Rick Rubin is a hip-hop producer, songwriter, and songwriter. He s worked with some of the biggest names in hip hop, including Jay-Z, Nipsey Hussle, Nas, and many others. In this episode, Rick talks about how he got his start in the music business, and how he became one of the most successful producers of all time. He also talks about his new book, How to Make It in the Business: The Story of Rick Rubin, which is out now. Rick also discusses how he went from being a rock and roll drummer in a punk rock band to writing and producing some of hip hop s most iconic songs, including his first album, The Best of the Best, and why he s one of my favorite artists of all-time. He s also the author of the book How To Make It In The Business: How to Be a Producer and has written a new book called How I Became a Songwriter which you should be read. If you haven t done so already, you re missing out on this episode of the podcast, you ll definitely want to check it out. It s a must listen. Enjoy this episode and tweet me to let me know what you thought of it! if you liked it or if you have any thoughts or suggestions on what you d like it to be included in the next episode. Timestamps. Tweet Me! on Insta: . and of this episode! or any other episode you dm me a song you re listening to this episode? in the podcast! . . or you re a fan of the show? , tweet me! and I ll send it to me a message! if it s a song I should be featured on the next one! ;) on insta , and I d be sure to send it on the podcast :) or a review! , right? or I ll be listening to it :) tweet me what you think of it or not? and what s your favorite part of the episode ? or what s the best song you like it s been listening to? is it a good one? tweet or tweet me a tweet about it? if so, I ll have it on my Insta story? .
00:02:32.000And there were very few at this time 12-inch singles would come out.
00:02:38.000And there would be, I don't know, I don't know if there were more than 30 or 40 rap songs in the world at this point in time.
00:02:50.000But there were these clubs where stuff would happen.
00:02:52.000And at this club that I went to called Negril, what you would normally only be able to see at a club in Harlem, like there was a club called Broadway International and there was a club called the Disco Fever, was brought downtown and people downtown could see it.
00:03:10.000So I started going every Tuesday night.
00:03:12.000That's when I was going to NYU. And I just loved the music.
00:03:19.000I would buy every 12-inch single that would come out when it would come out, and none of them sounded like what it sounded like at the club.
00:04:03.000They were made by people who made other kinds of music.
00:04:06.000So they made them the same way they made other kinds of music when hip-hop was really different.
00:04:11.000So I started making hip-hop records really with the idea of I just wanted, as a fan, to hear what it sounded like in a club.
00:04:21.000So it was almost like a documentarian style.
00:04:26.000And I would just start documenting what I heard and making things that sounded more like the energy of a club, which was, again, different than these slick records.
00:04:33.000And part of it was because I didn't know what I was doing.
00:04:35.000I didn't have any training or skill, but that allowed...
00:05:52.000I just said, you know, I'm your biggest fan, and your new album doesn't sound like what's good about you guys, and let's work together to try to make something that's as good as you guys are.
00:06:08.000And he said, well, we're signing Sugar Hill, we can't really do that, but...
00:06:13.000You should talk to Special K, another member of the group.
00:06:15.000He's got a brother, T LaRock, who's a really good rapper, and you could do it with him.
00:07:59.000Break it up, break it up, break it up!
00:08:01.000You hear guitar, you hear bass, you hear drums, and it's a band playing, and it sounds like it's at a party, and then there's rapping on top of that.
00:08:47.000Now you haven't really heard that on records yet because it was what would happen live.
00:08:53.000The DJs were the musicians, but to people who made other kinds of music, the DJs were only playing back a band, so they assumed the record's supposed to be a band playing.
00:09:09.000And my assumption was that's not what it was.
00:09:11.000It was the DJ playing a drum machine and playing parts of records that that's what was exciting.
00:09:53.000It comes out of the idea of the break, starting with the break.
00:09:57.000The break is, you have a song that has all different parts in it, a traditional song, but there's one little part in it that has a cool drum beat.
00:10:09.000And what a DJ would do in those days was they would play just that little snippet of the song, might be four seconds, and they would have two turntables, and they'd play four seconds here, and then four seconds here, and then four seconds here, and four seconds here,
00:10:24.000to create a longer piece out of this four-second loop.
00:10:29.000But there was no such thing as a sampler then, so it only happened through live playing it.
00:10:38.000And then when did people figure out sampling?
00:10:41.000A lot of times sampling was maligned, right, in the early days.
00:11:04.000The way it was used in hip hop in the early days, I was saying we would use a snippet of a record and then sometimes we would even create a tape loop.
00:11:15.000So you would take a little piece of music on tape and then have it come back around and you'd edit it and splice it.
00:11:23.000And there's at least one song on the first Beastie Boys album that uses that technique.
00:11:29.000But it was about extending these pieces of music to create something new.
00:11:35.000And hip-hop from the beginning was always a form of montage.
00:11:39.000It was finding things and making something new out of it.
00:11:43.000It wasn't finding things to make it sound like it sounded.
00:11:47.000It was finding something and changing it into something new.
00:11:53.000And this montage process is the basis of hip-hop.
00:11:57.000And up until the time of It's Yours, we didn't really hear it on the records because people still were making records using traditional methods, non-hip-hop methods.
00:12:09.000Did you get a sense, like, while this was all happening, of how that was—this is like a completely new music genre.
00:12:20.000Like, it must have been very exciting.
00:12:22.000It was—being part of it was very exciting, and loving it was exciting, and there was a disconnect between that and the outside world.
00:12:35.000Because the outside world didn't recognize it, didn't even recognize it as music, much less something that was good, you know, like that could be good.
00:12:48.000It was viewed as this other thing, not music.
00:12:55.000I can remember being in, um, once Def Jam happened and we started having a lot of success putting out music, and I'm still probably at NYU, um...
00:13:08.000Labels would come around and want to be involved in one way or another, and one label asks, like, what do you attribute the success of this to?
