Rick Rubin: Legendary Music Producer | Lex Fridman Podcast #275
Beastie Boys Johnny Cash Paul McCartney agi ai ai podcast artificial intelligence artificial intelligence podcast broken record country hip hop lex ai lex fridman lex jre lex mit lex podcast mit ai music producer rick rubin rock
Rick Rubin is one of the greatest music producers of all time, working with many of the greats including Beastie Boys, Eminem, Metallica, LL Cool J, Kanye West, Slayer, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Dixie Chicks, Aerosmith, Adele, Danzig, Red Hot Chili Peppers, System of a Down, Jay-Z, Black Sabbath. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Recording space is courtesy of The Chinati Foundation and John Chamberlain.

EPISODE LINKS:
Rick's Twitter: https://twitter.com/RickRubin
Broken Record Podcast: https://bit.ly/3j7BFXZ

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:52 - Nietzsche and music
12:53 - Rick's approach with artists
24:16 - Beautiful simplicity in music
28:00 - Marvin Gaye
37:15 - Best album of all time
41:08 - Paul McCartney
43:13 - Ideas
45:36 - Rebellion and conformity
50:24 - Fitness
53:32 - Johnny Cash
1:03:28 - Tom Waits
1:08:07 - Lyrics vs rhythm
1:12:54 - Johnny Cash continued
1:14:53 - Beastie Boys
1:21:14 - Depression
1:25:36 - Art vs Business
1:34:24 - Art of conversation
1:50:57 - Rick's podcast
1:54:07 - Advice for young people
1:58:13 - Mortality
2:00:48 - Meaning of life

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 There are no right answers for anything involved in art. It's, we're all trying experiments to find a way. And even for the things that I work on, I don't have a set way that I do anything. Every, I come to every project blank. Maybe you're just a meat vehicle and you're channeling ideas from somewhere else. I believe we know close to nothing, close to nothing, about anything. If we embrace that not knowing, we'll have a healthier experience going through life. The following is a conversation with Rick Rubin, one of the greatest music producers of all time, known for bringing the best out of anyone he works with, no matter the genre of music or even the medium of art, or just the medium of creating something beautiful in this world. And the list of musicians he produced includes many, many, many of the greats over the past 40 years, including the Beastie Boys, Eminem, Metallica, LL Cool J, Kanye West, Slayer, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Dixie Chicks, Aerosmith, Adele, Danzig, Red Hot Chili Peppers, System of a Down, Jay-Z, Black Sabbath. I can keep going for a very long time here. Most importantly, Rick is just an amazing human being. We became fast friends, which is surreal to say, and is just an incredible honor. I felt truly heard as a person when I spent the day with him eating some delicious Texas barbecue, talking about life, about music, about art, about beauty. This was a conversation and experience I'll never forget. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Rick Rubin. Are you nervous? I'm not shaky, but I would say I feel uneasy. And I feel like the sooner we start talking, the more relaxed we'll get. Yeah. Well, maybe we should sit in this moment and enjoy the nervousness of it. Let me start with Nietzsche. He said, without music, life would be a mistake. What do you think he means by that? Let's talk some philosophy. Let's try to analyze Friedrich Nietzsche from a century ago. It seems like music has the ability to bring us so much depth in our soul that's hard to access any other way. And without it, there would be a loss, beyond the pleasure of it. It feels like it's a window into something else. Something that no other medium can express quite the same way. I would say not as automatically. Something about music can do it automatically. Maybe poetry or maybe certain abstract forms can get us there. But there's something about music that really can get us there quickly. But it's also the time, the place, the history. There's something about, a lot of my family's still in Philly. There's something about driving through Jersey and listening to Bruce Springsteen. And then you just, I'll get emotional. Like listening to I'm on Fire. One of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs, there's a haunting kind of strumming to it. It's not a strumming, it's actually picked. It has a country feel to it, almost like a Johnny Cash feel actually. And it, I don't know, makes me feel, so for people who don't know I'm on Fire, that song is, I guess, a love song to a woman that you can't have because she's married or she's with somebody else. Which I guess is quite a lot of love songs. But there's something about the haunting nature of the guitar and then it has to be driving through Jersey. And I feel like everyone has fallen in love with a Jersey girl at one point in their life. I don't know if that's true for her, but I feel like that. I haven't either, but I just feel like that. There's something about Bruce Springsteen is like, yeah, I've been there. And that just takes you to a place of emotion that you just, that captures love, that captures longing, that captures the heartbreak of just the way time flows in life and the fact that it's finite. And just all of that in a single, simple song. What else can capture that? Yeah, I don't