Rick Rubin: Modern Master Of The Creative Act

An absolute icon of modern music whose influence on culture has been nothing short of titanic, Rick Rubin is one of the greatest music producers of all time, noted for his unique—and some might say counter-intuitive—way in which he is able to help manifest the absolute best in every artist he works with. But lesser appreciated is Rick’s spiritual approach to artistry, explored in his newly released and completely transformative book, The Creative Act, which is all about cultivating the innate creativity that dwells within all of us. But more than that, creativity is a way of moving through the world. Enjoy. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: seed.com/RICHROLL Calm: calm.com/richroll Momentous: LiveMomentous.com/richroll Squarespace: Squarespace.com/RichRoll Thesis: takethesis.com/RICHROLL Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  The idea that one person says, "My art is better than your art." It's an insane idea. It's like saying, "My diary entry is better than your diary entry." It's insane. The things we make are a reflection of who we are in this moment. And that's all it is. It's not more than that. It can go on and mean more than that, but that's not in our control. And it's something that cripples artists, thinking, "I have to make the greatest thing ever made to humankind." And then they basically psych themselves out of being able to make something good. There's a great benefit in taking a risk, making the thing that's interesting to you, sharing it with the world.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Because if you don't do it, nobody else will. You're the only one who can make the art that you can make. Everything that you make is a reflection of who you are. And how you live in the world will impact the things that you make. And I wish the best of luck on the journey in making beautiful things that we can all enjoy.

• 2:20Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:24Rich Roll?

  Today, I want to talk about magic. I want to talk about awe and wonder and oneness. And I want to do that with a very special human. For most, he needs no introduction. An absolute icon of modern music, whose influence on culture has been nothing short of Titanic. Rick Rubin is one of the greatest producers of all time, noted for his unique, and some might say counterintuitive, way in which he is able to manifest the absolute best in everyone he works with. Rick is the founder of Def Jam Records, who now runs his own label, American Recordings. And over the course of his storied career, has worked with a litany of greats like The

• 3:09Rich Roll?

  Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash, The Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Jay-Z, Adele, the list goes on and on and on. And it's all coming right up, but first.

• 3:23Rich Roll?

  Okay, Rick Rubin. So, the thrust of today's conversation surrounds the release of Rick's brand-new and completely transformative book, The Creative Act, which is about cultivating the innate creativity that dwells within all of us. But more than that, it's about a way of being. It's about an openness to possibility, wonder, energy, and of course, magic. And while this is a rare audio-only episode, recorded outside with Rick, characteristically sitting across from me shirtless, I assure you that the contents that lay within this

• 4:05Rich Roll?

  conversation are nothing short of profound, and dare I say, perhaps even life-changing. So, let's just get after it. I mean, needless to say, I can't wait to share this conversation with you. So, without further ado, please enjoy this illuminating discourse between me and the truly singular Rick Rubin.

• 4:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I started it coming up on 10 years ago on the North Shore of Kauai.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Beautiful.

• 4:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, which is a place I know you've spent quite a bit of time.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 4:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, in a warehouse up there. My second or third guest was Gabby Reese.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 4:46Rich Roll?

  Because they were up there at the same time back in 2012. And it's just been a creative odyssey, you know, over these many years. And I still love it just as much as I did on day one. It's a privilege. It's a gift. It's, it's just been such a fulfilling experience. Gives me the opportunity to sit down with people like yourself and then share that wisdom with so many people. It's been really cool.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Cool. What I found interesting in doing a podcast with musicians is, one, I get to meet people I've never met before. And it's interesting. The conversations are interesting. And also I get to, when I interview someone who I know for a long time, I've never interviewed them before. Like I've interviewed people that I've known for 30 years and I learn a tremendous amount through the interview. Because you don't really ask your friends interview type questions.

• 5:41Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, you, by introducing a structure and formality, it kind of forces everybody into a presence of mind that ordinarily we wouldn't do on our own. Like I did one with my dad and I was able to ask him questions that I had never asked him.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  What a great idea.

• 6:00Rich Roll?

  I think everybody should do a podcast with their parents or their extended, and not necessarily to share it.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:06Rich Roll?

  But as a document.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Yes, beautiful. And also, yeah, for future generations.

• 6:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 6:11Rich Roll?

  So we were introduced by our mutual friend, Stephen Pressfield. We have lots of mutual friends, but it wasn't until the past couple of days that we actually got a chance to meet. And we've been corresponding for, I don't know, like a year and a half? Yeah. Two years or something like that? Yeah, I think two years. Trying to make this happen. And you're, you know, always traveling and in distant places. And at one point you were like, look, I do tons of Zooms. Happy to do it. Like, let's just do it digitally. I'm super comfortable with that. And I was like, no, I don't. That's not the experience that I'm looking for. I'm willing to wait until everything, the universe sort of conspires to bring us together. Beautiful.

• 6:55Rich Roll?

  And in my experience, that like, discipline to wait always proves to be the correct choice as opposed to like, willing it into happening when it doesn't feel like the right moment. Like, there is something about timing and I'm really grateful that we're doing this now and not, you know, when originally maybe we were going to do it. Yes. And I think it'll be a richer experience as a result. Beautiful. I'm in. Yeah, man. So, I guess we have to be cryptic about where we are and what's going on, but... We're at an undisclosed location somewhere in the world. It's a weird Fight Club thing, but basically, we've been hanging out for the past couple of days, getting to know each other a little bit.

• 7:40Rich Roll?

  And I have so many questions for you. I'm fascinated by your life, but really the occasion for this conversation is this beautiful new book that you've written called The Creative Act, which I had the privilege of reading. It hasn't come out, it comes out in January. We're recording this in the middle of the summer. So I got an early peek at it and it was great to read it with a beginner's mind, which is part of the message of the book, without having read any reviews or having had anyone tell me this is what it's about and this is what it's not about. And among the many kind of fascinating, you know, sort of emotions that I had in the experience of reading the book was that...

• 8:25Rich Roll?

  First off, it defied my expectations of what it would be. And I had this assumption, you know, I went into it even with the beginner's mind idea, like I still formed an assumption of what this book was going to be. Because there are certain conventions that kind of come along for the ride with people who write a book at a certain stage of their career. So I was like, oh, this is going to be somewhat of a memoir. It's going to be all these crazy stories of the bands and the amazing artists that you've worked with over the years. And then, you know, through that, it will be interlaced with takeaways or some wisdom that you've accrued. And it very much was not that. It was heavy on the wisdom part, but it's not a memoir at all.

• 9:06Rich Roll?

  It's really a standalone work of art, a timeless meditation on the act of being a creative being. What is the experience of being an artist? And how to, you know, sort of manifest the artist within all of us. So what was the kind of inception of the idea to write this book?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  When, um, when the thought of doing a book, I had an experience where I got to work on someone else's book about Johnny Cash, an artist I worked with, the Robert Hillburn's book, beautiful book. And the last few chapters are about Johnny Cash, um, the later period Johnny Cash. And that's when I got to work with him. So we spent some time together and he suggested we listen back to the records and talk about different song choices. And I found through the process of helping Robert with his book, I learned a tremendous amount that I didn't know about my relationship with Johnny Cash. Just through, I tend not to look back. I'm always making something new.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  I tend not to listen back to any work I've made in the past. I'm just moving forward. I might come across hearing a song in a coffee shop. It's like, oh, wow, that's, I produced that. It's unbelievable. But I don't choose to listen also because in the studio to get the things to sound like they do, we work on them for such a long time that I'm good not hearing it again. You know, like we've done that. I put in my thousands of hours.

• 10:39Rich Roll?