00:13:17.000Now, these are people in the music business who are wooing us, wanting to work with us, and they're telling us they don't hear it as music.
00:13:26.000That doesn't even make sense today, right?
00:15:37.000Because people didn't know what to think.
00:15:39.000It's like some people thought you were ruining Walk This Way by adding Run DMC. And some people were like, why do you have Run DMC with rock and roll?
00:18:09.000I just had the idea of doing the song and recording the song with Run DMC, and then the label said, why don't we reach out to Aerosmith and ask if they would participate?
00:18:18.000I was like, that sounds crazy to me, but if they'll do it, obviously I'd love it.
00:18:24.000You know, I loved that band growing up.
00:18:25.000They were one of my favorite bands growing up.
00:18:40.000If you really stop and think about all the ripples that came out of that particular song, that song introduced so many people to hip-hop, and I'm sure so many hip-hop fans to rock and roll and Run-DMC. Absolutely.
00:18:53.000You know, combining with Aerosmith is like the perfect combination.
00:20:20.000They had actually put out an album called Done With Mirrors, which was like their comeback album before Walk This Way, and that was not well received.
00:20:31.000And then Walk This Way came out, and then it both broke Run DMC in a mainstream way and re-broke Aerosmith as a mainstream group.
00:20:42.000So then what happens with you after that?
00:20:44.000That song obviously is this giant smash and things just start happening then?
00:20:50.000Things start happening right from the beginning.
00:20:52.000Honestly, the whole thing was miraculous because I'm working in this form of music that people don't think is music, nobody likes and nobody cares about other than the 200 people at the Negril Club that I would go to.
00:21:11.000The first album I produced was LL Cool J. He was 16 at the time.
00:21:16.000And the way I met LL was because of the It's Yours record, the Teela Rock record that we listened to, it had Def Jam Recordings' name and the address, Five University Place, which was my dorm room at NYU. And we started getting demo tapes to the dorm room.
00:21:39.000And Adam Horowitz from the Beastie Boys was listening to all of the demo tapes, and he found the LL tapes.
00:24:59.000But it's just like, I think then, is that what happens?
00:25:03.000It's like now there's like a form that people accept for hip-hop.
00:25:07.000There's like a form that people accept for a certain band at that time.
00:25:11.000And then Paul's Boutique comes along and it's like, well now we're going to try something even wilder.
00:25:16.000It's always been the case that people come to expect, or the audience comes to expect a certain thing, and if you veer outside of those lines, it's often not well received.
00:25:28.000An example also, even Public Enemy, when we put out the first Public Enemy record, None of the—at this point in time, there were already stations playing rap music, like Master Mix shows on WBLS and KTU would be like Saturday night.
00:26:42.000I remember at the time that LL came out, another record came out called Roxanne Roxanne by a group called UTFO. And UTFO was a much bigger hit than LL's song.
00:26:57.000But over time, the consistency of LL's artistry Bypassed UTFO. But sometimes, like, the thing that catches on isn't the...
00:27:19.000One of the things that I found interesting about hip-hop was I can really remember this clearly because the first time I listened to N.W.A., I was on a treadmill.
00:28:00.000Like, I'd never heard that kind of violence and that extreme lyrics and just their depictions of real life in South Central L.A. And, I mean, it really ignited this completely new branch of hip-hop in a lot of ways.
00:28:33.000So when we started doing the stuff we were doing, hip-hop didn't really exist.
00:28:37.000And then all of a sudden it got popular.
00:28:39.000And once it got popular, it felt like the community changed.
00:28:44.000And it wasn't people getting into it out of love for hip-hop or wanting to continue pushing the boundaries of what was creatively possible.
00:28:55.000It just started all sounding like records we had already made.
00:29:01.000Everything was derivative at this point.
00:29:03.000So I started producing other, produced Slayer and Danzig, different kinds of music that felt more challenging to me in that moment, that just spoke to me more.
00:29:13.000And then I heard NWA. Actually, it was Eazy-E. NWA hadn't recorded yet.
00:29:18.000There was the Eazy-E album, which is the first album from Dre in the sound of what became NWA. Yeah.
00:29:37.000That's fascinating, too, that this new thing emerges, and then people just imitate the pattern of success, like whatever the successful pattern of that music.
00:30:03.000Everything I do is just personal taste.
00:30:05.000And it's what the book's about, is, like, really for people to trust, artists to trust in themselves, make something that speaks to themselves.
00:30:15.000And hopefully someone else will like it, but you can't second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like.
00:30:57.000When artists are not successful yet though, it's very difficult for them to find who they are because they're always just trying to figure out what's the path to success.
00:31:08.000Where success seems to be the carrot at the end of the stick.
00:31:11.000It's like there's always this something, you know, these guys have all this money, these guys have all these cars and these big houses, how do I get that?
00:32:08.000We experience that in stand-up comedy where there's these kind of derivative voices where they're kind of like finding what they think other people want to hear and they start saying it because they've heard other people say similar things that are now successful.
00:32:23.000And even if they have some sort of a short-term success doing that, it's not revolutionary.
00:33:34.000There was something about or there is something about someone like that that is completely unique.
00:33:42.000I think what you said, you said perfectly.
00:33:45.000That's what changes things and that's what lasts.
00:33:47.000Whereas something that's derivative or someone's just trying to do things that they think other people are going to buy that's going to be successful.
00:33:57.000You might start out that way and hopefully you can deviate and find your own voice, but if you don't, you can't keep imitating.
00:35:04.000And there are things that happen when you're successful that you're not expecting, and things become a lot more complicated in your life.
00:35:13.000It can shrink your life to the point of, you know, I know some rock stars over the years who literally never left their house or did anything.
00:36:38.000And not thinking about what people think about me.
00:36:42.000Just thinking about what I like, what's interesting.