know. But it's true that there's a connection both between time and place and music. Certain music growing up on the East Coast didn't really resonate with me until I spent time on the West Coast. Eagles being an example. When I lived in New York, the Eagles didn't really speak to me. ZZ Top didn't really speak to me. And then when I started spending time in California and driving through Laurel Canyon, all of a sudden the music of the Eagles felt appropriate somehow. And I started listening to it more. Got it, so not until you went out West, can you understand the sounds of the West? So it's really like New York has a sound. What other places have a sound in the United States? I think every place does. And that said, sometimes we can get an experience through music of a place. We can resonate with the music and not understand why. And then maybe when we go to the place where it was created, it's almost like we have a knowingness of that place. It's not a strange place anymore. Yeah, Stevie Ray Vaughan with blues and Texas blues. You can just listen to Texas Flood and just, again, there's this like a woman you're missing, a broken heart and somehow that connects to the place. The Eagles, what song of the Eagles connects with you? Are we talking about like, Take It Easy or are we talking more like Hotel California? I'm thinking Take It Easy, but both are great. Yeah, there's certain songs when I started learning guitar when I was young, that's like, I would like to be the kind of person that not only knows how to play this song, but understands the song and like, have that song be something I played 20 years ago. And I've lived with that song for a while. Like Hotel California is an example. Obviously there's the solo, but there's also the soulfulness of the lyrics, which I still don't understand. And it could be about anything. And as you get older, I feel like the meaning of the song could be anything. Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's the beauty of them. I think when the person wrote them, they may have had one interpretation, but it's not contingent on us getting that interpretation to like it or resonate with it or feel it. In some ways, the best art is open enough where the artist gets to have their experience when they make it, and then the audience gets to have their experience when they listen and they don't have to be the same. And then it connects thousands or millions of people together. There's a togetherness of music when you share that music, when you're listening to stuff together, like in a car. First of all, the car is a sacred place. So I work in part on autonomous vehicles and you start to think, well, what are the things you lose when the car stops being the central part of American life? The car ownership. It just feels like the car when you're alone, it's like a therapist thing, session, because you get angry at other humans and then you get to sit in your own anger and emotion. You get to listen to the song on a long road trip and remember, like run through your memories, the heartbreak, I don't know, the one that got away, but also like the beautiful moments, all of it. Yeah. And all of that in the car. Yeah, driving also serves another purpose and it's one of the things that we can do that we have to pay attention enough not to crash, but typically can essentially run on autopilot enough where we could be thinking about something else or concentrating on something else. And the difference between concentrating on something or trying to solve a problem when you're solely trying to solve a problem versus when you have some little task that's keeping you occupied, I find if I have some slight, something slight to take care of, it frees a more creative side of my mind to better solve problems. You know, I'm kind of jealous of people that found that in painting, for example. They'll be drawing or painting and listening to, so that's the small task you do. You're coloring in the lines. It's like this gentle, peaceful, slow process that requires just a small fraction of your mind and then you can listen. Some people listen to podcasts that way. Some people listen to music that way. Yeah. How do you do it? How do you free your mind? Running is one of them. There's a process. So most freeing of the mind for me has to go through a process of a bit of pain for a bit. So doing something difficult, it's just like an airplane taking off or something. So that's, like for example, running, the first few miles would just be just, first of all, the physical aspect, which is like, ah, you're so fat, you're out of shape, you're this, this, this, this, this, this, this, you're out of shape, you're this, this, this, getting old, this, that. Okay, that slowly dissipates. And then the demons come in who are like, you should be, you should be getting this and that and this done, you haven't gotten it done. You're like breaking promises, all those kinds of voices coming in. And after that, maybe mile four, it's like, fuck it. You just run, run with the wind at a very slow pace, but with the wind. And then you could think. So it's the footsteps, the physical activity, then you could deeply think about stuff, ideas, sort of design, whether it's program design stuff, or like high level life decisions, all those kinds of things. I would