  It's everybody else's turn now.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yes. So I'm good, next. So in that experience of working on the Johnny Cash book, or participating in the Johnny Cash book, I understood what

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Working on a book could be and how it could be about me learning something. And I thought about what could I possibly offer? I don't want to talk about myself. I'm not interested in myself, but I am interested in what happens in the studio. And so much of what happens in the studio isn't about music. It's about, I guess we could say their principles, although at the time that I started, I didn't know what they were. I knew that I wanted to share what happens, the choices being made in the studio, how

• 11:30Speaker 01

  that happens in a way that someone else could use it and apply it to their lives. And so it took a very long time to figure out what those things were because at the time that they happened originally, in each case, it was an intuitive choice. So I spent seven years thinking back, both for all the projects I've worked on in the last seven years, in real time, if something would happen, I would, once something good happened, I would try to understand, okay, is there a principle at play here that might be useful to someone else? And I would make notes. And then I tried to reverse engineer decisions that I could remember from my earliest works and all the way through.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  And again, it's not about those works at all. Those were just a portal into what was the thought process to solve a problem at the time? And is there some tool there that can help someone else? And if so, I want to share that.

• 12:29Rich Roll?

  Right. So in other words, it's a canonization of these instinctual tools that you didn't sort of conceptualize them and bring them into the studio. It's just been a process of them emerging over time in the context of solving the typical type of problems that come up.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Yes, and I would say they were all essentially reactions to a problem, essentially a problem. And the problem could be writer's block, or the problem could be a transition in a song doesn't work, or a problem could be, there's a story to tell.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Through a song that works in almost a coded way. Explain what that means. I'm not sure I get that last point. I'll talk specifically. I don't speak specific in the book, but I can, here I can speak specific. At the time that I was working with Run DMC, it was in the early days of hip hop and no, you have to understand what the world was like at this point in time. Hip hop was a tiny niche form of music. So tiny and so niche that most people, not only did they not think it was good music, most people didn't think it was music.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  I can remember being courted by the head of a big record company because we were having some success and he wanted to, you know, work with us. And he said, what do you attribute the success of rap? We all know it's not music. And he's being kind, you know, like imagine what the- Or just confused. Yeah, or imagine what the people who, there were some people who just hated it, just were offended by it. So we were finishing Run DMC's album and the album was done and I listened to it and I felt like there's some, one, it's missing something. I don't know what it is, but it's missing something. There's a piece missing. And I had just had these experiences of people telling me what I was working on wasn't music.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  And I was thinking about it as solving a problem. How do I demonstrate this is not so foreign from what we're used to? And the thought was to find a song that was an existing, well-known song, not change it really, and have Run DMC do it true to what it was, yet have it be a rap song. And the choice was Aerosmith's Walk This Way. And I picked it because of the phrasing of the verses are essentially, it's a non-melodic verse. It's all about the phrasing and it works like a rap song, same as a rap song.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  And another meta-layer on top of that is that there's a breakbeat in hip hop music. There are breakbeats which are little instrumental snippets from longer works, not indicative of the big work, just a tiny snippet that if you loop it up-

• 15:38Speaker 01

  It's its own thing. And in hip hop world, they called it the Toys in the Attic break, which was Walk This Way. But no one who heard that break knew who Aerosmith was or ever heard the song. All they ever heard was that drum beat.

• 15:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  So.

• 15:55Rich Roll?

  Dun-dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun-dun.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the.

• 15:57Rich Roll?

  Dun-dun-dun-dun.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  It's more than.

• 15:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Dun-dun-dun-dun.

• 16:02Rich Roll?

  And I'm trying to recollect like because Aerosmith has its own amazing history of being huge in the 70s and disappearing and them having, you know, sort of personal issues. And then this incredible Renaissance in their career, was that song coming out in addition to being the crossover event for hip hop that introduced this new genre or medium of music to a much broader audience? Was that the kind of inception point for Aerosmith's resurgence?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:31Rich Roll?

  On the timeline?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  It worked in both, in both directions.

• 16:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's unbelievable. So were you the one who chose that band and that song? And it was a conscious choice, the purpose being like that we need that crossover and this will achieve that? Or was it just a crossover?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  This would be cool. Yeah, crossover is not the right word because crossover makes it sound like it was a, um, a commercial decision. This was not a commercial decision.

• 16:56Rich Roll?

  But a way of telling a story.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  This was a communication decision of people don't understand this. I want to explain it in a way that someone can understand it. That was the goal. I want to demonstrate it.

• 17:06Rich Roll?

  Right. And it, I mean, it had to have exceeded your expectations of what it achieved.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 17:12Rich Roll?

  To this day.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 17:13Rich Roll?

  It's crazy.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 17:15Rich Roll?

  What year was that?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  I don't know. I'm not really good at this. I have no idea.

• 17:19Rich Roll?

  It was a while ago.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. A long time ago.

• 17:22Rich Roll?

  Um, you know, your story is well told and well documented. But I think for people who aren't familiar, um, you know, with who you are, or just kind of know some of the work that you've done, it would be good to recap that a little bit. But just to introduce that idea, um, most recently, uh, I, not that recently, it was probably last year. Um, I watched the Beastie Boys documentary and, you know, you recur in that story. A lot of which, you know, your role in all of that, I already knew. But one thing I didn't know was that you were actually a band member of the Beastie Boys at the inception. We know about the NYU dorm room and how that was kind of a ground zero space and how

• 18:04Rich Roll?

  the hip hop community at that time was such a small, close knit group of people. And there were only a couple venues and it was the same people showing up at those venues that created this massive global movement. But, you know, maybe talk a little bit about, you know, how you came into this space and a little bit about, you know, how you've architected your career.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Okay, we all, we were all punk rockers. We all loved punk rock. And the hip hop wave happened. And for me, I experienced the hip hop wave as, as black punk rock. It was the same. It was a, it was a democratization of music. It was taking music back to the streets. You didn't have to be a virtuoso player. You just had something to say and a point of view, a gripe, an energy, something to brag about in the case of hip hop sometimes, or a fantasy. And it appealed to me in the same way that punk rock did. And the Beastie Boys were already a band that I was not a member of, and they were a punk rock band.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  And I met them through friends and a guy named David Skilken, who was a really cool kid, who's no longer with us, but a good friend of all of ours. And they had recorded a song before I was involved called Cookie Puss, which was a college radio hit. And it was a parody song, rap related parody song. And they wanted to play that live and it wasn't a song that you play as a punk rock band. You needed DJ and I was DJ going to NYU and I DJed at NYU events and sometimes at Dance Ateria and clubs in New York. Not much, more mainly in the dorm, but was a big fan of music.

• 19:49Rich Roll?

  Right. Dance Ateria, pre Madonna?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Around the same time. Like Madonna would be around and that was part of the, that world. As a matter of fact, the first Beastie Boys tour, we went on tour with Madonna as her opening act for her, the Virgin Tour, her first tour.

• 20:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. So you hook up with these kids, high school kids.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'm one year older. I'm in college there in high school. Adam Mialk was already in college. He was at Bard. I was at NYU. We hook up. It starts with me DJing in, in the part of the set where they don't play their instruments. And as our appetite for rap music grew, it was, it ended up being all we listened to. That side of making music took over. And I had already, at this point in time, produced LL Cool J's, not yet albums, and they were just singles at this time. And that were, and T La Rock, a record called It's Yours, very first rap record I ever

• 20:50Speaker 01

  made, which was like a cult hit. Using the techniques of, that I used with T La Rock or LL Cool J, we tried making Beastie Boys records in that format, like real rap records. And that's, that's what we did.

• 21:07Rich Roll?

