Rick Rubin has worked with artists such as Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Run DMC, Adele, The Beatles, The Chili Peppers, The Beastie Boys, Eminem, and many more. He s also the author of a new book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. In this episode, Rick talks about how he s been able to work with so many great artists, and why he thinks there s no such thing as a perfect producer. He also discusses the importance of having a good relationship with your muse, and how it s an essential part of being a good artist. Rick Rubin is a prolific record producer, and is one of the most sensitive people I ve ever met. He has a great sense of humor and is a great storyteller, and I really enjoyed this conversation with him - I hope you do too! Stay tuned for the next episode of the Stay Free Podcast! Stay free! Timestamps: 2:00 - What is a good producer? 4:30 - What does it take to make a good song? 6:20 - How to deal with artists? 8:40 - How do you know who you re working with? 9:25 - What are you listening to? 11:15 - What do you want to hear from an artist? 12:00 What is the point of your music? 13:30 14:00-16:50 - Why do you listen to music? 16:30-17:10 - What kind of artist is the most important thing to you? 17:40- What is your art? 18:40 19:20- What does your music come to life? 20:00 What are we trying to do with music? 21:00 | How do I see it in a song? 22:00 + 23:30 | What do I want to know you re listening to me? 25:00 // 22:40 | How can you see it? 26:00 & 27:00 Is it possible to create a better version of yourself in a world like that? ? 27:35 - How can I know that I m trying to understand the artist in a better way? 35:00+ - How does my ideas come to me better than you re trying to create something that I can help you understand me in a way that I'm trying to help you in a sense that you can help someone else?
00:00:02.000Welcome to the Stay Free Podcast where I have an in-depth conversation with great and influential thinkers with wild and fluid minds.
00:00:12.000On previous shows we've spoken to Tim Robbins, MIA, Duncan Trussell, Eckhart Tolle, Jordan Peterson and today we're speaking to the legendary record producer Rick Rubin who's of course worked with Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Run DMC, Adele, the Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys, Eminem.
00:00:28.000He's got a new book called The Creative Act, A Way of Being.
00:00:56.000Now, within there are these signifiers formulated in a pre-agreed set of semantic terms that you and I can use to convey complex and simple ideas.
00:01:07.000But we will never know for sure that the intended image that I'm trying to convey is accurately recreated in your mind, Rick.
00:01:16.000That is one of the risks of communication.
00:01:34.000You might say something and it lights up something in me and I think I know what that means and it may have nothing to do with what you said and that's the The closest we get to any real communication.
00:01:46.000So do you think that music is sort of super semantic?
00:01:52.000It's an opportunity to communicate beyond the limitations of language and perhaps dance and movement.
00:02:00.000You know, I was watching something about Chaplin the other day and he was saying that when talkies came in, he said it's less A perfect form of communication than what he was able to achieve through the body.
00:02:12.000And I suppose that really what we're looking for is connection.
00:02:15.000The point of communication is to create common unity, to create connection.
00:02:21.000And I suppose through your life you found ways of enabling artists who by their nature are complex people to deal with To generate and curate the best version of themselves.
00:02:36.000With this incredible array of people you've worked with, is it something that was sort of intuitive to you, the kind of sensitivity that must be required?
00:02:46.000And is it something that's altered from when you first started producing your legendary work?
00:02:53.000I think I said to you at the time, it's the most I've ever understood Paul McCartney.
00:02:56.000like right to present day, like, you know, we communicate when you're doing that thing
00:04:53.000Because in our minds, We create an idea of what we think we're supposed to do, or what's right to do, and it undermines who we really are.
00:05:08.000And to get closer to that true spirit of who we are, and how we see the world, and sharing that is the most beautiful thing.
00:05:19.000It's the reason we're here on the planet, is to get to share Who we are and how we see it.
00:05:24.000And between all of these different points of view of people sharing who they are and how they see it, we make some sense of what's going on.