say running. I used to build bridges from toothpicks. I used to be a thing, it's an engineering. I guess some people like glue together airplanes and stuff like that. But the bridge is such deeply honest work, because at the end of it, you're gonna have to test that bridge. And you're gonna see how good your work was. The little details, but also the big picture. Do you use glue or no? Yeah, I use glue. So it's not pure physics. It's materials engineering too. Because the way you want to do it is you actually split the wood as thin as possible and then glue it back together, because the glue is really strong, except for the arches and things like that. So you're building arch bridges, which is a whole nother skill, because you have to bend the wood. And it's so cool, because the thing can hold thousands of times its weight. And then you get to watch it explode at a certain point from the pressure. And when you do a really good job, it doesn't explode in a kind of some weak point that you didn't anticipate, just kind of starts cracking. Everything cracks, everything explodes. It's just pieces fly everywhere. And it's literally hundreds of hours of work just explode in front of you. And that's a metaphor for life maybe. And it's all for nothing, except for the journey that you took to get there. And no one understands. Speaking of which, back to Nietzsche. These questions are ridiculous. So you're gonna have to try to figure out what the heck I'm trying to do here. So Nietzsche also said a line I love, which is, and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. Do you, Rick Rubin, ever feel crazy? Or maybe you're the one who's sane and everybody else is crazy. You know that the dancing, the joy of the music, of just feeling the music and everybody else just doesn't understand. And this doesn't have to be literally about music. This is about art, about creation. I would say I feel different. And it's hard to say, it's like, which side of the equation is crazy, you know? Did you ever find a group of people that you get, that get you? Yes. Is that what producing is essentially? Is you try to find the moments when you just get each other? No. I would say they're definitely, certain artists with certain temperaments, when you're around them, it feels like you can finish each other's sentences. You know, just see the world the same way. Comedians as well. And that's not essential for the two of you together creating something special? No. So it could be attention too? It could be anything. There's no rules. It'd be like, think of it like a coach. A coach could bring what they have to bring to any talented individual and help them find their way. And sometimes it's the right coach for the right athlete really works and other times there's a mismatch. Have you seen the movie Whiplash? I did. I saw it when it came out, so I don't really remember it well, but I did see it. So there's a coach type of figure who is pushing a drummer to create, to grow as a musician, but also to create something special. I don't know if it's even special music skill-wise. It's a special moment. I don't know what he's trying to create. From one perspective, it's just an abusive, a person who selfishly gets off on being abusive to those he's with. But from another perspective, the way I saw that movie, it's just the two right humans finding each other at the right moment in life and risking destroying each other in the process, but maybe something beautiful will come of it. Do you think that's a toxic relationship? Or is there, does some of that movie resonate with you as that sometimes is required to create art? That kind of suffering? Yeah, it doesn't. Well, there's suffering involved, but not that kind of suffering. Not for me. There are some people who that's their process and that's whatever works. There are no right answers for anything involved in art. We're all trying experiments to find a way. And even for the things that I work on, I don't have a set way that I do anything. I come to every project blank and see, I really listen to what the artist plays and says. And through what they explain they wanna do, help find the best way to get there. Was it implicit in the movie that the mean teacher liked being a mean teacher? You said the way you described it was that he got off on treating people this way. Do we know that to be the case? I don't remember that in the movie. But we sometimes project that onto people, who are really rough on students. You start to think, well, maybe, maybe that is fundamentally who they are. And if it's fundamentally who they are, that there must be some pleasure in it, or it's an addiction of some sort. But it could be also a deliberate choice made by the teacher. It also could be a lineage like, you know, in the Zen tradition, there are sort of the mean Roshis, who if you do something wrong, take a physical action. And it's just in the lineage, it's considered that's how you teach. I didn't come from that lineage. So I'm much more of a, I feel like it's more of a collaboration between people working together to make the best thing. It's not a boss slave relationship at all. It's much more of a, let's find our way. And we agree at the beginning of the process that if either of us or any of us don't like what's happening, we say it. And the