00:36:46.000I think one of the things that really tempers me or keeps me sane is the workouts because they're so brutal and they're so hard that everything else is easy.
00:36:56.000And I think that's something that's missing from a lot of people's lives where you deal with the anxiety of fame and celebrity and just the attention and all the demands on you.
00:37:07.000And if all you're doing all day is like dreading those experiences, like if you're Tom Petty and you're hiding in your house, you're dreading going to dinner or dreading going out.
00:37:17.000Then those moments do become too big to deal with.
00:37:20.000And then you just want to get away as quickly as possible and go back to your house.
00:37:23.000You know, I mean, you see it in people that become famous.
00:37:27.000You know, as I've become friends with more and more famous people, you see the...
00:37:31.000And they're always, like, asking questions of other people that are also famous.
00:38:33.000So day-to-day for me, it's the workouts.
00:38:36.000It's doing things you don't want to do and doing them rigorously.
00:38:43.000And then when you get over it, there's also these physical changes that happen.
00:38:47.000The endorphin releases and the alleviation of anxiety, which I think is critical to being able to manage those states of fame.
00:38:59.000But you also got to have perspective and realize like, hey man, this is just what comes with it.
00:39:05.000But the most important thing is like, hey, you're getting to do what you want to do, which for me as a kid, you know, starting out doing stand-up when I was 21, it was like this impossible idea.
00:39:18.000The impossible idea was just being a professional.
00:39:21.000Like, God, wouldn't it be great to not have a job?
00:39:23.000Just to be able to get money from stand-up?
00:39:33.000You know, my good friend Steve Graham, who was an ophthalmologist at the time and a flight surgeon, incredible guy that I'm still good friends with to this day, he's the one who talked me into it.
00:40:47.000You think I'm funny because you like me.
00:40:48.000I go, other people are going to think I'm an asshole.
00:40:50.000And plus, this is like Boston, conservative, late 80s, early, you know, like the late 80s people were fucking pretty conservative about like what they thought was funny.
00:41:04.000And then Kinison came along in 86. And that was right at the time when I started to consider it because I was, it's a funny story, I probably told this on the podcast before, but I was working at the Boston Athletic Club, which was a fitness club in South Boston.
00:43:05.000And I would watch Evening the Improv or The Tonight Show and these guys would have the blazers on with the rolled up sleeves and like, I gotta dress like that.
00:43:39.000So to me, my life was so extreme and so filled with violence and so wild that this stayed sort of sedate existence of like, did you ever notice?
00:45:00.000After being a little kid of listening to music like British Invasion, Beatles, Monkeys, that kind of music when I was a little kid, then I'd stop listening to music and only listen to comedy for years until junior high school when I started listening to hard rock.
00:45:18.000But I remember seeing Sam and being blown away, and I was already doing music at this time and had a label, and I went to find him, and then I found out he already had a record out, and I was so bummed.
00:45:29.000He didn't have a record out, but he was signed to Warner Brothers, and I was bummed.
00:45:33.000And then I saw Dice, and Dice blew me away.
00:46:00.000And it was another one of those, like when I first saw Sam, it's like, he's not, it's a very different character than Sam, but it's as hard and as extreme.
00:46:41.000The Day the Laughter Died, Cassette 1, which is one of my all-time favorite comedy CDs, specials, whatever it is, recordings, because it was so crazy that he did that.
00:48:58.000And then in honor of doing The Garden, I remember saying, Andrew, how about instead of recording The Garden...
00:49:07.000Let's try to do a set at Dangerfields and let's find out what night would be the least, like the most suburban, like not anyone who likes comedy, people who are just going to a club because they're traveling through New York.
00:49:25.000The people who will most likely not like it.
00:49:46.000We thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
00:49:49.000One of my favorite parts of that cassette or that recording is when some guy in the audience goes, you're about as funny as a glass of milk.
00:52:29.000And we had already done, I think at that time we had maybe done either three, probably three full regular comedy albums by this point in time.
00:54:58.000It's like they would vilify him and portray him As if he was hateful when all he was doing was trying to make people laugh and succeeding tremendously in doing that.
00:56:02.000That's when I started, like, I called my manager up and I said, let's start doing clubs in all these different cities.
00:56:07.000So when I wasn't doing news radio, when I wasn't on television, I would go off on the weekends and I would go, you know, do fucking wherever, Houston, Phoenix.
00:56:15.000And I started doing the road because of Dice's direction.
00:56:26.000First of all, it made me a real comedian.
00:56:29.000Well, the store made me a real comedian, but the road made me a real headliner, because I was doing an hour in these towns, and I was doing two shows Friday, two shows Saturday, and I was getting the feel of different vibes,
00:56:45.000and that's really when I fell in love with Texas.
00:56:47.000It was 97 when I started coming to Texas, 98. And they were just so rowdy and fun and free.
00:56:57.000And there was a different, there was a rebellious friendliness to them.
00:57:02.000And I was like, God, I love these people.
00:57:05.000And the first album I recorded in 99 on Warner Brothers was the I'm Gonna Be Dead Someday.
00:57:16.000Really like the touring and all that was because it dies like that.
00:57:19.000That's what really ignited me Ignited my my inspiration to go do that and it is There's too many guys that were just staying in town and everybody at that time In the 90s and it was kind of starting to die off But there was this thing where everybody wanted a sitcom that was the Holy Grail the Holy Grail mean the real Holy Grail was the tonight show if you would be the hope that was out of my reach I was you know in my fucking 20s it was not gonna happen and But the holy grail was getting a sitcom.
01:01:02.000Al Gore's wife, Tipper Gore, at the time, was the one who was leading this fight against these lyrics.
01:01:07.000Because to a lot of these house moms and shit, they would hear those lyrics coming out of their son's bedroom, and they're like, what the fuck is this?
01:02:03.000But then I'd hear the Allman Brothers and be like, fuck yeah.