  Right. And in that process, was there a sort of awakening, like, oh, this is, this is what I love about music. It's being, you know, in the producer's seat, trying to craft these things with great artists? Or was it just, oh, this came up and this seems cool and just I'm jumping from one thing to another and one thing, you know, your, your universe just kind of slowly expanding?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  A series of events happened. I remember I had to leave the Madonna tour because I had an ear infection from flying. And while I was home recovering, I was continuing to make records. And based on that experience, and again, luckily, the universe set up this system where it basically told me home was the place for me. And, and I just realized I wasn't resilient enough to be an artist on the road. Didn't suit my, my lifestyle. And then in the earlier records that I worked on with LL or the Beasties or Run DMC, I would, I would write a lot, I would write a lot of music and sometimes in the case of, more

• 22:13Speaker 01

  in the case of the Beastie Boys, write lyrics. The idea of how much work I could be involved in.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  If I was gonna write everything, it would really limit how much I could do. So the idea, and I like to, I like to work on a lot of things. It's just, I have really eclectic tastes. I love music and I like to be busy. So if I had to wait until every time I wrote something, it took, I remember the first Beastie Boys album took over two years from the time we started till we finished, not of recording every day, but until the ideas came. It just took a long time.

• 22:52Rich Roll?

  And you were heavily involved in the writing aspect of that first record?

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:56Rich Roll?

  Licensed to Ill?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of the music except for one or two songs. And I don't know, forty percent, half the lyrics, something like that.

• 23:05Rich Roll?

  Right. I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  But that changed after that album. It was, it was, it didn't, that life of writing, it's a very time-consuming act and it would just limit the output. And for some reason, I don't know, it always seemed important for me to make a lot of things. I like, I like being productive. And so it just, again, it happened. If not for the ear infection, it might not have happened that way.

• 23:35Rich Roll?

  Right. Super interesting, you know, these little obstacles or I'm sure at the time you were disappointed.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was unbelievable. We were on tour with Madonna, people, you know, it was wild.

• 23:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And then with Licensed to Ill, I mean, that just, I mean, I vividly remember when that record came out. And, you know, me and my friends had an obsessive relationship with every song on that record. That had to be mind-melting, the extent to which that became a cultural phenomenon. And another, you know, kind of real tipping point in terms of the broadening of hip-hop or a certain kind of genre within hip-hop.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't follow stats or charts of any kind, but I read the other day that Licensed to Ill was the first hip-hop record to be a number one album. I didn't know that until the other day, but it's interesting.

• 24:29Rich Roll?

  Well, I guess as a producer, you have to be a buffer between the business side of music and protecting the artist. But At the same time, to the extent that you're capable of, like, you try to stay out of numbers, results, externalities, awards shows, I don't know how many Grammys you've won, but like, you've never shown up for an award ceremony.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 24:50Rich Roll?

  That's part of the process of staying grounded in what's important about what you do. Like, talk a little bit about that.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yes, for me, the success happens when we sign off on a finished thing and say, "Okay, send it out into the world." That's the moment of success. And once that happens, I don't look back.

• 25:11Rich Roll?

  Onto the next.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Onto the next.

• 25:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Because that's the only part I have any participation in. That's the only part I can control. Everything else is based on market conditions, on stars aligning, on... One of the stories we heard today in what we were doing was, many of the people whose music came out on 9/11, their music got lost and their careers never recovered, just because it happened to come out on 9/11. And it's fascinating, and that's out of everyone's control. And that's, again, it's a universal intervention. We don't know how it works.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  But these are all... One of the things we talk about in the book is watching these occurrences. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, and thinking of it as riding a wave. And that the universe is pushing us in a direction, and we can ride with that energy. And like when you're surfing, if you really try to fight the wave, it's probably not gonna work. You know, we try to use the power of the wave where we're almost dancing with the wave, not against the wave. And that's the work of creativity as well. Certain projects come together very easily, and they happen quickly, and they have a momentum to them.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  And others are a real fight. And sometimes we fight that fight, and other times, we decide, is there another path of less resistance around this? Is there a better way in? Let's rethink. If it's so hard, something's up. Not supposed to be so hard. Again, it's wildly time-consuming, takes a great deal of focus, takes patience.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  But if there are no signs that something's working for a long time, that might be a time to step back, step away.

• 27:14Rich Roll?

  There's so much packed into what you just said. I mean, first off, it being very counterintuitive or, you know, opposite to this notion that if you want to be successful, you just, you push, you hustle, you force things into existence. And that is antithetical to the expression of great art. There is a surrender and an allowing and a shaping and a sort of dispassionate relationship. You have to have a non-romantic, you know, connection to the result of the work. In the book, you say, "The work is the work," right? What is the work? The work is lots of things. The work is hard, but it's play.

• 27:59Rich Roll?

  It's about sharing and it's about passion. It's about structure, of course. Like, it's very elusive and difficult to pin down. Like, when you said, like, "Oh, I just, you know, this book came about because I've been doing this thing for so long, but I never really had a formal sort of structure in my mind of what exactly..." It's in the process of creating this book, its own work of art, that you become more deeply connected to like, who you are and what it is exactly that you do that makes you unique or, you know, allows you to bring a certain sensibility into the studio that can elevate the artist that you work with. But it is ephemeral, so it's understandable. You're like, "I don't know what it is."

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:43Rich Roll?

  "But I know what it's not."

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yes. And I don't know how to do it. That's another thing. Like, before I start any new project, I always have a lot of anxiety because I have no idea what's going to happen. Now, I have a lot of experience that helps now, but that doesn't make it happen. It takes a tremendous amount of patience to wait for it to reveal itself. And I guess now I have the wisdom to know this, that be patient and I have the discipline to stay with it for a long time. And I want to make that point because we were just talking about sometimes you have to bail. But... While you're in it for a long time, there are usually clues.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  There usually, and it might be a radical course change. You could start out, you have a moment, something beautiful happens, think, ah, this is what it's gonna be. And you start running in that direction and then you realize we're going in the wrong direction.

• 29:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  And then you have to, you know, set a new course.

• 29:42Rich Roll?

  Be nimble enough to not, to be able to walk away from that even when you've invested, you know, some ungodly amount of time and effort into that direction that's not functioning.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  It's something that we see often is the, um, the initial moment when an idea springs forth, that first sketch, the first demo, the first, very first rough, often has some energetic charge in it that's really compelling. And we hear many stories in, in music where records come out and people don't respond. And then they go back, oh, well, but it was, we missed it. It was all in the demo, you know, we, the record screwed up. And, um, being aware of that's helpful because you can, just because you put more time in, like from the time you've made the demo, you may put in, let's say we'd work for a month.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  After we've made a demo, we work on something for a month. Might work on a song for a month. We might realize at the end of that month, if we listen back, which is the key, always checking back. See, I know we're putting time in, but are we progressing?

• 30:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Is it different or is it better?

• 30:52Rich Roll?

  Right. Just because you're working on it a lot doesn't mean that it's better. And after hearing it, you know, 10,000 times, you're so close to it. And you become like sort of immune to its allure and you think there's something wrong with it.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:05Rich Roll?

  And so you tinker and then you actually end up dismantling the whole thing.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 31:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Many just get overdone.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  So in the cases when the demo is the best version,

• 31:20Speaker 01

  luckily, we recognize it and that ends up being the version now.

• 31:23Rich Roll?

  But it takes discipline, confidence, and experience to recognize that the original GarageBand version of it is actually better than the highly polished studio version.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yes, and even if it has mistakes, sometimes you fix them. Sometimes you hear mistakes, you fix the mistakes, and it's not as good.

• 31:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  You wouldn't expect that.

• 31:42Rich Roll?

  It's drained of its energy.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  It's drained of its humanity.

• 31:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  It's drained, and we don't know, this is the other part. We don't know why it's good. You, you, you hear it.

• 31:52Rich Roll?