goal is to keep working till we get to a point where we're all really happy with it. It's like if we make something that an artist likes and I don't like, or that I like and they don't like, we haven't gone far enough. In terms of lineage, the ones that seek destruction and the ones that seek happiness all come from the same lineage. We all came from fish. So somewhere in you, deep down there, there's the other stuff too. It's just that you haven't been yet, by the way, because you said every new project, including maybe starting today, is an opportunity to channel, to plug into something that was always there and you haven't gotten a chance to plug into. You mentioned listening. How do you listen to a person? How do you hear a person? When you first come in, like we just met, what's the analysis happening? But I mean, with me is one thing. I'm an artist of sorts. I program and I'm just, I'm human, I guess. I guess we're all creating art. How do you see, like, how do I bring out? So for people who don't know, I mean, obviously everyone knows that you've produced some of the greatest records ever, but the way I see that is you just brought out the best in a lot of interesting artists. And so in order to bring out the best in them, you have to understand them. You have to hear the music of their soul. Hopefully I'm not being too romantic here, but just like, is there something you can say of how difficult that is if there's a process, if there's tricks, if it's luck? I think it starts with this, again, coming in blank, like not having any preconceived ideas, being open and really listening, listening and not thinking about what you're gonna say next or what your opinion is or any, you know, not, basically being a recorder and just hearing what comes in. And then once you hear what comes in, processing that information and trying our best to do that without any of the beliefs that we might have to impact what that is. You know, if I ask you a question, I don't wanna hear, I don't wanna listen to you and have any reaction happening when you're speaking and wanna be as neutral as possible. For me, my goal is not to form an opinion, it's to understand. So if anything, I would draw you out further and just ask questions to really understand. And if you say something that somehow triggers me in a way that that's, you know, I wonder how he came to that, I wouldn't challenge you, I would ask, like how did you find that? You know, how did you get to that place? Form a place of curiosity, you would try to figure out. Yeah, I wanna understand who the person is and through questioning, we can usually get there or through just spending time together, you find out who the person is. What about finding out and figuring out how to then take the next steps of bringing out the best in them? Like, is it just trial and error? Like, let's try this. It's definitely trial and error. It's always trial and error. You afraid of making a mistake? Like, let's add this instrument, let's remove this instrument. Let's try. Let's add this line, let's remove this line. Let's try and let's be open. So one of the, we don't really have rules, but one of the agreements in the studio is any idea that anyone has will always demonstrate it. We'll always try it. Because I can describe to you an idea and you can think that's a terrible idea. Let's not do that. And then I can play you the idea and then you can say, oh, that's really good. And it's completely different because we, when we're told something, we have to imagine what that is and the way you see something and imagine it and the way I see something and imagine it are completely different. So you say a thing and now there's two humans that play that thing in their mind differently in their imagination. And then there's a cool creative step. And when you actually do it to see how it differs in the imagination and then the difference or the commonality will be like an exciting little discovery together. Well, so many groups of people making things together in a room, one person will suggest something and someone else in the room saying, that doesn't sound like a good idea. Let's not do that. And then they move on. The testing of every idea is really important. And that's how you get to see, oh, that's not at all what I thought it was gonna be. Happens to me all the time. I know because someone else suggests, why don't we do it like this? And I'll think that sounds bad. And then I'll think, okay, let's try it. And then we hear it. And then eight times out of 10, it's nothing like I imagined and great. And you try not to have an ego about the fact that you thought it was not a good idea in your head. There can't be any ego in this. It doesn't, if everyone's there with the purpose of making the best thing we can, there's nothing else. There are no, there can't be any boundaries to that. So there's a moment I saw with, I know you don't love talking about previous things you've done, but it's cool to dive in there. I'm fine to talk about maybe. To sample it. Anything? We'll see. I have this pain I gotta talk about. I'll think of something ridiculous that would make you change your mind. You mentioned, I saw a video of you with Jay-Z at WorldCamp99problems where you suggested acapella opening the song with acapella. Just no instruments, just