00:05:37.000To get a grasp on what's happening is through talking to people, hearing how they see it, discussing it, open mind, you know, being open minded and going in, not wanting to change somebody's mind so much as really understand if someone thinks something differently than we do, really understand why do they think that?
00:05:59.000What can I learn from this person who thinks something so different than me?
00:06:04.000That's so beautiful, Rick, and such an invitation to being creative and acknowledging spontaneity.
00:06:13.000And it seems as well that embedded in what you just said is the acknowledgement of the possibility But all of us live with a self-generated system, the persona, that I bring so much to the world, that I map my reality onto every experience that I have, that I have a tendency to recreate conditions of the past, like that I can re-experience the traumas that I've already experienced because, in effect,
00:06:45.000I am projecting reality onto apparently external experience.
00:06:51.000And it's only through this sort of genuine commitment to presence that you can experience
00:06:56.000a kind of actual transcendent reality.
00:07:00.000I know that every conversation that I have, if I'm not careful, I'll just replicate conversations
00:07:08.000that I've seen you have or imagine that might be pleasing to you.
00:07:20.000You know, like, I suppose it's because of the conversations that we've previously had and the communications that we've previously had that I feel that I can talk to you with a degree of confidence.
00:07:32.000You know, I was struck when you were speaking that in the space of global communication, where we have the potential now for a For almost universal communication.
00:07:46.000People can communicate continually now.
00:07:49.000We're experiencing censorship to an unprecedented degree.
00:07:53.000We're experiencing polemicism and polarity.
00:07:57.000People aren't willing to listen to an alternative perspective.
00:08:02.000We are siloed into our particular echo chambers and at a time where there could be more communication, more unity, more More unification and more acknowledgement of the likely unitary force that underwrites all consciousness that we are each an individual expression of.
00:08:19.000People are more and more infatuated with individualism.
00:08:25.000So in this work, The Creative Act, A way of being.
00:08:29.000I know from the part I read that you said that by the more we are willing to become our personal selves, our authentic selves, the more we will discover the universal and that there's a kind of a fractal, there's an implication of a fractal reality inferred there that by becoming who you truly are, You will make universal connections.
00:08:54.000How's that going to be possible when we live at a time that's defined by surveillance and censorship and conflagration and the amplification of our differences?
00:09:03.000I'm referring to the cultural war and the actual war that's taking place now.
00:09:10.000And may I ask, Rick, how do you interface with those, let's face it, somewhat political and cultural arguments as an artist and a creator?
00:09:20.000Well, it's always been an issue that's been around.
00:09:24.000The first time I came in contact with this was in the 80s, living in New York and starting to make music.
00:09:35.000Whatever the mainstream forces were trying to censor the type of music I was working in and wanted it not to exist.
00:09:44.000They didn't understand what it was, and that was hip-hop.
00:09:47.000So hip-hop was originally uh verboten and it was not played on any radio stations and it was uh it was people who did it were unpeopled and it was un-music and whatever it was it was bad and it was evil and now it's the most popular form of music in the world so that gives me some sense of uh assurance
00:10:12.000That when people come together to do something good with a positive, you know, the people who are making hip hop, we're doing it out of love for this art form and having something to say.
00:10:26.000And maybe these are people who never went to a musical academy or were great virtuoso musicians, but they had something to say and they had an experience of life that was different from others and they wanted to express it.
00:10:40.000And they expressed it in a very elegant, beautiful way that if you weren't part of it, you didn't understand.
00:10:50.000Now, over time, people have come to understand it.
00:11:33.000Whilst I am excited by your perspective that something that was esoteric, particular, literally ghettoised has become powerful and ubiquitous, my concern is that it became that through a process of commodification and commerce.
00:11:56.000When you're dealing in the alchemic What do you feel about the necessity for commodification?
00:12:10.000Do you regard things only as a success once they become commercialized and commodified?
00:12:17.000Do you think the original art form loses something as a result of that process?
00:12:23.000The history of rap and hip-hop is one that Its origin felt like a transgressive and dangerous movement that provided a voice to the voiceless, that mobilized a kind of movement that was previously oppressed and invisible, exactly as you say.