01:02:07.000It was like, for whatever it is, it's like whatever your personality is, your life experiences, The place you grew up, that shit resonated with me.
01:02:57.000He has so many, the Ill Street Blues, so many great hip-hop songs that I remember listening to them at the time going, why isn't this bigger?
01:03:07.000Like, why don't more people know about this?
01:03:10.000Why isn't this, like, you know, to this day, you know, people will go back and they'll talk about, like, Nas, who's fucking incredible, but Cool G Rap slips by.
01:03:27.000Sometimes it's not based on how good it is.
01:03:30.000The stars line up at certain times for certain things to happen, and they happen.
01:03:36.000And sometimes you can make something great, and it doesn't connect for whatever reason.
01:03:40.000I found this out from making a lot of stuff.
01:03:42.000Sometimes you make two things that you think are the two best things you've ever made, and one of them connects with the world, and one of them doesn't.
01:03:48.000And it might not have anything to do with...
01:04:51.000And knowing Dice, as long as I've known him and seen so many late night sets, like some of my favorite sets of Dice, Dice would go up in the OR and he would have a challenge he would do where he wouldn't talk.
01:06:28.000And when he's on stage it really shows.
01:06:32.000Well Chris though, Chris will take a lot of chances on stage too.
01:06:36.000And Chris also has this very unusual approach where he will like Purposely try to find the beats and and you know and leave dead air because he's finding these beats and Like stand on stage the comics don't be like what else what else?
01:06:55.000And I'll have it like where he's you know, he's just like Thinking and like the audience is like I'm worried.
01:07:21.000This audience, I know you're here to see comedy and you're happy that Chris Rock just showed up, but Chris Rock was not announced, so it wasn't like this was a big production and he was going to do his very best material.
01:07:34.000He was there to try to put pieces together.
01:07:37.000And he would have a team of comics in the back.
01:08:28.000Will Smith slapping him, I think, woke up...
01:08:33.000I mean, I haven't talked to him about this.
01:08:35.000My impression was that I think now he understands that those people, those Hollywood people, are fucking crazy.
01:08:43.000They're all in this weird, bizarre cult of actors And Oscars and parties and applause and in this this very bizarre Disconnected world,
01:08:59.000you know of these are our heroes and these are the most important people in the world and these people that win these awards and make these films they're the most appreciated most respected and Him getting slapped And then him trying to go back to comedy and seeing Will Smith just meltdown in front of him.
01:09:29.000That moment was probably the end of how anybody will ever think of Will Smith again as this movie star guy who's like this happy guy with his family who's like putting together all these incredible films and goes on to win the Academy Award that night goes on stage and they applaud him after he just assaulted one of the greatest comedians that's ever lived over the most innocuous roast joke The most innocuous.
01:11:05.000Like, we just did Columbus together a couple weeks ago, and he can take a fucking giant room and thousands of people and make it feel like you're just hanging with them in a living room somewhere or in a small club.
01:12:34.000And he just listens to the beat and hums, hums, and then goes on the mic, you know, 20 minutes later and just says a whole complicated verse.
01:14:57.000It's not uncommon for singers or rappers to hear something and immediately start, like, automatic writing, where they'll just start saying nonsense words.
01:15:22.000Just coming out now, I think, but the first one came out like six months ago, but two double albums.
01:15:27.000And the way Anthony works is he'll hear the music and he'll sing along, but he'll sing along with an idea of a melody, but he doesn't yet have words, and just sing nonsense words, and just sing along, making up nonsense words.
01:15:42.000Automatically, real-time, and then listens back and says, oh, okay, this phrase in this spot sounds good, and this phrase in this spot sounds good.
01:15:51.000And then it's like a puzzle where you fill in the rest.
01:15:54.000It's like you don't necessarily have an idea of what the song's going to be about, or you might not even know what the song's about until you finish.
01:16:00.000You might not even know after the song's finished what it's about.
01:16:03.000You might not know for years what it's about because it's like a dream.
01:16:13.000It's a great way to write, to just like participate with what's going on in a free way and then listen back to what you did and look for clues.
01:16:25.000Look for where is the connective tissue here?
01:16:28.000Are there any things here that sound like they belong there?
01:16:32.000Dan Auerbach from the Black Keys, he does that.
01:16:36.000He says he gets really high, and he just makes up words.
01:16:40.000He'll make up words to the music, and just try to find how it works.
01:16:47.000He's just trying to figure it out as he's doing it.
01:16:51.000There's parallels to comedy, I think, because in comedy, you can write things, and I do.
01:16:58.000I write a lot of things, but sometimes...
01:17:01.000When you're on stage, there's a path that just opens up and you know that this is the way to do it.
01:17:08.000It's different than the way you wrote it.
01:17:09.000Because the audience is there and you feel it.
01:17:12.000Because you only feel it when you're performing.
01:17:14.000But with comedy, the thing that's so different is the only way we ever know it's any good.
01:17:25.000Cosby used to just write it all out and then he would go on stage or have it out and then not even need to rehearse it, not need to work it out in front of clubs.
01:17:35.000He would just do it in front of giant audiences and it would be done.
01:18:33.000It's all different, and it all comes alive while you're performing, which I guess parallels with music, but the benefit of music is you can create it in the studio.
01:18:45.000You could put it together in the studio, and you can make fucking incredible music almost in a vacuum.
01:21:11.000One of the more brilliant things about the producers and Paul Sims, the writer of that show, the head writer of that show, is that he would let you do that.
01:21:19.000He would let you come up with a totally alternative punchline.
01:21:22.000And then he would sit there and laugh and go, yeah, yeah, keep that, keep that.
01:21:26.000And he would let you fuck around with it.
01:21:29.000So it gave all the performers all this freedom.
