The Peter Attia Drive - #57 – Rick Rubin, legendary music producer： collaborating with sensitive psyche of greatest living musicians, and his personal story of weight loss and spiritual quest

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atiyah drive. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. The drive

00:00:10.880 is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along

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00:00:19.660 with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast

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00:04:08.480 supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is my friend and

00:04:14.560 legend, Rick Rubin. Rick is a Grammy award-winning recording producer. He's the co-founder of Def Jam

00:04:21.800 Records, which if any of you grew up in the era I grew up in, you're intimately familiar with the

00:04:27.400 incredible breadth of hip hop that spun out of that. The Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy,

00:04:32.860 Run DMC, Ghetto Boys, et cetera. In thinking about doing an introduction for Rick, I almost wonder if

00:04:38.420 it's easier to mention the artists he has not produced or worked with. But rather than that,

00:04:45.280 I'll rattle off, I don't know, a small fraction of those that he has. ACDC, Adele, Aerosmith, Eminem,

00:04:52.980 Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, which we talk quite a bit about, Justin Timberlake, Kanye, Kid Rock, Lady Gaga,

00:05:00.200 Linkin Park, Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, Tom Petty, Smashing Pumpkins,

00:05:07.840 kind of you name it, and he's worked with them. MTV referred to Rick as, quote, the most important

00:05:13.440 producer of the last 20 years. And in 2007, he appeared on Time's 100 Most Influential People in

00:05:19.980 the World. This is one of those episodes where, honestly, we could have just spent the entire time

00:05:24.980 talking about music. And at some point, I had to extract myself from the discussion on music,

00:05:30.340 which is probably about the first half of this interview. We also did this interview in his

00:05:35.140 legendary recording studio in Malibu. So I think a lot of my interviews feel sort of personal because

00:05:41.920 I do almost all of them in person. This one, I would say even more so because we basically did this

00:05:47.580 in a recording studio sitting on couches with boom mics down in front of us so that you're

00:05:52.100 barely even thinking about this as an interview. And it was kind of just Rick and I talking like we

00:05:56.900 would have been talking at his place or my place. And I think that that allows us to get into some of

00:06:02.320 the more intimate stuff about not just the music, but the pain that sometimes drives music, the cycle

00:06:08.180 of addiction. Rick is certainly no stranger to seeing the downside of the creative genius phenotype

00:06:15.420 that produces some of the most incredible music that all of us love and listen to.

00:06:19.840 We also get into his health. Many people know Rick has lost a lot of weight and he was at one point

00:06:25.040 morbidly obese. And so we talk about that, which he's talked about a little bit before,

00:06:29.380 this incredible transformation. But we also talk about a really significant health scare that Rick had

00:06:33.820 less than a year ago. And for me, this was actually very powerful because I lived this health scare

00:06:38.120 with him as a friend. But I don't think as it was unfolding, I fully understood what he was going

00:06:43.260 through. Because Rick is such a sort of happy-go-lucky guy, I didn't appreciate at the time

00:06:48.240 the challenges that he was dealing with. And I think being able to relive it through this discussion

00:06:52.260 was helpful for me. And I think it's going to be helpful for many other people to understand

00:06:56.040 the challenges that people are going through when they're confronting something that's quite

00:07:00.600 frightening, which it was. We could have spent, honestly, another five hours talking, but we had to

00:07:05.860 get back to his place for dinner. And I'm convinced that most people will really, even if you're not a huge

00:07:10.420 music fan, you will really enjoy this episode. So without any further delay, here's my really fun

00:07:15.540 discussion with Rick Rubin.

00:07:19.420 Well, Rick, this is a huge honor, man. Not only do I get to talk with you, but we get to do so in

00:07:24.900 a kind of legendary place, huh?

00:07:27.780 Yes, sir.

00:07:28.900 Can you tell me a little bit about where we are? I mean, Eric gave me a tour that blew my mind,

00:07:34.180 but, and I don't think that a listener could appreciate the physical beauty of what we're talking about,

00:07:39.340 but this is some, I wouldn't, when you said, let's meet at the studio, I didn't have this in

00:07:44.780 mind. How did this place get to be?

00:07:47.160 The band and Bob Dylan built it in 1974 and the house was already here. They put the studio in

00:07:54.380 before that. They had been living in Woodstock in a place called Big Pink. They made a famous album

00:07:59.200 called Big Pink. And then they all decided to move to California. And this was the place and they

00:08:05.760 built the studio. And if you watch the last waltz, all of the scenes that are not the concert

00:08:11.280 happened here. And all the rehearsals happened here and all the interviews happened here.

00:08:16.180 And it's been rocking ever since 1974.

00:08:20.720 The trailer out there was Bob Dylan's, huh? That was his, there's the tour in that trailer.

00:08:25.140 In theory, that's one of the stories associated with the studio. So much of it is,

00:08:30.940 you know, there's so much myth. I don't know where the line is of what's real and what's not.

00:08:38.320 There's probably no average to this, but how long does it take a band to actually produce a record in

00:08:44.280 a place like this, assuming that they're not distracted by other things or obligations. But

00:08:49.420 if a band says, look, Rick, we want to come and we want to work with you and we want to produce

00:08:52.660 an album and we've written the music, but you know, it's still a little rough.

00:08:56.820 Is that something that a typical band would be able to do in a month, in two months? I mean,

00:09:01.900 I don't even have a sense of that scale. It could be a couple of weeks and it could be a couple of

00:09:06.820 years. It really is dependent on the project. Everyone has its own flow, its own, it creates

00:09:14.780 its own rhythm. So let's kind of go back to the beginning a little bit. So you grew up in New York,

00:09:20.020 right? Yes. Long Island, Long Beach, Long Island. Did you always love music? Always loved music.

00:09:26.140 And you went to NYU, if I recall. What were you studying there?

00:09:31.780 I started as a philosophy major. And then after two years, I switched to film and television.

00:09:37.600 And when did you first start producing music and what did that look like?

00:09:44.120 I was in a punk rock band and recorded a couple of things with my band. That was my first experience

00:09:50.900 recording and I enjoyed it. And then hip hop was just starting in New York City. And it was a

00:09:58.260 small underground form of music.

00:10:02.280 This is early eighties?

00:10:04.100 Mid eighties.

00:10:06.000 Eighty.

00:10:09.160 I'm going to say 85, something like that. I'm not sure exactly, but mid eighties.

00:10:14.300 And I would go to these clubs and hear this music. And at the time there was very little

00:10:21.540 recorded rap. There would be maybe, um, if you went to the stores where DJs would shop,

00:10:28.420 which would have 12 inch vinyl singles in those days, that'd be the only place you'd find any,

00:10:33.660 anything rap related. And it would be a 12 inch single. And that's all there was,

00:10:39.420 these 12 inch singles. And maybe every week, one or two 12 inch singles would come out. And that was

00:10:47.020 all there was in rap music. Then I would go to the DJ store every week and listen to all the new

00:10:52.680 music coming out. And the energy, when I went to a hip hop club, what I felt there was very different

00:11:02.060 than what I was hearing on the records. The records were more, they were less like hip hop records and

00:11:08.920 more like other kinds of records musically, other than they may have somebody rapping on them, but musically

00:11:15.660 it could have been an R and B record.

00:11:18.680 So at the time, where were the best clubs in New York for hip hop?

00:11:23.080 The only, when I started listening to hip hop, the only place you could hear hip hop downtown where,

00:11:28.600 where I was going to school, there was a reggae club on,

00:11:32.620 it was either on first Avenue or second Avenue down a flight of stairs, a small little club

00:11:39.360 called Negril. And I think it was Tuesday nights at Negril. They would invite the hip hop DJs from

00:11:46.920 the Bronx and Queens to come. There were some from Harlem as well. And that would be the only place you 0.98

00:11:53.260 could get that experience. And then as I got deeper into the scene, I would have to go to clubs in the

00:11:59.240 Bronx or in Brooklyn or in Queens or in Harlem. By mid eighties, by 84, I mean, Run DMC was already

00:12:05.920 pretty well known. But I'm trying to remember. Yes and no. They were well known in New York. In

00:12:12.340 84, they were well known in New York, but they weren't. When did Crush Groove come out?

00:12:16.840 I don't know. We were already successful. I mean, they made a film about us. So we were already

00:12:22.820 successful at that time. Okay. So, so prior to that, so I'm trying to think like, when would

00:12:28.280 Run DMC and LL Cool J first have popped up on my radar, which was before the Beastie Boys,

00:12:33.260 if I recall, but maybe not. But I mean, I wouldn't have heard of them until their albums came out,

00:12:39.500 presumably, right? Yeah. Well, Run DMC's first album came out before I ever met them.

00:12:44.800 I think that's the last I'm doing. Yes, Run DMC's first album came out.

00:12:48.780 Did they self-produce that? Like, how did they actually do that?

00:12:51.120 A guy named Larry Smith was the main producer and Russell Simmons was the co-producer.

00:12:57.260 There were things on that album that were really revolutionary in terms of

00:13:01.280 the first time we ever heard anything that truly sounded like hip hop was on that album,

00:13:08.440 even though there had already been other records. The other records, again, were more like an R&B

00:13:13.480 record with somebody rapping on it. But Run DMC's first record had a couple of glimpses of what was

00:13:20.020 to come. So LL came from what part of New York? LL was from Hollis, Queens.

00:13:27.980 Got it. And he sent a demo tape to the dorm room where Def Jam was located in my dorm room.

00:13:35.840 Who did you found Def Jam with? Russell.

00:13:37.960 Was you and Russell? Yeah. I actually started the first couple of releases were before I'd met

00:13:41.900 Russell. Like the punk rock records I put out were on Def Jam of my band. And then the first

00:13:48.680 single that I did in hip hop was on Def Jam. And that's how I met Russell was because he heard

00:13:55.700 that record and he loved it. And he was, again, I was a kid in college. He was already a big fish in

00:14:02.220 this small pond of hip hop. Pretty much anyone who was doing hip hop was managed by Russell.

00:14:08.580 So LL sends a demo.

00:14:10.700 Yes. And Ad Rock from the Beastie Boys found that he would listen to all the demos that came in.

00:14:15.780 So you already knew Ad Rock and Mike and those guys prior to that?

00:14:19.480 Yes. Okay.

00:14:19.740 Yes. Ad Rock found the demo, played it for me. We both really liked it.

00:14:27.500 What song was on the demo?

00:14:29.040 Can't even remember. Can't remember. No.

00:14:30.960 What was it about LL that struck you as distinctive at the time?

00:14:36.220 Lyrical, lyrical ability. He really had a great vocabulary and a great, great command of language

00:14:43.500 and believable in his presentation. And how old was he at that time? Like 18?

00:14:50.020 16.

00:14:50.740 Yeah.

00:14:51.180 Wow.

00:14:51.940 Yeah.

00:14:53.340 So what were the next steps? So how do you take this kid with all this raw talent

00:14:57.000 and say, okay, like, I mean, how much money does one need to raise?

00:15:01.640 Well, again, he was 16. I was, I was maybe 20.

00:15:03.760 Right, right, right. Yeah.

00:15:04.880 Yeah.

00:15:05.360 So, so how much money did it take at that time to turn what he had in his head

00:15:09.900 into an album that you could now put out in a record store that was more than a single?

00:15:14.320 Very little. But we started with, we started with a single first.

00:15:17.340 Okay.

00:15:17.500 I think we'd maybe even did two singles. We did two singles before we ever did an album.

00:15:22.060 And the, the singles would have been, I would program the, the beats in my dorm room.

00:15:29.160 Then we would go to the studio, bring the drum machine, NLL. Oh, he would bring all of his books

00:15:35.540 of lyrics. I would go through the lyrics and kind of pick the stuff that I liked. And then we would

00:15:40.780 talk about how to form it into a song. Because in those days, in the early days of hip hop,

00:15:45.440 it was less about songwriting and more just about the, the vocal style. So typically at that time,

00:15:55.260 it wouldn't be unusual in those 12 inch single days for a song to be 10 minutes long and be more

00:16:01.640 like what we would think of as a dance remix of a song, as opposed to the single version you'd hear

00:16:07.940 on the radio. There was no hip hop on the radio. That was not a thing. This was more something that

00:16:14.560 would be played in a club. So one of the things that, that because I grew up listening to the

00:16:21.960 Beatles, I had this affinity for traditional song structure. So many rap records you'd hear before

00:16:29.420 the ones that we made might just be a guy rapping for 10 minutes without any song structure at all.

00:16:35.820 It might just be a long, like a long monologue.

00:16:37.800 No chorus. No, no, no chorus. So you wanted to impose a bit of that structure.

00:16:43.600 Yes. Just because that's the music I grew up on and liked it and thought it would,

00:16:47.880 I would like it better. So we started doing that and we would chop up these long

00:16:52.160 raps into a 16 bar verse and then create a hook. So the first singles we made probably cost,

00:17:01.520 I'm going to guess in the three to $500 range to record them and make them.

00:17:08.440 That's, that's unbelievable. Yeah. And how many would you typically make in a first print?

00:17:15.860 It depended on a lot of things, but I'll just, it could be like just a hundred or so or a couple

00:17:20.300 of, it'd be like a thousand between a thousand and 5,000. Got it. Because I was so young at the time

00:17:26.180 and I wasn't really thinking about anything beyond listening to the music. Yeah. It's hard for me to

00:17:30.500 think about the logistics of it, but you only had how many record stores in New York that could sell

00:17:35.480 these, or that had the people that would walk in, that would know what to do. Three or four.

00:17:39.200 So basically you're physically taking these records in stacks to these guys and the people that own

00:17:45.260 the record stores like the music and they basically have the clientele that are going to appreciate

00:17:48.980 this. Yes. There weren't really dedicated hip hop radio stations at the time. No. So how were you

00:17:53.980 getting this on the radio and how were you, you weren't, you weren't, you'd bring it to

00:17:58.720 Negril and then later the Roxy, which is as the scene at Negril grew big on those Tuesday nights,

00:18:06.000 it eventually moved over to a roller rink called the Roxy. And I went to the Roxy on the first night

00:18:10.720 that it opened for hip hop. And it was this giant roller rink with maybe 50 people in it

00:18:16.360 and watched it slowly over the weeks and months become the hottest place in New York. So my only

00:18:24.580 goal was to get them to play it at the Roxy or Negril. That was the only place that we would think

00:18:28.360 about. So at that moment, like if you could put yourself back in where you were at the age of

00:18:34.100 20, making, you know, a thousand copies of LL's first single, did you have a sense of the fact

00:18:41.840 that you were a part of a new type of music, a new genre of music? Not really. We didn't think

00:18:49.060 about that at all. And there was no expectation that anything was going to happen. The whole goal

00:18:54.700 would be to sell enough records to be able to make another record. That was the whole purpose. It

00:18:58.720 was not a, nobody thought about this as a profitable venture at any point.

00:19:05.800 So you're still going to school while you're doing this? Yeah.

00:19:08.760 Was the stuff you were learning at school applicable in some way? No.

00:19:12.060 No. So you were basically learning how to do this stuff.

00:19:15.120 Absolutely. Absolutely. The best thing about school was that it was just the location was that it

00:19:21.220 happened to be in New York and that's happened to be where hip hop was happening. So had I gone to

00:19:26.060 University of Chicago, my life would have been very different. And that was a choice I almost made.

00:19:30.280 So. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? To think about these things. So you, you go to University

00:19:34.380 of Chicago, you, I can't imagine there was an underground hip hop scene. There was not.

00:19:38.060 There was a rival. What was going on in New York? No.

00:19:40.800 So Run DMC were basically the act of the, of that era when you were starting, correct?

00:19:46.400 Yes. Maybe before them it would have been Curtis Blow. He was the first big, big rapper who

00:19:53.660 Russell managed and then Run DMC who run was Russell's brother. And that was the next big

00:20:00.260 band and eventually eclipsed Curtis. Yeah. It's amazing. And then of course by 86, License to

00:20:10.360 Ill came out, which you produced as well, didn't you? Yeah. That's the second album that I ever

00:20:17.000 made. LL Cool J's first album was the first album I ever made. And License to Ill was the second album

00:20:23.980 I ever made. I had to have two copies of each of those. That's how much I wore both of those albums

00:20:30.400 out. And both of them were, there were like a handful of times in music when I can think about

00:20:37.200 a huge step function in what I was hearing. NWA was another big one in 89. For me as well.

00:20:44.160 Exactly the same. Couldn't stop listening to it. What am I hearing? Yes. This is, yeah. The only way

00:20:50.820 I describe it is to think it's a step function. It was nothing incremental. Absolutely. But License to

00:20:55.400 Ill, probably even slightly more. So what was LL's first album? Was it just self-dive? Radio. Radio.

00:21:00.820 That's right. I mean, they were both, you couldn't stop listening to them. Like, I mean,

00:21:07.300 I literally remember carrying around a boom box with the cassettes and it was like such a big deal.

00:21:13.820 13, 12, 13. And so it was a really big deal when I could finally save up enough money to get a boom

00:21:20.560 box that had two cassettes with one in Dolby that I could start making mixed tapes. Like that was like

00:21:26.020 a huge step forward in my evolution of being able to take my favorite of all the songs. Cause then

00:21:32.860 there was like also run DMC at that point, I think had two albums now, if I can. Yeah. I played guitar

00:21:38.300 in a couple of songs on the second album, but I didn't produce them until the third album.

00:21:42.120 And to be able to make mixed hip hop, hip hop tastes. Then I had one of my best friends in eighth

00:21:47.180 grade, Mark Sillis was his name. And I probably haven't seen him in a thousand years. And I hope someone

00:21:51.980 listening to this knows him and can, you know, but Mark was a DJ. So he had these techniques,

00:21:57.360 1200s turntables in his basement and he had a heavy bag. And at the time I was boxing, right? So

00:22:03.480 boxing is my life. And so we would go and I would just hit the heavy bag and the speed bag and he

00:22:10.440 would take these albums and he was then making mixes of these. And we were creating tapes out of

00:22:16.480 these things. And it was pure. I mean, that was heaven. Yeah. It's so much fun. Yeah. License to

00:22:22.880 ill was perhaps the single most, I don't know, important slash influential piece of music I listened

00:22:29.720 to as a kid. Amazing. And it's really exciting because my daughter now, I mean, knows most of

00:22:37.200 those songs. I mean, I remember the first time she heard no sleep till Brooklyn, like, and watching the

00:22:43.900 video. And it's like, and now I look back at the videos and they seem more comical. Yes. Like at

00:22:49.240 the time they were, they seem very serious to me. Like, wow, this is, but now I look back and I'm

00:22:53.880 like, Oh my God, they're kids. But they weren't kids to me when I'm 13 and they were older than you.

00:22:59.120 That looked like grownups. And now I'm like, look at Mike D and Ad Rock NMC. Like they really look

00:23:04.900 young. They are. They were in high school. So how did you meet these guys? Just hanging out in punk rock

00:23:11.040 circles. Yeah. So what was their influence? Like what, cause they, they also sort of,

00:23:15.920 they were really hip hop punk. I thought of as, as like to me, LL was the pure embodiment of hip hop.

00:23:23.000 Yes. And the Beastie Boys had this sort of punk feel to them and rock. The Beastie Boys came from

00:23:28.080 a punk rock background. The band started as purely punk rock band. They put out at least two

00:23:36.460 punk rock only releases before I ever met them. And then they made it a song called Cookie Puss

00:23:46.440 before I met them. That was the first sort of DJ based song. And it was great. And to perform that

00:23:54.520 live, they needed a DJ and they didn't have a DJ in the group because they were a band. And I was

00:23:59.640 invited to be their DJ. And that's how we started working together. How did you learn that skill?

00:24:03.920 Because I remember like going to Mark's, my friend Mark's house and sitting there with, I mean,

00:24:09.560 I could barely remember what I'm talking about now, but you had the two turntables on either side.

00:24:12.860 You had this like crossfader in the middle. You've got the, I remember you'd always have one ear to be

00:24:17.720 listening to this. And I mean, I was a Luddite, like I could not do it. Like he would try to teach me how

00:24:25.220 to make my own tapes, but they sucked. So I have enormous respect for what a DJ is doing. Again,

00:24:32.040 is that the sort of thing where you just had a natural affinity for it?

00:24:35.240 I think so. I think it comes pretty naturally. It's like, there's a lot that you can learn.

00:24:39.780 And then there's also parts like you can learn to be a very good boxer, but to be the best boxer,

00:24:46.920 there probably has to be more to it than just the practice.

00:24:49.900 Yeah, for sure.

00:24:50.760 There's, do you know, there's some-

00:24:51.880 The best has both elements.

00:24:52.880 Exactly.

00:24:53.380 The natural affinity and the capacity to practice relentlessly.

00:24:57.100 Yes. So everybody can get better at anything they're interested in. I didn't know that until

00:25:01.620 Laird Hamilton really changed my life because I've, I lived my whole life with no physicality at all.