00:12:46.000But that acceptance is achieved ultimately through financial success, which it seems to me comes with a degree of nullification and neutralization.
00:13:05.000I think it's true what you're saying, that as things grow, they become commodified.
00:13:12.000But both you and I are practitioners of transcendental meditation.
00:13:17.000And transcendental meditation is something that could be taught for free, but you pay for it if you want to learn it.
00:13:24.000And Maharishi made a point of saying, if we want someone to take this seriously and to honor it, it has to have more value than free.
00:13:35.000And he said, if someone's not willing to pay to learn meditation, what they're willing to pay for a refrigerator, then they're not going to treat it in the same way that they and with the same degree of commitment as they do to using a refrigerator every day.
00:14:47.000It's just when the cart comes before the horse and it only becomes about commodification that, you know, you turn on the TV and there's a bunch of terrible stuff on.
00:14:57.000It's because people who are making it are making it with this business idea.
00:15:00.000They're not making it with this artistic content.
00:15:04.000We want to make the most beautiful thing we can make and nothing else matters.
00:15:08.000It's made by committee, what people think will work.
00:15:13.000All things that undermine the potential beauty of the art that's being made.
00:15:19.000Throughout my whole career, I've only tried to make the best thing that I can make that moves me.
00:15:27.000And then in the hopes that if it moves me, maybe it'll move someone else.
00:15:30.000But I don't think I'm smart enough to project I'm going to make something I don't really like, but this seems like the kind of thing someone else would like.
00:15:39.000And it seems like that's the majority of the output of the mainstream commercial artistic output is just what somebody thinks somebody wants to see.
00:15:53.000Yes I think it becomes inorganic at that point because as you say it's a project of commodification.
00:16:03.000I suppose I'm speaking about this in particular in an environment that it seems to have been completely immersed in an ideology not just in music but in culture and in sport that we that All of our creative endeavours might be regarded as invisibly undergirded by commercial imperatives that, as you have explained, the artist cannot engage with and consider themselves still to be an artist rather than a kind of trader.
00:16:35.000But you used the example of transcendental meditation and that makes sense, the idea of exchange, the idea of valuing, that those ideas, those tools are not necessarily of themselves bad.
00:16:53.000But I have concerns about the commodification of spirituality and specifically this, Rick,
00:16:59.000that in a sense contemporary spirituality, new age spirituality, which is the sort of area both you and I,
00:17:07.000if we're not cautious, could be categorized as operating within,
00:17:13.000is a spirituality that in my view is guided implicitly by the principle of meditate,
00:17:23.000you will be a better unit in the system. Meditate, you will become a better, you know,
00:17:30.000in order that you, there's a telos, there's the presumed telos that you should meditate,
00:17:35.000do yoga, take ayahuasca, do whatever it is, so that you can function better in this system.
00:17:43.000Isn't, it seems to me, you know, like some of the things we've touched upon the moment, the inability to communicate authentically, the ongoing censorship, polemicism, a stoked conflagration between different groups, the needless cultural war, the constant posing of traditional ideology against progressive, you know, socially and culturally progressive ideologies in order to create hate because of the way that social media has evolved.
00:18:07.000Look, spirituality, in a sense, you know, this is the quote I think that helps, we have been taught that freedom is the freedom to pursue our petty trivial desires, but real freedom is freedom from our petty trivial desires.
00:18:39.000So like, you know, for me, when it becomes about, you know, learning to meditate ultimately so you can fit within a system better, it concerns me.
00:18:48.000So I wonder if there is something necessarily that creates compromise, you know, whether it's in music or spirituality or anywhere.
00:18:58.000And I wonder what your thoughts are, perhaps, with spirituality.
00:19:01.000He's just said something very interesting, which is your reason for getting into spirituality for yourself had to do with controlling of your appetites.
00:19:14.000And I imagine, so that's what got you in.
00:19:18.000Now that you're in, is that all that it's about?