  That's the thing.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  There are no metrics for this. The idea that one person says, "My art is better than your art." It's an insane idea. It's like they're all, it's always apples and oranges. It's like saying, "My diary entry is better than your diary entry." It's insane. It's, the things we make are, are a reflection of who we are in this moment. And that's all it is. It's not more than that. It can go on and mean more than that, but that's not in our control.

• 32:27Rich Roll?

  And that's not the reason to do it.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  No, and it's something that cripples artists, thinking, "I have to make the greatest thing ever made to humankind." And then they basically psych themselves out of being able to make something good. They give in to the pressure of thinking it's more than it is. So one of the things we talk about in the book is lowering the stakes, where we're not setting out to make the greatest album of all time. We're not setting out to make the greatest song of all time. We're there to have fun in the studio. We're going to entertain each other. We're going to see if something happens that's interesting to us. And there's no better.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  I've found, luckily, over the course of my life, that the things that I truly believe in, that really feel like something to me, other people resonate with. I don't know if that's the case for everybody, but I don't know of a better metric to use for anyone than, "I really feel this." If I really feel it, it's much better than, "I think someone else might like this." It's not really from, you know, it's not really me, but I think someone else might like it.

• 33:38Rich Roll?

  You're dead.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  It's a losing game.

• 33:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah, you have to make it to please yourself.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And one of the things I say in the book is the audience comes last. And the audience comes last in service to the audience. The audience wants the best thing. They don't get the best thing while you're trying to service them. They get the best thing when you're servicing yourself, when you're true to who you are. And the more you can trust yourself as an artist, in my case, I've been, every decision I've made, from working in a different genre than I started in, every time, every time I do something different or new, I'm always told not to do it. I'm always told it's a terrible idea.

• 34:26Rich Roll?

  So now you know you're on the right track when you hear that?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Well.

• 34:30Rich Roll?

  I mean, you can't always be correct.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  I'm not, but I know, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks.

• 34:36Rich Roll?

  You know what you know.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  I know what I know, and my job is to share what I know. That's all I can do. I can't second guess myself.

• 34:44Rich Roll?

  Well, the idea that the audience would dictate to the artist what to do, because this is what we want, is insanity, right?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  It's insanity.

• 34:53Rich Roll?

  It's the artist's job to express themselves in a way that makes the audience think differently or feel something.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:02Rich Roll?

  And the audience doesn't necessarily know that yet.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:05Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Yes, Steve Jobs said, you know, famously, "The consumer doesn't know what they want."

• 35:11Rich Roll?

  Until you make it.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:20Rich Roll?

  So talk about the making. I think there might be some confusion about what it is that you exactly do. Like, oh, you're the producer. Well, what is a music producer? Oh, you go in, you have this amazing taste, and when the artist is going in a wrong direction, you say, no, it's better like this, and you kind of impose your opinion in a certain direction, like place a script or a format on top of the whole thing and like drive it to completion, and ultimately, commercial success.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Yes, that is not at all what I do. There are many producers who work like that. I don't really know the details because I've not watched other producers work, but I know that everyone has their own style. Some producers today are people who make beats, and they're producing a record, and then when you hear on the, what you hear on the radio or streaming is something that they made the beat, they gave it to an artist, they never met the artist, then the artist puts the words on top, and then that comes out, and they're the producer of the song.

• 36:22Rich Roll?

  Right, and there's nothing wrong with that.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 36:24Rich Roll?

  I know, I remember like, that's how Madonna always continued to innovate and keep what she was doing fresh, because she would work with these different producers

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:33Rich Roll?

  who had a certain sound or a way of working with music that was different from what she had been doing historically.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yes, and when I first started, I had a sound, but very quickly, just my tastes are too eclectic. Like, I would never do the same thing for too long. I will say there tends to be a thread that runs through my work. Not always, but I like to think of it as getting to the essential heart of what's there. So, whereas it would be like the opposite. Phil Spector was famous for the wall of sound.

• 37:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  A lot of sounds all put on top of each other to the point where you couldn't tell what anything was. It was just the wall of sound. I'm the opposite, in that I want the least amount of information.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  The most space, whatever you do here, I want you to be able to hear well and hear its personality, almost like a conversation between two or three voices, more than a wall of sound.

• 37:41Rich Roll?

  You build the songs and then you have to strip them down to see if it holds up, right? It's about like the paring down, like what is the truest essence of this thing? And then we can add things if we think it's improving it, but like, let's take it down to the studs and see what we're actually dealing with.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like to get to like an architectural framework of something and experience it that way. And I will say, more often than not, although not always, it tends to stay very close to that, the minimalist version.

• 38:23Rich Roll?

  But I would imagine it brings clarity, like now you know what you're dealing with, right? Like, we're all on the same page. When it's at its bare bones, this is what we have.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:34Rich Roll?

  Then we can have a discussion about whether we need to add anything to it or not.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  It also puts a tremendous amount of pressure on those individual elements when you can really hear them. I can remember one, one successful record producer saying to me, very successful record producer saying like, I don't know how you have the patience to make music with so few elements, because for that to work, everything has to be perfect. And in his case, he would just layer things on top until a big thing happened that he liked. And again, that's fine, there's no, the beauty of all of this, there's no right way. We all find our own way. And if I worked with an artist where the best version of it was a heavily layered, dense work, I'd be fine to do that. I'm, I'm open to wherever it goes. I'm.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  When I say the minimalist tends to happen often, that's probably where my taste lies. But my taste in relation to whatever the thing is that I'm dealing with, and sometimes the thing that we're dealing with, the whole point of it is its density. So I maybe minimal would undermine what that is.

• 39:48Rich Roll?

  In service of the highest expression of the artist.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Of itself, yes.

• 39:53Rich Roll?

  That's the ultimate parameter, right? Like, that's what you're obviously always driving towards. But to just kind of extend that thought of minimalism a little bit, like in reading the book, I mean, the book's long. It's like 432 pages, I think, at least the manuscript I read, right? And, you know, it is like this, you know, I Ching sort of devotional piece on a way of being, right? And even though it's long, and I read it in like one and a half sittings, which is not the way you're supposed to consume this book. This is a book that should be consumed with patience and consideration. It's a book that you can put down and pick back up and reread, et cetera. It felt very minimal is the point that I'm trying to make.

• 40:38Rich Roll?

  Like, it didn't feel like there was any extraneous sentences. Like, it is distilled down to, you know, a very specific point that you're trying to make. Even the very few stories that you use to illustrate some of these points are like two sentences long and like no names are used. And then you move on.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not about that. I was thinking about that early on. And I think if the information had the name of an artist attached to it, when you read it, you would visualize that artist, and it would be harder to put yourself in the place of doing it.

• 41:15Rich Roll?

  Well, because your association with that artist would bring some baggage into your opinion on the point that you're trying to make.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yes, it couldn't help it. It would sensationalize it in a way that would undermine the information. And this was about the information and the ability for the information to help someone else. It wasn't about to.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Talk about a past glory in any way.

• 41:38Rich Roll?

  There's a lot of shared DNA with this book and the way that you think about creativity and the expression of art with the work that Steven Pressfield does in his marvelous books. Like, this book that you've written is very much a piece with The War of Art and Turning Pro. Like, these things should be read in tandem or on the bookshelf together.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:00Rich Roll?

  But I think one distinction between these two things is you have a broader embrace of the mystical. Like, the act of creation is an act of magic. It requires playing with energies and really considering the unseen as very real. Like, these are tangible forces that you have to channel and reckon with if you are gonna be in this space of creation, right? So, talk a little bit about like how that came to be part of your sensibility and so important in the work that you do.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  I'll start by saying I'm a believer, and I'm a believer in everything. I start with the idea that I believe everything. And I'm willing to try things, the, in some cases, the more edgy, the more interesting they are to me. I'm less interested in what the orthodoxy thinks and more interested in what the fringes think. I live on the fringes. And, you know, I'll try, I won't take any pharmaceutical drugs, but I'll take all kinds of crazy biohacking stuff.