00:25:09.060 So for me, everything was music, but that was how I-

00:25:12.700 So you're mixing for these guys now. You're the DJ.

00:25:16.220 Yes.

00:25:17.980 How did License to Ill come about? In other words, how many of those songs did they show up with?

00:25:22.040 How did you guys even think about stringing those songs together?

00:25:24.620 We wrote them, almost all of them we wrote all together, just hanging out. Like we would

00:25:30.220 go out to Danceteria every night, which was a big nightclub, just listening to the music,

00:25:36.220 watching the people dancing, looking at the people, and trying to make each other laugh.

00:25:41.560 And we would write rhymes with the idea of, you know, I would, often me and Ad-Rock would be

00:25:48.860 together and I would say something to try to make him laugh, and then he would say something to try

00:25:52.680 to make me laugh. And if it was good, we would write him down. So we'd collect all of these

00:25:56.960 phrases and then eventually figured out how to put them together into things. And then we,

00:26:03.000 one of the secrets of that record is that we probably started it two years, two years before.

00:26:08.440 And at that time, people were making music in a shorter period of time, especially in hip hop,

00:26:12.940 might be, you know, a month or two to make an album. But we did, we would only do a song when

00:26:20.300 there was a song to do. So, so it wasn't like we built up this big catalog of material and then

00:26:26.500 went in to record it. It was like, we would stew on a song idea for a while. And then when it was

00:26:32.620 written, then we'd go in and do that one song. And then we would start from scratch again and just

00:26:37.000 go to the club and make each other laugh and eventually do another song over a long period of

00:26:44.660 time. So your day job at the time was still going to school. What were the Beastie Boys doing on the

00:26:51.760 side or what was their, what was their, were they the same age as you? They were a year, a year younger

00:26:58.000 and maybe two years younger. I think Adam Yauk was one year younger. I think Mike and Adam might've

00:27:03.200 been two years younger. So they were out of high school, obviously at this point. I don't even

00:27:07.620 know if that's true. I think they might've been going to high school. I'm not sure. So did your

00:27:14.060 parents like think this was awesome? Were they so happy to see how passionate you were about something

00:27:18.800 or were they sort of like, look, you know, whatever, this is just another thing that you're doing on

00:27:22.600 the side. And my parents were pretty supportive in general of whatever I did. That said, there was no

00:27:30.160 hope that this would be any, anything more than this fun hobby. That's what it, that's really what

00:27:38.920 it was. It was a fun hobby. My plan was to go to law school. And if I went to law school,

00:27:45.440 the plan was to have a job and to be able to make music as my hobby. I never thought it would be.

00:27:51.640 You didn't even think I'm going to go to law school so I could manage musicians.

00:27:54.700 No, I might've thought maybe there's a way to be involved in the entertainment business as a

00:28:00.900 lawyer, because that's, I want to be involved in this world, but I don't, I don't know anything

00:28:05.980 about this world and I don't know any of the jobs or it just didn't seem like a realistic thing to

00:28:11.020 aspire to do. So I had a more grounded plan and then life took over and dictated the rest of it.

00:28:20.340 Yeah. So when, when radio came out, which I think was 85, does that sound about right?

00:28:27.380 That sounds about right. What allowed that to become such a hit or am I applying a bit of

00:28:34.040 revisionist history to it? And it, did it become a hit after the fact? Like, did it immediately take

00:28:38.640 off or did it take off only after Crush Groove? No, it took off. It did. Okay. So what, how do you,

00:28:45.000 how does that happen when there's no radio stations that are organically playing this? And if you're not

00:28:50.660 in New York in that club scene, like how is it that a kid in Toronto could become?

00:28:55.800 It was, well, the music was starting to spread virally already. It was good. It was new and it

00:29:02.840 was already starting to spread. Most of the music up until that time had been put out by independent

00:29:08.120 labels who didn't have so much of a reach. They didn't have the distribution. No. And the first

00:29:14.060 seven, 12 inches we put out, we put out as an independent label where again, we didn't have so

00:29:19.160 much of a reach. We, we found independent distributors. I think there were 12 of them

00:29:26.140 around the country that we would work with. So we would ship records to Texas and ship records to LA

00:29:31.140 and ship records to Seattle. There were, there were a few hubs, but it was still very baby

00:29:37.180 underground business. But those seven, 12 inches were created enough interest in the industry that

00:29:45.740 Columbia records came to us and offered to become our partners. And they were the biggest record

00:29:51.480 company in the world. So the first release through our relationship with Columbia was radio.

00:29:58.260 So you're 20, 21, 20. Yeah. So how are you negotiating a deal with the big, you're a minnow

00:30:06.020 and the shark comes along to negotiate a deal. Yes. How did you not get squashed? I mean, we got

00:30:12.660 squashed. Did you, did you get squashed? Yeah, absolutely. What kind of legal counsel do you need to help

00:30:18.860 you even? Well, my partner was five years older than me and experienced in the business. So he pretty

00:30:24.080 much, you mean Russell, Russell, he handled most of the negotiations, but then as time went on,

00:30:31.900 our vision sort of parted ways. This is a couple of years later now. And then as our visions parted,

00:30:40.800 I started getting a little more involved in some business stuff and then decided it was better for

00:30:46.520 us to just go our separate ways. And, and I asked, I remember going out to lunch with him. I remember the

00:30:51.900 restaurant, I remember where it was. And I said, I don't think we should do this together anymore.

00:30:56.780 Do you want to leave the company? And he said, no. And I said, okay, I guess I'll leave. And that was

00:31:02.160 how we parted. And is that more because you and Russell were seeing things differently or

00:31:08.500 you and Columbia were seeing things differently? It was, it was both. There were, there were two

00:31:12.600 things going on. It's like, I went to the label with a list of concerns on behalf of our artists,

00:31:18.720 really. We had, Russell and I had did our first trip to the UK because Russell managed other acts

00:31:24.900 that were not on Def Jam. We got to meet with people at all different record companies

00:31:29.100 in England. And all of these different people were so excited by the stuff we were doing. They just said,

00:31:34.660 you know, any opportunity to work with any of your artists, anything we can do,

00:31:38.440 we want to be in business with you.

00:31:39.760 And your deal with Columbia was a worldwide, was worldwide exclusive.

00:31:44.200 Yes. Okay. So then we went to our last meeting was with Columbia who owned our work. I remember

00:31:52.160 the guy's name. I won't say it here, but I'm sitting in his office and I don't remember anything,

00:31:56.940 but I remember this. We're sitting in this dark little office and the guy said, you were signed

00:32:03.260 by the New York company and we view the New York company, Columbia as an albatross.

00:32:11.400 Yes. So you're in LA having this discussion. This is in London. Oh, in London. Our first trip to

00:32:17.000 London meeting the guy who controls our destiny in London, which is the gateway to the rest of the

00:32:23.760 world. Yeah. After having all these meetings of people who are desperate to be involved in any way

00:32:30.300 in a positive way, the person who's in control of our stuff said, we look at Columbia records in

00:32:37.300 New York as an albatross and this is nothing against you personally, but because you come

00:32:42.360 from them, we're just not interested. And I just like my eyes got wide. It's like, okay,

00:32:47.900 now I know what I need to just go back. But, but the beauty of it was I went back and met with the

00:32:52.560 people in New York and I said, we have a problem and it's not our problem. It's your problem,

00:32:58.660 but there's a way we can fix it. We met with all these labels. Everybody wants our stuff.

00:33:03.920 Columbia is not interested. Why don't we together? I'm not saying let's take it away from you,

00:33:09.400 New York. Let's together find the best home for each of these artists around the world

00:33:14.480 and share everything as if you were putting it out, but let's do what's right for the artist.

00:33:20.320 And I was told that Columbia has a policy that they would rather see the works die than have

00:33:29.000 someone else have success with them. So, uh, wonderful policy to a 20 or 21 year old kid.

00:33:37.180 That's not a reasonable, I mean, it wouldn't be reasonable to me now, but then it seems so far

00:33:44.700 fetched and so counterproductive when there was an opportunity to be had that they could participate

00:33:51.520 in. Yeah. To turn that off because of a corporate policy. That was one of my first experiences of

00:33:58.100 that. So Russell, he didn't want to rock that boat. Well, they wrote a check to the company,

00:34:05.160 which satisfied Russell, but didn't satisfy me because I was not concerned with, I wasn't concerned

00:34:12.520 with the check. I was concerned with, uh, what happened to these, this music. This is what year,

00:34:18.360 this is late eighties. Yeah. Maybe 80, probably 88, either 88 or 89. Okay. So now you're, you're sort of,

00:34:28.600 you've experienced pretty amazing success for a 22 year old. It was unbelievable. And I still want to

00:34:35.340 come back to actually understanding how this music blew up. I want to get a little bit more on that,

00:34:42.240 but we can talk about that more first if you want. Yeah. Well, I'll forget this question. I guess

00:34:46.300 my point is you, you basically risk giving everything up because in theory, I mean, you could

00:34:53.400 argue you had the artists, the artists cared about you because they saw your honesty and they saw that

00:34:58.520 your heart was with the music and not the money as evidenced by what you just did. Yeah. But they

00:35:02.620 didn't necessarily see that, but yes, nobody really knew what was happening. So I can't say that they,

00:35:08.200 they saw that or knew that. Got it. So were you scared when you made that decision?

00:35:14.440 Did you think, did you second guess it? No, it may not have been the best decision,

00:35:19.100 but it felt very natural to me. And it felt like I'm making things that I really feel good about.

00:35:25.980 And I know that I'm going to keep doing this. And if I have a partnership with this big company,

00:35:32.400 that's doesn't want to do what we want to do, I need to find a different way to do this.

00:35:38.340 And did Russell understand that by taking the check, but you leaving that the artists were

00:35:43.420 more likely to go with you than stay with Def Jam? No, and they didn't. That wasn't even an option

00:35:48.280 because we had contracts. So you were walking away from everything. Absolutely. Which I did. Yeah.

00:35:53.720 Okay. So we'll come back to that in a second, but I want to go back to this point of

00:35:57.760 what is it that lit up License to Ill? Well, one thing, it's crazy that this is the case,

00:36:08.780 but it's the case. It's a little bit why Elvis is Elvis, even though Chuck Berry and Little Richard

00:36:18.880 came before him. The Beastie Boys were white. And this was an underground black music. And in terms 0.73

00:36:27.080 of maybe in the city, it didn't matter. But in terms of deeply penetrating into the rest of the

00:36:37.260 country, the fact that the Beastie Boys were white played a huge difference. I didn't see it so much

00:36:42.460 then, but now in retrospect, it's clear. By 87, I mean, the Beastie Boys are one of the most

00:36:50.360 popular acts in hip hop. Yes. How many copies did License to Ill sell? 10 million, something like

00:36:56.680 that. And I can never keep these things straight. The colors that go with numbers and I hear

00:37:02.740 multi-platinum. I forget what all that stuff means. So a platinum album means what? 1 million.

00:37:08.820 500,000 is gold. 1 million is platinum. It doesn't happen often, but the 10 million mark called

00:37:17.180 diamonds. There are not so many of them. So this was a diamond. I guess. Or close to it. It was,

00:37:23.000 but I don't even know if they counted diamonds then. It's like it's so, it was such a random event.

00:37:28.600 There were very few things that sold that many. How did the success of that album change your life?

00:37:35.760 And how did it change theirs in the immediate aftermath of that? Because that's really,

00:37:40.720 that success is happening in the course of like 12 months, right? Yes. It drove a wedge in our

00:37:47.600 relationship in, in not a great way. And what it had to do with was I usually presented a pretty clear

00:37:56.480 vision of the things that I thought that we could accomplish. And in success,

00:38:02.120 a lot of people started surrounding the artists who were more concerned with

00:38:12.000 placating the artist than doing what was best for the artist. And I would always fight for what was

00:38:21.380 best. And when there are other voices who are saying whatever you, you know, whatever you want,

00:38:29.980 you're then it's easier to tune out the voice of the person who's not going along with everything

00:38:38.120 because it wasn't always good. So you're only a couple of years older than these guys. Is there

00:38:43.920 a manager also in the mix at this point? Or were you sort of acting as a de facto manager? No,

00:38:48.700 Russell really was their manager. And then Lior Cohn came in to work with Russell as their manager.

00:38:54.840 Got it. So their next album was Paul's Boutique? Yes. And I know you did not produce that. No,

00:39:02.920 and they left Def Jam. They left Russell as well. They left Russell. Well, I was already gone. Yeah. I

00:39:08.560 think when they left. Yeah. I'm not sure if that's right. I can't really remember, but either way,

00:39:13.700 we left similar times. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you do the morning after you wake up and you've walked

00:39:19.880 away from Def Jam, the label you've co-founded, you left all the money behind and you left behind

00:39:28.000 artists who had already been signed with an organization that you now know didn't even

00:39:32.780 really care that much about them. Did you think at that point, you know what, maybe I'm just going to

00:39:37.620 go back, go to law school and just make music on the side. Or did you, what was the internal dialogue

00:39:42.220 to sort of make the next decision? I thought that it was the Def Jam experiment had worked.

00:39:50.580 So I thought I could continue doing what I was doing, just that the framework that was set up

00:39:56.360 was not the best framework. So the goal was to start a new framework, which I did immediately.

00:40:01.140 And what was that called? At first it was called Def American,

00:40:04.020 and then it became American, which is what it's called to this day.

00:40:06.700 Okay. And at that point, what were the most important lessons you learned from Def Jam that you

00:40:12.100 instituted and kept in place? I mean, was it basically, we're not going to partner with another

00:40:16.920 major record label or? No, it was, we have to partner with a major record company who's going to

00:40:21.720 support what we want to do. Because again, the reason you knew about these artists living in Toronto

00:40:27.980 was because of the reach of the major labels, a combination of how good the music was.

00:40:32.200 If this had stayed independent, I probably wouldn't have heard of it.

00:40:35.700 Yeah. Walk me through the economics of a record in a moment. So you've got, again,

00:40:42.120 it's so hard today. Let's answer this question through the lens of 1990.

00:40:45.640 I honestly don't even know if I'm going to be able to answer the question because I never really look

00:40:48.760 at that stuff. It's like, I'm trying to think about how rent gets split, right? Like when I went

00:40:52.740 into a record store and I paid $10 for a cassette or a record album, I'm guessing that Columbia is

00:41:01.840 getting like seven of those $10? Maybe half. Half. Okay. And the artists, when everybody else gets

00:41:08.840 paid, the artists are getting what, two or three? Typically in those days, a record deal would be,

00:41:17.840 the artists would get in the, let's say a 12% royalty of the retail price.

00:41:25.000 So whatever that would be, would be not unusual. That would be typical. A bigger artist, it would

00:41:31.360 be a bigger number. Like maybe Michael Jackson might get 20%, but 20% of the retail, not of the

00:41:38.180 wholesale. Yeah. Yeah. And also the retail number was a little fictitious because it would, let's say

00:41:44.280 it would be $14.99 list, but then you might be able to buy it in the store for $11. And they're

00:41:50.980 getting it off the $14.99? Whatever the list price is. The true list price. Yeah. Not the sale price.

00:41:55.340 Yeah. And that's of course changed. And I'd love to understand better how the world works today

00:42:00.540 because when you think about the big disruptions, I mean, it's sort of weird to think, I don't know

00:42:06.760 the last time I went into a record store. No, there are not so many to go into. Well, I still pass,

00:42:12.800 like in New York, you still see them. And every once in a while you'll go in and you'll find a

00:42:16.660 place that's just got this incredible vinyl. Yeah. But the funny thing is I don't have a place to

00:42:20.980 even play it anymore. Yeah. Like I probably still have a turntable at my parents' house.

00:42:26.780 Techniques. You're the norm. That's not unusual. So who was the next artist or who was the first

00:42:32.260 next artist that you discovered when you went out on your own? Probably Danzig. Slayer and Danzig

00:42:38.120 were the next two, both of whom I think I signed when I was still at Def Jam, but I signed them.

00:42:44.980 And when I left, they, they did come with me because they hadn't put out any music yet. Anyone

00:42:50.180 would put out music was kind of obligated to stay. So now we're in the late eighties. You're still

00:42:57.880 in New York. When did you come out to California? Probably maybe 1990 around the 89, 90, something

00:43:04.400 like that. So as far as other huge seismic or tectonic shifts in music, I think Nirvana would

00:43:11.680 have to be viewed as another one. How much was that on your radar? It wasn't the music you were

00:43:16.720 producing, but what were you thinking about it at the time? I wasn't thinking about it so much when

00:43:21.140 the grunge movement happened, the people who were excited by it, it was newer to them than it was to

00:43:30.060 me. It felt more like a continuation of Aerosmith and Black Sabbath and the heavy metal I grew up on.

00:43:40.500 So it didn't feel as revolutionary as it ended up feeling to others. So I didn't get as excited

00:43:48.280 about it as other people did. And of all the bands, the band that most spoke to me from that world was

00:43:53.980 Soundgarden. You worked with Chris, you worked with Soundgarden. Yeah. I worked with Chris in

00:44:01.040 Audioslave. Yeah. Cause it was sort of like, that's one of those things where at the time I feel like

00:44:08.200 Metallica and Guns N' Roses were the biggest bands in rock and roll. Yes. And then overnight Nirvana

00:44:18.380 showed up and this album, I think Smells Like Teen Spirit was the first one. I don't know if it was

00:44:25.420 the first one, but that's the one that changed everything. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then Pearl Jam

00:44:30.080 right on the heels of that. Yeah. They put out records on Sub Pop before that was their first

00:44:34.360 major label album. It's just so interesting to contemplate all these things. So you come out to

00:44:44.560 LA for what reason besides the weather? I never really thought I would live in LA. I thought I

00:44:50.020 would live in New York my whole life. I came out here to work on a soundtrack for a movie and I was

00:44:53.640 out here for eight or nine months. Eventually I got tired of living in a hotel, which I was living on

00:44:59.120 the month at the Mondrian on sunset. And I would always drive through the Hollywood Hills looking at

00:45:05.040 houses because where I come from, everything is flat. So seeing these houses built into mountains was

00:45:11.820 unbelievable. So every weekend or late nights, I had a friend who lived locally and we would drive

00:45:18.380 the hills together. And eventually I found a little house that I liked. So I bought this house thinking,

00:45:23.680 okay, when I come to LA, this will be the place I stay instead of staying in the hotel.

00:45:27.480 And then ended up never really going back to New York. And maybe five years later, I eventually took

00:45:33.240 the things out of my apartment because I realized I wasn't going back, but it was never like a decision

00:45:39.080 to move here. Same thing happened moving to Malibu. I, I got a place to come on weekends. I came the

00:45:45.000 first weekend, never went back. I can see why you weren't interested in taking me up on my offer to

00:45:51.240 come and live with me in my guest house. You're like, I don't, I don't do San Diego, but maybe on

00:45:56.600 some deep down level, you were like, there's a, there's at least a 1% chance I might like get stuck

00:46:01.820 there. So when did you first connect with the Red Hot Chili Peppers? They had asked me to produce

00:46:08.040 an album, maybe their third album, which is called maybe Uplift Mofo Party, I think. Yeah. So this

00:46:18.800 would have been like 93. No, no. I first met them probably 89, 90. Mother's Milk was their first

00:46:24.620 album, right? No. No, no. Mother's Milk might've been their fourth. Really? Yeah. At least third,

00:46:32.580 maybe fourth. We have to check. Oh, okay. Yeah. Cause Mother's Milk, I feel like that's the,

00:46:35.940 that's the first album that I paid attention to, which was like 80. That was their first breakthrough.

00:46:41.760 88, 89. Yeah. But they had, I want to say three, maybe two, maybe, but possibly three before that.

00:46:49.320 You know, we're going to talk about exercise in a moment, but I do Tabata workouts once a week and

00:46:53.960 they're really, really miserable, but it's like this four minutes once a week where you're going

00:46:58.440 to go as close as you could go to dying, doing an exercise. And so the musical selection for that

00:47:04.000 four minutes really matters. Like I put a lot of time into what song am I going to be listening to

00:47:09.040 at a 97 decibels when I go to the point of puking. So for Monday's workout, it was from Mother's Milk.