00:19:22.000I'm guessing you found something that Resonates with you on a deeper level and it's not just about that and I'll tell you I've had a friend who originally used to go to yoga classes because there were a lot of girls in yoga classes and he thought if I go to yoga classes I'll meet girls at the yoga class and then he started doing yoga every day to meet girls and then he became a yogi and he maybe even become celibate because he it didn't matter what got him in.
00:19:52.000It's like the seed was planted in him And once the seed is planted, I think when we're young, we think about, I want to be a rock star, I want to be famous, or I want to do this, and then it gets you to start.
00:20:06.000But once you start, you realize it's about something completely different.
00:20:10.000You realize it's about, one of the things I talk about in the book is when we're making art, it's not even about the end product, that we think it's Most artists think it's about the song I'm recording, or it's about the movie I'm making, but really it's a connection to something outside of ourselves, a greater source of creativity that we're tapping into, that we get to feel part of.
00:20:39.000and we're part of this like universal communication that's going on.
00:20:44.000When you really get deep into creativity, it's not really us.
00:20:48.000We're just vehicles through which it happens.
00:20:52.000And in the early days, you don't know that.
00:20:55.000It's something that comes over time and mastery.
00:20:59.000The more you do it, the more you see, ah, this isn't really me.
00:21:47.000I was thinking about that as you were saying it.
00:21:49.000You know, the movie Network, Howard Beale has these incredible revelations and he's this wild character and then basically the corporation tells him that's not how the world works.
00:22:01.000It doesn't work the way you think it works.
00:22:37.000And this is just like as a voyeur, it seems that that's the relationship that artists have with you.
00:22:43.000So I'm honoured that you would say that about me because there are times when I...
00:22:49.000Because I talk about subjects on this show, about, like, corruption, about the military-industrial complex's possible incentives in a war that's being portrayed as humanitarian, and of course there is a humanitarian aspect because people are suffering and dying, and the simplification of the narratives around war, and what happened in the last couple of years, the pandemic, and trying to stop short of stuff that's conspiratorial and not underwritten by good information and good data.
00:23:16.000Sometimes I, um, You know, because I'm dealing with these things and I recognize I have to convey them in a way that's consumable and accessible and scintillating, I every so often forget this is actually bloody real.
00:23:28.000You're actually talking about things that are real.
00:23:31.000And there's a sort of necessity for a kind of spiritual hygiene when dealing with these matters, Rick.
00:23:37.000And it's sort of challenging because, and I must say, because I'm a person in recovery and because I believe in God, I have to, I keep this at the forefront, I'm fallible.
00:23:46.000I'm a fallible, flawed individual and I never let that stray too far from the forefront of what I'm dealing with.
00:23:58.000I try never to... because I know that I don't like people talking to me like they think they're cleverer than I am and I try to remember that and I've learned because of the touring aspect of what I do for a living that most people want to be left People want guidance, people want instruction, but people don't want to be told what to do.
00:24:22.000Thank you for the beautiful compliment.
00:24:24.000A moment ago, when you talked about this feeling of grace in your work, of knowing that there is something moving through you, can you tell me a few examples that come to you in your working life where you have felt the evidence of that, the bliss, the joy, the playfulness of being touched by Krishna or Christ Consciousness or however you feel it and describe it, particularly in your work?
00:24:49.000It happens all the time, and an example would be a band will be playing a piece of music and it sounds ordinary, and it's ordinary for a period of time.
00:25:01.000They play it over and over and over again and try little changes, try little differences, and nothing, and it doesn't really change, ordinary.
00:25:10.000And then sometimes something happens, and when I say something happens, not because We had a great idea or change something radical where it all of a sudden what's happening goes from pretty good.
00:26:42.000Like, it's like an out-of-sync movie where you're hearing these sounds and his mouth is not making those sounds and it's just this otherworldly presence in the room.
00:26:57.000Neil Young can go into these states of just Disappears in the music where he's gone.
00:27:05.000And it's I don't know what to say about it.
00:27:08.000So I get to see it on a regular basis and it's magic.