• 43:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  That's, that's my MO. And I, and I see, you know, and I've had mystical experiences in my life, non-drug-related mystical experiences in my life. So, I can't discount these things that happen.

• 43:32Rich Roll?

  Will you share one of those mystical experiences?

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Think of a good one.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  I've suffered with depression at different times in my life. Starting, it started when I was thirty-three years old, which was the year they got Jesus, turns out. But I, before then, I was great. And then at thirty-three, I got hit with this, first a panic attack, which I didn't know what it was, but I thought I was dying. And then, and then I had serious depression for probably two years. At which point, it was hard to get out of bed, if I even did get out of bed. I would see a different therapist or healer every day, sometimes two a day, at least five days a week, looking for healing.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Just, every day was just like this, maybe this appointment's the one that's gonna, you know, we're gonna find out what's happening. And would drag myself from healer to healer. And nothing worked. And then a friend of mine had taken Prozac, and it changed his life. And he said, not only did he say, "You ought to try this", but he said, "I will never not take this." Like, "This changed my life. This is the greatest thing that ever happened." And while our personalities were very different, after two years of pain, it was a, it was at least something to consider, but it was a barrier that I wasn't comfortable crossing. You know, I was a vegan.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  I didn't use any medical, you know, I'm really a person who lives in a natural way. Yeah. Cautious about any, any interference with that. Absolutely. Anything that undermines nature, I'm wary of. And...

• 45:32Speaker 01

  I finally heard, there was a woman who wrote a book who was a, she was a psychic. And she was a psychopharmacologist. And I thought, okay, if I'm ever gonna take a substance, I'll take it from a psychic. That, I'll do that. Yeah, okay. So I went to see, her name was Judith Orloff. And I went to see Judith Orloff, told her what was going on, told her the story about my friend in the Prozac. And she said, it's certainly worth trying. And she prescribed it and told me what to do, take it, take it right before you go to sleep.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  And I took it that first night and I woke up an hour later, wide awake, feeling energy racing through my body, as if there was a race going on in my body. It was the worst feeling, the worst feeling. She also said, when you take this, you're not gonna feel anything for six weeks. You know, it takes six weeks to start working. I tie trade up or whatever. So I took it, first night, hour later, wake up bad. And I'm just laying in bed scared until the morning, wide awake, terrified that I'm dying, until I can call her and find out what to do.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  And finally, eight o'clock in the morning, I get through and she says, okay, don't take that one again. So that was, it was a bad start. And then I ended up trying many different antidepressants, one after another. Every one of them made me sick right away. The ones that didn't make me sick, I waited the six weeks taking them every day and didn't work. So no, nothing worked. And then finally, one drug worked. And it worked again, not like I was told it would work. I was told, you know, well, wait six weeks, see what happens with this drug.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  I took it the first evening and it felt like, within a half hour, all of the light in the room turned to candlelight and I was being held and braced in a safe hug.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  And that night, I felt better for the first time in those two years.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  And a side effect of that particular drug is that you gain weight. Nobody told me that, but I was on the drug for six months, eight months, and I gained something like seventy pounds. And I was already overweight.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  It's interesting also that the, I've never really researched this, but the fact that the one drug of all the drugs that I tried that worked for me, I already had a weight problem, also somehow side effect made me gain weight, makes me think my weight and depression somehow are related. I don't know, I don't know enough about the science of that, but it seems clear there's some connection there. Too close.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  So I gained a lot of weight, I got better, I weaned off the drug. I was good again. And the mystical piece was, in the throes of the depression, one of the things that would help me, I would drive to Malibu, I lived in town at the time, I would drive to Malibu, and we had a little house, a tiny little shack on the beach that I was renting. And I would sit in that house, and usually I would get some, some of the heaviness would lift.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  So, one day I went to Malibu, I got there at around noon, did nothing, nothing, listened to classical music, relax, meditate, meditated for hours, did all the things that would like help get me out, and nothing got me out, and I was devastated.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  And I was hopeless. And in that moment of hopelessness, I prayed. And I prayed for a sign.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Please, universe, please give me a sign. Please give me a sign to go on. Because I don't think I can go on. Please give me a sign.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  And I walked out to the beach, which was something I never did, or rarely did. I walked out to the beach and I'm standing out on the beach. And in one minute, the entire sky turned into the most dramatic, orange, wild biblical painting. I had never seen anything like it up till that moment. Never seen anything like it since. I walk out, I experience that. It blows my mind. I feel like my answer is, I'm, I'm, I'm being spoken to.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  And then, within a minute, gone back to normal blue sky. So that was, for me, that was a mystical event.

• 50:55Rich Roll?

  Right. So what do you make of that? Like, how did that color your sort of sense of, you know, energies unseen?

• 51:04Speaker 01

  It felt like I'm not, I felt less alone. I felt like I could, um, my cry for help was heard. And I felt connected. And that felt really good.

• 51:18Rich Roll?

  In the book, you refer to, you talk about the universe and you talk about Source. Steven Pressfield calls it the muse. This is the, you know, place from which we can extract those, those inspirations, those ideas and channel them through the artist into creating something that lives and breathes in the world. But I guess I'm curious, as is Steven Pressfield, because he asked me to ask you this question. Like, how do you differentiate how he thinks about it, e.g. the muse, versus like how you're thinking about it as Source? Are those things synonymous? My sense is that you're, you have a more kind of expansive,

• 52:02Rich Roll?

  spiritual version of the muse.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Maybe, and I think it doesn't matter. It's helpful to know that the information we need.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Doesn't all come from inside of us. Might not come, maybe none of it comes from inside of us. Maybe it all comes from outside of us. And whether that be mystical, or whether that be physical, whether that be practical. I've had experiences where I'm looking for an answer for something, curious, and I'm holding it lightly in my consciousness, not working on it, just, I know there's this problem to be solved. And then I'll be out and something will happen in the world directly related to answer the question. It happens all the time. It doesn't happen once in a while. It happens all the time. I believe it happens all the time for everyone if they're paying attention. If you're open to the communication,

• 52:58Speaker 01

  we're getting information all the time. There's so much more information coming at us than we can digest that we pick and choose unconsciously certain data points, and then based on those data points, we make up a story about what happens. It's different for everybody. There's so much wisdom all around us, all of the time, coming in the form of nature, coming in the form of the culture, coming in the form of people speaking at a coffee shop. You know, overhearing a conversation.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  If you're open and if you're paying attention, and I would even go further to say, I mean, it probably works either way, but I would say, and if you invite it, it might work even better. I don't know if that's true, but why not? That's the thing.

• 53:54Rich Roll?

  But if you're inviting it, then you're sort of injecting a level of intention into the practice of paying attention and being open.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yes, and because of the subtle nature of the information that we're looking for, it's not getting shouted at us. It's the thing that if you weren't really quiet and really paying attention, you would likely miss. So we have to quiet ourselves and we have to live in a way. It's why the subtitle of the book is A Way of Being is we live in the world in this constant state of looking for clues, looking for information. What can I learn? What shapes a line? Where are their connections?

• 54:44Speaker 01

  What's more to be seen in the picture than just the face value? If I look deeper, what's happening? And that's the practice. And there are some suggestions of things that you can do to get there. But meditation is a key. For me, meditation is a key. It may not be everyone's. That's the other point of this is we all function in different ways. We can speak about diet. For when I was vegan, I was wildly overweight and sick. And that was part of my depression. And when you became a vegan, you became a world-class ultra-runner. So it's like it works different for different people. We each have to find what works for us and try things and see what works.

• 55:28Rich Roll?