00:47:15.840 It was a knock me down. Oh, great. It's a good song. Amazing song. And as I was laying on the floor

00:47:20.800 afterwards, trying not to vomit, which is generally like most of my effort is going into not puking

00:47:26.600 after I'm on the ground, like listening to this song being about, you know, knocking me down. And

00:47:31.800 I'm like, this is perfect. It's like really a great, it's actually a great song. I posted something on

00:47:36.440 Instagram about it like a couple of months ago, because it's one of those songs like where I don't

00:47:41.920 listen to it that often anymore, but it's on shuffle. Like if I, it'll come up through my iTunes and

00:47:46.400 it actually means much more to me today than it did when I was 17 or 16 or whatever age I was when

00:47:52.540 it first came out, when I first listened to it, it really speaks to me more as like a struggle of

00:47:59.300 like the grandiosity that we experience as we get older and experience success more. And it's like,

00:48:06.620 I was really moved by it actually in a way that, and I guess maybe that's something about music in

00:48:11.960 general. That's just very special is it can mean totally different things, not just to different

00:48:18.260 people, which is I think a bit more obvious, but to the same individual at different points in their

00:48:23.100 life. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's the poetic nature of it that allows, it's like if you, it's harder for

00:48:31.200 that to happen when you see a movie, a movie is more face value. That's right. It takes, it takes some

00:48:38.100 of the imagination away. Whereas books and music, the reader or the listener is making the mental

00:48:47.660 images that you associate with it. You may be nudged in a direction by the artist, but the story

00:48:54.500 that you make up is your story. Yep. And that can change over time. I've become more cognizant of

00:49:01.320 this in the past year, especially when I hear a song that I haven't heard in five years, 10 years,

00:49:06.100 I'm on a huge chili peppers kick right now. I mean, I keep forwarding you songs. I'm like, dude,

00:49:12.040 this is unbelievable. Like I remember once I sent you an email and I was like, what is the world

00:49:17.000 record for most times listening to this song? I don't even remember which song it was, but it was

00:49:21.180 on, it was on, um, I don't remember which album it was. It was on California occasion, but you were

00:49:27.240 like, dude, how many times did you listen to that song? I'm like, I think I've done 53 straight without

00:49:32.820 stop. 14 years later, it means something a little different or a lot different.

00:49:38.020 Yeah. That's great. So the first time I met them, I went with Adam Harvitz from the beastie boys. We

00:49:43.120 went to a rehearsal. I remember it was on sunset. They were signed to EMI at the time. It was in a

00:49:48.820 place on the South side of sunset Boulevard. I think it was like an EMI rehearsal studio and

00:49:56.760 the vibe was not good and it didn't have anything to do with the music. It was just a, the energy

00:50:03.580 between the guys in the band was something I didn't understand. And it just felt like

00:50:13.560 I don't really want to be in this room. It was like a dark energy. And I ended up not working

00:50:21.520 with them. And then I didn't end up working with them until two albums later when I met with

00:50:25.840 them again. And it was like, they were different people. And it turns out. Was this part of through

00:50:31.780 their addiction cycle? Yeah. So the first time I met them, there were a lot of drugs involved. Now

00:50:37.540 I've not done drugs and I hadn't really been around a lot of people who do a lot of drugs. So I didn't

00:50:41.960 really know even what, what it was, but you could feel this sort of lack of trust in the room between

00:50:50.640 the members that didn't feel, it didn't feel healthy. Again, not knowing what it was. It just felt like

00:50:57.840 whatever's happening here is not for me. And then again, I met them maybe four or five years later and

00:51:05.320 it was different. Everything was different. And then we made a blood sugar, sex magic. It was the

00:51:11.900 first album we made together. Okay. So that was 91. I remember that pretty well. That, that had to be 91.

00:51:17.960 Yeah. So then I probably met them in 1888, I'll guess. Yeah. So yeah. So that, that makes sense. So

00:51:25.740 mother's milk would have come out just after you guys met. I think I met with them for the album

00:51:30.540 before mother's milk, I think. Yeah. And then, then mother's milk. And then, so, so, which could be

00:51:35.860 three years, 18 months, 18 months. What's your favorite Chili Peppers album? No idea. I never, I never

00:51:42.720 listened back. So I don't know. Really? Yeah. Cause that's funny. A lot of times I'll text you and I'll be

00:51:47.440 like, dude, this song. And it's a song you produced and you're like, which one is that again? Yeah. I

00:51:52.300 don't know songs by title. That's awesome. And it's the effort that goes into making these things is so

00:51:59.060 grueling. And in the process of making it, I might hear the song a thousand times. And by the time it's

00:52:06.400 done and signed off, I'm good. It's like, I've had my fill of that song. So I don't feel the need to

00:52:12.880 go back. And there's so much music to listen to. I'd rather listen to something that doesn't make

00:52:18.420 me think of the process of making it, but just so it feels like you listen to music and you have

00:52:23.160 this wonder. Right. I like that experience too. And I don't have that for the things I worked on.

00:52:28.000 Yeah. Yeah. So, so you like to eat the sausage, but you certainly don't want to see the sausage.

00:52:32.120 You don't want to eat the sausage you made. Not often. I mean, I think it's great sausage. I mean,

00:52:36.820 I love, I love the music we make. I don't feel the need to listen to it. If I go, if I go to a

00:52:41.920 coffee shop and a song that I produced comes on, it's a good feeling. And I wondered, does time

00:52:49.140 heal that? Not heal, heals the wrong word. It makes it sound like there's some problem there, but

00:52:51.860 does time change that? For example, if you go back and listen to something you produced 30 years ago,

00:52:57.700 if there was a reason to listen to it, I'll listen to it, but I wouldn't choose. I wouldn't out of the

00:53:03.740 vast catalog of music available to me. I can't imagine choosing something that I worked on

00:53:09.160 to listen to for fun. Which artist of the last 20 years that you've had no formal relationship with

00:53:17.400 are you most impressed by or artists? First thing that comes to mind is there's a D'Angelo album

00:53:24.380 called Voodoo that is pretty much of a perfect album for me. Usually when I listen to an album, 0.69

00:53:29.760 even when I like it, I think about what I would do differently. And that's an album when I hear,

00:53:35.100 and I just wish I was in the room to watch because it's so beautiful. Tell me why.

00:53:41.980 It goes against so many of the things we come to expect in music. For one, D'Angelo is a really

00:53:52.460 great singer with a beautiful voice. So you'd expect that voice to be, and he's a solo artist,

00:53:59.460 so you expect his voice to be front and center and the star of the show. Whereas instead his voice is

00:54:06.740 almost buried and his performance is so understated that it almost sounds like he's dreaming it

00:54:15.220 as opposed to performing it. The first thing about it's interesting is it doesn't work the way other

00:54:21.680 R&B records work. That's the first one. The next one is usually records sound, I'll say perfect.

00:54:32.460 Everything is played as good as it can be played and put together in a way that is seamless.

00:54:39.240 Whereas this album purposely always sounds like it's on the verge of falling apart.

00:54:47.040 And it makes it thrilling. And I hadn't really heard music like that before. It almost sounds like

00:54:54.020 musicians who aren't really playing together, but somehow it manages to hang together. So it's

00:55:03.540 just interesting. It doesn't sound like anything else. That's the first one that comes to mind.

00:55:08.160 Now, before we leave that example, who produced that?

00:55:10.660 I think it might've been D'Angelo himself. I'm not sure whose credit is the producer,

00:55:16.960 but Questlove was involved. Questlove was the drummer on the project and I'm sure it had a hand

00:55:23.520 in it. Have you talked to anybody involved in that about how deliberate that decision was and

00:55:29.300 how they did it? A little bit, a little bit. And I hope to do more. Actually,

00:55:33.560 I started doing this podcast with Malcolm Gladwell called Broken Record. And one of the episodes I want

00:55:39.220 to do, which we have not yet recorded, is a deep dive into the Voodoo album, talking to as many of

00:55:44.840 the people who were involved and understand the story of it. Again, anytime there's an album that

00:55:51.220 stands alone, it's interesting to me. There's another album where we did record. I've recorded

00:55:57.480 three interviews so far relating to an album by a group called Love called Forever Changes,

00:56:08.260 which is one of my favorite albums. And it's another album where it doesn't sound like any of

00:56:15.060 Love's other albums and no other albums sound like it by anybody else. It's a real moment in time.

00:56:23.840 So that's exciting to me.

00:56:26.380 So you're still basically a student. I mean, everything about you is all about learning.

00:56:30.840 Have to be a funny line that I love pro wrestling. And there's a funny line that a pro wrestler once

00:56:36.740 said that you can't call yourself a professor unless you two are a student. And he was talking

00:56:43.080 about wrestling, but it applies to everything. Yes. Yeah, for sure. So you're about to say something

00:56:49.320 else. There's another album you were going to refer to or artist. I think the question was music that

00:56:55.520 you have not produced that you are enamored with. Yes. A more recent one would have been

00:57:02.060 James Blake's first album. Beautiful. Doesn't sound like anything else. Very original. Really

00:57:10.060 touches me. That's how many? God, I'm blanking on the time. Is that like 10 years ago or less?

00:57:16.740 Probably less. Maybe eight. Yeah. But I'm not sure. I'm not good with time. I'm not good with time.

00:57:21.980 Yeah. So let's go back to the Chili Peppers for a moment, just because it was the foray into this,

00:57:30.580 but drugs are forever a huge part of rock and roll, right? It's sort of like,

00:57:37.580 I don't know that anybody's ever done the actuarial analysis on it, but when I was in high school,

00:57:44.560 and I really liked all kinds of music. And so as much as I loved what was happening currently,

00:57:49.680 you know, beastie boys, et cetera. I mean, I loved Hendrix. I love the doors. Yeah. And

00:57:56.160 I remember at the time, maybe naively thinking like, why did these guys keep dying? Like I couldn't

00:58:02.040 understand the self harm that was going on. I just didn't have enough of a sense. And I don't know

00:58:11.700 that I have a sense today, although it makes you wonder, right? Is there a pain that's leading to

00:58:17.220 this incredible creativity that's along the, there's the collateral damage along the way

00:58:21.860 is the soothing that's coming from the drug use? Or do you think it's less about that and more about

00:58:28.540 the culture of I'm a rock star. I'm supposed to be doing this.

00:58:31.680 It's the first it's self-medicating people who make music tend to be very sensitive.

00:58:36.520 If you think of Kurt Cobain as a raw nerve, he's going through this world, feeling things that other

00:58:45.540 people who have the same experiences don't feel. It's painful. He can put it into the music. It's

00:58:51.640 why he is who he is, but it makes it hard to survive in life. No one around him is savvy enough to

00:59:00.380 understand what's happening because people don't look at that stuff. And this goes for most musicians.

00:59:06.360 But it's always the case of the musician just trying to find a way to exist in a world where

00:59:15.700 they feel like they don't really fit. I don't think that's something I appreciated until

00:59:21.920 kind of recently. I remember with my daughter about a year ago, maybe two years ago watching,

00:59:30.700 and I can't believe I'm even blanking on the name of it, but it was the documentary about

00:59:33.960 Michael Jackson's preparation for his last tour. Yes. You know what I'm talking about?

00:59:38.180 I've never seen it, but I know what you're talking about. Yeah. So I'm blanking on the

00:59:40.320 name, but we'll link to it in the show notes. I'm sure many folks have seen it. So you're

00:59:45.120 watching this documentary and it's really funny when I was growing up, although Michael Jackson,

00:59:50.700 Madonna, you know, Beastie Boys were epic for whatever reason, I didn't gravitate towards

00:59:55.340 Michael Jackson. So even the hit songs like Beat It, Thriller, Billie Jean, like I didn't dislike

01:00:00.960 them, but I can't even think I owned those albums, put it that way. Like it just wasn't

01:00:05.680 on my radar for some reason. So I think Michael Jackson is not someone I paid any attention

01:00:12.000 to. And even when all of the, you know, the scandals were going on and all of the, oh,

01:00:18.380 he, how many times is he going to have plastic surgery and he's changing his skin color. And,

01:00:22.680 and then of course all of the, the sexual abuse stuff, like it just, you know, it just wasn't

01:00:26.640 something I was reading about or, or particularly paying attention to him. And I think I knew most

01:00:32.020 of the facts. Like I knew that, you know, he was part of a band when he was a boy and all of these

01:00:36.120 other things, but something struck me when watching that documentary, which is like, what a fragile

01:00:42.120 soul. And given what I understand now about pharmacology to imagine that this is a guy who all

01:00:51.260 he wanted to numb and soothe was like to have this doctor come to his house and give him a general

01:00:58.300 anesthetic. I mean, propofol is not, I mean, that is not really what we would think of in the, in the,

01:01:06.020 even the mainstream of recreational drugs. Yes. Again, notwithstanding all of his faults,

01:01:12.040 right. Which are numerous enough that we could spend a whole day talking about them.

01:01:15.860 Um, but I also sort of realized, wow, talk about a traumatized kid. Yeah. Like here's a boy who never

01:01:24.040 stopped being traumatized by something. Yes. And ultimately that trauma, he passed that on to other

01:01:29.400 kids. Yes. And again, you talk about the red hot chili peppers and flea has been pretty open about

01:01:35.980 his struggles and Anthony and stuff. I mean, these guys make unbelievable music, but you get the sense

01:01:42.080 that there's like, there's something tormenting these people. It almost makes you feel as a pat,

01:01:47.760 like someone like me, who's just a consumer of music, right? Like there's nothing I do at all to

01:01:53.280 contribute to the world of music other than consume it. You feel a little bit guilty in the sense that

01:02:00.420 I'm profiting for lack of a better word at the expense of someone's pain. Now, of course they're

01:02:06.960 profiting too. Everybody's getting something in this transaction. I'm not even talking about money,

01:02:10.520 of course. Yes. You seem to have picked up on this sooner. I mean, I, I remember reading something

01:02:16.340 a long time ago. It was actually before Mac Miller died that you, you really tried to help him when he

01:02:22.580 relapsed. I'm guessing that's not the first artist you had to try to help. No, it's as much of the

01:02:30.940 part of the job as the music part is helping a sensitive soul work through this life and this

01:02:41.460 business where there are, there are a lot of voices who again, are more concerned with getting the next

01:02:48.160 record out and cashing in and less concerned with the health of the artist. A mutual friend of ours

01:02:55.540 who shall remain nameless until we're having dinner tonight. And then I can rat him out.

01:02:59.000 He said something to me once about you that I thought was really interesting. He said,

01:03:04.580 you know, Rick has a superpower and I don't know where he got it from, but he has the ability to

01:03:12.600 take really creative people and somehow disarm them enough to, I'm paraphrasing. He said it much more

01:03:21.360 eloquently, but disarm them enough to do their best work creatively, but still do it within the

01:03:27.760 confines of a business structure that allows, you know, a product to be made. Like there's a balance

01:03:32.660 between the business and the art. And you've managed to sort of create this environment that

01:03:40.380 fosters both optimally. And it's not exactly true. My feeling has always been that if you get the art

01:03:48.640 right, the commerce side of it works itself out. So maybe in that I can help an artist to refocus,

01:04:02.640 to just pay attention to the art instead of overthinking what comes next and what other people

01:04:09.860 are going to say about it or what their manager is going to think or what the label is going to think

01:04:14.380 or what a radio station might think, or what's going to be the first single or any of those thoughts,

01:04:19.120 which tend to lower the vibration of the entire project. So we try to get to this pure art place

01:04:28.600 and in doing so, it benefits them in all areas, but there's very little thought of the business side.

01:04:38.040 I think what he meant, and I'm probably not articulating it is exactly that, but what you're

01:04:45.140 doing ultimately, though, it's not your primary aim happens to be in service of also making something

01:04:50.500 amazing commercially. Like it's almost like it happens. Yeah. It happens as a, you haven't diluted

01:04:56.680 that you haven't reduced the ability to be successful. No, but it happens more through the purity of it

01:05:05.060 instead of through aiming at it. Yeah. I can totally imagine that. Right. It's sort of like

01:05:09.540 meditation. If you're, if you're meditating with the goal of becoming the best meditator,

01:05:14.100 it's very hard to, if you're meditating with the objective of trying to sit here for the next 30

01:05:20.440 minutes and that's all I'm going to do. Yeah. At the end of that 30 minutes, you've succeeded.

01:05:24.900 Yeah. There is no more to it than that. So hip hop in New York seemed just like a different vibe

01:05:33.180 from the hip hop that came out of LA. And I don't know if part of it was that they were just

01:05:37.940 temporarily offset, but is it a surprise to you that gangster rap came out of LA and not New York?

01:05:44.660 Not really, because there's more of a gang culture in LA in real life. So the gangster rap sprung out

01:05:51.560 of the gang culture that really exists. There's, there's some gang culture in New York, but it was

01:05:56.380 less and I never really ran into it in my New York time. So were you here in LA when NWA's first album

01:06:06.040 came out in that summer? Yeah. I went to visit them in the studio while they were making Straight

01:06:10.320 Outta Compton. Yeah. And what was your impression of not just the music, but what was feeding this

01:06:17.700 beast and where was this going to go and how was this going to change the industry?

01:06:21.700 I never think about any of those things. I knew that like, like when you said it was, it felt like

01:06:27.880 a tectonic shift in music. That was my experience. Just like as a fan, it got me excited about hip hop

01:06:36.120 again. By that time, after doing the stuff that we had done at Def Jam and having left, hip hop was

01:06:44.100 not so exciting to me for that window between after Public Enemy and before NWA, there was this

01:06:51.680 window of rap where I wasn't really paying so much attention. NWA got me excited about hip hop

01:07:00.480 again. That's so interesting because through your lens, you see, I never consider there to be a

01:07:07.000 window between Public Enemy and NWA. Like when I think about, I just think Public Enemy just like ran

01:07:13.520 into the back of NWA. Like there were a few years in between there. See, for me, it was just like

01:07:18.580 Public Enemy was everything at that point. Yeah. Where's Chuck D from? He's from Long Island.

01:07:26.820 I mean, he strikes me as like lyrically one of the most cerebral, gifted hip hop artists of all time.

01:07:36.820 Brilliant guy. Yeah, I can't imagine. And how much of an act is Flavor Flav? Like what,

01:07:43.200 what is he like when the mic is off? Same. He's the same. Exactly the same. He is a living cartoon

01:07:49.040 character. That is comical. Yeah. See, that's the thing about music. Fun to be around. Well,

01:07:54.160 I was just about to say, that's the thing about music that's sort of interesting is

01:07:56.320 these personalities have to coexist. Sometimes it's a miracle to me that bands can actually stay

01:08:04.160 together as long as they can. Many don't. You know, it's... Yeah, there's a survivor bias that we...

01:08:09.600 Well, absolutely. Imagine, think of how often marriages work. Right. And that's between two 1.00

01:08:14.520 people. Now you have a marriage between four people, often younger with substance abuse problems.

01:08:22.380 It's hard for that to maintain. Yeah, I was joking with my wife the other day. We were watching this

01:08:27.840 movie on Motley Crue and... How is it, by the way? I haven't seen it yet. I mean, it's okay. It depends.

01:08:33.700 For me, it's awesome because I loved Motley Crue. And so even though the acting is not that great or

01:08:40.260 anything like that, it's like... And they're lip syncing all the songs. I really enjoyed it because

01:08:45.320 again, it's taking me back to my childhood. These were the songs that I was listening to in my

01:08:51.340 basement, doing the workouts that defined my existence as an adolescent, right? Yeah.

01:08:56.140 And for my wife, like, you know, Motley Crue was not even on the radar, maybe recognized a couple of

01:09:01.660 songs off Dr. Feelgood, but nothing before that. And so we're watching this and I'm already knowing

01:09:09.960 what's happening, right? Like, so I know in 84, you know, like the accident and I know all of the

01:09:15.020 details. And at the end of the movie, she asks kind of a logical question, which is like, how are these

01:09:20.760 guys alive? Like, how do they not just die 17 lives earlier? To which I said, my guess is there's

01:09:31.240 just a strong selection bias in this. The only reason we know about Motley Crue is that they

01:09:35.320 didn't die. And there are probably 20 bands that could have been Motley Crue, but they just,

01:09:41.220 they died physically and or blew up relationship wise along the way. And so you're sort of seeing the

01:09:48.280 one, the one survivor is the one that sticks around. It's sort of like in football, right? Like

01:09:52.900 half of being Tom Brady is not just being the greatest quarterback. It's like not getting

01:09:57.240 injured for that many years is sort of what allows you the, you know, you earn the right to play the

01:10:02.320 game. So when did you fully internalize that your role was not about making music as much as it was

01:10:12.880 about curating a person's soul and helping them express this? Cause I think the analogy you gave

01:10:21.140 with Kurt Cobain is great, right? That is a beautiful image of a totally raw nerve that he's

01:10:27.400 seeing the world in 4k color to what everybody else is seeing in black and white. Yes. And there's

01:10:34.420 good to that, but there's also bad to that. Absolutely. Did you realize that even when you were 20

01:10:41.020 years old? No, for me, it started when I was 33, I got very depressed. And I would say that I

01:10:50.800 tend on the depressed side anyway, which is part of where the sensitivity comes from to do what I do

01:10:58.440 musically. But at 33, it was crippling, wasn't able to get out of bed. It took about two years

01:11:07.700 for that to change. And I had a much greater understanding of the artist's pain after that

01:11:18.540 experience. Do you know what precipitated that? Yes. It was a phone call with the person who took over

01:11:27.480 the company that I was partnered with, the major label. So I'd been in a good relationship with this

01:11:36.080 company. The person who I had made the deal with was politically forced out of the company after

01:11:42.560 years. And this new person came in and we had a phone call and he said several things that just sort

01:11:51.220 of to anyone else, this phone call would have been non-controversial. Okay. See you back in LA and

01:11:59.460 we'll talk about it then. So you got wounded, not because someone threw a spear deliberately at you.