00:27:12.000And all we can do is recognize it when it happens, be respectful of it, be thankful, and do anything we can to set the stage to allow it to happen, but never be arrogant enough to think that we can ever make it happen, because we can't.
00:27:36.000You're describing, it seems to me, Rick, shamanism.
00:27:39.000And there are some arguments that the entire profession of show business is fueled by our kind's need for an experience of the divine.
00:27:53.000And this somewhat loops back to my earlier point.
00:27:57.000And believe me, I'm going to be asking what you had in that bottle, because you can't have shit floating around in a bottle like that and not have people inquire about it.
00:28:17.000Glory unto him that would afford you this long life, Rick Rubin.
00:28:22.000When we talk about shamanism and perhaps when we talk about interfacing with divinity It seems that the individual charged with conveying that power needs mostly to get out of the way.
00:28:41.000I read a beautiful book, and I'll send it to you actually, called The Death and Resurrection Show, which talks about the transition from... It posits that there was a...
00:28:53.000When there were settled cultures and there were still nomadic cultures that the relationship between the nomadic cultures and the settled cultures would be the nomads would turn up and perform their shamanic rites and rituals and it talked about how many archetypal components of these rituals are found in show business and it talked about great examples of ambiguity and self-annihilation and self-destruction that are to be found at these Tropes are found throughout show business.
00:29:22.000The weary idea of the self-destructive artist being little more than the inability to hold the flame, to hold the power of what is coming through.
00:29:33.000The thing you describe casts a shadow, of course, Rick.
00:29:36.000You describe the sort of benign aspect of the shamanic performer.
00:29:42.000Revealing the transcendent, the universe in young Krishna's mouth.
00:29:47.000But the flip side of that is that it burns them and destroys, destroys to have that power.
00:29:57.000I suppose you must have experienced that as well.
00:30:01.000It's the way I would interpret it as there's a sensitivity that the great artists have that they feel everything much more than other people.
00:30:11.000And it's when you feel something, you're with other people and you feel something strongly and no one else can feel it.
00:30:19.000You start feeling a little crazy, you feel disconnected, and it's difficult.
00:30:23.000So when you're constantly saying, hey, no, but look, this is happening, and this is happening, and this is happening, and people are like, you're crazy.
00:30:33.000This level of pain that comes up from either being not heard, being misunderstood, not being seen, And feeling things much stronger than other people.
00:30:47.000And people don't, they look at you funny.
00:30:51.000You know, they look at you funny and they treat you poorly.
00:30:54.000And then when, then in success, it's a reversion because you go from this sort of person who nobody wants to be around to a person who everybody wants to be around because you're successful or famous.
00:31:10.000But they still don't understand you, and they still don't treat you for who you actually are.
00:31:16.000You know, that's why Kurt Cobain's not here anymore.
00:31:19.000It's the pain of being totally misunderstood and not being seen for who we are.
00:31:29.000And it's why so many artists, you know, die young from drug overdoses.
00:31:35.000Our mutual friend, the publisher, Jamie Bing, I love that guy.
00:32:52.000And it seems to me somehow, intuitively somehow, intuitively as well as being learned, of course, I'm sure, you've found yourself Operating in this space, and I feel like when there is a success like yours, not that there is much success comparable to your own, that it's an indication that something like that is happening.
00:33:24.000And it seems like this magic is what you're working in.
00:33:27.000And is this the creative act a way of being?
00:33:30.000Are you talking about how personal creativity is something that we must access in order to be healed, in order to be whole, in order to be who we are?
00:33:40.000Well, it's not something we must access, it's something we're...
00:35:10.000One, something I read about Francis Bacon, the artist.
00:35:13.000He... I read in an interview that the journalist that was interviewing him said that Bacon would not allow people to be neutral and switched off.
00:35:23.000He said like that when the waiter brought over their coffee or their drink and people are just prescriptive.
00:35:51.000And the British artist Damien Hirst A similar thing to what you just said, you know, and of course he's a famous post-modernist and almost situationist artist, most famous for his works like the bisected animals, like the shark in Formaldehyde and all that stuff.