01:21:32.000It also allowed the thing to come alive like while performing it the same way you would kind of do stand-up like you would figure out the beats while you were actually doing it and then you really didn't know until the audience was there and Then when the audience said this job lines that I didn't think were good and I would say I don't know do we have a better line for this and they were like just try it just try it I'm like okay I was like didn't believe it and I'd say the line and to get a huge laugh and I'd be like what the fuck I Like,
01:22:48.000One of the brilliant things about Curb is because he doesn't have that script, people are talking the way they talk in real life.
01:22:55.000They kind of talk over each other and they pause when the other person is talking and then they chime in and it seems like a real conversation versus like Big Bang Theory.
01:23:08.000Or one of those shows that's more formulaic, like Set Up, Punch Lines, where you train monkeys and you're teaching them how to get a piece of candy.
01:27:22.000And the feeling of going on stage for the very first time, I'll never forget, was so alien, so bizarre, just to hear my voice and a microphone.
01:27:49.000And he was a professional, so he would joke around about how this is Comedy Hell, and you're going to watch people bomb, it's going to be terrible.
01:27:56.000But then you'll see professionals that night and they'll go up.
01:28:00.000So the first night I ever went to see comedy, I got to see people that were awful.
01:28:06.000And then I got to see like a couple of like real world class comics would go on stage and kill for 10-15 minutes.
01:28:45.000I mean, you realize this is one layer of paint at a time.
01:28:48.000One, you know, 13 sets a night hopping around, catch a rising star and fucking the cellar and going to all these clubs in New York and then puts it together and then takes it to Boston or takes it to Cleveland or takes it to all these places.
01:32:22.000And you put up with having to travel and having to sleep in strange places and all the drudgery of going on the road for that little hit of the excitement to being on stage.
01:32:48.000You're When you're entertaining a group of people like that, you're taking them on this wild journey of laughter and ideas and they leave like you just hit them with a drug.
01:33:00.000You just fucking BOOM! You just drop this drug on them and they walk out of there feeling better.
01:33:15.000You know, and it's your responsibility to do that work so that that can happen again.
01:33:19.000And you got to be on point and you got to go over your notes and you got to be prepared and you got to do a lot of sets so that you're polished and smooth and Confident.
01:33:28.000You got all the beats in your head and then you also have to be loose and relaxed so that it can flow and then you can adjust to some chaos if something happens in the crowd and it's the best.
01:33:40.000In the studio recording, it's similar in that there's a lot of time where nothing good is happening, you know, and it's out of our control where Everybody's playing and they're doing their best,
01:33:56.000but it doesn't matter for whatever reason.
01:34:00.000When you're listening to it, it's just not great.
01:34:04.000And it's just really a game of patience, of waiting or trying different things.
01:34:09.000Like, how about if we do it like this?
01:34:49.000If you feel like you're going to try something and someone's going to tell you that was no good, that wouldn't feel like you want to do that again.
01:34:59.000So part of it is like the headspace of less people around, no audience.
01:35:08.000Literally, it's set up similar to this, where it'll be the producer and the artist, one engineer, and nobody else.
01:35:19.000And if it's a band, it's just this group of people.
01:35:23.000The least amount of people, not friends hanging out, not anybody watching.
01:35:29.000So there's a sense of we're there to work.
01:35:58.000It's more let's have fun, make music, let's see what happens, and then down the road we'll look back on it and see if there's anything good there.
01:36:06.000Then in terms of the physical location, You want to create a space where it feels like a place you want to hang out and it's a good feeling and sometimes we'll do something like on the first album I produced with the Chili Peppers we recorded it in a house instead of recording it in a recording studio because they had made four albums prior to that in a recording studio and they had told me None of those experiences were good.
01:36:34.000Not necessarily because of the studio, but it was just an interesting point.
01:37:01.000Just now, a few months ago, I was in Costa Rica recording a new album with The Strokes, and we rented this house up on the top of a mountain Wow.
01:37:42.000But if you've done a bunch in a big professional studio, what else can we do that'll spark the feeling of we're doing something new and different?
01:39:46.000And we're making an amazing, amazing, groundbreaking, revolutionary, beautiful, artistically heightened, incredible record.
01:39:55.000If Baron von Munchausen had ejaculated the four of us, being the Red Hot Chili Peppers, onto a chess board, I would have to say that Rick Rubin would be the perfect chess player for that particular board.
01:40:27.000It's helping to get the best performance, talk about if the material's good enough, how it could be better, create an environment where it's exciting to do what we're going to do, and make any suggestions, not just as it relates to The task at hand,
01:40:45.000but anything you can do in your life that would benefit the task at hand.
01:40:50.000And when you decide to work with an artist, how do you make that determination?
01:41:03.000How do you know if you're going to vibe with them?
01:41:04.000We usually get together and talk, and it comes more from the...
01:41:09.000The energy in the conversation can feel it.
01:41:12.000And if we share a way in, like the Chili Peppers had asked me to produce them before that, and I went to a rehearsal and the energy wasn't right.
01:41:25.000Like I could feel, I didn't know what it was.
01:41:30.000But the energy in the room didn't feel good to me.
01:41:33.000And it turns out at that time, they were really heavily into drugs, like serious drugs.
01:41:39.000And you could see this, like, these are not people who trust each other.
01:41:43.000You know, that was a feeling in the room, was like, just the way they were looking at each other, it wasn't like...
01:42:31.000And sometimes it'll be material, like The Strokes had asked me to produce them several times in the past, and they would send me demos, and I listened to the demos, and I just couldn't see a way in.
01:43:03.000They sent me these demos that were probably the worst demos they ever sent in terms of, you know, like a 20 seconds into an iPhone would be at one song.
01:46:25.000I don't really know anything about music.
01:46:28.000It's more a way of looking at the world.
01:46:33.000And wanting it to be the best it could possibly be and doing whatever it takes to be the best it could possibly be and being true to knowing that no one else knows.
01:46:43.000I'm not saying I know, but that everyone's idea is as valuable as mine.