  Which is its own form of openness.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 55:31Rich Roll?

  Being able to accept people in a nonjudgmental way, leading with curiosity, with patience, all of these principles, which we'll get into that are kind of splayed out over the course of the many pages of your book. But on this idea of being open, I mean, certainly in my own life, the best decisions that I've ever made, the most important decisions, and the reason that I'm even sitting here today is a result of a few brief sort of windows of opportunity where I was present enough to notice a whisper and respect it.

• 56:12Rich Roll?

  And take action on it. And I do believe like yourself that we're all visited with these moments. But we have to be in a place of receiving, right? Like, receiving is a huge theme of the work that you do. And, you know, it resonates throughout the book. Like, how can we be better receivers? How can we attune our antennae to be in receipt of the messages that are available to us? And you talk in the book about the idea of, it's sort of a hive mind collective consciousness notion that ideas are real things that exist among all of us. And when our antennae is properly attuned, we can draw that down. And then the artist can translate that into something real.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:57Rich Roll?

  But if the artist or anyone who's receiving that doesn't heed it, doesn't respect it, doesn't fertilize that seed, the seed being, you know, another big aspect of the book, it will ultimately be fertilized by somebody else, probably, if not simultaneously, in time proximity. And that's, it's an idea, sorry, let me just finish this one thought. We were talking about this the other day. That idea, you're talking about this idea, but I also read the same notion in Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic. Like, she talks about it in a very similar way.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Beautiful. I haven't read that. I'd like to read that.

• 57:35Rich Roll?

  I think you would like that book.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  I'll check it out. It's the idea of movements. When movements happen in the art world, movements don't happen where one person discovers something and a bunch of people copy it. It's, there was a time for abstraction, for abstract expressionism. In most art movements, it's difficult to pinpoint who was first. Because usually, it springs up in groups. And it might even spring up in different places in the world at the same time. Punk rock happened all over the world at the same time. It wasn't because one punk rock band influenced everyone else. It was a reaction to what had come before.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  It was time to take music out of the conservatory and bring it back to a street level. That's what that was about. And hip hop was the same. Out of the R and B suits and down to the be boy mentality of people that you might recognize on the street, how your friends might dress.

• 58:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 58:40Rich Roll?

  Pre-internet, by the way.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 58:42Rich Roll?

  Before ideas could spread instantaneously across the world.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely. At the time that I went to high school, I was a punk rocker. There were no other punk rockers in my high school. I didn't know any punk rockers. So it was, I just think, had the internet been around when I was a kid, I would have had friends all over the world with similar interests. I had none. I had none.

• 59:03Rich Roll?

  And you had to find your people.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, or I would go to a show and you'd meet people at a show.

• 59:08Rich Roll?

  There were just a couple of clubs and you could go.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  And once in a while, you know, there'd be a show once a month. And yeah, and there'd be 20 people and those would be, and you might meet, you know, you might meet two of them.

• 59:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 59:26Rich Roll?

  On that idea of being open, I think what's important about that is the notion of creativity itself and how we kind of culturally think about it. Like, there is this idea that there are artists and there are normal people. I was talking to somebody the other day and he said, "I don't have a creative bone in my body." Very successful person, by the way. Of course, that's not true. We're all innately creative. Now, most people, however, kind of, you were talking about like, the stories we tell, how we extract tiny little nuggets of the billions of pieces of information that we're being exposed to on a second-by-second basis, and we create a narrative out of that. And I think we get calcified around what reality is and like,

• 1:00:11Rich Roll?

  who we are and what we're doing and what this means and what that doesn't mean. We walk around with blinders, right? We've made decisions about what's important to pay attention to and what isn't. So we don't notice things that somebody who is natively more sensitive or somebody who has cultivated the practice of being more open can see. Like, we're sitting here, I have an idea of like, where we are and all of that kind of thing, but... A more sensitive person sitting here might be paying attention to something I don't even notice because they're attuned that way naturally, or they have developed a practice of expanding their awareness, so they're allowing more in.

• 1:00:53Rich Roll?

  So talk about this idea, like disabuse us of this idea that creativity is the genetic gift of the few, and they walk the earth differently from the rest of us. As somebody who's worked with so many brilliantly talented people.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  We make creative choices, all of us make creative choices every day of our lives. The way, when we choose to take a new route on a, that we've, we've driven the same route every day, and we try, we decide to take the scenic route, that's a creative choice. And if we're paying attention, and we decide, today I'm gonna take the scenic route, and if you happen to notice something that day on the scenic route that you didn't notice before, and that ends up helping you in the thing that you're working on, maybe it's a coincidence, but when you come to expect it to happen, it happens all the time, all the time, you know?

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Be prepared to be awestruck and surprised on a regular basis by things that you would never imagine happening. It happens all the time.

• 1:01:56Rich Roll?

  Isn't that a better, more fun way to live?

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  It's incredible. And you feel like, also you feel like you're part of this bigger thing. You know, I can't remember exactly how I said it in the book, but we think of ourselves as the conductor, but we're not the conductor. We're an orchestra member being conducted. And we're part of this bigger thing that's going on, and it works like, like clockwork. And we all play a part. Every one of us plays part, and we all have our part to play. So when someone says, "I'm not artistic," or "I'm not good at art," it'd be like saying, "I'm not a good monk." There is no such thing as not a good monk. You're either living your life as a monk, or you're not living your life as a monk. Monks aren't good or bad.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  You're either doing a monk, or you're not doing a monk. And we all live as artists, but we don't know it. And there are things we can do to amplify. The artistic side of ourselves that will make everything we do better. Everything, your relationships, your ability to communicate, your ability to listen, your joy of life, your feeling of connection, your ability to commune with nature will... It's like taking off blinders.

• 1:03:17Rich Roll?

  And to problem solve. We were talking the other day and you were like, "I don't like softball questions. I don't know how to just talk about what it is that I do." Like, I know how to solve problems, right? To bring an artistic sensibility into a problem-solving context is a process of undoing everything you think you know, trying to ditch whatever baggage and biases that you are loaded up with and approach it with a beginner's mind so that you can see it more expansively. And I think, obviously, it's been very effective in how you extract the best

• 1:03:59Rich Roll?

  out of the musicians that you work with, but I can't help but think about the applications in the real world to some of the biggest problems we have, whether it's climate change or artificial intelligence or the things that we're grappling with, that very smart people are trying to come up with new ideas around. We need that sensibility as a major part of that conversation. We can't solve these massive problems on logic and reason alone. We need inspiration. We need new orthogonal approaches that maybe we're not seeing.

• 1:04:39Rich Roll?

  And there's a really great story in the book about an AI that illustrates that point.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Would you like me to tell the story?