voice. That to me, I mean, that's one of the characteristics of the things, of the ways you've brought out the best in artist is doing less. Sort of the tending towards simplicity in some kind of way. So that choice of acapella is really interesting because I could see a lot of people think that that's a bad idea. But it turned out to be a really powerful idea. Can you maybe talk about the simplicity? How to find simplicity? Why you find simplicity is beautiful. It does appear to be beautiful. What is that? Yeah, I don't know where it comes from. It has been with me from the beginning of my work. The very first album I ever produced, the credit I took was reduced by me instead of produced by me. For that reason, I like the idea of simplicity. I like the idea of getting to the essential. And I have a better idea now that I've done it for a while, but at the time it was purely an instinctual thing. And part of it is a sonic, there's a sonic benefit, which is the less elements you have, you can hear each of the ones that are there and they can sound better. And the less there are, the more space they could have around them and the more you can hear their personality. If you were to record 10 people playing the same guitar part and you listen to it, it would sound like guitar. And if you record one person playing a guitar part, it sounds like a person playing the guitar. It's different than just guitar. And often in the studio, the idea of building upon things and adding layers to thicken, to make it sound bigger, sometimes the more things you add, the smaller it gets. So a lot of it is counterintuitive until you just in practice see what works. To try it, to try removing stuff until it's just right. It's the Einstein thing, make it as simple as possible, but not simpler. That's such a, like finding a stopping place. Just keep chopping away and chopping away. Yeah, there's something we also like to do called the Ruthless Edit, which is, let's say you're at a point where it can work for anything, but I'll give you the example with an album. We've recorded 25 songs. We think the album is gonna have 10. Instead of picking our favorite 10, we limit it to what are the five or six that we can't live without. So going past even the goal to get to the real like heart of it and then see, okay, we have these five or six that we can't live without. Now, what would we add to that that makes it better and not worse? And it puts you in a different frame when you start with building instead of removing. And you might find that there's nothing you need to add. Sometimes. Sometimes something happens when you get to the real essence. Then when you start adding things back, it becomes clear that it was just supposed to be this tight little thing. Can I ask you like a therapy question? So you mentioned somewhere that one way to kind of think about music to get into music is to look at the top like 100 albums of all time and just go down the list and like just take it all in like one piece of artwork. So I was doing that for a while. It's a cool experiment because unfortunately I have to admit I've gotten lazy and stopped taking in albums as albums. And I looked at one interesting top 100 list, top 500 actually, which is put together by Rolling Stone. And they put, this is the therapy session part. And this has to do with simplicity too. They put Marvin Gaye's What's Going On at number one. Spoiler alert. So I'd like to maybe get your opinion on that choice. The reason Marvin Gaye is really interesting, it'd actually be cool to play what's going on in a second, but when you just listen to his like acapella, just listen to his voice, it is really good. Like people, it makes me wonder if it's possible to pull off like most of his songs with no instruments. Like in many parts, there's so much soul in just Mercy, Mercy Me, What's Going On. There's so many songs that you could just be like, I want to play that song. There's so many songs that you could just be like, I wonder if you could just like, just go raw. Or maybe in parts or maybe do what you do with Jay-Z, just open up with nothing. Anyway, there's something so powerful to a great soulful voice. Do you mind if I play it real quick? No, please. What's going on? This is probably one of my favorite songs. I mean, it's up there. Yeah, what's happening? Brother, what's up? Hey, I'm not. Hey, I'm not. Yeah, brother, like, stop, I'm right on. I'm sorry. That voice. There's too many of you to cry. Brother, brother, brother. There's far too many of you dying. There's some just very subtle backing vocals. You know we've got to find a way to bring some loving into day. Hey, part of our lives. This one hurts. Father, father, we don't need to escalate. I wonder who the father he's talking about is. Oh, that's interesting. I mean, I have so for people who don't know, his own father ended up killing Marvin Gaye. Yeah. I mean, that one is really painful. I mean, for a lot of people, your relationship with your father, your mother, I mean, there's different dynamics, but it's almost like part of life is resolving some kind of complex puzzle you have with the people you love, the people close to you, or the people who are not there, all those kinds of things. That's so much pain in that we don't need to escalate. Father, father. I never thought if