01:46:55.000If we can be true to ourselves and show it, At least that's been my experience, you know, because I never went into anything thinking anything was going to be successful at any point in time.
01:47:08.000It's always been, I make this thing because I like it.
01:47:11.000I'm excited to show it to my friend, you know, a friend or two friends.
01:47:43.000And I got to work with Johnny Cash for the last ten years of his life, so the last few chapters of that book was gonna be about my time with Johnny Cash, so he asked to spend a few days with me.
01:47:53.000So we hung out, and he asked me a lot of questions, and we listened back to some of the recordings, and I tend not to listen back to things I've worked on in the past because I'm always working on something new.
01:48:04.000And I've listened to it a million times when we were making it.
01:48:29.000I had a better understanding of that relationship, and it was interesting to me, and I liked it.
01:48:35.000And then I thought, okay, if this is what book creation could be like, where I could learn something, and if I learn it, I could share it, and what can I possibly share that would be helpful?
01:48:52.000And I thought, well, I only get to work with a handful of artists every year.
01:48:58.000Wouldn't it be great if the things that happen in the studio or this way of looking at the world could be available to other people?
01:49:18.000So if you ask me, you give me a hypothetical question, or if I think back to something that happened in the past and a good outcome happened, I would try to reverse engineer why those decisions were made.
01:49:32.000In the moment, they weren't made for any thoughtful reason.
01:49:36.000They were made out of reactions or trying something.
01:49:42.000But they're rarely based on a principle.
01:49:47.000So the book was trying to reverse engineer all things that have worked out To see if there were principles underlying that could be applied to other things.
01:52:10.000It allows us to make better stuff because we start looking for connections in the world.
01:52:17.000You'll notice something on your drive that doesn't make sense or someone will recommend something to you that sounds like that's not for you.
01:52:24.000In the past, when someone would recommend something to me, it sounded like it wasn't for me.
01:53:08.000My experience is when you are open and looking for these clues in the world, they're happening all the time, and they're happening often right when you need them.
01:53:21.000There's a story, there's a song, System of Down song called...
01:53:30.000And it has this big, do you know that song?
01:53:33.000It has this big bridge section in it where Serge, the lyric writer, the singer, lyric writer, didn't have words for this one part of the song.
01:53:45.000And we're sitting in the library in my old house.
01:53:48.000And he said, you know, I don't have words for this.
01:56:52.000All through questioning an interview, recording, loads of conversations, and it's just random, just looking for information.
01:57:04.000And it got to the point where it had like a thousand pages of information.
01:57:10.000And then the task was getting from that format into the book, and it took four years to get the content, and then it took three years to get the form.
01:57:25.000And so you had this idea to do it, and then as it's coming together, did it become what you initially thought it was going to be, or did it become its own thing?
01:58:40.000And I read that and every time a new subject came up, I gave it a name.
01:58:47.000And originally it was 68 areas of thought.
01:58:50.000And those were things that came up that I thought, okay, even if it didn't do a deep dive into each of these areas of thought, this is something related to creativity that's interesting.
01:59:02.000So I had this list based on an earlier version of the book.
01:59:07.000This list of topics, and then I did another round of interviews referring to what the reference was in the old version, and then another set just using the words.
01:59:21.000I'll give you an example, because one of the areas of thought is collaboration, and you would think collaboration is about working with other people.
01:59:31.000That's not what that section of the book's about.
01:59:34.000So if I were to do it just based on the word, I would probably go to collaborating with other people, but when I knew the context, it would be different, because what collaborating is about is we're always collaborating at all times with the universe.
02:00:47.000So we're always like, how we're in the world impacts how we see everything.
02:00:56.000Then there's another section in the book called cooperation, and that's about working with other people.
02:01:02.000And that section's about having worked with a lot of bands, I see that There's often this friction where, and I'm sure you've seen it in a writing room for comedy, where people are trying to get their idea in.
02:01:47.000And so it's just things that you can, habits you can, things to watch out for and habits you can develop that'll make you better at working with other people in that section, for example.
02:01:59.000So when you got the first version, which you said was great prose, but there was something missing, whatever that was, how did you make that determination and why did you decide to try again?
02:02:13.000I just, I read it and I felt how it made me feel.
02:02:17.000I read it and thought about how it made me feel.
02:02:20.000And I felt like there were a lot of words, nice sounding words, but it didn't feel essential.
02:02:40.000The most concise and the most specific, and it's explaining, sometimes it's explaining what I'll describe as technical things.
02:02:50.000It's almost like I see things as like a machine, like the world's a machine and the way the gears work together.
02:02:58.000So I could look at a description and say, that sounds like the machine, or I could read the descriptions like, well, that's not how that machine works at all.
02:07:36.000And I open a window, push out the screen, and by now, because Muriel's been screaming for help the whole time, some neighbors came, and they're outside, and they're like, jump!
02:09:14.000It felt like 4 o'clock in the morning.
02:09:15.000And I sat there, and in three minutes, I watched this 100-year-old two-story house completely burn to the ground, flames higher than the trees.
02:10:33.000The crazy thing is that you were happy the book was done.
02:10:48.000Maybe five days before this, four days before this.
02:10:53.000And we're talking about art and music and what you'd expect a conversation with me to be about, the only things I know about or care about, talking about.
02:11:20.000And I answered the question, and then I went home and saw my wife, and I said, it was a really interesting interview, but he asked me if I'm afraid of death.
02:13:41.000And I went out to lunch with Mo Austin, who just recently passed away, who was He was Frank Sinatra's attorney, and then he ran Warner Brothers and Reprise.
02:13:50.000You might have met him through Warner Brothers.
02:13:52.000If you were on Warner Brothers, Mo Austin was the chairman of Warner Brothers Records.
02:14:01.000And he was one of my mentors in the music business.