01:12:05.420 No, no, no, no, not at all. I got wounded because I was so vulnerable having never really dealt with

01:12:16.400 any controversy other than the one that I told you about earlier with the guy in the UK who was

01:12:24.620 not supporting our artists. So this was another situation like that, except this one was personally

01:12:32.280 to me instead of about the artist. This was just. And was this person saying something to you like

01:12:37.520 sort of off the cuff, like off the cuff, you know, Rick, the way you did such and do you remember what

01:12:42.160 it even was? Yeah, I do. But it wouldn't help to. Yeah. It wouldn't help. So it was something

01:12:46.620 relatively minor that was critical. It had nothing to do with me. He said, I, this is the guy. So

01:12:51.900 the person just became the chairman of the most loved record company in the world. It would be

01:13:01.200 considered the top job in the music business. And he calls me and he said, I just looked at your deal

01:13:07.900 and I'm jealous. I don't really like it. When you come back, we should talk about it. That was the

01:13:14.600 whole call. So help me understand what sent me into a tailspin. It was the first time because you

01:13:21.460 were worried that now there's this business thing that you don't want to have to think about and you

01:13:25.260 have to go back and negotiate a deal or something like that. Well, I, my parents, as I said earlier,

01:13:30.440 were always very supportive of me. Then while still going to college, we have this tremendous success

01:13:37.800 with Def Jam. So there's maybe been a, if I'm 33, there's been a 12 year run of nothing but

01:13:48.240 success. I mean, there's all kinds of little, little issues along the way, natural, regular

01:13:54.120 stuff. But for the most part, I have led pretty much a charmed life until I'm 33. And now this phone

01:14:02.260 call, it just like felt like a pin that burst the balloon. And honestly,

01:14:10.760 truthfully, I'm still not the person I was before that phone call. That's how radical it effect,

01:14:18.980 how radically it affected me. And I can tell you that it was, I know that it was a tiny thing.

01:14:27.220 I know that anyone else would have not even, it would have not even registered. And this thing

01:14:35.100 that was catastrophic in my world then led to a much better situation that would not have happened

01:14:42.100 had that not happened. So everything about it in retrospect was it only everything worked out for

01:14:51.120 the best. Yet still the person who I was before was different. And it just somehow triggered some

01:15:01.280 vulnerability in me that I'd never felt before. It's so interesting. I didn't know this about you

01:15:08.540 actually. This is amazing that this has never come up before. This is a, this is profound. And

01:15:13.520 what's interesting to me in trying to imagine what possibly could have triggered that the first thing

01:15:19.840 is, well, was there economic insecurity, but that strikes me as highly improbable because one,

01:15:25.500 you'd already been successful until you were never even motivated by the economics of it.

01:15:29.360 It was, it was the feeling of the rug being pulled out from under me. It was, is it because

01:15:33.560 you'd already been through something with Columbia where you had seen that a big corporation

01:15:38.360 can change their mind and that can jeopardize your music?

01:15:44.520 Hmm.

01:15:47.620 I think it was more,

01:15:49.740 I had always had the trust of the people I worked with, even if they didn't like the choices I made,

01:15:56.880 I always felt like these people have my back. They, they get me. And it was a sense of like,

01:16:05.360 not being seen. That's what it felt like.

01:16:11.200 So you said for the next two years, you had a hard time getting out of bed.

01:16:15.300 Yes.

01:16:16.780 So what did you do during that period of time?

01:16:19.340 I went to, I probably had two therapeutic treatments a day of different kinds. I would go to see

01:16:32.800 psychiatrists. I would go to see psychologists. I would do acupuncture. I would do herbal remedies.

01:16:42.440 I would do massage. I changed my diet to be one that would better support my, the, the brain chemicals.

01:16:51.320 I did, I did everything that I could do short of taking drugs because I was a non-drug taker

01:16:58.460 until eventually I found a woman who was a psychiatrist who wrote prescriptions,

01:17:07.500 but who was also a psychic. And I thought, well, if she's a psychic, I'll go see her because

01:17:14.040 I don't like doctors and I don't trust doctors, but a psychic, I could, I could get behind that.

01:17:20.100 And I had another friend in the music business who, who had started taking Prozac and he told me the

01:17:28.760 wonders of Prozac as it related to him. He said, meaning the good or that it blunted him.

01:17:34.840 And for him, he said, I will never not take this drug for the rest of my life. It changed my life.

01:17:41.000 Everything is better, which it still didn't feel like this is right for me, but I'm really suffering.

01:17:52.420 I'm doing everything I possibly can to feel better. Nothing's working. I was doing, at that point,

01:17:58.380 I was only doing guided meditations because I wasn't able to do a self-directed meditation.

01:18:03.300 But if I was being instructed, I could do that. And I would still show up to work.

01:18:11.300 Oh, so you were still able to sort of get through work at this time?

01:18:14.840 Windows. I remember engineers would come and bring me mixes and I'd be laying in bed and

01:18:18.840 they would play the music for me and I would say what I would hear.

01:18:22.400 So what broke that cycle?

01:18:24.100 Well, the psychic woman prescribed 0.95

01:18:28.140 Paxil.

01:18:31.860 And I took it the first night. I did exactly what she said. I took it the first night and

01:18:37.620 it was the worst night of my life because she said, well, you'll take this. You're not going to feel

01:18:43.780 anything. It takes about six weeks to two months before you'll feel anything, but it has to build

01:18:49.320 up in your system. We'll see what happens. I took it the first night. I went to sleep. I woke up

01:18:54.080 an hour later and it felt like there was a race going on in my body. I felt tremendous energy

01:19:05.540 rushing through my body and it felt terrible. And I remember just wanting to be able to make it to

01:19:13.720 8 a.m. to be able to call her. But I just hang on and suffer through this feeling until 8 a.m.

01:19:22.740 And then I called and eventually got her and she said, okay, don't take that anymore. So that was

01:19:28.680 good advice. But then eventually started on this journey of looking for the right

01:19:33.820 antidepressant. And I tried many and it took a long time. And every one of them made me sick

01:19:40.240 in different ways. Usually more often had to do with nauseousness. That first experience was

01:19:46.280 different than the others. All the others would just make me sick, nauseous until I finally found

01:19:52.940 the magic drug, which was called Remeron. And I took Remeron. And again, so each of these drugs I'm

01:20:03.260 taking, knowing they don't start working for six weeks. And the first night I took Remeron, I could

01:20:08.460 remember the room. I could remember what was going on. I took the Remeron and a half hour later,

01:20:13.500 it felt like all the light in the room turned to candlelight. And I felt like I was being cradled,

01:20:21.660 like protected like a baby. Well, Remeron has some really great sleep properties.

01:20:26.380 Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. And then what I didn't know, I've always had a weight problem

01:20:31.520 my whole life. Yeah. What I found quickly was that on Remeron, I ended up gaining 60 pounds in

01:20:40.100 three months, something like that, a tremendous amount of weight. But it helped me get through

01:20:47.520 that period. So you sort of had to break that cycle. Yes. And part of that, I think, is at the

01:20:53.440 risk of stating the obvious, it's psychological. Like you have to get through the cycle to know you

01:20:56.920 can get through the cycle to know that you're okay. Yes. And the idea of getting off the drug,

01:21:02.180 which I always wanted to do, was really scary because now I'm finally feeling okay. How am I going to

01:21:09.240 ever stop taking this drug? But then I did stop taking the drug and was able to manage.

01:21:16.080 And you're still impacted by this. You still look back and see a different guy. Yes. 33 before that

01:21:20.760 phone call. Absolutely. What's better about Rick today than that Rick? More empathic.

01:21:31.220 You don't strike me as one who would have ever lacked empathy. It's different than it was then.

01:21:36.220 I would say before that I felt more like Superman. And I've never felt like Superman since.

01:21:47.880 Interesting. I can't say that that Superman feeling before was rational or correct. Sure.

01:21:54.520 But that's what it felt like.

01:21:55.480 Hmm. You've worked with many artists who have died. Which one do you feel?

01:22:06.240 I don't want to say the saddest about because it's hard. I don't think you can compare it in that way, but

01:22:11.360 is there one artist where a piece of you died with them or you felt like,

01:22:18.900 how could this have happened or where you were most caught off guard or was there,

01:22:24.140 is there anything that just stood out? Because I mean, I, as I look through the list of all the

01:22:28.920 artists you've worked with, I, there are, there are some tombstones there.

01:22:32.620 Yeah. It's, I would say every one of them had a jarring effect in a different way in the moment.

01:22:40.080 And the, obviously the younger the artist is, the, the more surreal it feels like the most recent one

01:22:46.180 was Mac Miller. And that, that wasn't even a year ago. That was like last fall, wasn't it?

01:22:50.220 Yeah. And it just seemed like impossible. It seemed impossible. And I can remember when Chris

01:22:57.460 Cornell passed, I couldn't, couldn't believe it. Could not believe it.

01:23:01.420 When was the last time you spoke with Chris before he died? How, how?

01:23:04.400 Probably within, within a year, I would say. Did you work with Chester as well? Yeah. Produced

01:23:10.560 three or four albums of, of Linkin Park. So I can't even keep track. Like at this point,

01:23:15.460 it's easier for me to think of artists you haven't produced, but I couldn't believe it when,

01:23:21.720 I don't know why I would have any reason to believe or not believe. I don't know any of these

01:23:24.440 people, but like when Chester died, like that was really heartbreaking in a way that even in a way

01:23:30.840 that I didn't feel heartbroken with, with, with Chris or with Kurt Cobain, even though that was

01:23:35.880 such a big deal, but I don't know why that one just like that was. And I think also from a personal

01:23:44.020 level, I remember being really rocked when Johnny Cash died, which doesn't make sense because he'd

01:23:50.720 been sick for a long time. Right. And he's, he's the one guy who dies of some chronic disease like the

01:23:55.440 rest of us schleps. Yeah. It really shocked me. Why, why do you think that was? Well, I was talking

01:24:04.240 to him on the phone every day and he had been getting better and better. There's, there's a,

01:24:08.620 you know who Phil Maffetone is? Of course. Okay. Yeah. So I sent Phil Maffetone to live with Johnny

01:24:13.000 for a while and Phil helped you. Phil helped me a lot. Yeah. And after he helped me, I sent him to see

01:24:20.060 Johnny and when Phil showed up at Johnny's house, Johnny was in a wheelchair and blind and Phil got

01:24:27.400 him to walk and to see miraculously. So I got to see that happen. So I saw Johnny going from very

01:24:36.280 sick to only getting better and better and better. It was the setback when June died. That was terrible.

01:24:42.020 And he, it really, it really. Because June died pretty close to his death. He didn't live much

01:24:47.780 longer. Yeah. I want to say it was within the year. Yeah. I want to say it. I'm pretty sure it was

01:24:53.500 within the year. But we continued. He started recording every day after June died because that

01:25:00.860 was his reason to be alive. He wanted to, he said to me, he said, you have to keep me very busy because

01:25:07.140 if you don't, I can't do this. I can't, I can't continue. The movie walked the line with Joaquin

01:25:15.040 Phoenix in it. I love that movie. And again, I don't know how accurate it is. And you always run

01:25:18.780 the risk when you fall in love with these Hollywood movies that you're sort of, but there are parts of

01:25:23.740 that, that you just know are true factually, just based on what you've read, including the loss of

01:25:27.940 his brother and the sort of jarring effect that had on him. And there's yet another example of

01:25:33.460 we love this guy. Like we love his music. Yes. And to me, it only got better as he got older,

01:25:42.840 right? Like his, the gospel stuff's not nearly as interesting to me as the pain stuff.

01:25:49.720 And of course that's why we love it, right? Like we love that this person can articulate something

01:25:57.060 that is so deep inside of us that we don't want to think about or talk about. And yet he can create a

01:26:03.140 scaffolding upon which we can write our own narrative and feel understood. But it comes

01:26:09.040 back to this thing of like, if only he couldn't have suffered so much, like I can't help, but

01:26:14.620 wonder how much of the pain of his childhood and the loss of his brother and the shame with

01:26:20.320 his father. And like, did any of that get fixed as he got older? You know, I just, it sort of

01:26:27.800 makes me sad. Well, it, some of it got his relationship to it changed through his spirituality.

01:26:35.860 He was a very devout Christian and he found great solace in his religion. But then like

01:26:43.080 from the time I met him, what year did you meet him?

01:26:45.420 I don't know. Years roughly like 10 years, 10 years. Yeah. The last 10 years of his life

01:26:51.120 we worked together. What was the last song? I probably met him probably. So 12, 12 years

01:26:55.720 before he died, we probably met the, what was the last song he did. He did the cover for

01:27:00.560 Nine Inch Nails. That was like, is that, that's gotta be one of the last songs. No, that was

01:27:06.700 on the fourth album. We made six. Although, you know what? Literally five and six, I think

01:27:12.940 came out after he died, but we had been working on those. Maybe that's why I feel like that

01:27:17.760 was the last album or one of the last songs he did, but that might've been the last one

01:27:20.960 that came out while he was alive. I feel like I remember reading at some point, like he didn't

01:27:26.800 even talk to Trent about this, right? He just, no. And that, that always amazes me. Like when

01:27:32.380 I hear of one mega star doing a cover of another mega star, like I've always assumed like there's

01:27:37.500 this, Hey, you call the guy up and Hey, I love your song. You mind if I do a cover? No. And

01:27:42.460 I remember you telling me once, cause I think I asked you like this last year and you said,

01:27:47.160 no, any artist can do anything for any artist as long as they don't. And then you said something

01:27:51.040 that amazed me, which was the key is they can't change the words. Like if they produce

01:27:55.780 it, if they, if they sing it exactly as the original artist did it, they'll pay a royalty

01:27:59.920 presumably, but they, they're allowed to do it. Whether the second artist rises. And

01:28:04.140 I can't remember if you told me this or I read this, but originally Trent was not psyched

01:28:08.100 on it. Right. Correct. And this changed when he heard it, it changed when he saw the video,

01:28:13.540 when he heard it, he wasn't that psyched. He wasn't. Okay. No, but when he saw the video,

01:28:17.680 he got it. I would put that in the, if I were going to have sort of a top 10 songs that speak

01:28:29.100 to life. I think that has to be, I don't know how that's not in it. Right. Yeah. It's,

01:28:34.440 it's a beautiful song. It's a beautiful song. Where did you guys do that? Do you guys do it

01:28:39.540 here? We recorded it at my house in, in town. Did you realize what was happening when you

01:28:46.080 were making that? Like what, what did he come to you and share? Like, I want to do this and

01:28:50.320 here's why, or how did, how did it evolve? That one, we would pitch each other songs. I would send

01:28:55.680 him CDs filled with possible songs to try. And I remember putting it at the top of the list. It

01:29:03.940 was the first one on the first, on one of the CDs I sent. And when he called, he reacted

01:29:10.520 to several other songs, but he didn't react to that one. And then I remember on the next

01:29:14.500 compilation I sent him, I sent it again with the note, I really think this first song could

01:29:19.740 be special. And he listened to it. I think part of it also is I can't remember what I was sending

01:29:26.780 him. If I was sending him the, the nine inch nails version, it would have been hard for him

01:29:31.820 to hear that and know what it could be. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like, if you know the

01:29:37.040 nine inch nails version, it doesn't sound very much like the Johnny Cash version. And the funny thing

01:29:41.880 is I loved the nine inch nails version, loved it. Great. But I like his more. Yeah. And that I think

01:29:49.940 again, speaks to aging. Well, it's context also. It's like when you're in your twenties and you're

01:29:56.960 singing about regret, it has a certain weight to it. And if you're 70 and you're singing about a

01:30:03.020 life filled with regret by 70, you're supposed to figured it out. Looking back with regret is a

01:30:09.140 young man's game. So hearing Johnny sing these words is shocking. And there's a reality to it.

01:30:18.860 That's different or a gravity to it. That's different than when Trent saying it just due to his age has

01:30:25.540 nothing to do with the individual pain they were feeling. It just has to do with the age really

01:30:30.580 does change the way you understand these words. Do you remember when he called you after listening

01:30:38.260 to it and finally saying like, I got it or I'm willing to give it a try? Like what was it that

01:30:43.760 that spoke to him about that? Or what did he hear in there? He just agreed that if it was important to

01:30:49.980 me, he'd be, he was willing to try it. I see. But he wasn't really attached to that. So when,

01:30:53.840 when it was all said and done though, he loved it. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have a sense of what song

01:30:58.920 he was most proud of or what two or three songs he was most proud of over his career?

01:31:03.960 I don't know over his career, but I know of the stuff that we worked together. There were a handful

01:31:07.660 that he would remark that really meant a lot to him. One was there's a Nick Cave song called the

01:31:13.580 Mercy Seat. And that was on one of the albums we did. And I remember him thinking that was very

01:31:18.760 special and, and it is very special, but that was one that really resonated with him.

01:31:23.640 There was a Sheryl Crow song on one of the albums called Redemption Day. Yeah. Yeah. And he said,

01:31:30.280 I forgot about that. I remember him saying, I would give up all of the other songs just for this song.

01:31:36.400 When it was all said and done, what is Sheryl? What a Trent? What do they think of this once he has put

01:31:42.700 his, his hand on it? Are they moved by that? Are they, did they? Cheryl was definitely moved.

01:31:49.000 Bono was moved by Johnny's version of one. I think Don Henley really liked Johnny's Desperado.

01:31:57.340 Most of the ones where I've talked to the artists, they liked it.

01:32:00.680 You know, I have a huge picture of Johnny Cash in my office. I should have to send you a picture of it.

01:32:05.340 I don't know if it's Folsom and it's a sketch. So it's like, it's a sketch off the very famous photo

01:32:10.600 when he's on the stage and he's given the finger down, but it's, it's like this beautiful sketch

01:32:15.280 that I was able to find. I remember saying to my wife, I'm like, I got to get this on a t-shirt.

01:32:19.300 And she's like, don't be an idiot. Like, why do you want that on a t-shirt? And I was like,

01:32:23.520 I don't know. It's just so awesome. And I like rationalize all the reasons why, like,

01:32:27.480 don't you understand what he was saying? And you know, this is why he was in prison. And this is

01:32:31.720 what he was fighting. And it's like, she's, she just didn't want to hear it. She's like, all right,

01:32:35.340 settle down over there.

01:32:36.300 I actually don't know if any of the things that you just said were actually true because what he

01:32:42.160 was thinking was this photographer is a pain in the ass. Oh, that's really what he was.

01:32:47.360 I'm totally sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I'm applying my own ridiculous filter of all of this.

01:32:52.780 But that's how, what we all do all the time. That's to your point, right? That's music.

01:32:56.440 Yeah. I think you know this, but do you know, my son thinks I'm Tom Morello?

01:33:01.160 You told me. It's funny. It's really funny. So the reason this all came up because there is an

01:33:08.620 awesome video of Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello doing the ghost of Tom Jode circa 2009,

01:33:17.300 Madison Square Garden. So midst of the recession or, you know, like beginning of the recession,

01:33:22.940 I guess, in some ways. And I feel like Tom Morello isn't like a blue shirt or blue hat or

01:33:28.020 something. And I like with my daughter and we're like sitting there and we're watching this and

01:33:31.780 we're just watching it over and over again. Cause you know, my daughter is so musical and I,

01:33:34.980 I love her getting to see these things. And my son, who's like four at the time comes in and he's like,

01:33:43.000 daddy, I didn't know you could play the guitar. And I was like, what is he talking about? I can't,

01:33:46.800 you know, Reese, I can't play anything. He's like, no, no, no, that's, you're playing the guitar.

01:33:52.420 And I was like, oh no, no, that's not me. That's a, his name's Tom Morello. You know,

01:33:55.660 I started trying to explain to him, he's not having any of it. He's really like perplexed by

01:34:01.560 the fact that like all these years, Olivia has been playing the drums and you play the guitar and

01:34:06.920 you've never played the guitar for us. And I'm like, okay, Reese, sit on my lap. We're going to

01:34:12.480 watch this. He looks a little like me, but we're really different. But for whatever reason on that

01:34:18.660 night, on that stage, he really does. I really do look like him. And this took like a month of me

01:34:25.140 having to show him this video to realize like, that's actually not daddy. And it was so awesome.

01:34:33.220 Amazing. Yeah. Rage is another one of those bands. Like how, how did they do that? And how did you

01:34:39.960 see your role in curating is the wrong word, like fostering or providing the creative space to do what

01:34:50.940 they're doing? I mean, talk about hyper intelligence, anger, all of these things. I mean,

01:34:56.900 when you first came into contact with them and I don't even know enough about the history of the band,

01:35:01.960 like Zach and Tom were, what were they doing before? How did they merge?