it's, I always thought it's his father directly. Yeah, I don't get that. It could be, but I feel like it's more masculine spirituality. Like a father figure or just broadly some kind of spirituality. Could be like God, father God, mother God, you know, like could be. I don't know. But there's so much, it's like both hope and melancholy. You're saying war is not the answer. It's like you don't tell your father war is not, your blood father war is not the answer. It's strange conversation. It's a bigger conversation than a personal. Don't you think it feels like war when it's personal? What's the difference between, war is personal too. It's only leaders think about war in a geopolitical sense. Yeah. When people that fight wars, you lose your brothers. I mean, death is just right there. So it might feel just like that. But yeah, there is a dance between like the personal and like talking to the entirety of the society. It's like John Lennon. Imagine like also a song or is that, is that a hopeful? Is that cynical? Is it like melancholy? Like heartbroken? Like you, you hope you wish things would be a certain way and they're not. Yeah. I don't know. John Lennon is giving up on the world in imagine. Yeah, I don't know. No, it's an interesting question. There's another John Lennon lyric. In let me think of what it is. Take me a second. Different songs keep coming into my head. Not the one that I'm looking for. And you keep pressing next. Once I'm, once I'm taken across the universe, everything's going to change my world. And when I hear that, I hear it is hopeless, but I don't think I don't believe that that's well, it may be how he meant it, but I don't think that's how it's normally taken. And it's also the taker. is important. I'm generally optimistic and hopeful. So I always like look for the hope in the, actually the harshest love heartbreak songs are always somehow hopeful to me. That's a love song. To me, like a song about losing love is a song about the great capacity for love in the human heart. That's what I hear. So to me, losing love is exciting. Cause it's like, that means you really cared. That means you felt something, you feel something, you can sit in that pain. And that pain is a reminder what it means to be human. When you're that, what is it? We're just listening. The only man who could have reached me was the son of a preacher man. So it's like that early love or something or partially sexual or whatever. That's not as interesting to me. It's fun, it's great. But it's that heartbreak. That's a reminder that it can go deep. Although that's a damn good song. Have you ever heard the Detroit mix of the Marvin Gaye album? No. Call it up. By far better. Mind blowing. I just heard it recently, blew my mind. ["Mama, Mama"] Oh wow, reverb. Distant. ["Mama, Mama"] Interesting. ["There's too many love you cry"] ["Brother, brother, brother"] ["There's far too many love you die"] Feels like it's all around the room more. ["We know we've got to find a way"] ["To bring some loving here today"] More voices, more voices. My father. ["You see war is not the answer"] He's layering his own vocals. ["You know we've got to find a way"] ["To bring some loving here today"] Feels like there's multiple people singing. ["Don't punish me with brutality"] ["Talk to me so you can see"] ["What's going on, what's going on"] Yeah, it's beautiful. Seems to have more energy. If you listen to the whole album, even though you just said you don't listen to albums anymore, the Detroit mix of the whole album changes the album a lot. I mean, that felt, so that's the opposite of acapella, I would say. Yes. There's layers, there's, and maybe, I don't know if you remember, if memory serves me correct here, he produces this own album here, Marvin Gaye, was the producer on this, I believe. I believe so, and this one sounds more like it's a get together, and the whole album sounds more like a get together, where it's a group of people in a room playing music together, whereas the album version sounds more like a recording. This sounds less like a recording and a little more like a party. Now you had a series of conversations with Paul McCartney, which is amazing that people should watch, but is there, this is continuing our therapy session, is there a case to be made that what's going on is number one album above the Beatles, White Album or Abbey Road above, Pet Sounds, can you still manage case? There's always a case. I mean, there's always a case. Every, there's no, in reality, in art, there is no metric that makes sense. So you could put numbers on things, but it's like, is this apple better than this peach? Like, it's not really a fair comparison. But if you just had to keep one to represent the human species, that's the way I think to the aliens. So I think it's a very personal decision. I think you can make your choice to represent the human species and I'll make mine, you know? Well, I would pick the Beatles over the Beach Boys. So that's my, if I became dictator of the world and was talking to the aliens, but I don't know the full historical context to the impact of the music. I don't know if that's something to consider, like this kind of thought experiment of imagine what it was like back then to create, to go into the studio, to do such interesting work in the studio, as