02:14:05.000And we went out to lunch one day, and he said, you know, Rick, I know you watch what you eat, and you...
02:14:10.000You take care of yourself, but you're really getting big, and I'm worried about you, and I want you to—I'm going to get the name of a nutritionist, and I want you to go to my guy and do whatever he says.
02:14:19.000And I said, okay, I'll do whatever you say, knowing it's not going to work, because I've been overweight my whole life, and nothing ever worked.
02:14:25.000But you didn't look overweight in that Red Hot Chili Peppers thing.
02:14:34.000I worked out with a trainer that Dice connected me with for the first time and was in—I still was not in good shape, but I was in better shape than at any point prior to that, and that was before I became a vegan.
02:14:49.000The vegan thing really took me down a dark path.
02:14:54.000Well, I was eating chicken and vegetables, and I was healthier then.
02:15:01.000And then a friend of mine gave me a book called Diet for a New America, and he said, if you read this book, you're not going to want to eat chicken anymore.
02:15:07.000And I said, well, I already gave up everything else.
02:15:56.000Gave up red meat, gave up basically everything other than chicken and vegetables, and then I started getting in better shape when I was eating chicken and vegetables.
02:16:04.000Then I met Dice's trainer, started training, got into better shape, and then I read this vegan book, became a vegan, and then it all went the other way for 22 years until I got very big.
02:16:16.000And what about veganism got you that big?
02:17:48.000So I read the Stu Middleman book and he talks about meeting this performance expert, Phil Maffetone, who changed the way he trained and that's why he could run a thousand miles in 11 days.
02:18:02.000So it's like, okay, Phil Maffetone is the answer.
02:21:43.000I think I was working with Kid Rock at the time, and Kid Rock introduced me to Laird and Don Wildman and this group of Malibu athlete guys.
02:21:52.000And Chris Chelios, the first person I ever went into a sauna with was Chris Chelios, who was really a fanatic.
02:22:36.000So, meeting people who are good at anything Is interesting.
02:22:45.000And to meet someone who's so good, world class at something so foreign to what the people that I know who are world class at stuff, it's like a different universe.
02:22:56.000So I wanted to go to hang out with Laird, really just to hang out with him and see how he thought about the world because he's such an interesting character.
02:23:21.000For every exercise, if I couldn't do it the full way to start, he would have me do a piece of the exercise.
02:23:28.000And then another piece, and then another piece, and then put the first two pieces together, and then put the second two pieces together, and finally put all three together until I could do things.
02:23:38.000And with his help, I went from not being able to do one push-up to working up to 100 consecutive push-ups, which was...
02:24:01.000Up till that point, I always thought I knew what was best for myself.
02:24:05.000And what I thought was best for myself was being a vegan.
02:24:11.000But when I gave myself up to, in this case, other people, I lost weight, I got fit, My life changed and then started doing the ice and sauna was another part of it.
02:24:26.000And the ice, I was terrified to go in the ice at first and then worked up to, you know, sometimes we'll do 30 minutes in the ice before even getting in the sauna.
02:26:54.000First of all, I would say the number one thing that it did was put me in a great mood.
02:26:59.000I would say that I can be moody at times, and nothing has made me feel better in my life than the combination of the sauna and the ice back and forth.
02:27:10.000By the fourth round, you do not have a care in the world.
02:27:13.000And whatever difficulties you have in life to deal with are not as bad as getting in the ice, whatever they are.
02:28:29.000And I definitely gained weight, and I don't feel great about it, but I'm excited now when I leave here, I'm going right back to, I'll probably do shakes now for, to get back to where I want to be, and then I'll go more carnivore.
02:28:43.000And so the shakes are just a calorie deficit thing?
02:32:41.000It's like you need to hear these things from different people, different journeys, you know, and try to understand We're all the same in some way.
02:32:52.000At some core essence of our being, we're all the same in many ways.
02:34:23.000We're talking about Like, the universe conspiring on our behalf if we let it.
02:34:31.000And to be in this flow of catching these waves that anyone can catch if you're trying to catch it, you're open to it, you see it coming, you...
02:34:47.000You take off on every chance you get, and sometimes the ride happens, and it's remarkable.
02:35:07.000These things that want to be, that the universe wants to happen now, comes through us.
02:35:14.000And if we don't do it, maybe someone else will do it.
02:35:16.000Have you ever had that experience where you have an idea for something and you don't do it and then six months later you see that someone else has done it?
02:35:47.000The way you see it, you have the best joke because you see it best.
02:35:54.000And one of the reasons I believe that you can see it best is because you don't believe what the structure around you assumes to be the case.
02:36:09.000I mentioned before, I grew up watching pro wrestling and I still...
02:36:13.000I watch 11 hours of pro wrestling every week, something like that.
02:36:18.000There's a lot of wrestling on TV. And I love pro wrestling.
02:38:04.000Stand-up comedians, he has professionals that come and sit on this panel, and then amateurs will go up and do one minute.
02:38:10.000And there's this incredible band behind him.
02:38:12.000The band is like, some of the members are the guys that work with Gary Clark Jr., and just these incredible musicians.
02:38:19.000And they play along with it, and then these people go up and they do one minute, and then Tony asks them questions and riffs with them, and he fucking loves pro wrestling.
02:39:27.000Well also, what you're saying, like people trying to hurt each other, that's not what it is either.
02:39:33.000My description of mixed martial arts is high-level problem solving with dire physical consequences.
02:39:41.000There's this thing that they're doing where they're trying to achieve excellence in this insanely difficult endeavor.
02:39:48.000And through doing that, you create some of the most exceptional people I've ever met.
02:39:52.000Because they're the people that can rise and figure out their own bullshit through all this chaos and through these moments and there's so many variables in there like fatigue, mental and physical fatigue,
02:40:11.000You know, when you're inspired, you can do more work.