01:35:08.220 Tom was in a band that was signed to Geffen that had, I think they put out a record that kind of came

01:35:13.940 and went. So of the guys in the band, Tom was the most experienced and Timmy and Zach grew up

01:35:25.560 together. I can't remember exactly how they found each other, but the four magic guys ended up finding

01:35:32.200 each other. And, and how, when did you get involved? Cause they, they sort of involved later. I mean,

01:35:37.020 I knew them, I went to see them, I went to see them play at the place called Coconut Teaser on

01:35:43.340 Sunset Boulevard before their first album came out. So this is late eighties at this point,

01:35:49.060 maybe early nineties. I don't know. Yeah. And there were maybe 40 people there. That was the first time

01:35:56.600 I saw them. And did you at the time think this is, I thought it was good, but it was, it was not a great

01:36:03.620 way to see them. It was a, not a good place to see a show. It was hard to hear it. It was hard to

01:36:11.340 hear what the music was actually doing. It just seemed kind of like a din. And Perry Farrell from

01:36:16.880 Jane's Addiction was the person who recommended I go see them. He loved them. And I went to see them

01:36:23.020 and it was, again, it was not the greatest show, that show that I saw. It probably was, but

01:36:28.220 there's so many things that go into what makes something work. And it could have even had to do

01:36:35.320 with my own emotional state at the time. There's so much goes into it. I'm really careful with the

01:36:41.040 way I, when people send me new music to listen to, it can take me a long time to listen to it because

01:36:46.080 I have to be in the right frame of mind to be able to be present and open and feeling well enough

01:36:54.740 to not let what's going on inside of me affect the music that I'm listening to. It's not like I

01:37:01.900 could just turn it on all the time. Yeah. So it may have been me. It may have been the fact that the

01:37:07.840 sound was bad in the room, but my first experience of it was, it was interesting, but I didn't really

01:37:12.880 understand what it was. And then they made either two or three albums. And then they asked me to make,

01:37:21.900 uh, they wanted to do an album of covers. They wanted to do a live album and an album of covers.

01:37:28.720 And we did both of those things. We did a live from the Olympic auditorium and the album of covers,

01:37:37.300 which has the cover says R-A-G-E kind of like the Gary Indiana love poster, except says rage.

01:37:44.940 Yeah. Yeah. Robert Indiana. I'm sorry. Gary Indiana's place.

01:37:48.180 One of the things that happens when you start to digitalize your music collection is I've started

01:37:55.020 to forget what album covers look like. And it sounds crazy, but one of the artifacts of being a

01:38:01.380 kid making mixed tapes is you knew the name of every single song all the time. Cause you were writing them

01:38:07.400 out. And back then you had albums and you had lyric jackets. And so you knew the words to every song

01:38:13.480 and the name of every song in the album. And you knew the cover and blah, blah, blah. And it's like

01:38:17.320 these days, it's actually the exception when I can remember, like, again, going back to the BC boys,

01:38:23.280 like I remember exactly what the cover of Paul's boutique looked like. I remember everything about

01:38:28.180 the jacket. Remember it was that crazy colorful, like out of control. Like I don't know how they

01:38:34.080 packed it all into that CD. Right. And, and of course, I mean the picture I used to sketch,

01:38:39.700 I would sit there in eighth grade sketching out the airplane on licensed ill and getting in trouble

01:38:44.660 for not paying attention in class. Like I just, you know, and I feel bad that we don't do that

01:38:49.700 anymore. Like, I don't know, maybe I shouldn't care that kids don't get that experience anymore,

01:38:53.540 but there really is something so cool about the anticipation of a new album and physically going

01:39:00.520 there, taking your lawn cutting money to buy said album, to bring it home, to listen. And

01:39:06.700 yeah, I mean, I know, I know I just sound like an old guy, like lamenting the past or something,

01:39:12.920 but it's a give and take. I mean, it's definitely the experience of getting new music is less special

01:39:19.420 than it was, but now you can listen to anything you want, anytime you want. There's no friction

01:39:26.700 between you and the music, which as a fan of music, that's really great too.

01:39:31.240 Is it different today? So, so I keep trying to, you know, like with my daughter, again,

01:39:37.720 we listened to so much music and we, I love to talk about this stuff with her. And, but I also

01:39:43.760 realized that, for example, like Zeppelin is something that we are really, really obsessed with

01:39:50.940 and her drum teacher, who's an awesome guy, huge fan of John Bonham. And, you know, we're talking

01:39:57.220 about like, you know, what parts of this could she start to learn to play and blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:40:01.820 And I, I don't know why, but it only occurred to me a couple of years ago that, you know, Zeppelin

01:40:07.120 were only around for 10 years. Like, whereas when I was a kid, like they were around forever because

01:40:14.660 by the time I got into them, they were already, you know, Bonham had already died in 1980. So I

01:40:18.480 wasn't following them when they were alive, but that was my first, first CD. When I first, I remember

01:40:24.160 in 19, the summer of 91, when I bought a CD player, I bought the Zeppelin box set, which

01:40:31.280 was a five disc set. It cost a hundred bucks, like staggering sum of money. It's really good

01:40:38.500 though. Oh my God. So, so first CD I buy is this five disc Zeppelin box set. The next one

01:40:45.540 I buy is Rush Chronicles. I mean, like only going with the best of the best. Is it a survivor

01:40:51.980 bias again when we look back at the seventies and think of the great music of the seventies

01:40:56.560 or the great music of the eighties or the nineties for that matter? Whereas today I just think

01:41:01.040 like, I can't tell the noise from the, like, I don't know what is it that my daughter listens

01:41:05.760 to today that will mean as much to her in her mid forties as the music we're talking about

01:41:12.060 does today. Like, is it going to be the same or has this frictionless system that you've

01:41:18.460 described changed the way she will list? Like, will she look at Taylor Swift in 35 years? The

01:41:26.060 way I look at the beastie boys, she might, it's hard to know. It's impossible to know. And there

01:41:31.540 is an argument that the music in the sixties and seventies was probably the best music ever made

01:41:36.720 because of the barriers to make it and get it to like, you just concentrated more combination of

01:41:44.300 all those things. And the fact that the technology was such that unless you were really good, you

01:41:50.440 didn't even get to make a record. Yeah. Yeah. Just a pure selection bias. So now it's much easier to

01:41:56.180 make. Anybody can make a record. Anybody can make anything now, which is great. But you just lowered

01:42:03.660 the signal to noise ratio. Exactly. That is my intuition as well. The signal to noise ratio has changed.

01:42:09.680 The barrier to listening has gone away. I love her telling me stuff that she's hearing that I would

01:42:18.360 have never heard otherwise and trying to think like, will this song be relevant in five years,

01:42:24.280 let alone 35 years? Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to know. It's hard to know. Even if we look back at music

01:42:31.000 from the sixties or seventies, and if you look at the things that really were popular, then some of them

01:42:38.440 we still talk about and others that were equally popular, then we don't talk about anymore. So it

01:42:45.220 really does. There's so, there's so much to it. It's hard to know why we're impossible to predict

01:42:52.140 why. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. You know, earlier you talked about the impact that Laird has had on you

01:42:59.600 in terms of introducing a new dimension to your life, which is the dimension of physicality.

01:43:04.240 So we go back to this period of your life when you were in the throes of depression,

01:43:12.200 Remeron comes along and gives you some hope in the process. You gained 60 pounds.

01:43:18.160 Remind me at your peak, what was your weight? The heaviest I got was 318 pounds.

01:43:23.500 And if I recall, it was really Phil Maffetone or was it Barry Sears or Phil Maffetone? One of those

01:43:31.760 guys was kind of the first guy that got you to make dietary changes and exercise changes that began

01:43:38.080 the process of... Well, Phil was the first to do that, but I will say my whole life

01:43:45.840 fighting weight issues was part of my world. And I would do everything I could to try to lose weight

01:43:55.200 from the time I was a child. My mom was obese. So she had a stigma against weight issues because 1.00

01:44:03.160 she had it. And it's so funny how there are some people who are overweight and they think,

01:44:08.720 oh, everybody who's overweight is beautiful. And there are some people who are overweight and they

01:44:12.480 think, I don't like fat people because it's just their experience of the world. So my mom was one 0.99

01:44:19.700 of the people who did not like fat people who was fat. So how did that impact you if you were chubby

01:44:25.420 as a kid? Well, I always felt sort of ashamed of my weight and her mom, my grandmother, was very hard

01:44:35.240 on my mom about her weight. So it was sort of this generational shame. In college, were you trying

01:44:44.080 different diets? What were you doing to... Yeah. Even before college, I can remember as a kid going

01:44:49.860 to Weight Watchers as a little kid. So I tried many different things over the years and for whatever

01:44:55.260 reason, nothing really worked. And then at the time that I became my heaviest, I was vegan. I was vegan

01:45:01.260 for 20 something years thinking I was eating the healthiest diet I possibly could. And I just kept

01:45:11.100 gaining weight. Was your foray into veganism, like, was it an ethical issue as well with killing meat or

01:45:18.420 with killing animals? Or was it mostly through the lens of this will be the best way to manage my weight?

01:45:23.180 Mostly with the eyes of health. Although there's the compassion side too. But I would say the primary

01:45:31.820 goal was to take care of myself and be healthy. How old were you roughly when you reached nearly 320

01:45:40.980 pounds? In my forties, somewhere in my forties. And it's sort of one of those things, right? Where you

01:45:48.680 think? To a lesser extent, but I certainly remember when I was finally, like, at my absolute heaviest.

01:45:54.560 And I look back at pictures and things like that. It's not like there's a day that you wake up and

01:46:00.720 you're at that weight. I mean, it's been going on incrementally, incrementally, incrementally. And

01:46:04.700 I look at pictures over this span of probably five, six years. And I'm like, I wonder what I was

01:46:14.360 thinking at that moment. Like, clearly, I realized I was much heavier than I ought to have been.

01:46:20.080 What was your aha moment, which was like, I have to do something different?

01:46:24.240 Well, I was always looking for something different to do. And my first aha moment was Phil Maffetone. I

01:46:29.640 read there was a book by a guy named Stu Middleman, who ran 1000 miles in 11 days. And I'm thinking,

01:46:37.960 I don't know how someone can run 1000 miles in 11 days when I can't walk to the corner

01:46:43.160 without feeling like I'm going to pass out. How is this? It just seemed like so

01:46:48.020 unrealistic. It's like, what does he know that I don't know? And I read his book. And somewhere in

01:46:56.260 the middle of the book, he talks about and then I met this guy, Phil Maffetone, and he changed my life.

01:47:00.320 And I started doing training the way that Phil recommended. So I researched and this was early days

01:47:06.920 of online for me. I don't even think I had a computer yet. It might've been web TV, something

01:47:11.440 like that. But I somehow found a contact for Phil Maffetone. And I sent him an email.

01:47:16.300 And where was he at this time? Like Arizona, Florida, Florida. And I asked if I could become

01:47:21.960 a patient. And he said he was giving up his medical practice and wasn't taking any new patients. And

01:47:28.400 he's stopping being a doctor. He didn't know who I was at all. And he mentioned in the email

01:47:35.280 that he was giving up his medical practice to become a songwriter. And, um, you couldn't make

01:47:42.860 that up. Yeah. It's unbelievable. And I sent a message and I said, well, I got a deal. Yeah.

01:47:48.500 I'm involved with songwriters and maybe you can help me with my health and I can help you with the

01:47:55.660 songwriting as best I can. And he was open to that. So we, the first time we met was in New York city.

01:48:01.500 He was going to be in New York for something else. And I was going to New York for something else.

01:48:05.740 And we happened to work out the timing where we could meet. And he treated me in a hotel room and

01:48:10.580 we became friends. I started doing, he would recommend programs for me to do. And eventually.

01:48:17.500 And how much of it was nutrition related and exercise related?

01:48:20.500 Both. It was both of those.

01:48:21.460 And what were sort of those first steps that were being made? Do you recall?

01:48:24.900 Well, I was still a vegan at the time and it was hard. And he was frustrated clearly

01:48:30.020 by me maintaining my veganism, but he had me cut out all carbs.

01:48:36.000 Carbohydrate restriction is very challenging with vegans. It's not as challenging if you're a

01:48:40.320 vegetarian, but when you're a vegan, it becomes a lot of soy. Well, and you just have to sort of

01:48:47.020 like embrace a lot of plant fats in which are by themselves. Not, I mean, no fat by itself is

01:48:54.100 particularly palatable, but, uh, so you're going through this and when was the first kind of

01:49:01.500 glimmer? Oh, he also had me get a heart rate monitor and had me start walking at my target

01:49:09.000 heart rate for maybe the first 10 minutes and working my way up to eventually an hour.

01:49:13.400 And do you remember at the time what your maximum heart rate was or at what heart rate you would

01:49:17.000 begin to feel gassed? Well, my heart rate would immediately go over my target immediately.

01:49:24.760 Yeah. Just walk into the bathroom. Yeah. So it took time to kind of train myself down,

01:49:30.420 even just to be able to go for a long walk in those days on a treadmill. Cause the place I lived

01:49:36.480 was not so great to walk outside. I would do walk on the treadmill. And at first it was snail's pace

01:49:43.520 walk. And then it was able to get faster and faster and faster and still be in that target

01:49:49.280 zone. Eventually Phil ended up coming and living in my house with me for a couple of years. He came

01:49:55.120 out here to LA. Yeah. Then he started having me doing stairs and I lived in a house that had one,

01:50:00.460 two, three. It was a three flight. You could put together three flights and he would have me

01:50:06.320 walk up the three flights and walk down the three flights, but always watching the heart rate so that.

01:50:11.020 And what was your target zone back then? I mean, Phil is a pretty big proponent of

01:50:15.300 long, slow zone too. Yeah. Yeah. So it's probably, I want to say it was 156 maybe was the target

01:50:25.220 originally. Oh, that high. Yeah. Huh. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Based on my age, that's what it was.

01:50:32.140 When did you start to include animal products in your diet? Well, he convinced me to add

01:50:37.980 fish and eggs, which were two things that I never ate. Even when I was a meat eater,

01:50:43.980 I never ate fish and I never ate eggs, never liked them. And he said, those would be the best things

01:50:49.840 for you to start on and don't think of them as food. Think of it as medicine and you need this

01:50:54.940 medicine. We would find ways to mask it. So we'd do like a blueberry shake with three whole eggs in it.

01:51:02.660 Mm-hmm. And I eventually was able to find, you know, one or two, maybe sea bass and halibut were

01:51:09.720 the only, you know, mildest white fish. To this day, those are the only fish that, and even now,

01:51:14.520 I don't even know if I'll eat sea bass anymore. Pretty much just eat halibut just because it's so.

01:51:19.020 You don't eat salmon? No. It's too fishy.

01:51:21.360 I'm going to make you a salmon that you'll eat. I promise you. I take pride in making

01:51:27.920 salmon that most people don't even recognize who don't like fish. So that my highest point,

01:51:33.900 my highest accomplishment in my life, certainly top three, is getting my sister to not just eat 0.91

01:51:38.780 the salmon that I made, but love it. Wow. That's great. And my sister is, she's always been a picky

01:51:43.320 eater as a kid and like just wouldn't eat fish if her life depended on it. And a couple of years ago,

01:51:50.160 her and her husband and kids were over at our place and I was making salmon and I was making

01:51:55.420 something else for her because I knew she wasn't going to eat the salmon. She tried it and she was

01:51:58.740 like, it's unbelievable. And I couldn't believe it. The irony of it is, of course, I learned how to do

01:52:02.300 this from my dad. So she grew up with my dad making that salmon, but she would never try it. Amazing.

01:52:06.900 If I'd thought of this, I would have brought some salmon up tonight and made it tonight.

01:52:10.020 We're going to have a feast tonight. Muriel's cheese.

01:52:15.240 There's a reason I didn't have lunch today. Oh my God. Me either. And that's unusual for me.

01:52:19.860 I usually, I mean, I intermittent fast, but yeah, you're, yeah, you don't, you'll skip the first

01:52:23.960 meal. So you introduced the eggs, you introduced the fish. You're now doing the exercise. What is

01:52:31.280 the pace with which that weight is coming off? It's not, I would say over the two years of doing

01:52:36.560 everything Phil said with him watching me do it, I maybe lost five pounds. Interesting. Yes. And he's,

01:52:45.000 and he was befuddled and he said, I see what you're doing. I watch it every day. I watch everything you

01:52:53.000 eat. 99 out of a hundred people who are doing what you're doing, all the weight would fall off.

01:52:58.820 Something else is going on. I would love to go back in time and look at your blood work from that

01:53:04.000 era. I have a hypothesis about patients in your situation. Yeah. I've seen

01:53:10.240 four or five people where that has been the case. So that's probably more than 1%, by the way,

01:53:17.300 in my experience, it's so interesting because I think I didn't have the luxury of being able to

01:53:23.260 watch those patients as closely as Phil is watching you. But I tell you, I was a hundred percent

01:53:30.100 convinced that they were also doing everything. Like it didn't even cross my mind that they're not

01:53:35.160 doing it or they're lying to me. Like I knew that they were doing it. And I, and I know,

01:53:38.680 and I would trust anyone by what they say. Cause I know I'm a disciplined person. I just had bad

01:53:44.220 information. And now I finally had good information from Phil, but I wasn't willing to fully embrace it

01:53:49.740 because I'm in my head. I'm a vegan. I'm eating fish and eggs as a, as medicine, but you hadn't

01:53:56.100 really been able to give up the carbohydrates and I'm still a vegan. No, but I gave up carbohydrates.

01:54:00.800 So, so what do you think? I mean, that's pretty amazing by the way, that you could stick to

01:54:05.280 something for two years, losing five pounds. I mean, you've gone from three 18 to three 13.

01:54:09.820 Well, it was easy cause Phil was there. So it was like, you must've been feeling better though.

01:54:13.960 I felt a million times better and it changed my whole life. He also changed my circadian rhythm.

01:54:19.860 I used to work all night and sleep all day. He got me to change to normal hours. He changed a lot of

01:54:27.280 stuff. And my vitality changed. I definitely got healthier, felt better. I was just still big.

01:54:36.000 Yeah. So what was the next step? The next step. Then he started having me add more animal protein

01:54:42.660 through other masked ways. Like the first one was we would make this vegetarian chili,

01:54:50.100 chili, which didn't have beans, but we would try to grind Turkey and mix it in. So it would still be

01:54:58.960 like vegan chili, but it would sneak in the protein that I was, that he wanted. And at this point,

01:55:04.160 like I was vegan for six months, I did an experiment. And in just six months of giving up all animal

01:55:10.560 product, when I went back to eating, and this was a planned six months. So I was like, I'm going to do

01:55:14.960 this from January 1st to June 30th. And I remember on July 1st, when I went to the steakhouse to get

01:55:19.940 the biggest steak I could eat, one, I couldn't finish it. And two, it tasted disgusting to me.

01:55:24.420 I had really, in just six months, lost my taste for meat. I assume for you, it was even more profound.

01:55:30.780 It was impossible. Impossible. Again, it was always these masked foods for a while. And then it was,

01:55:39.420 I think red meat was the last thing to go back in, which was, it was my birthday. And me and Muriel

01:55:47.500 had gone out to a restaurant that makes great steak, although that was not something that I would,

01:55:52.220 I would usually go there and eat fish. And we both ordered fish. She was vegetarian. And the plan was,

01:55:58.160 we would go, we would order a normal dinner, but we would also order a steak.

01:56:02.200 So that if you want, you could have one piece of it.

01:56:03.700 Yeah. Which is what we did. We ate one bite and it was, it felt like we were eating human flesh.

01:56:09.420 It was disgusting. And we did that every maybe two weeks for, I would say it would have ended up

01:56:21.320 being maybe four times where we would get through a couple of bites of meat. And then by around the

01:56:28.980 fifth time back, we just ordered steak. It took adding a little more, adding a little more,

01:56:36.140 adding a little more. It's a bit of a tangent, but two nights ago I made a venison stew. And this is

01:56:42.780 from venison that I had, had shot with my bow and arrow hunting, which I've become obsessed with,

01:56:48.480 by the way. So we'll have to talk about this over dinner tonight. I'm going to get you onto this

01:56:52.260 incredible wild venison that is like nothing I've ever consumed, but whatever, two days ago,

01:56:58.740 and I'm making the stew. I just happened to like, I can't, like I've got so much meat in the freezer

01:57:04.120 that I brought back, but I can't always tell what's in the bag. So they're in these huge Ziploc bags.

01:57:08.040 So I'll just take one bag out and thought, and that becomes the stew. Well, I didn't do a great

01:57:13.640 job of packaging this, or I didn't do a great job of thinking about it because it had like three hearts

01:57:18.300 in there and kidneys, which is fine. Cause I'm going to eat the organs. But I was like, Oh,

01:57:22.520 I didn't want to eat them all at once. So, you know, I thaw these things out. So I'm preparing it.