00:36:09.000He said that, you know, you will walk past the same tree every day, but if that tree falls over in a storm and crashes across the sidewalk and across the road, you'll be like, oh my God, this tree!
00:36:23.000And a little like, you know, hallucinogenic drugs, that suddenly you realize that we have curated the wonder and awe out of our experience. When I speak to Vandana Shiva, she
00:39:16.000Gary Shandling said that the entire endeavour of creativity is to capture, create a moment that is real.
00:39:24.000We're so used to consuming mediocre art.
00:39:30.000It just passes before the eyes, the junk food, like gum.
00:39:35.000And then sometimes, often inadvertently, you capture something that is real, that is authentic.
00:39:41.000And the fact is, is that these are states, so they are ever present.
00:39:45.000And perhaps it is the genius or the great artist that accesses it with more regularity and apparently with more ease.
00:39:54.000But as if those invisible threads, as if the sort of the The living archetype is present and able to be vivified, vitalized, that some incantation, some ceremony or rite will bring it forth.
00:40:08.000For me, because like, you know, obviously you are a master in the domain of music and for me, I've always had to be, had music brought to me.
00:40:15.000I'd like all human beings to enjoy and love music and have heroes, you know, throughout the pantheon of music.
00:40:22.000But for me, As an artist, it's always been in the tunes of comedy.
00:40:27.000That's where I experience it more viscerally, I suppose, Rick.
00:40:35.000The tunes that are in language, in comedy, the ongoing revelation of truth that Comedy can provide people with.
00:40:55.000I feel that all of these great tools that we're being offered, that could be bringing about a utopia, have been negatively charged, that are robbing us of that potential.
00:41:07.000And I suppose I enjoy speaking to you because It seems so local and personal and possible to awaken.
00:41:15.000It doesn't seem esoteric and Himalayan and impossible.
00:42:11.000Yes, it's beautiful that it's discerning as opposed to judgmental, you know, and this quality you described of feeling as opposed to thinking, I love analysis, you know, I like to look at things and work out why, I enjoy that process, I always have, but when I've Consider what appear to be some of the shortcomings we're experiencing culturally right now.
00:42:40.000Much of it seems, and I spoke to the beautiful Duncan Trussell on this show recently, and he talked about how Ram Dass said to him, we need you to move from here, indicating the head, to here, the heart.
00:42:52.000I'm reminded of a time I was told that the Australian Aboriginal culture, the word that they have for the, you know, they say they have three brains, the brain of the stomach, the brain of the heart and the, you know, the cognitive mind.
00:43:07.000And the word they use for the cognitive mind is the same word they use for a tangled fishing net.
00:43:13.000And we live in, like our culture lives entirely in this sort of Tangled, synaptic, neurotic network of the mind with all of its great capacities.
00:43:24.000Our solutions in short, in my opinion, are not going to come from the intellect.
00:43:28.000They're not going to come from the rationale.
00:43:30.000It's taken us, science, progressivism with all of its wonder, technology with all of its glories, You know, surely they will provide more solutions medically, but these false markers of technology and medicine are obscuring the fact that we have become almost neanderthal when it comes to feeling and heart.
00:43:48.000That we've forgotten how, at least behaviorally, we are not practicing the intuitive connections that are available to us Through what used to be called a love of God and Lord alone knows the problems of religion, organized religion, are evident and manifest and the traumas and travesties they have practiced hardly need reiterating here.
00:44:07.000But with this loss of a realized and radical God, we are starting to create something somewhat threadbare.
00:44:17.000And I suppose, Rick, another concern of mine is that if it's only available to us, I think it's just part of the process.
00:44:22.000If art is only available to us in commercial spaces rather than explicitly sacred and spiritual
00:44:28.000places, I wonder if we're losing something there.
00:44:31.000And are you attempting here in this book to once again conflate or reintegrate spirituality
00:45:07.000If you're working without the sacred as part of your process, you're working alone and small.