• 1:04:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, tell that story.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  I saw a video about seven years ago about AlphaGo, which was an AI system created to play the game Go.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  And they chose Go because up until this point chess had been used, computer chess. But Go is the most difficult, or it has the most potential combinations of any game. And it's the most difficult, would be the most difficult game for a computer to be able to play, be good at. Yeah, there's like hundreds of billions of permutations. Yes, there are more permutations than there are grains of sand on the planet. That's how many permutations. So it's a very difficult computing problem. And humans have been playing the game for 3,000 years. It's a very old game. And there was, there came a point in the movie where the computer is playing the world's grand master.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  And eventually, the computer makes a move that has never been made before. It's a funny thing to say because it's a game where you place a stone on a square. You can place it on any square you want. You know, there's no rule where you can and can't place it if you place it on one of the, one of the intersections of the squares. You can place a stone on any intersection that doesn't have a stone on it. And the computer made a move that was outside of the strategy understanding of human beings.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  It placed a stone in the, as I remember it, there were two choices based on the conditions for the computer to make a move. And to either make, it was either going to place a stone on the first line or the second line. And if they placed the stone on the first line, it meant a defensive game. And if they placed it on the second line, it was a defensive game. But anyone with experience who was playing the game of Go would know it's one of those two moves. Right. And those are the only two moves that any rational person would make? Anyone, yes. And the computer put the stone on line three. Now, there's no rule saying you can't put it on line three, but it, it was outside

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  of the imagination of the culture of Go for 3,000 years. It made a move that was... I'll say irrational to the human go world. Right, the community of go wizards. Yes, and it was so inflammatory that the Grand Master got up from the table in disgust. And there was some questions with the commentators, because this was, this was on television. This was like a the computer versus man, big story. People thought the computer made a mistake. It was like it was such a wrong move, couldn't be. And the computer ends up winning that game.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  The Grand Master eventually comes back after he composes himself and the computer wins the game. And the Grand Master ends up retiring because his mind is so blown by what happened. Right. And when I'm watching this story, I realized there were tears running down my face and I'm crying. And I wasn't sure why. And I thought about it for a while. And it wasn't, the most obvious answer was the computer beat the man. Oh no, it's the end of the world. Man loses to the computer. I'm crying because we're, but it wasn't that at all.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  What it was, was the reason, I realized the reason the computer won was because the computer didn't know more than the human. The computer knew less than the human. The computer only knew the rules of the game. It didn't know the customs, the morals, the mores, the stories. What one Grand Master learns from another Grand Master. The cultural references over the years of the game, didn't know the history. The etiquette. Didn't know any of that. All it knew was, I could put it anywhere. By putting it here, it's going to increase my chances of winning mathematically.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  So the computer solved a problem not by knowing more, but by knowing less. And that's a really beautiful idea for me. Because I, it gets back to the beginner's mind idea. It's not that we need to necessarily learn more. It's more like we need to think different. Like, maybe if we can let go of some of our beliefs, if we can let go of some of the stories that we hold. If we watch an event happen, instead of accepting the first version of the story that comes to us to help us survive in the world, that's what we do. We'll, we'll see a series of events,

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  and we make up a story that explains what that is. And that way, we can sleep at night.

• 1:10:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Because really, we don't know anything. We don't know anything.

• 1:10:14Rich Roll?

  That's the powerful epiphany in the whole thing. This humility to embrace the idea that we really don't know that much. And when you look at the Webb Telescope images, it's so awe-inspiring, and it's such a healthy dose of humility to that point, right? We walk around rational beings. It's the age of reason and enlightenment. We have answered many questions, and to the questions that we don't yet have answers to, we feel we're capable of answering those very soon. And yet, that is still such an incredibly limited perspective

• 1:10:56Rich Roll?

  on the totality of what we're actually fucking contending with, which is beyond our ability as these tiny organisms to comprehend.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 1:11:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 1:11:08Rich Roll?

  So to walk the earth with that sensibility of, actually, we don't really know anything.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  We don't really know anything. And, and when something happens, to say, oh, that, it might be that. Maybe it's that.

• 1:11:21Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Or, let's see if we can come up with another reason. What else could it be? And like, not assuming things are as they seem on their face.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not. Or thinking, I can think of so many times over the course of my life where I thought that someone was mad at me, or I thought that, like, I thought I knew it was in someone else's head. And it was never true. It was only just self, negative self-talk, or some misunderstood, something that I misunderstood, or-

• 1:11:55Rich Roll?

  That causes our own suffering.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So much of the difficulty is self-inflicted. And the more we can let go of all of our beliefs and just experience what happens and see what works, try things, it's like, that works. And not to assume, well, that works, so that's the only way. No, that works, and maybe there's a hundred other ways.

• 1:12:22Rich Roll?

  So what would be an example of taking that notion into the studio? Like, is there a situation in which you consciously thought, you know, let's take a tip from AlphaGo and try to unlearn what we think we know about what we're doing here and approach it from the other side?

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  The first thing that comes to mind, and I don't even know if we've done this, but the first thing that comes to mind when you say that is to ask a musician, a great musician, most of the people I get to work with are really talented, to try playing on an instrument that they're not familiar with. That would be an example of like, let's let go of all of your practice and everything that we think of what makes you great at what you do. You're the wizard on this instrument. Let's play something else that you never played before and see what happens. And let's see where that goes. Let's see if we find something new.

• 1:13:15Rich Roll?

  Shake it up.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Who knows?

• 1:13:17Rich Roll?

  I don't know if this story is apocryphal, but isn't that what occurred with The Talking Heads with Naive Melody? Like, every member of the band played an instrument that they didn't play.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  I didn't know that.

• 1:13:29Rich Roll?

  And that is how that song came together, which ends up being one of their, if not the, you know, best song they ever created.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Beautiful. I didn't know that.

• 1:13:38Rich Roll?

  It might not be true, but I've heard that. I've heard that story.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  A story on the other side.

• 1:13:42Rich Roll?

  And that's why it's called Naive Melody. Like, the naivete of it is what created the beauty.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  It's funny that Van Halen's biggest hit at the time, Eddie Van Halen's one of the greatest guitar players of all time, and "Song Jump" was maybe the first song he ever just played a keyboard on, and that was their biggest hit. And he was the greatest guitar player of the century for some, yet the song that worked was the one where he played the keyboard.

• 1:14:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So, in this idea of the creation of art and creativity as a way of being, there's this quote, it's near the beginning of the book, if memory serves me, this quote by Robert Henry, who was a painter, and he says, "The role of the artist isn't to make art, but to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable." So it's about creating an environment, like acculturing a mindset, a way of walking the planet such that you're conducive to the messages and the material execution of the inspiration and the ideas.

• 1:14:50Rich Roll?

  And that's really kind of the role that you serve. Like, how can you be a facilitator of enhancing the container of creation, right? And it's a guru role, it's a coach role, it's a teacher role, and it requires a certain delicate touch, right? Like, you have to be patient. Like, when the other, the record producer or executive said to you, like, "I don't know how you could be so patient." Like, you have to be patient in order, and you have to listen and marinate in all of this stuff and just gently guide the sensitive soul to that landing place so the highest expression can emerge.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  And to do it with as little, I try to do it with as little of a footprint as possible. So, in some cases, I'm more involved, in some cases, I'm less involved, but I'm only as involved as I need to be. If there was a way to make it happen... Where, I mean, in a dream scenario, if I could produce an artist, support them in doing their best work without ever meeting or speaking to them, that would be the highest form of it. I've not achieved that level yet. But that would be the ultimate version of it.

• 1:16:08Rich Roll?

  Just the shadow lurking in the background.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  It would just happen.

• 1:16:12Rich Roll?

  What happens, though, I'm sure this happens. You're in the studio, you're working it out, playback something that you just laid down, and the artist says, "Well, what do you think, Rick? If your job is not to inject your own sensibility into it, do you have to mirror that back to the artist? Or like, how do you kind of gracefully dance around that?

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  My job is to mirror my true reflection as it's needed. So in that case, if I'm asked what I think, I will absolutely say what I think, good or bad. I'll say it in a way where it's not confrontational or not unkind. But we're talking about something outside of ourselves. I would never say it about the person. It's never about the person. It's if someone takes criticism personally, the game is over. And it's helpful to remove whatever it is that we're making from the people making it. We're making this thing.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  It's a reflection of us, but it's not us. It's this thing out here. And once we have this thing out here, we could talk about this thing. It's not dangerous to talk about this thing because I'm pointing at, right now, I'm pointing at the table. I'm not pointing at Rich. So it's like, I'm not saying you're no good. I'm saying this aspect of this thing, maybe there's a way to do this part better. This part's good, this part maybe can be better. Let's see, you have any ideas? How would we make this part better? Can it be better?

• 1:17:51Rich Roll?