02:40:14.000And how do you decide when to turn up the gas, when to hit the gas and when to coast, when to attack, when to defend, when to move, when to lure your opponent into a false sense,
02:41:21.000And that was fascinating to me because I didn't understand it at all, what was happening, but it always seemed like He was losing, and then the other guy would give up eventually.
02:41:31.000And it was like, I don't even understand what's happening.
02:41:34.000Well, that was one of the challenging things about my job when I first came aboard with the UFC is to explain that aspect of it to the casual, to the person that's at home.
02:41:44.000Like when someone's, like if Hoist was, I never, I commentated some of Hoist's fights, but later in his career.
02:41:55.000The challenge is to explain the jiu-jitsu.
02:41:58.000Because everybody kind of understands all that guy who just punched that guy, that guy that just kicked that guy.
02:42:21.000It's fairly common in gi jujitsu because of the friction involved in wearing the kimono, but in MMA where it's slippery and there's punches and all this, and it's a technique where...
02:42:48.000Their hand is almost like scratching their back.
02:42:51.000And through the leverage of your legs and your upper body controlling their body, you put extreme torque and pressure on their shoulder until they're forced to tap.
02:43:04.000To explain that to people while that's going on, explain how this person's setting this up and what they have to do next, and to try to explain it in a way that's going to make sense to people that have never felt it, they don't know what's happening,
02:43:19.000and just to convey my excitement of this very difficult maneuver being pulled off.
02:43:25.000Would that be as dangerous as, let's say, a figure four leg lock?
02:43:28.000A bunch of wrestlers got mad at me because Tony and I were watching pro wrestling.
02:43:34.000I was trying to explain how dumb a figure four leg lock was.
02:43:37.000Because I was like, he's literally giving up an inside heel hook.
02:43:40.000Because an inside heel hook is one of the most devastating submission techniques because once someone gets it, the time you have to tap is so small before your knee gets ripped apart.
02:46:36.000A guy who is good would go to one hip.
02:46:39.000You would immediately go to your side and you would hip escape and you would put a hand on the hip and you would try to get to a defensive position which would either be half guard.
02:47:17.000Would go on the road and they would go to carnivals.
02:47:22.000And they would compete with any man who wanted to get in the ring with them.
02:47:26.000And they would have these submission matches.
02:47:29.000And you could either pin a guy, you could win by pin, or you could win by tap.
02:47:33.000Or a guy would tap out from a submission.
02:47:35.000And there's a lot of techniques that came from catch wrestling.
02:47:39.000That are applicable today, including there's some catch specialists that compete and win against very high-level guys in submission matches and against jiu-jitsu guys, including the Gracies.
02:47:50.000One of the best examples is Josh Barnett.
02:47:52.000Josh Barnett is the youngest guy to ever win the UFC Heavyweight Championship.
02:47:57.000Elite, top of the food chain, professional mixed martial arts fighter, who's also a catch wrestler and a huge fan of pro wrestling and has competed in pro wrestling in Japan, done it in America, does commentary on pro wrestling, is just a huge pro wrestling proponent and connoisseur.
02:48:18.000And Josh would use catch wrestling techniques on elite jiu-jitsu fighters and tap them.
02:48:37.000Well, it's a very violent form of submission wrestling because wrestlers compete very differently than submission fighters.
02:48:44.000Wrestlers kind of go all out and sprint because matches, although you have to have incredible endurance to compete in an amateur wrestling match, there's a time limit.
02:48:53.000And these time limits are fairly short in comparison to, say, like Gordon Ryan, who's the greatest jiu-jitsu athlete of all time, who's only 27 today.
02:49:31.000These no-time-limit submission matches against the best jiu-jitsu fighters in the world.
02:49:37.000And people are terrified to compete against him in this because it's a matter of time before he gets you.
02:49:42.000And so he has this slow, steady approach where he's slowly ramping up the heat and slowly putting his foot on the gas until the guys start to break and then he gets them.
02:49:55.000And he was competing recently against this guy, Felipe Pena.
02:49:59.000And Felipe is also elite, world champion, top of the food chain.
02:50:05.000And Gordon got him to quit at 45 minutes.
02:50:08.000Because he was so on his way to getting defeated.
02:50:12.000But his pace was a pace that was set up for time limit jiu-jitsu matches.
02:50:17.000Where it's a lot of explosivity, a lot of quick movement, a lot of technique.
02:50:22.000But it's also you're recognizing that you can only do this for so long.
02:50:37.000There's a ton of stuff about him on the internet and great mixed martial arts fights and a lot of submission grappling matches and all kinds of stuff.
02:51:31.000Like I can remember one call from a WrestleMania from childhood where one of the Japanese wrestlers would throw some, you know, had a little bit of salt in his palm and throw it in the guy's eyes.
02:51:45.000And Gorilla Monsoon was the commentator at that point.
02:51:48.000And he said, he just threw about five pounds of salt in the man's eyes.
02:55:07.000One was like a Western, one was like a kids' show.
02:55:10.000So when wrestling turned into a kids' show, and WWE was the biggest, the other league used to be called the NWA, and it became WCW, and WCW followed suit, and they started chasing kids also.
02:55:24.000So for all of the real wrestling fans like me, nobody was doing wrestling anymore.
02:58:26.000So if I can see a way to make something crazy and interesting that probably no one else is going to make, then that's a thing for me to make.
02:58:36.000Is there anything else like that in your life that's unusual that you're involved in creatively?
02:59:10.000If you think about it this way, if someone were to give you two plates of food and say, taste both, and you taste both, and say, okay, which one do you like better?
02:59:20.000That's not a hard question to answer usually.
02:59:40.000You just have to block out any other, oh, what so-and-so's going to say or what this one does or what that other person did or what they're playing on the radio.
03:00:12.000That is one of the most insidious things about social media, is that it gives people so many of those what does everyone else think about what I'm doing thing.