01:57:28.720 And I'm like, my first thought is, Oh, I'm going to wait till like the kids get home so I can show

01:57:32.140 them how to dissect the heart. Cause the deer's heart looks just like a human heart. Like it is

01:57:37.580 the organ that is identical. Like their kidneys are much smaller. Their livers look a little bit,

01:57:42.360 their livers are similar, spleen's a bit bigger, but their heart is a human heart. Like it's

01:57:46.880 indistinguishable. So then I like, eh, maybe that's not a good idea. I don't know. That might be one,

01:57:52.380 that might be one bit too far. So, so I'm just going through the heart and chopping it up to put it in

01:57:56.860 the stew. And it kind of like, it comes over me. I'm like, God, this is like, this is a little weird

01:58:05.260 because the other times I'd eaten deer heart, it was in the field where it was fresh. And this

01:58:14.200 reminded me much more of an anatomy class cause it had come out of the freezer. And even though it

01:58:18.440 didn't smell like the chlorophyll laden hearts that you dissected in anatomy class, it was firm in a way

01:58:25.620 that wasn't natural. And so I made the stew and I didn't tell anybody what was in it. I didn't tell,

01:58:31.100 I told my wife, I said, just so you know, you're eating a bunch of heart and kidneys and stuff

01:58:34.180 tonight. Everybody loved it. They were like, dad, this is better than any stew you've ever made.

01:58:39.160 Cause I always make venison stew, but I'm usually using like more muscle meat. So they loved it. It

01:58:43.440 was a huge hit. And it occurred to me, like it sort of made me think like it's upsetting to me to

01:58:52.260 think that I could have eaten that on some level. Cause doesn't this mean I could eat a human?

01:58:55.120 Like if I was a cannibal, that could have been a human heart that I would have dissected. Like

01:59:00.060 it just weirded me out in a way that I don't really know what to think about actually. But I was

01:59:06.380 thinking about it today for some reason, cause I don't know why I was carrying like trash out and

01:59:09.800 something made me think of like, it must've been some leftovers or something. And I was like,

01:59:13.680 God, that is so weird that I just like, my family just ate three hearts and three kidneys

01:59:20.000 in the last couple of days. And of course, on the one hand you realize like that's actually the

01:59:24.060 healthiest meat in the animal is the organs. And that's, you know, when you look at our

01:59:28.620 carnivorous ancestors, they were only eating those meats. They were actually giving the muscle meat to

01:59:34.180 their dogs and to things like that. They were going for these nutrient dense organs that were 0.99

01:59:38.760 incredible, but everything becomes acquired. And even that this is my first time putting a heart

01:59:44.500 into a stew because other times I'd fried it, but you're taking different cuts to it. And I was like,

01:59:49.360 the valve, I don't want to eat the valve. You know, I got to cut that part out and stuff like

01:59:53.880 that. The whole, and the atria are not particularly interesting. I mean, it's all about the ventricles.

01:59:57.960 So I can only imagine, and I'm someone who's pretty used to eating meat. So I, it's, yeah,

02:00:03.440 it's amazing to think what you would have thought. Yes. Eating a piece of steak and how disgusting that

02:00:10.280 must've been. Yeah. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. It seemed like, how does anybody eat this stuff?

02:00:15.400 Because even smelling meat cooking would have made me nauseous. So you're feeling a lot better,

02:00:21.500 but obviously on some level you're sort of thinking, gosh, I, I'd still love to lose a

02:00:24.960 hundred pounds here. I mean, if for no other reason than just the difficulty on your joints and stuff.

02:00:30.120 I was so happy with the change in the way I was feeling that even though my main purpose was to

02:00:38.920 lose weight, the change that I got was not that, but it was great. And I loved it. And I assumed

02:00:43.960 that maybe it's just a genetic thing. And, you know, because my mom and it'll, it'll always be,

02:00:51.900 it'll always be an issue, but at least I feel healthy now. And then I was having lunch with

02:00:57.940 Mo Austin, who's a guy who ran Warner Brothers records for 35 years. He worked for Frank Sinatra.

02:01:07.060 He signed Jimi Hendrix. He signed the Sex Pistols. He signed Black Sabbath. He's an unbelievable guy.

02:01:12.180 And I went out to lunch with him one day. We would see each other probably once every

02:01:19.360 two months. And he said, you know, Rick, you, you're really getting big and I'm really worried

02:01:26.460 about you. And I know that you, you know, I know you walk every day and I know that you're

02:01:31.520 strict about what you eat, but something's wrong. And I'm going to get a nutritionist for you. And I

02:01:39.180 want you to go to see my nutritionist. I want you to do everything he says. And I said, okay.

02:01:44.700 And I knew it wouldn't work, but I was happy to do it. It's like, I have nothing to lose. Like I'll

02:01:49.080 do it, but I've done everything and nothing has worked my whole life. So I don't know why that

02:01:55.080 would change now, but I'm, I love this person and he's cares about me. And if he's got an idea,

02:02:01.320 I'm open and I go to see his name is Dr. Heber at you, UCLA. And he hooked me up to a machine,

02:02:11.380 like a body fat impedance. Yeah. And he told me how many calories I burn every day. And he told me,

02:02:21.240 what are the foods that I was allowed to eat and not allowed to eat? And said, you know, you, you burn

02:02:30.460 2,300 calories a day. I'm going to put you on a 1400 calorie a day diet and you'll lose. And he said,

02:02:41.060 you'll lose this many pounds over this period of time. Just like science. He's like, no, like a hundred

02:02:46.260 percent. This is how this will work. And I didn't believe it at all. And he also had me shift my diet

02:02:54.220 to be based around protein shakes. So he wanted me to have six or seven protein shakes a day every two

02:03:03.140 hours. And then I could have dinner at night, which would be fish, soup, salad, like a light dinner,

02:03:10.360 a low calorie dinner with no carbs. So, so it was basically amazed. You could have that many shakes

02:03:16.880 and that low that, and, and he'd still eat a dinner and be under 1400 calories. Yeah. Cause the shakes

02:03:21.820 were 120 calories each. Cause all it was, was J Rob egg protein powder and water. Yeah. There's no,

02:03:32.320 nothing else in it. It wasn't so bad. It wasn't so bad. The first three days I felt a little dizzy

02:03:39.360 doing this. And after three days, it was no problem. And, and how was your appetite

02:03:45.880 after three days? Fine. Because the, the protein and the shakes was so satisfying. And I had had them,

02:03:54.760 I had one as soon as I woke up in the morning and then every two hours, I never really had a chance

02:03:59.420 to get hungry. And then I would have again, this light dinner and I would spread out my dinner through

02:04:06.080 the night. So I would have, first I would have the fish and some cooked vegetables. And then an hour

02:04:13.540 later, I would have a vegetable broth or a chicken broth. And then an hour later, I would have a

02:04:21.140 giant salad, but with just a little bit of oil, a little bit of lemon maybe. And I did that. I was

02:04:28.460 eating one piece of fruit at that time too, cause it seemed really restrictive. And I remember saying to

02:04:35.240 him, can I have like an apple a day? And he said, it'll slow things down, but you can. And I had

02:04:40.600 an apple a day and really savored the apple. So then the weight starts coming off. Yeah. And then

02:04:45.800 in 14 months I lost 135 pounds. Now that's also a testament, I think, to your being able to stick

02:04:53.940 to it. How did you manage, you know, the social side of things going out for dinners? I mean,

02:04:58.060 certainly. It was fine. It was fine. You would just order appropriately when you would go out?

02:05:03.420 Absolutely. Yeah. It was, it was pretty easy to do. Are you a disciplined person?

02:05:08.920 Yes. Like with everything, do you, are there any things where you'd, like, I don't consider myself

02:05:14.640 a very disciplined person, even though I get accused of being one all the time because.

02:05:18.660 I would say in some ways, very much so. And in other ways, less so. But with food, you're quite

02:05:26.320 disciplined. I would say I'm diligent. So I don't like to settle. I'll continue. I have on the unhealthy

02:05:35.440 side, I can be a perfectionist and that can really slow things down. So you lose some unbelievable

02:05:46.200 on a wage. You're down to, you're below 200 at this point. Yes. I met Laird when I had lost 90 pounds

02:05:52.360 and there was a friend of ours named Don Wildman who was at that time in his seventies, super fit

02:05:59.500 bicycle racer, unbelievable, unbelievable guy and jacked. To give you an idea, he was, I think he was

02:06:07.040 maybe when he was 80, he did 23 pull-ups on the beach at 80 years old. Wow. And looked like a 0.84

02:06:14.200 bodybuilder until he passed recently, maybe between a year and two years, he passed away.

02:06:22.960 But anyway, he was with Laird and he was, he owned a Bally's fitness and built Bally's fitness.

02:06:30.360 He was very impressed with the weight loss. He just said, you know, it's being in the gym business. He

02:06:37.040 said, this doesn't happen often. This is really remarkable. And you might want to start training

02:06:41.940 with us. Because at this period of time, is Phil still living with you at this point? Phil's not

02:06:46.900 living with me. And all I'm doing is walking for an hour a day. Oh, now I'm up to sort of jogging.

02:06:52.400 Uh-huh. Now I can on and off jog. You can jog and stay mostly at your target. And stay at my target

02:06:58.340 heart rate. Yes. But you haven't started to lift weights yet or do anything. No, no. So you're also

02:07:03.540 kind of probably, you've lost a lot of weight, but you've probably haven't, you've lost muscle as well

02:07:08.000 as fat. Oh, absolutely. Although that was one of the things that Dr. Heber said about the key to the

02:07:14.040 diet is you want to have, and he told me what the grams were. I can't remember now. He's like,

02:07:21.980 you want to have 200 grams of protein. Oh, I can remember. He said, your target weight. The first

02:07:27.360 time he tested me, he said, your target weight is 235 coming from the one, the 318. And each time I'd see

02:07:36.940 him, the target number would go down. Because you were making progress faster than he'd anticipated.

02:07:42.720 Or the stats changed. Yeah. Based on the stats, where he wanted to see my, it kept moving.

02:07:50.740 So at first it was 235. And so it was 230 or so grams of protein. So he was targeting you at one

02:07:57.360 gram per pound of target body weight. And he said, if you do that, you're going to lose mostly fat

02:08:02.360 and much less muscle. Diets like that have gotten people into a lot of trouble.

02:08:09.480 And unfortunately that created an enormous backlash against carbohydrate restriction because

02:08:15.820 carbohydrate restriction is a pretty vague and broad concept, right? It can be anything from a

02:08:22.460 ketogenic diet, which is, you know, say a four to one ketogenic diet, which is what you would give

02:08:28.360 kids that have epilepsy where you're pretty much, they're pretty much just eating fat. I mean,

02:08:32.820 there's virtually no protein and certainly no carbohydrate in their diet. And at the other

02:08:37.280 end of the spectrum, a low carbohydrate diet could be what you were consuming, which is very high protein

02:08:41.160 diet. And, you know, there were some patients that got into trouble with these high liquid protein diets.

02:08:49.240 And like with anything, you know, you get, you see one or two complications because the wrong person

02:08:54.720 is consuming this when their kidney function can't handle or something. And all of a sudden it,

02:08:59.120 you know, the world isn't smart enough to appreciate nuance. So it turns into anytime you're strict

02:09:04.120 carbohydrates, you're going to kill yourself. So when did you start reintroducing food? Because at some

02:09:10.220 point, let me say there's another piece of this. It's really important, which is had I not done the work

02:09:16.360 that I did with Phil. Yeah. The diet wouldn't have worked. It was a combination of Phil getting,

02:09:23.500 getting my body working again. Yeah. And then actually the high protein and calorie restriction

02:09:30.620 really changed everything for me because in the Phil was a believer in you don't count calories. You

02:09:38.480 don't think about that. So I might eat half a jar of almond butter every day. Almond butter was healthy,

02:09:44.940 but half a jar of almond butter might be 2000 calories just in almond butter, forgetting all

02:09:51.000 the rest of the food I was eating. Yeah. Yeah. My guess is if we could have gone back in time and

02:09:57.560 looked at you, I would suspect that Phil fixed a lot of your fuel partitioning issues. So when you

02:10:03.140 probably met Phil, my hunch is you were glycogen overloaded, hyperinsulinemic, glucose dependent.

02:10:14.540 I definitely was because I would get frantic if I didn't eat, like really crazed.

02:10:21.960 Yeah. Desperate.

02:10:23.280 I think what you're saying makes a ton of sense actually. I would suspect that Phil fixed your

02:10:27.660 fuel partitioning and probably fixed a lot of the hyperinsulinemia. Yes. But to take it to the next

02:10:33.840 level, you just had to restrict calories. Cause when you restrict those calories, you're going to

02:10:38.120 deplete glycogen levels and you have to basically get, you have to, you have to take glycogen off the

02:10:42.920 table to, I'm actually convinced now. I don't think I was convinced of this even two years ago or a

02:10:48.880 year ago. I don't think one can lose weight when the liver and the muscles are full of glycogen

02:10:54.800 that has to be depleted. And the two quickest things that you can do to deplete glycogen in

02:11:02.220 the liver and the muscle are to exercise and to restrict calories above all else. But within the

02:11:08.560 calories, carbohydrates are probably the most important to restrict. So, so when did the doc

02:11:14.560 at UCLA, when did you guys decide, okay, you're at a goal. It's now it's time to start reintroducing

02:11:19.740 when he saw, when I came to see him one time, he's just like, you're, you're at your target,

02:11:23.960 which was, you know, as they say, I got down to like 187, I think. But you were already training

02:11:28.820 at this point now because you'd already met started when I'd lost 90 pounds. So probably

02:11:34.100 I had another 50, 50 ish pounds to lose, but I started training at that point. And I can remember

02:11:39.960 showing up at Laird's house the first day and I could not do one pushup. And, uh, and he said,

02:11:46.560 no, don't say you can't do it. So you haven't done it yet. And then he would,

02:11:50.780 and did you know a lot about Laird before you guys met? Not much other than like,

02:11:55.160 you just knew he was some star surfer, but you, yeah. And I'd seen riding giants,

02:12:00.140 which is a movie that he's the third piece of. Yeah. And he just seemed like the most incredible

02:12:06.820 person in the world. And he is, you know, he's a really, he, he lives up to the hype, you know,

02:12:13.140 he is that guy. So I didn't go there to exercise with the idea of wanting to exercise. I went there

02:12:20.380 with the idea of, I just, it's interesting to be around people who are really good at what they do

02:12:24.960 and him and the group of athletes that would train there were so different than anyone I'd ever met

02:12:31.700 in my life that it was interesting. And where I would think of exercise as this sort of tuning out

02:12:42.980 grunt work. What I learned with him was that it was as mentally challenging as it was physically

02:12:52.800 challenging because everything was like doing, doing two exercises at the same time while you're

02:12:59.560 balancing. It was very focus intensive, which suited my same thing I do with music. So it didn't feel

02:13:10.120 like, Oh, now I'm giving up my focus to goof off in the gym. Right, right. This was a cerebral

02:13:19.640 with certain things. The first thing to give out was the concentration, concentration, or the,

02:13:26.640 I could only balance for so long before I would lose the ability to do the exercise. So

02:13:33.880 different things started coming into play that were fascinating and fun. And with him, it was every

02:13:42.280 day would be, you do an entirely different thing. And sometimes it would be weight training. Sometimes

02:13:49.040 would be, we're going to do a hundred of each of these moves. Some days it was, we're going to do

02:13:58.320 one rep of every exercise super slow, or we're going to just hold the weights in this position for as

02:14:08.780 long as we can. Or we're going to get into a horse pose and hold it for five minutes or just all

02:14:15.920 different kinds of things, different machines, different. And then, then the pool training

02:14:19.800 started happening. And I watched that evolve through. Yeah. What was the exercise? I remember

02:14:24.660 you telling me about that you would do underwater with a dumbbell. There's a whole, it started

02:14:30.520 originally when he started it, it was carrying heavy weights from the shallow end of the pool

02:14:38.280 into the deep end of the pool. Oh yes, this is the one. And then coming back, you know, doing a

02:14:43.020 circle in the underwater in the pool. And that's how it started. That was the only exercise. And were

02:14:48.180 you comfortable enough in the water to do that? Because for some people- Yes, I love being in the

02:14:51.300 water. I felt best in the water. And I was, I really politicked to get to where we started doing

02:14:59.200 pool training as a regular thing. Because they would do it sometimes for fun. And when you say they,

02:15:04.080 who else was there? Was it mostly professional surfers? No, it's all different kinds of, of

02:15:08.980 athletes. It might be a- So this is what, like Laird's running a boot camp at his house?

02:15:13.920 He's running a boot camp, but it's just friends coming to exercise because- That's awesome.

02:15:17.740 That's all anybody wants to do. So you'll see a football player and a basketball player and a

02:15:24.220 hockey player and just some guys from around town who were jacked and liked to lift weights.

02:15:29.880 So it started, it was Monday, Wednesday, and Friday was weightlifting. And then on occasion,

02:15:37.260 we would do this pool workout. And then we started making the pool workout a regular Tuesday,

02:15:43.900 Thursday, and Saturday. So Monday, Wednesday, and Friday was weights, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday

02:15:47.800 was pool. And I remember the day, one day it was the time for the pool workout and Laird came down and

02:15:55.040 he said, I had a dream last night. And he said, another part of the exercise was, so let's say

02:16:00.560 you have a 40 pound dumbbells, 50 pound dumbbells. So the first exercise was the walk. Then you would

02:16:07.100 go to the deep end of the pool. You would leave the fifties. You would swim up, you would catch your

02:16:13.120 breath. And then when you felt strong, you would swim down and do as many, as many curls as you could

02:16:21.700 underwater, holding your breath. And then you would swim up, get a breath, go down and do another

02:16:27.140 set. And then you do as many shoulder presses as you could. A lot of things are interesting about

02:16:33.740 it. You're in cold water. It's not freezing cold, but it's still cold enough to change things.

02:16:39.720 There's no lactic acid buildup at all. Your whole body's under tremendous pressure because you're deep

02:16:46.100 underwater. So how deep was this pool? It's like 14 feet deep. Oh wow. Yeah. That's deep. So you feel

02:16:53.260 very safe lifting weights that would feel scarier to lift on land because there was so much support

02:17:05.500 from the water. And also Archimedes principle. I mean, you're technically moving less relative weight

02:17:10.860 because the water is lifting part of it. Yeah. Yeah. We were lifting the heavy weights and swimming

02:17:16.060 up to get air and you could only do so many reps and even so many sets because you just got fried

02:17:23.200 really fast doing that. Yeah. And then he had this dream and he said, I had a dream last night.

02:17:28.460 If we use lighter weight, it would be heavy enough to hold us down, but light enough where we could get up

02:17:36.620 and get air. Holding the weight, holding the weight. So then we started with 10 pound dumbbells

02:17:45.100 doing jumps like, and it would be one breath per move because it was so it started taking on this yoga

02:17:54.260 like practice. And then one day he's like, let's try doing backflips. So you come up, get a breath

02:18:01.600 and do a backflip and then land. And then the next one was like, now we're going to, and it became

02:18:07.560 into, there are like 50 different exercises now. What is the period of time from which your first

02:18:12.940 workout at Laird's house till you're doing backflips underwater with dumbbells? Is that a year?

02:18:20.080 Maybe two. Maybe two.

02:18:22.500 And it might've been two more because those exercises didn't exist two years earlier.

02:18:29.100 With him, it's always a finding a new challenge and then learning to do it.

02:18:37.860 I don't know what's a more remarkable transformation, the losing 140 pounds,

02:18:43.040 which is remarkable, or the physicality, as you put it, of going from a guy who has a hard time

02:18:51.180 walking to his car or walking up a flight of stairs to a guy who's hanging out with pro athletes

02:18:56.820 doing pretty hard stuff. I mean, I don't know that I could do any of this stuff you're describing

02:19:02.380 now, actually.

02:19:02.980 I don't know if you could do it the first time, but you could definitely learn to do it.

02:19:08.280 It's complicated, but that's kind of what makes it fun. And it feels good. It's not a,

02:19:14.040 I wouldn't say it's grueling. It's fun. Being in a pool is fun. I mean, if you're not just

02:19:20.320 swimming laps, do you know what I'm saying? It's like the variety involved and the potential for

02:19:26.880 new ideas. It's really fun. Super fun. And I even find it fun to just swim laps.

02:19:32.460 Really? Yeah. I get, I get, I guess I get in a good mood doing it, but the first half,

02:19:38.800 and for me, my goal would be to swim a mile and the first half of it would be pretty grueling,

02:19:45.100 but then the second half would be kind of like the downhill.