  It's powerful to restrict that feedback to the work, taking the personality out of it so that it's purely focused on the common goal of making the thing great, right? Like, it's not a commentary or a referendum on the human being.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  Never.

• 1:18:05Rich Roll?

  Otherwise, you're dead in the water.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Yes, it can't be.

• 1:18:08Rich Roll?

  And that's applicable in life, you know?

• 1:18:12Rich Roll?

  It's really interesting to sort of be a fly on the wall for like a note session with people who really know what they're doing. And you can see it's its own art form, right? To do it properly. And it takes a lot of, you know, it's a soft touch, it takes grace, it takes experience to do it well. And it requires that the ego has to vanish, right? All egos have to be set aside. We're in unison as a team to create this great thing. Our only interest is in making the best thing possible. Credit, all of that, who cares about that? And there's a maturity that's required for that, right? But it's cool, there's a, you know, the comedian, Mike Birbiglia?

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Uh-uh.

• 1:18:56Rich Roll?

  He's a great stand-up comedian. He has a podcast called Working It Out. And what he does is he'll bring people on, other comedians, writers, actors, people who are artistic in some way. And they each share what they're working on. And then they give each other feedback on the podcast.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Sounds great.

• 1:19:16Rich Roll?

  Which I think is such a service to people.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:19:20Rich Roll?

  To hear people who are, who really care about craft and know how to communicate what's good, what isn't working, et cetera, in a really constructive, healthy way. Because it's so applicable to all other areas of our life. If you're having an argument with your spouse, your partner, if you're having a conflict at work, like, all of these skills have high, high applicability in all areas of life.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And taking the ego out of all of it is such a key component of allowing the thing to be the best thing it can be. If it's about you, it's about you. It's not about it. And it's not about it being its best, whatever that is, whatever that is. Or to, in any way, be defensive.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  When someone's sharing information, when someone gives criticism, that's how they see it. It's helpful. It's helpful to you to know. You don't have to see what they see, but it's helpful to know that that's what they see. And the fact that it's different than what you see, that's good for you to know. That's not bad for you to know. That's helpful information.

• 1:20:33Rich Roll?

  Right, but our insecurities end up hearing, you're an untalented hack, you're a terrible person, you don't know what you're doing, you truly are the imposter that you believe yourself to be. Like, we create these narratives out of that in a way that ends up being destructive. And I would suspect, I'm interested in your thoughts on this, that the most generative artists are the ones who understand how to remove the ego and receive the feedback for the best interest of the project.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And it's something, for someone who's never had helpful criticism before, it can be shocking. I can remember one artist, very successful artist. I was listening to some new songs that they were playing me. And I gave, you know, very analytical, everything that I felt on every song as they, you know, on this one, I felt this, this, this, this. On this one, I felt this, this, this, this. And I finished, and it's completely analytical, talking about the craft, just the specifics of these things. And he said, "Have you ever talked to an artist like this before?" I said, "Every day. It's my job." He's like, "No one's ever talked to me like this before." I said, "Well, I'm here in service to you.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  I'm here to help. These are the things that resonated with me. These are the things that didn't. This is information to help you." And we ended up working really well together after that. But there was this initial like, wow, no one's ever told me anything before.

• 1:22:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  No one's ever shared what they, especially with people who are successful. People who are successful are used to hearing, yes, yes, yes. Everything's great. And it's not helpful.

• 1:22:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  It's not helpful. It's helpful to have, yes, yes, yes, when it is, yes, yes, yes. And hmm, is that as good as it could be? When is that as good as it can be? Having some sense of reality. Otherwise, there's no grounding. They're operating in a vacuum and they lose perspective with what's really happening. If they have no, no ability to get feed, real feedback.

• 1:22:46Rich Roll?

  Humbling yourself to be a craftsman among craftsmen, right?

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Beautiful.

• 1:22:52Rich Roll?

  In service.

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Well said.

• 1:22:53Rich Roll?

  To the higher purpose of the work.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:22:56Rich Roll?

  So in this idea of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we're capable of, and how the means by which we communicate with others, the assumptions we make about how those communications are received. I think we need a new perspective on how to shift how we think about that or to dislodge our entrenched thinking about how we see ourselves and how others see us. And this idea is illustrated beautifully by this psychological experiment that we were talking about the other day. So I think it would be cool to kind of, even though we are ending a little bit shorter

• 1:23:36Rich Roll?

  than I wanted to, like, it will give people something to ponder and consider until we meet again, because we're gonna have to do a part two.

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  Great. I'm in.

• 1:23:45Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  Let's close our eyes, unless you're driving.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Close your eyes and envision a desert. A desert.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Once you have pictured the desert, in the desert, there is a cube. A cube. Visualize the cube in the desert.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  There is also a ladder.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  See the ladder.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  There are flowers in the desert.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Notice the flowers.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  There's a horse in the desert.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  Picture the horse.

• 1:24:47Speaker 01

  And finally, there is a storm.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  What's interesting about this experiment is if you were to, you might even want to write down the details of your, of what you're imagining. And

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  the next time you're with a friend or a loved one,

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  ask them to do the same. You can either play this for them or

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  read them the cues, the six cues. And then compare your cube image story and their cube image story, and see how similar or different they are. Try it with your friends. It's interesting. It's an old, it's an old, I first did this about 20 years ago. And I remember the first time I did it, having a very clear vision of what my, my story was when that, when I was given those cues, very simple cues. And I imagined that's what it looked like. And then I spoke to some other people around the table who took the same, answered the same questions. And

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  it was mind blowing how different our pictures were. And it's a great example of how we all imagine such different worlds. And it's why

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  if we don't make the thing we want to make,

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  if someone else's antenna is more tuned to ours, and they pick up the same source material.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  The thing they make, it's not gonna be the same thing we would make. No one can do our part.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  Our picture is our picture. So there's a great benefit in taking a risk, making the thing that's interesting to you, sharing it with the world, because if you don't do it, nobody else will. You're the only one who can make the art that you can make. And it's not in competition with anyone else. There is no competition. There's no competition who has a better picture in their head. It's a reflection of you. Everything that you make is a reflection of who you are. And how you live in the world will impact the things that you make. And I wish the best of luck on the journey in making beautiful things that we can all enjoy.

• 1:27:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's beautifully put. I think a fantastic way to end this, this call to action that we all have something inside of us that is worthy of exploration and expression because there is no other you. And that in and of itself makes you infinitely valuable.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:27:41Rich Roll?

  And you're depriving all of us of that if you choose not to share.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  True. And if you want to know the psychological meanings of your cube, you can Google cube psychology test. And I'm sure you'll find the, what everything means.

• 1:28:01Rich Roll?

  Right on. Yeah. Do that, then pick up the creative act. It really is a beautiful expression. If you want to more finely attune your radar to the subtle art of making things and adopting a certain way of being, I can't think of any better way to start there. I mean, it's, it's really something special. So thank you for writing it. And I think people are gonna really enjoy it.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Beautiful. Thank you for speaking to me and thank you so much for reading it.

• 1:28:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I hope that I can call you friend. And again, I would like to have you back. So if we ever find ourselves, even though we, we kind of live close to each other, you're in parts unknown. So I had to grab this opportunity. We have background noise and all of that, but it's an organic living, breathing thing, man.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  Beautiful.

• 1:28:49Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  I love it. And when we hear it back, we'll remember where we are and what's happening. It's beautiful.

• 1:28:54Rich Roll?

  For sure. Forever.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  Cool. Thank you, sir.

• 1:28:56Rich Roll?

  Thank you.

• 1:29:10Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review

• 1:29:53Rich Roll?

  and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated, and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, The Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis, Dan Drake,

• 1:30:36Rich Roll?

  and A.J. Akpodiate. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.