idea. There were flowers in the room or, no idea. All of these things are coming from a much more subliminal place. And so this sort of hyper intellectualization and analysis of it is something that you can do as an undergrad to pass the time. But it doesn't mean the artist has any awareness of this.

• 1:28:53Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  And, and shouldn't. And so. I like to sort of liberate high school kids from that. And of course, sometimes their teachers are horrified that I'm saying much of what they're reading and analyzing is

• 1:29:07Rick Rubin?

  It's made up.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Is made up. It's just make work.

• 1:29:10Rick Rubin?

  Do you ever start projects and not finish them?

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Always. Ninety-two percent of the time.

• 1:29:15Rick Rubin?

  Really? A lot?

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, a lot of times, you're waiting for somebody to tell you it's a bad idea. And then sometimes somebody else will do it in the meantime before you've finished. Sometimes you just can't get to it and it takes you 20 years. And very often, you yourself will realize, ideally as quickly as possible

• 1:29:36Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  That between three in the morning when you wrote it down and nine in the morning when you see the note by the bed, how stupid it is. But yeah, I tend to sort of going in a lot of directions at once. And trying to find time and reason to focus on the one thing and get it finished. But I don't know what you'd call it. I mean, I'm sure it's diagnosable now. I've never been diagnosed with anything and nor do I want to be. I think that I finish plenty enough. And I always tell people like, there's just no shame in 100 abandoned projects. As long as you're getting that 101st one finished. They say you've got 40,000 thoughts a day, right?

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  So I for sure believe that. I definitely have counted them. It's, it's a lot, but I love being told, not that one. And then I'm like, oh, thank God. And then I can move on. And it's only when, when knowledgeable people will say, oh, that's pretty good. Then you're like, oh, fuck, I might have to do this. You know, even if it's like outside of the realm of writing, you know? We had this idea for this thing called Art and Water. And it's like a free MFA art school. It'll be in a peer in San Francisco. And it's, I was upset by how art school is $100,000 a year now. No one I know can pay this. So I say, well, why don't we take mentors, teach? Aspiring artists for free.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  Everybody shares space, studios and all together. So I pitched this for five years to different people and nobody told me it was a dumb idea. And I, so I was never free of it. And so now it's gonna happen because people joined up and now it'll be open later on the summer. So it'll be like 50 artists all sharing.

• 1:31:25Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  Studio space and teaching each other and no money exchanged. So you have to come down and see it. It'll be a thing.

• 1:31:32Rick Rubin?

  Tell me more about your thoughts on education in general.

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  Well, this has been the sphere we've been in with our nonprofits since 2002. I went to public schools all the way through college. So I think schools should be free and I think the teachers should be better paid. Those are the two main things. It could be under a tree. It could be anywhere as long as you're motivating and paying those teachers. All comes down to teachers and paying them better. So we have a bill before Congress right now where we would, it would set a $60,000 minimum for all teachers in the U.S. And then, as you can imagine, that's not going anywhere super fast. But I think more than ever, now that they're chasing teachers out of the classroom by banning their books and arresting them for handing out the right, these certain books. My books have been banned all over the country.

• 1:32:21Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did a whole documentary. Matt Stone funded it, actually. It was directed by Arthur Bradford called To Be Destroyed. And I had a book called The Circle. It now is on the banned list.

• 1:32:34Rick Rubin?

  Do you know why they banned it?

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's about, you know, they assigned it in high school because it's about the dangers of technology and social media and a lot of things. But there's three very awkward intimacy scenes that are meant to be so awkward and about how, like in one case, during a romantic encounter, the male of the two wants her to rate him as they go along, you know? Cause he's so insecure and he wants everything to be measurable and datafied. So they're not like sexy scenes, but they're in a book that's often assigned in high school. So that's often what they're banning is intimacy in a book that's given to kids.

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, these kids all have phones. They have access to every piece of pornography that's ever been made by humankind, but they're worried about the three scenes in the novel. So they banned this book in Rapid City, South Dakota, and they didn't just ban it, but they they destroyed them all. And they pulled them out of libraries and they've never been seen again.

• 1:33:33Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  And so that's why they were marked to be destroyed on the official documents.

• 1:33:38Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  So that's what we called it. We went back to South Dakota many times and Arthur, the director, filmed students and parents and teachers and and to examine how these things happen. And it turns out there was nobody in the town that objected to any of the books.