02:19:48.580 When I was training for a swim in Hawaii, the time I lived in San Francisco, I had to do the swim in

02:19:55.980 June. That was sort of my window to do it. So, you know, you know what the water's like in June

02:19:59.520 in Hawaii. It's pretty warm. It's about 80 degrees. So I couldn't do my long, long swims in the ocean,

02:20:06.660 in the bay, because it was, it's reverse acclimating. I actually had to learn to do long swims in the heat.

02:20:13.140 Yeah. So different. Yeah. Totally different. You know, there's a sweet spot, like 70 degrees is

02:20:18.200 perfect or, you know, sort of 66 to 72 is really the right temperature for marathon swimming.

02:20:24.420 So if you're, you know, if you're doing a swim in the sixties, you actually have to train in the

02:20:28.900 sixties. And this was just the reverse. It was training in the eighties. So I had to do all these

02:20:33.060 long swims in a pool. And that was one of the tougher swims to train for because in the ocean, it's,

02:20:40.020 it's completely different. Yeah. It's just, well, it's just nothing to do with each other.

02:20:43.140 Yeah. It's, it's mentally a lot easier to swim 10 miles in the ocean than to swim 10 miles in a 25

02:20:49.500 yard pool. And, you know, so swimming a marathon is no different from running a marathon. You have

02:20:54.060 a very similar periodization of training where, you know, you'll, I forget, I think I was on,

02:20:58.360 I was on a three week cycle. So each three weeks I was taking a step forward of, you know, 20%

02:21:04.940 additional volume. And then you would cycle up, down, up, down with these three week peaks or two

02:21:09.700 weeks. I can't even remember, but I do remember the day very clearly when I had to do my longest

02:21:15.300 pool swim, which was not going to be my longest swim. I was going to do one ocean swim in cold water

02:21:21.660 just to get the really long swimming. But it had to be, I want to say like 28,000 yards in the pool

02:21:29.400 without stopping, which was about as long as the pool was open on this particular Saturday afternoon.

02:21:35.000 And the thing that I had learned doing these long swims is there's two options. One, you're going

02:21:44.120 to get in the water and actually feel good. You're going to just be having a good day and you'll know

02:21:48.940 1500 yards into this, like it's going to be a good day. And the good news is if that's the case,

02:21:54.260 at least you're not going to suffer for the next eight hours. The bad news is you didn't build the

02:21:58.500 mental toughness that you actually want for the real swim when it hurts. Conversely, you're going to get

02:22:03.740 in some days and that first 1500 is going to feel horrible and it's only going to get worse. And

02:22:09.280 you're going to, it's going to be the worst eight hours of your life, relatively speaking. When you

02:22:15.320 finish, it'll be incredible because you'll have no, you persevered through it and you didn't know which

02:22:20.320 of those two you wanted in the short term. You sort of wanted the good day. Of course. So on this one

02:22:24.700 day when I had to do my, you know, 28,000 yards or whatever, I mean, 500 yards into that swim,

02:22:31.740 I couldn't believe how much pain I was in. Wow. And then a thousand, I'm like, Oh my God,

02:22:36.520 this is going to be bad. And by the only way you can keep track of those swims is on the splits on

02:22:41.220 your watch. So I basically knew exactly how many strokes I would take per length. And I knew to the

02:22:46.560 second, how long each lap was taking. And I was struggling to hold that pace even at 1500 yards.

02:22:52.520 Whereas the first 16,000 yards, generally you could turn your brain off and do it. And so sure enough,

02:22:58.380 that ended up being one of the most difficult swims of my life from a training perspective

02:23:01.320 in the pool, swimming the laps in the heat. But when it was done, I was like, all right, well,

02:23:08.960 you got through it. So you, you, the benefit is on the other side of that. So that was,

02:23:12.960 that was the one of the few times when swimming laps was unbearable, but I can see what you're

02:23:18.020 saying. There's an athleticism that Laird, who I don't know by the way, but just, he writes a column

02:23:23.200 in a men's magazine that I love. And you can tell like, there's this interface between play and work

02:23:30.520 and functionality. And he's very creative, right? Like he seems to be one of the most creative

02:23:36.340 athletes I've ever read about. And it's not just in his sport, but it's also in how he sort of

02:23:42.580 revolutionized the way he trains. It's the reason he does what he does in his sport is because of the

02:23:49.120 way he thinks he's very out of the box problem solving. He sees something that no one's ever

02:23:56.380 done before and thinks about, okay, how do we do this? It's very different than we know how it's

02:24:05.120 done and we're going to just grind it out. He's not, he's not the grind it out. He'll, he'll grind

02:24:10.160 it out if that's the job. But what excites him the most from my perspective seems like is no one's

02:24:15.760 ever done this before. Let's figure out the problem and then let's train to be able to do

02:24:21.040 this thing. Yeah. It's amazing. So this journey you've just described sounds like it took about

02:24:28.840 five, six years to go from the guy who can't walk to his car to the guy who's, you know, frankly,

02:24:34.800 I remember even seeing the magazine, I don't know, story, what, six, seven years ago with you and Laird

02:24:40.340 working out. And it was, I mean, a total transformation, total transformation. Like I

02:24:45.720 said, the first day I went there, I couldn't do one pushup. I got to the point where I could do

02:24:49.660 a hundred consecutive pushups, which was crazy for me. That seemed insane. How did this impact your

02:24:57.240 work? So to think for a moment that you're doing this incredible work with physical limitations. I mean,

02:25:05.940 at some point not having the energy to walk to your car must be impacting the energy you could

02:25:11.160 bring to a studio or the duration with which you could be in a studio. I'm not sure. I don't know

02:25:16.020 that that's the case. Interesting. I think it's almost like a different, if anything, I was just

02:25:22.500 in a better mood. I feel like I came alive through that process in a different way. Now I was already

02:25:28.800 alive in the studio, but maybe that was the only place I was alive before. But through the exercise,

02:25:34.720 I became alive more in life. So let's fast forward to last summer. Okay. So we're sitting

02:25:43.100 down to have a coffee in New York and you had stopped off on the way home from Italy. The story

02:25:50.200 just makes me laugh to this day because I can't believe it, right? You had called me and said,

02:25:53.600 Hey, I was once told I might have aortic stenosis. The ask was like, what do you think? Or something

02:25:59.680 like that. And I think I just basically said, you know, Rick, echocardiogram, you know, is pretty

02:26:04.360 good, but really cardiac MRI is really the way we want to do this. And I'm sure there's a great

02:26:09.660 place to do it in LA, but I know, I know the best place to get it in New York. And since you're in

02:26:13.920 Italy, why don't you just stop by and we'll do it? So great. So you, you stop by, you get the cardiac

02:26:19.200 MRI and then we met for coffee around the corner and my phone is ringing. Right. And it's like,

02:26:25.440 I looked down and it's, it's Bob Peters, who's the radiologist. And I'm like, I wonder why Bob's

02:26:30.740 calling me. It can't be that important. I don't even think to put the two and two together that

02:26:34.720 he's calling because he's looking at the scan you had. And if I remember correctly, he called like

02:26:38.500 10 times. He called 10 times. And at which point, like, you know, my spidey sense goes off and I'm

02:26:44.200 like, Rick, sorry to be rude. Let me just go see what this guy wants. Yeah. And I call him and he goes,

02:26:49.700 are you nearby? And I was like, yeah, dude, I'm like a hundred feet away from, he goes, um,

02:26:55.740 are you with Rick? I said, yeah. He goes, uh, can you, can you guys come by? And I was like,

02:27:00.980 okay, sure. Now I told you, Hey Rick, this is Bob calling for us to come and look at this. Did you,

02:27:08.180 what did you think at that moment? No, I had no preconceived idea. Okay. So it didn't seem

02:27:14.080 odd to you because this is just, well, it seemed odd, but I didn't know what to expect.

02:27:19.080 I can give you another odd, just a little odd piece that happened before this, which was when I did

02:27:24.380 the last echo out here after I was in Hawaii and before I was in Italy, the reason that I had to

02:27:34.680 do this, this new test, I do the test. Everything's fine. I'm leaving the test. And the woman who does 1.00

02:27:43.340 the test says, how are you feeling? And I said, I'm feeling pretty good. And she's like, that's good.

02:27:49.480 Like all things considered to something like that. Like, like, or in your condition, like, okay.

02:27:57.360 Like, I have no idea what she's talking about. And there, was there a followup to that discussion

02:28:02.160 with her? No, I leave. You leave. Everything's fine. So you're in Italy. And so it's two months.

02:28:07.060 And I'm doing at this, at that point in time, Olympic deadlifts and squatting with as heavyweight

02:28:13.800 as possible in this new experience of like the last 18 months had been devoted to just

02:28:21.280 deadlifts and squats heavy. Oh, and that's the other part of the story that reminds, that makes

02:28:26.100 me laugh. While Bob is ringing me off the hook, we are discussing a new deadlift protocol. Yes.

02:28:32.820 And I'm like, all right, you know, I'll come up to LA and we'll do, I want to really fix your

02:28:38.960 deadlift and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Okay. So now three minutes later, we're,

02:28:44.800 we're sitting inside and Bob pulls up this scan. And again, it's, I'm more interested in your point

02:28:51.860 of view because I don't need him to say anything because I've looked at a million scans so I can

02:28:57.400 see it. But of course, if you haven't looked at one of these MRIs, like what would you know what

02:29:01.320 you're seeing? It means nothing to me. What was your first recollection that something was wrong?

02:29:05.160 Just the conversation that two of you were having, I was just sort of watching you, you guys were

02:29:11.400 comparing notes on what you were seeing. Right. And, and we're, but we were also probably not even

02:29:16.780 making an effort either deliberately or not to communicate with you. I think we were just talking

02:29:21.080 in the normal shorthand we would have spoken if you weren't there. Yeah. Again, I don't really

02:29:25.180 remember much about like what was said, but it's like nothing I'd ever seen before and it's nothing

02:29:31.160 Bob had ever seen before. Yeah. But I remember the conversation where you guys together said,

02:29:39.720 you're going to need open heart surgery as soon as possible. And I remember saying as soon as

02:29:46.560 possible in the next year. And you're like, no. Yeah. And I said in the next six months.

02:29:53.180 And you're like, no, as soon as possible, but not emergency because we want to find the right doctor.

02:29:58.780 Right. And I remember, I remember as you and I walked out of there, I said, oh, by the way,

02:30:04.740 Rick, all that stuff I was saying about the deadlifting, scratch that you are not lifting

02:30:10.000 a heavy weight until we get this resolved. Yes. And you are very good. I think at not demonstrating,

02:30:21.960 or maybe you don't even experience it, but you never seemed stressed or panicked. And sometimes

02:30:28.600 you would just have to tell me that you were stressed, but you never displayed this, right?

02:30:33.060 Like, so, so in some ways, I don't think I understood what you were going through at that time.

02:30:38.520 I'm not sure that I did either. And, and I don't know that

02:30:42.660 I was planning on acting on the information that we had gathered.

02:30:49.300 And I guess just for the listener, I should explain what's happening since you've already,

02:30:52.760 I mean, I had asked you before this. So just so the listener understands this,

02:30:55.440 I would not have brought this up if Rick hadn't been willing to talk about it.

02:30:58.680 So Rick, you have something called a congenital bicuspid aortic valve.

02:31:02.880 I was born. You were born. That's right. So, so the aortic valve normally has three leaflets and

02:31:09.160 this is, you know, embryo, you know, this is, this is from the way you're born and a small subset of

02:31:14.980 people are born with two leaflets and hence the term bicuspid as opposed to tricuspid.

02:31:20.400 And one of the real problems of a bicuspid aortic valve, and I have two patients with bicuspid aortic

02:31:26.440 valves who we just follow, you know, because we know at some point they're probably going to need

02:31:30.980 surgery. In fact, I think Arnold Schwarzenegger had a bicuspid aortic valve and that's ultimately

02:31:34.580 why he needed to have a similar operation. But one of the drawbacks is it is more prone to

02:31:40.360 calcification. So it basically, the valve starts to act like a piece of bone and it models itself

02:31:48.680 like bone. And the problem with that is it becomes harder and harder to open. And that is that that is

02:31:54.860 known as stenosis. So people with a bicuspid aortic valve are much, much more likely to develop

02:32:00.180 something called aortic stenosis. And the aortic valve is what empties the biggest, most powerful

02:32:06.460 chamber in the heart called the left ventricle. And so several things are happening. One is as the

02:32:13.720 heart is pumping, the ventricle is pumping, it's pumping against a greater and greater force of

02:32:19.460 resistance. And for transient periods, that's wonderful. It's great for the heart to have

02:32:25.100 resistance. But the heart being the most important muscle in the body has great adaptation. And one of

02:32:31.480 the adaptations is it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and more muscular and more muscular as

02:32:35.580 it goes against that. So among the things that really stood out to me looking at your cardiac MRI

02:32:41.280 was how thick the muscles of your left ventricle and your septum, which is the muscle wall that separates

02:32:49.140 the left and right ventricle, they were without exaggeration twice the normal thickness of a man

02:32:54.620 your size. And that in and of itself becomes problematic for reasons that I won't bore you

02:32:59.520 with, but you can get an outflow obstruction. In other words, the wall of the heart itself can begin

02:33:04.960 to impede outflow. So if that's one problem, the second problem is you're now having a harder and

02:33:09.640 harder time getting blood out past the aortic valve. So you can actually have sudden death with

02:33:16.340 something called critical aortic stenosis, which you have. And there's a threshold we use to define

02:33:20.920 that based on the gradient and the pressure across the valve and the size of what's left. So the amount

02:33:28.820 of room in an area, we say how many square centimeters of opening is there? And once you're below a certain

02:33:36.240 level, it's called critical. And once you reach that, the probability of sudden death goes up

02:33:41.020 significantly. But there was a third problem that was probably even more frightening on the MRA,

02:33:48.980 which is the portion of the study that looks at the vasculature, which was the size of your aortic

02:33:54.300 root was very dilated. And this also tends to go hand in hand with aortic stenosis. And it turns out

02:34:01.660 it's not entirely clear why. One thought is the higher pressure gradient going across just stretches it out.

02:34:07.920 But I actually think the literature is pointing to the fact that whatever congenital factors lead

02:34:14.400 to the remodeling or the defective valve leaflets in the remodeling also speak to not having the right

02:34:22.280 collagen mixture or matrix within the ascending aorta because it goes up like an arch. If the normal

02:34:28.980 aortic diameter there is about three and a half centimeters, and there are adjustments you can do

02:34:34.020 based on a person's size. If you were even twice your size, the allowance would be about 3.9

02:34:41.500 centimeters. I think you were like 6.6 or 6.7 centimeters. I mean, it was, again, one of those

02:34:49.620 things where we have these nomograms that predict the risk of a sudden dissection. So a dissection would

02:34:55.000 mean that that thing tears. And unfortunately that comes with a mortality of, I want to say two to 4%

02:35:05.360 per hour that it's untreated, which for many people means if it dissects, you die. And so we left and we

02:35:13.880 went back and you were going to fly back the next day. And I was going to fly back the next day to

02:35:20.140 California. And then the plan was, we're going to find you, you know, who is really the best surgeon

02:35:25.380 to do this today? Because the last time I had looked into who's going to be the best surgeon

02:35:29.760 to do this, it had been a couple of years and, you know, you want to go with the best person. So

02:35:34.440 what did you go home and talk about that night? Like, again, I guess I feel like I wasn't being

02:35:39.000 very sensitive to what that news must've been like to you. I was sort of in business mode.

02:35:42.820 From leaving that meeting with you until the moment the surgery happened, those were the most

02:35:55.260 difficult, probably six weeks of my life. Terrified. And my nature is not to intervene in medical,

02:36:06.900 certainly not in a surgical way and not even in a drug way. My instinct is always to follow nature,

02:36:15.780 not to do an intervention. And I think I told you that 20 or so years ago, my appendix burst

02:36:21.240 and I never had it removed. Right. And I remember I had a second

02:36:26.740 version of an appendicitis, maybe less than two years, less than two years after the first one,

02:36:35.580 my doctor called the pharmacy to get the same prescription antibiotics that I took the first

02:36:46.000 time that it happened. And the pharmacist said, well, he had appendicitis two years ago.

02:36:56.280 He had his appendix out and the doctor said, no, he didn't have it out. And this, the pharmacist said,

02:37:03.780 well, if you didn't have it out, he'd be dead. And you're probably not a real doctor. And I'm not

02:37:09.360 going to prescribe, I won't give him the drugs. By the way, it's so untrue. It's, it's in fact,

02:37:16.580 actually, I may have even told you this. It's actually come around full circle today. So

02:37:20.260 we learned about the non-surgical management of appendicitis through, you know, the days of when

02:37:26.060 sailors are going back and forth because appendicitis does have a very high mortality of left

02:37:29.940 untreated. But they learned that if you put a person on their right side with the pelvis down,

02:37:36.120 you could contain the rupture because the appendix is on the right. Nobody told me that.

02:37:40.280 No, no, no. And, and so you, you put somebody in that position, they can abscess it off and it

02:37:44.900 doesn't, you know, as long as it forms an abscess, you're, you're okay. It's like when it becomes

02:37:48.260 systemic. And nowadays the approach to appendicitis is much less surgical. It is a much more aggressive

02:37:55.620 antibiotic routine. But that said, you are still very fortunate to have survived because

02:38:02.040 absolutely the odds are not in your favor. No. And, and my, uh, the only way I was able to do it

02:38:07.460 was my osteopath, who's really my main doctor said, I did a CT scan. I think the guy who did the CT scan

02:38:17.040 said, okay, you're going to leave here. You're going to go straight to Cedars. I'm going to call them

02:38:21.600 and you're going to get an emergency appendectomy. And I said, well, what are my options? And he

02:38:26.800 said, you have no options. And I said, well, what if, what else can I do? And he said, if you were my

02:38:32.760 son, I would say you leave here right now, go to Cedars and get an emergency appendectomy.

02:38:38.820 That's what you have to do. And then my osteopath's office was right around the corner. I went to see

02:38:44.020 him. I showed him the pictures and he's like, looks like you need surgery. And I say, no way around it.

02:38:50.840 He's like, I don't think so. He says, too bad. We're not in Europe. I said, what are you talking

02:38:55.380 about? He said in Europe, they probably would give you a bunch of antibiotics and tell you to go home.

02:39:00.580 And I said, well, I want to do it the European style. And he said, well, I'll help you do this,

02:39:06.880 but I want you to see a surgeon and I want you to do it under his supervision. And we did that.

02:39:13.120 And I ended up never having it. And what do you think was your aversion to surgery? I mean,

02:39:16.760 it's obviously frightening under any circumstance. I even have a needle. I won't,

02:39:20.500 I have a needle phobia. So any, anything in any intervention like that, and it all stems back.

02:39:26.120 It's funny. You talked about the heart dissection earlier. I can remember in

02:39:30.480 fifth grade doing a frog dissection in biology class. And it was one of the worst experiences of

02:39:40.900 my life. I see. So I've always been, and I was afraid to go to the doctor as a kid. I was,

02:39:45.460 I've always had a, never felt right to me. Yeah. I remember you saying that even just getting the

02:39:53.400 MRI, if they had to use a needle, even to give contrast, it was going to be. Yeah. I said, I'm

02:39:58.580 happy to do any non-invasive anything, whatever it takes. And I, and I can be very strict. I just

02:40:06.080 don't want it to have needles. Although I'm getting better at it now after this, after what I've been

02:40:10.480 through. Yeah. Well, we ended up finding Joseph Wu, who's the head of cardiovascular surgery at

02:40:18.580 Stanford. And, you know, in the process, it was really great for me to get to know him and a good

02:40:24.880 friend of mine, Randy Green, who's a cardiac surgeon and was one of my mentors connected us

02:40:30.180 with, and he did the heavy lifting. He was like, look, cause I was like, well, it's really this guy

02:40:35.080 or this guy. And he said, you know, those guys were the man five years ago, 10 years ago. You

02:40:40.180 want the guy who's the man today. And it's, you know, with aortic surgery, it's really about the

02:40:46.420 reps. Like you want someone who's doing that operation constantly. And he's doing that

02:40:50.580 operation three times a week. The average cardiac surgeon might be doing that operation five times

02:40:56.340 a year. Yeah. And I remember when you went up, cause you went to Stanford, you went to, you went to a

02:41:00.260 bunch of places, but I think you came back also realizing that it's not just the surgeon that

02:41:04.500 makes it. It's what is the, what does the anesthesia team look like? What do the nurses

02:41:08.220 look like? What does the ICU look like? What is the step-down unit look like? You have to have

02:41:12.780 perfection across the entire spectrum. Yes. Now here's funny. I'm going to eat some crow.