00:45:19.000And, you know, we can only do so much.
00:45:22.000But if we allow in what's possible, and if we're open, and also, none of it's us even forgetting the sacred, none of it's us, because all we are is a compilation of the experiences we've had over our lives.
00:45:39.000You've seen the things that you've seen over your life, and that formed your opinions of how you see the world today.
00:45:45.000And if you came into a situation, it might trigger something that happened to you 20 years ago, and then you would react based on something that happened 20 years ago.
00:46:27.000The things in the book are things I've noticed that just are.
00:46:36.000In the man that you've become, can you see threads back to the boy you were, the child that you were?
00:46:42.000Can you see, do you feel like that you could, the seed, was it identifiable?
00:46:48.000Do you feel that it was there, that there was a sort of a spiritual inquiry that was present in you that has become, that has been unfolding over your life?
00:46:58.000I remember I would burn incense in my room as a nine-year-old and Would always read about, I became a magician as a child because I didn't really know where the line was, you know, where is, I was always interested in the unseen world.
00:47:15.000And whether that was doing card tricks, or whether that was a seance, or a Ouija board, or hypnotism, that's all part of this, the things that we can't explain.
00:47:28.000And I always felt like there was more going on behind the scenes.
00:47:31.000And when you learn magic from an early age, you learn very quickly that there are always things going on.
00:47:40.000When you learn magic, you learn that there are several principles at work And that's how most tricks work.
00:48:28.000It's like, it's the only legitimate sport.
00:48:30.000And it's the only legitimate... The way that that is a combination of performance and scripted, and sometimes the real world works its way into the script, and you never know what's really happening.
00:51:30.000You know, what I notice is, lately someone who helps me, and most of my, as we've discussed before, my personal spirituality is formatted through the folk technology of the Twelve Steps, which I believe to be sort of an American religion, really, of personal awakening.
00:51:50.000Someone told me to observe for a day, like anytime you're in a situation and you start to think about doing something else, like you want to change reality, just observe it.
00:52:01.000And like that day, I happened to have been eating with some people and I was just happily eating with the people.
00:52:07.000And then I noticed I was eating with the people and I thought, yeah, I'd like to leave now.
00:52:23.000I usually think about sort of like some kind of control or assertion, you know, and like with the rain and with the five breaths we just took, and with my meditative practice generally, you know, Bob Roth, who taught me TM for the David Lynch Foundation, Bob Roth always says, notice how easily the thoughts come, but you don't have to ask the thoughts to come.
00:52:49.000In the same way like the rain, and Bob Roth always says, in this way we think the mantra, in this way we think the mantra, or observe the breath if it was vipassana.
00:52:59.000And yeah, it's nice to experience that while I may experience sadness, I am not that sadness.
00:53:07.000While I may experience my thoughts, I am not those thoughts, so I don't need to be governed by them, you know.
00:53:16.000What was the title of your last audiobook?
00:53:29.000That was a beautiful book and it reminded me of something you just said which was being somewhere that you didn't want to be and I think you told a story in the book about being invited to a party or To a dinner or something, and then weeks in advance you think, oh this sounds great, I'll go, and then weeks later it comes and you're dreading it, and it's the last thing you want to do.
00:53:55.000And I just thought, I know that experience as well.
00:53:59.000That is because of the technique, Rick, you may be referring to.
00:54:02.000If someone asks you to do something, always imagine that you had to do it now.
00:54:07.000And then you might recognize whether or not you want to do it.
00:54:12.000Because normally for me, I want to be at ease.
00:56:14.000But I also say people do eat meat and we try not to judge people on that basis.
00:56:21.000But there's kind of an expectation that if you're a vegan person that you've got to have this very militant and judgmental attitude towards other people and I don't feel that's very helpful with any ideal.
00:56:31.000I don't think that's a good manner to deal with people from, you know?
00:57:13.000I feel a deep connection with you always and one that I honestly would say, while we don't know each other well, I don't have the connection I have with you with very many people.