opposed to like listening to just as a pop song almost from, because I've never been able to understand Beach Boys, God Only Knows. The song God Only Knows? God Only Knows, but all of it, the album, the Pet Sounds just- In My Room? In My Room? Pet Song. Is that, what's your favorite on the album? On the Pet Sounds album? Pet Sounds. The opening track. Do you mind if I play it? Please. It's too fun. That's part of their trip though. You open the heart with the fun. It's possible. Original mono and stereo mix versions. What's the opening song? Wouldn't It Be Nice? Yeah, that's the song. Yeah, that's the song. This part is good, man. And then back to fun. We could say goodnight and stay together. Wouldn't That Be Nice? Wouldn't It Be Nice to wake up together? But we're not. There's heartbreak in this one too. Still, to me, like George Harris, like, is that the way the album, While My Guitar Gently Weeps? I mean that, the Beatles, it's so hard to, depending on the day, I'll say a very different song, that's my favorite song, but I often return to While My Guitar Gently Weeps is my favorite song. Spectacular. And anything George Harrison, honestly, something, something in the way she moves. What would you classify that? There's like several Beatles songs, categories of Beatles songs. So that's like the melancholy love songs or ballads or something like that. Yesterday, Let It Be. What's, do you have favorites? So from your, like how have you changed as a man, as a human being, as a musician and music producer ever having done that lengthy interaction with McCartney? Hmm. Anytime you're around someone who's such a hero and you spend time with them and they're a human being, it helps put perspective on everything. Oh, that they're just human. Well, obviously. I mean, everyone's just human. And, but I remember the first time I got to see Paul McCartney play live, it was in a stadium of 70,000 people and he started playing and I started crying. And I couldn't believe I was in, even with 70,000 people, I couldn't believe that this man walks the earth and that I'm in the same place as him and he's the person who wrote that and played that. And now he's here playing it for us. Mind blowing. That's the voice. That's the, I. It's overwhelming. Is it inspiring or is it, like, cause sometimes when you have, and I've gotten a chance to me, I mean, I love people in general. Like every, every person is fascinating to me, but yeah, when you've been a fan for a long time and you meet a person, sort of, I'll just remove present company, is you, it's like, oh, they're just human. So there's both, it's both inspiring that just a simple human can achieve such beautiful things, but it's also like almost wishing there were gods moving around us. It's somehow peaceful. It's more comforting to know that there's, you know, there's bigger fish. I'm just a small fish and then there's bigger fish and they will take care of the ocean for us. I think we're all capable of being big fish. I don't think that there are special people. I don't think it's like that. I would make a case. So the variety of artists that you worked with and brought the best out of, it does seem that you're out of this world. So do you think you would know, like, if you're the same kind of species, maybe you're just a meat vehicle and you're channeling ideas from somewhere else? I feel like I'm channeling ideas from somewhere else 100%. But I think- Have you asked questions about where from? I believe we all are though. You know, I believe we're vehicles for information that when it's ready to come through, it comes through. And the people who have good antennas pick up the signal. But if, I'm sure you've had an experience in your life where you've had an idea for something and you've not acted on it and eventually someone else does it. And it's not because they're doing it because you had the idea and they stole your idea. It's because the time has come for that idea. And if you don't do it, someone else is gonna do it. It's being broadcast by whatever the source is. Whatever the source is. Yeah, I tend to see humans as not quite special in that way. Yeah, it's different kinds of antennas walking around, listening to ideas and ideas that are, I like the notion of Richard Dawkins of memes. It's kind of the ideas of the organisms and they're just using our brains to multiply, to select, to compete, to evolve. And humans, we really wanna hold on to the specialness of our body, of our mind, but it's really the ideas. So if Fred Krueger was born two centuries ago, you wouldn't be a music producer. You'd be, I mean, maybe, but you have an antenna. And if no signal's coming in, or you'd be hearing potentially a different signal. Is there- I think we all have our own antenna for whatever it is that we, you know, maybe not everyone has tuned into their antenna to see what it is that their strength in bringing through is. I'm lucky in that it found me because I didn't know that it was a, I didn't even know this was a job. I sometimes wonder, I mean, a lot of young people, a lot of people wonder, like, what's the purpose and the specs of my antenna? What am I put on this earth to do? Like if, you know, I can live a thousand lives, there's so many trajectories, and imagine the greatest possible trajectory that reveals the most