• 1:33:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  Not one authentic complaint. But because there had been a new Christian school board voted in, headed up by a woman with seven kids, none of whom were in the public schools. They were all sent to Christian schools. But because of this culture of sort of maybe preemptive censorship, they took all these semi controversial books off the shelves so as not to stir up any trouble. These are the principles of the schools. And then the kids found out about it. They were enraged. They felt stolen from and condescended to. And so we partnered with the local independent bookstore, Mitzi's,

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  and said, if we'll pay for it, will you offer all five banned books, there were five of them, to any kid that comes in in high school? So they did it. We're still doing it to this day, three years later. We walk in and so far more kids have read these books. And they all have them at home now, whereas they wouldn't then had they not banned them. But it does teach you like so much of censorship is not coming down from on high, but it's preemptive. It's like the powers that be saying, let's just avoid trouble in case it's coming or in case the school board objects, let's just preemptively take these books off the list. But it was it was really enlightening, amazing to see these kids stand up for the right to read freely.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  And got to see a really great part of the world, like Rapid City, South Dakota is an awesome town. It's right near Mount Rushmore in the Badlands and so there's a lot to see there, but.

• 1:35:34Rick Rubin?

  It's a great story.

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:35:36Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  Book banning has no fans. Even MAGA people, the farthest, there's very few Americans on any part of this political spectrum that want to censor books. Anytime we had a town hall or anything, everybody can come, any side of this debate. Not one person came from the town to say, let's ban books. So then the next school board election, they voted out all the lunatics. They voted back in a bunch of moderates and now things are back to normal. So it gives you hope. If any collector is well informed and they show up, chances are you're not going to have a hijacking by these, the right wing extremists, but you do have to vote and you've got to be informed.

• 1:36:21Rick Rubin?

  What are your thoughts on free speech?

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm an absolutist, you know? I even did this in the schools and in Rapid City. I was like, what's the one book you would ban? Because there's got to be one, right? And I always want some kid to say Mein Kampf, like that's one that doesn't belong. They they know the trick because if everybody has a right to ban one book and it sounds good in theory, like, well, just one book out of 200,000. Well, that library is empty very quickly. So we're at the point where there's more banned books than in any time in history and it's doubling every year. And it's because of technology and these banned lists that are shared from community to community.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  And then this culture of radical conservatism, but it'll swing around again. But in the meantime, it's really rough on librarians and it makes a hard, low-paying job much harder.

• 1:37:17Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about your editing process.

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  I'm pretty fierce, I guess. In newspapers and magazines, you know, like, there's never an unexamined sentence. Everything is subject to be chopped up and you get a thick skin. You can't be precious about much. And now, you know, writing your own books, you could be precious if you'd like to be, but you get very good at listening to editors and the humility of giving yourself to editing. And then you also become a very good self-editor, especially if you're editing other people. I always think you gotta edit other people's books to be a good self-editor. And not just, "I like it, I don't like it, but how could this be better?" You know?

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  "I know what you're trying to do here." So I was an editor for about 10 years before I ever wrote a book. So it's a great training. Toni Morrison was an editor, editor for decades before. She was a big editor at Random House. And then she wrote Beloved, and so I recommend it as a start and as an ongoing practice.

• 1:38:28Rick Rubin?

  Are there any popular rules or ideas about writing that you disagree with?

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  All of them.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  When you say rules about writing, that's a terrible phrase to utter. There can be no rules about writing. And this is how we discourage generations of young people from writing is when we say, "Here's your five paragraphs, here's your this, here's your opening this. And then have fun writing, be inspired, we're just gonna like, hold you to like,

• 1:38:58Rick Rubin?

  Box you in.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  Box you in everywhere you can possibly imagine." If we wonder why they don't consider themselves creative or good writers or whatever, and then you give them the five paragraph essay, that is exactly how you kill every generation's interest in writing, is the five paragraph essay. It needs to be obliterated. And you'll see everything open up, the sky open up, everything, all these kids feeling free of those shackles. But all of the tropes are wrong. Write what you know is a terrible canard, is misunderstood. People have taken it to mean that if you grew up in a suburb and your dad was a mailman, then that's what you should write, is a bunch of novels about suburban mailmen.

• 1:39:41Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  And it doesn't mean that at all. And you should never be constrained by just the things you know. How about learn some things and then write about those things? How about the book being bigger than yourself? Anytime you hear a rule, take it with a grain of salt. Maybe it's good advice, but generally speaking, it's to be ignored immediately when it's presented to you.

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

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• 1:41:33Speaker 02

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• 1:41:38Speaker 02

  Take a breath

• 1:41:40Speaker 02

  and see where you are drawn.

• 1:41:45Speaker 07

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