02:41:19.360 The next six weeks were not only you going through what you were going through, which again,

02:41:24.160 I don't think I realized until the day, probably three or four days before the surgery,

02:41:28.820 did I realize how anxious you were because you mask it quite well. And I was in New York and I was

02:41:36.460 flying to San Francisco to see you the day after the surgery. And it was a couple of days before that,

02:41:42.640 that you called me. But prior to that, you are sending me emails and texts every day with cockamamie

02:41:49.400 ideas to avoid doing this. Yes. And I couldn't, I honestly, at some point I was like, I don't know if

02:41:55.220 he's serious. I was dead serious. I was dead serious. And I had something happen. This was,

02:42:02.420 I don't think I ever got to tell you about this. I got a call saying this is maybe three days before

02:42:10.220 I'm supposed to go to Stanford. And this is after you've gone up for your pre-op

02:42:15.300 catheterization and everything. No, no, no. That was, I did that either the day of,

02:42:19.460 or the day before the same day. I've only met the doctor, but I haven't done anything at the hospital

02:42:25.580 yet, but I'm going in three days to do the surgery. And I'm having, I have a dinner plan

02:42:31.940 with friends at the same restaurant where I had meat the first time. And a friend of mine calls me

02:42:39.400 and he said, I, I finally have found a cardiologist who might be able to help you. He's not like the

02:42:47.360 other cardiologists. He speaks more your language. And his name is Dr. Junger or younger Junger. He

02:42:55.360 wrote the book clean. He's known more now for cleanses and nutrition, but he is a trained heart

02:43:00.960 surgeon. And he also has an aortic stenosis personally. I've pretty much given up hope at

02:43:11.860 this point, meaning. You've accepted the fact that you're going to have this operation.

02:43:16.360 Likely. I'm still thinking even the morning of the surgery was still 50, 50, but I'm,

02:43:20.700 I'm more on the train of doing it than not. I'd also seen a, there was a Chinese healer

02:43:29.440 who came to the house and did these ceremonies. And she told me not to get the surgery.

02:43:35.100 And Muriel, who's was very pro-surgery. She's like, well, maybe, you know, maybe you don't have

02:43:40.860 to do it. You know, the, the, the healer says you're going to be okay. Even then I was like,

02:43:45.740 I feel like I have to do it now. I feel like I'm, I'm past. I'd lost hope at this point.

02:43:50.720 I call the doc. He's like, I sent him all the reports, everything, history and current.

02:43:56.360 He looks at everything and he calls me back and he's like, I have, I think I have great news for

02:44:01.960 you. Can you come see me? It's like, absolutely. It's like the clouds have parted and there's a

02:44:08.140 God is speaking to you directly. There's a miracle. Right. And I say, great. I have a dinner in Santa

02:44:14.180 Monica. I'll cancel the dinner. I'll come. He's like, no, no, it's fine. Go to your dinner. And then

02:44:18.220 after dinner, come and see me. I'll be awake. He was close by. So I go to the dinner and I remember

02:44:24.460 it was the greatest dinner of my life. It was like the last supper. I was, no, I was off the hook.

02:44:32.600 It's like, ah, yes. The weight of the world is up. It's like, yeah. Unbelievable. It was like the,

02:44:37.540 the one moment of joy in my life was that dinner after these six weeks of, after six weeks was terror

02:44:45.260 or anticipation of yes. And second guessing. Cause I still don't want to do it. Yeah. And the guy

02:44:51.340 has good news for me. I go to see the guy and he said, I looked at everything.

02:44:58.200 He had a heart model on his, and he takes it apart and he starts explaining everything to me,

02:45:02.620 what's going on. He's like, this is great. It's so lucky that they caught it. They caught it in time.

02:45:10.840 And, um, you're, it's so great that they found this and that you can do this surgery.

02:45:19.180 I was like, that's the good news. He's like, it's, he said, the fact that they caught this

02:45:24.340 is the greatest news in the world. If you would have just gone on doing your deadlifts without

02:45:30.040 knowing this is going on, there's a very good chance that you would not live long.

02:45:34.960 You know, I, I look back at that and I'm sort of glad I didn't realize again, I assumed you were

02:45:43.000 definitely having the surgery, but you were just sort of tweaking me by sending me text messages

02:45:49.400 every day of funny ideas to avoid it. Yeah. And I was like, this is cute, but he can't be serious.

02:45:56.400 And I don't know. I feel like at some point I kind of read you the riot act about your son,

02:46:00.960 right? At some point I said, look, yes, you're being a little selfish right now. You have a wife,

02:46:06.180 you have a son and you're way too young to die. So you can't, you, you have to, I think I was trying

02:46:13.580 to say like, you have to do something that is really hard for you for them. Yeah. I feel like

02:46:19.480 once you sort of got to that point, it turned into, okay, how do I now hack the system and start

02:46:24.820 doing things? And I remember one of the ideas you had was I want to take methylene blue. I want to

02:46:29.520 have the anesthesiologist inject me with methylene blue. And I know, you know why, but for the

02:46:33.540 listener, the reason that this was of interest to you was you have to undergo what's called

02:46:39.000 circulatory arrest. So this is such a big operation. This is a much bigger operation than

02:46:45.840 even doing bypassing of the heart, because you actually have to do a special type of cannulation

02:46:55.640 to create another type of blood flow to the brain to make up for the fact that even the vessels on

02:47:02.300 the top of the aorta are not supplying the brain anymore. And this is a real reason why once I got

02:47:08.380 to meet and talk with Joseph Wu, I was really comfortable that this was the man, because this

02:47:15.080 is an area of surgery where speed is everything. The human brain can only go so long without its

02:47:22.420 natural perfusion from the heart. And the difference between Joseph doing this operation

02:47:29.080 and somebody else was night and day. And when he called me after, by the way, and he read me all

02:47:36.000 the stats, I was blown away at how quickly he was able to do this. It was literally in half the time

02:47:43.280 I expected it would take at every step of the way. So what the cross clamp time was, what the

02:47:48.340 cannulation time was, all these things. Your question was, methylene blue can protect the

02:47:53.460 brain. I'm going to have the anesthesiologist. I'm going to talk to them about doing this. And

02:47:56.820 it's funny. I was really dismissive of this. I was sort of like, Rick, you know, yeah, yeah,

02:48:02.060 I know. Methylene blue in theory could kind of work, but don't rock the boat. They're not even,

02:48:07.500 don't even ask them. They're not going to say yes, blah, blah, blah. Well, you ended up asking them

02:48:11.240 and they said no, but it was amazing. It was two months later. So the operation happens

02:48:16.520 or anything. Two months later, I'm doing research for a podcast with a guy named Francesco Gonzalez

02:48:22.260 Lima on Alzheimer's disease. In the process of doing this, I realized all of the work that

02:48:27.160 he and his lab have done with methylene blue. And I start going through all the studies and

02:48:31.840 I'm like, oh man, I was, I was really a jerk to be so dismissive of this to Rick. I, I didn't

02:48:39.480 realize how much research was here and how much data existed on the neuroprotective benefits of

02:48:46.940 methylene blue. And I would say to this day, I'm actually, one, I feel bad that I was dismissed

02:48:53.020 by that. But two, I'm like, I hope some anesthesiologists out there are paying attention

02:48:56.960 to this literature because I think there is actually an opportunity to reduce the morbidity

02:49:02.780 and potentially mortality of these really, really dangerous, big, big operations where it's unavoidable

02:49:08.860 that you have to alter the perfusion of the brain. Yes. And that idea came from Dr. Jack Cruz.

02:49:14.360 That's right. Who's a neurosurgeon. Right. And he said, well, he also said,

02:49:20.660 talk to your surgeon about this. You don't want to piss off your surgeon. You have to do what the

02:49:27.880 surgeon says. But as someone who's more focused on the brain than the heart, while they're doing the

02:49:35.920 heart surgery, I would really like you to have methylene blue in your brain.

02:49:40.160 Yep. And again, I do, I hope somebody out there listening to this, who's a cardiac anesthesiologist

02:49:46.540 or cardiac surgeon is, would consider doing a clinical trial on this. And again, it's possible

02:49:51.860 it's been done and I wasn't looking at that literature, but it was, I think it was actually

02:49:56.160 a great idea. And I remember I sent you a list. I talked to all of my biohacker friends.

02:50:01.240 He sent me like 50 different things. I sent you a long list of 50 things that I could do to sort

02:50:04.760 of hack the system. And I remember you said, if you show this to Dr. Wu, he will not operate on

02:50:09.980 you. Don't even show him this list. You cannot do these things.

02:50:16.400 Well, some of the things made sense, right? Which were like, I'll eat a certain way going into it.

02:50:21.400 If I showed up with more ketones in my blood, would that be protective? And I was like, yes,

02:50:25.060 sure. But you don't have to explain that to him, right? Yes.

02:50:27.080 But the two things that I fought for, which he said no to, were the methylene blue and to not

02:50:34.020 use opiates post-surgery. No, no, that made a lot of sense. But they said, no, they said,

02:50:39.480 well, they said, we're not going to manage it. They said, no, but then he, he, the anesthesiologist

02:50:44.640 will, if you can handle the pain, that's right. But his initial reaction was, no, I will not do that.

02:50:50.860 Right. And the reason in their defense that they would say that is if a patient is in tremendous pain

02:50:56.380 post-operatively, they are less likely to move. They're less likely to take deep breaths. Their

02:51:01.000 risks of infections are going to go through the roof and complications. But it turns out,

02:51:06.080 and this is a whole other issue, post-operative pain management is a very poorly handled area.

02:51:12.420 And there are lots of things that you can manage pain with using a very, you had a good epidural.

02:51:17.760 You know, a good epidural is the beginning of all great pain management following surgery

02:51:21.500 and, and liberal use of NSAIDs and Tylenol and things like that. And you can get away with

02:51:25.560 minimal opiate use, if, if not any, in your case, you know, you've had as big an operation as people

02:51:30.580 get. And to be able to get away with it is huge. There was one other thing that you were proposing

02:51:34.560 that I thought in theory made sense, but I just thought there's no way they're going to go for

02:51:38.360 it, which is just using exogenous ketones as well throughout. Oh, and the other thing that you

02:51:41.960 wanted, which I, again, completely agreed with.

02:51:44.920 The IV. Exactly. No dextrose instead of dextrose.

02:51:48.600 Yes. No dextrose. And I was like, also because it would be such a shock to my system because

02:51:52.940 I'm already a no carb person for, you know, two years and now I'm under this stress and

02:51:59.580 now they're jamming a bunch of sugar into me. That can't be good.

02:52:03.040 And I agreed with Jack on this, that, you know, lactated ringers would have been the perfect 1.00

02:52:06.940 intravenous solution and you could happily go days without glucose. But in the end they were

02:52:12.860 like, look, don't tell us how to do it.

02:52:14.900 What Dr. Wu said in his defense was, he said, the reason you came to me is because of my

02:52:21.240 success rate. And the reason my success rate is what it is, is because we do everything exactly

02:52:28.500 the same way. If we change any aspect of it, I can't guarantee you the same results that you're

02:52:35.780 coming here for.

02:52:38.440 So I forget, I think it was either the second day after your operation, your operation was

02:52:42.720 a Wednesday and I got there on a Friday. Now I remember this.

02:52:45.800 I remember it was September 12th.

02:52:47.320 That's all I remember.

02:52:48.020 Yeah. I think that was a Wednesday. So I feel like I got there two days post-op and I thought

02:52:54.120 you looked amazing, but I could also see how frustrated you were that, okay, I did everything

02:53:03.740 I was supposed to do. I had this stupid operation, but I think it was setting in that this was not,

02:53:08.620 you weren't going to be better in a week.

02:53:10.840 No. And I think I even told you that so much of my frustration about it wasn't necessarily fear

02:53:18.720 of dying. Although that, that's, that's a small part of it. It was more, this is just going to suck

02:53:25.720 for a long time.

02:53:26.920 Yeah.

02:53:27.080 This is going to be really uncomfortable for a really long time. And it was, yeah. You know,

02:53:35.020 you developed atrial fibrillation post-op, which I didn't sleep 20% of patients three weeks, you know,

02:53:40.600 just couldn't get into a position comfortable enough to sleep.

02:53:45.800 When you look back at that and look at where you are today, where do you think you are in terms of

02:53:51.500 recovery? I would say 90%. So Dr. Wu was pretty on the money, right? Six months to recover

02:54:02.180 80 to 90%. Yes. That said, I've not picked up anything more than five pounds since the day we

02:54:12.000 had lunch and went to see those pictures. I do remember also when you got back to Malibu after

02:54:17.660 the surgery. I remember one day I called you and I was like, how was your walk today? And you were

02:54:24.260 like, I didn't walk. And I said, how come? And you said it was too windy. And I was like, what?

02:54:30.540 And you were like, yeah, it was just too windy. I didn't want to go for a walk. And I was like,

02:54:34.640 Rick, you got to go for a walk, man. And you were like, no, no, it's really windy. And you sent me a

02:54:39.560 video showing me how windy it was. And I was like, all right, that was pretty windy. I'll give you that.

02:54:43.220 But I also sensed, I mean, did you struggle during that first month coming home? Like even

02:54:48.360 though you're back home and your pain is okay. Thank God that the house didn't burn down

02:54:55.120 until six weeks after the surgery. Cause had it burned down two weeks after the surgery,

02:55:00.660 I don't know how I would have been able to handle it. I mean, as uncomfortable and terrible as the

02:55:06.460 experience was, at least the comfort of home got me through those first six weeks.

02:55:12.980 The first night after the surgery where I stayed in San Francisco, that was my first night of not

02:55:19.560 sleeping. And I attributed it more to, I need the comfort of home. And then when I got home,

02:55:26.880 I still couldn't sleep, but I was definitely more comfortable being home.

02:55:29.920 And I remember the, you would send me the screenshots of your aura ring and it was,

02:55:34.240 it was pretty bad for a while. It really was. And I got to tell you, this is one of those things that

02:55:38.800 I think in medicine, we don't get training on. Maybe it's changing today, but certainly I don't

02:55:44.600 remember ever once spending a moment, not one second thinking about how is a patient going to

02:55:50.180 sleep when they get home. And when someone who's young and healthy, like you, they get over it.

02:55:56.560 But when you, when you start operating on patients who are older or patients who already have even the

02:56:02.180 slightest amount of cognitive impairment, that sleep deprivation, I've seen it on several occasions,

02:56:08.100 it precipitates a spiral that they never get out of. Yes. Looking back at that, what's,

02:56:14.160 what is the most profound thing you learned about yourself?

02:56:17.180 I won't say this about myself, but I'll say it about being a human, that as humans, we can

02:56:28.760 really handle much more than we think.

02:56:35.160 It's interesting that the surgery would be something to point that out to you.

02:56:39.200 I would have thought that you figured that out just based on what you'd learned through your,

02:56:46.180 you know, going from zero pushups to a hundred pushups to me would be an even more remarkable

02:56:50.780 example, but different. That, that made me think you can train to do anything, which I do believe,

02:56:57.460 but it's different than you can't train to do a surgery. That's just, you just have to show up.

02:57:03.940 Yeah. It's again, it's like a something to overcome. It's different.

02:57:10.500 Your disposition makes it, I think somewhat easier, I think as an outsider looking in at you

02:57:15.800 as a friend to go through these things. But at the same time, I guess it also, the challenge is

02:57:21.240 people don't always know what you're going through. When you think back on that two years of depression,

02:57:26.780 were the people you were working with aware of what you were going through, or were you able to

02:57:31.000 do your job well enough that people weren't necessarily aware of that?

02:57:34.960 I can usually hold it together enough where people might not notice.

02:57:40.620 What are you most interested in passing on to your son? And maybe assuming you have other kids,

02:57:46.100 but in terms of lessons you've learned in life, experiences, both positive and negative.

02:57:51.020 I feel like one of the beauties of having kids, I was talking with Eric before when we were just

02:57:56.460 walking around and he was giving me a tour of the studio. And there's that beautiful

02:58:00.240 tree. Well, there's a tree that's been cut down.

02:58:03.580 It was a tree that just fell.

02:58:04.640 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:58:05.040 Like a week ago.

02:58:05.760 Yeah, yeah. And I had to take a picture of it because the cross section of that tree is so

02:58:11.800 beautiful. And only because my middle son has become obsessed with counting the rings of trees

02:58:19.200 did I even notice it. And we went up and we were like talking and I was like, oh my God,

02:58:23.020 like look at this year versus this year versus this year. You know, we were agreeing that because

02:58:28.020 he's got a young child as well that one of the cool things about having kids is you get to rediscover

02:58:33.220 things that you once knew about that you've since forgotten about. And now you get re-reminded of it.

02:58:38.920 I also think another part of having kids that anyone listening to this who has kids

02:58:43.160 appreciates is there's this desire to protect them from the things that hurt us.

02:58:47.820 So when you reflect on all of these things, the successes, the failures, the fear, the pain,

02:58:56.380 knowing that your son has to find his own way in this world, what do you want to impart on him?

02:59:02.280 To try to have as much fun as possible to be prepared to work hard for the thing that you're

02:59:15.460 interested in doing, whatever it is, knowing that anything that's worth doing is going to take a

02:59:24.900 commitment and you have to work hard and it, and it feels good that it's not work. Isn't something to

02:59:29.940 be avoided? It's to be embraced, but balanced with that idea of having fun, which I did not have. I

02:59:35.700 had more of a workaholic side. And I think so much of it has less to do with what we wish to impart

02:59:47.680 and more to do with what we will really impart, which is just based on how we live our lives.

02:59:53.340 So it's not about what I can tell him. It's about living a loving relationship, living in a loving

03:00:03.180 household where we care about each other and making sure he always knows how much we love him

03:00:10.780 and are there for him through demonstration.

03:00:13.660 Rick, it's been awesome to sit down and have this discussion in what I I'm willing to say is the

03:00:22.760 greatest place I will ever sit down to record a podcast. I'm willing to predict that already. I

03:00:27.760 will never again get to record a podcast in an environment so beautiful. So until our next one.

03:00:32.740 Yes, there you go. And above all else, I want to say, I was like partially worried that we were going

03:00:38.460 to do this in a sauna like you did with Tim. And I remember after I heard that, cause that was years ago,

03:00:43.180 right? Yeah. I was like, Tim, how did you not electrocute yourself? Like with the recording

03:00:49.740 device, getting just sweating all over the thing. And he's like, yeah, it was tough.

03:00:53.780 And the real issue was that we were holding the microphones, which were burning hot.

03:00:58.500 Yeah. That was, that became the problem.

03:01:01.160 This was your idea. There's no way this was Tim's idea.

03:01:03.760 That was my idea. Yeah. Thank you for not subjecting me to that. As much as I do enjoy sauna,

03:01:08.320 I don't think I could.

03:01:09.080 It was kind of a one-time thing. And it really was a case of having done a lot of saunas at that

03:01:16.060 period of time. I realized that the conversations that happen in the sauna are really good. So it helps

03:01:24.880 to turn off a part of your brain that's maybe more guarded. You're preoccupied in the sauna

03:01:35.980 with survival. Same is true. It's like with an ice bath, you've done many ice baths and you're

03:01:44.560 experimenting with meditation. Now I know the best meditations you've had in your life. I guarantee

03:01:50.180 you were in the ice bath, whether you knew it or not, because it's a one pointed activity where

03:01:56.380 the other problems of the world don't come with you into the ice. That's a great point.

03:02:02.920 It's a forced meditation. You don't have to do anything but survive. But because of that,

03:02:10.700 you are very present and in the moment.

03:02:13.140 I look forward to giving that a try deliberately.

03:02:18.480 Yes.

03:02:19.580 All right. Is it time for that awesome dinner I've been waiting for all day?

03:02:22.860 Let's do it.

03:02:23.420 You can find all of this information and more at peteratiamd.com forward slash podcast.

03:02:30.900 There you'll find the show notes, readings, and links related to this episode. You can also find

03:02:36.000 my blog at peteratiamd.com. Maybe the simplest thing to do is to sign up for my subjectively

03:02:41.260 non-lame once a week email, where I'll update you on what I've been up to, the most interesting

03:02:45.720 papers I've read, and all things related to longevity, science, performance, sleep, et cetera.

03:02:50.620 On social, you can find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, all with the ID peteratiamd. But

03:02:57.000 usually Twitter is the best way to reach me to share your questions and comments.

03:03:00.580 Now for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general informational purposes only and

03:03:04.980 does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional healthcare services,

03:03:09.960 including the giving of medical advice. And note, no doctor-patient relationship is formed.

03:03:15.360 The use of this information and the materials linked to the podcast is at the user's own risk,

03:03:20.200 the content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice,

03:03:24.960 diagnoses, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical

03:03:30.380 condition they have, and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such

03:03:34.940 conditions. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest very seriously. For all of

03:03:40.960 my disclosures, the companies I invest in and or advise, please visit peteratiamd.com forward slash about.

03:03:50.200 Thank you.

03:03:51.960 Thank you.

03:03:53.400 Thank you.

The Peter Attia Drive - June 10, 2019

#57 – Rick Rubin, legendary music producer： collaborating with sensitive psyche of greatest living musicians, and his personal story of weight loss and spiritual quest

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