beautiful thing I can possibly create in this world, live in the most beautiful way, what is that? I feel like that's a good exercise to think about because it's also liberating to think that you can do anything. I mean, that, more and more, I suppose that's kind of life. It's like society is pushing conformity on you. You know, I thought I had my own flavor of conformity. I thought I'm supposed to be following. And then early on, I would say like in the late 20s, you realize, wait a minute, you don't have to tell, you don't have to do what teachers tell you to do, what parents tell you to do, what society tells you to do. You can, like, I would never wear a suit if I listened to like my colleagues in community who think a suit is like the symbol of, what is it? A symbol of conformity actually, which is hilarious. But it's actually a kind of rebellion and everything else of that nature, doing these silly podcasts. I have a question I have to ask. Sure. Because you brought up the suit. Yeah. Do you wear the suit? Is this your daily uniform outside of podcasting? So for the longest time it was some kind of suit. And then recently, coinciding with going to Texas, there's a, I'm such a loner, I'm an introvert. And there's a bit of a hiding from the world when I wear other stuff. I really want to, to not make fame, recognition, money, all those things, a motivation at all. And the world kind of wants you to make those motivations. Not the world, but I would say maybe the Western world and maybe America, maybe a capitalist system does. That's a choice to buy into that or not. Right. It takes a brave person, a person of character to not buy in. And I'm like a baby deer trying to find its legs. You don't have to buy in. Because I love people and I think I'm kind of an idiot. And so when other people say, do this and do that, there is a pressure there. It's actually very difficult to not listen necessarily to the advice of others and yet keep yourself fragile and open to the world. It's easy to be like, I'm always right, just kind of sticking a ground. But if you want to be like vulnerable, if you want to connect with people and just wear your heart on your sleeve, then you're going to listen to them. I mean, that's the double edged sword of it. And but then again, that pain, like if you don't let it destroy you, you can grow from that. Has fame affected you at all? Did you unplug from the system at some point? Same. I've always been sort of removed. I don't feel like I'm part of any system. Do you feel famous? I'm aware that when I go out, people say nice things to me, which is great. But that's about it. That's about as far as I can go. But it doesn't affect your art about your creativity or your thoughts. Like when you're sitting alone and thinking about the world. It can't. It's a destructive force. The thing, the reason that you're who you are and the reason that you're finding the success you're finding is because you've been true to yourself to get to that stage. So to start changing that, to either conform to someone else's idea of what you should be doing, it just seems like it doesn't make sense. Do you have a sense of who you are? Because I don't necessarily have a... I don't know. I know that I really like making good things. And I know that I'm crazy about it in that it's like an obsession. And I want things to be as good as they could be, whatever it is. And if I finish a music project and I have a window of time where I'm not working on music, I might be moving the furniture around in the house. I'm always looking for a creative outlet to find a way to make something better. Or there was a period of time where I was in a weird corporate situation that didn't allow me to flourish. And I turned, I focused the creativity in on myself and I lost a bunch of weight and changed my life. So that was the kind of art, like you've gone through a whole process of losing weight, getting in shape, getting healthy. That was a kind of creative act. It certainly was. It wasn't an intentional creative act, but I had a lot of energy. And I just, a series of events happened. I read a book. At the time that was my heaviest, I weighed about 318 pounds. And I'd never been, I'd been sedentary my whole life, basically laying on a couch working on music. So I've never been physically active in my life. And I read a book about a guy named Stu Middleman, a runner who ran a thousand miles in 11 days. And I thought, wow, I get out of breath walking to the corner and another human being can run a thousand miles in 11 days. I feel like I have bad information. Clearly I'm doing something wrong. And I reached out to a person that Stu mentioned in the book, Phil Maffetone. Who was a legend. I really appreciate him as well. He's math 180 method too. He's such an interesting, I think he focuses on. Heart rate training. And he was the first person to talk about essentially a paleo keto diet 40 years ago. For a person who's going to be healthy, who can exercise and actually perform at an early level. He's the first person when I, you know, talk about heart rate training him and other endurance athletes he influenced. He gave me permission to like run slower. Yeah. It was the first time I realized, oh, I can run long distances if I just run slower. And then I take that seriously. And I actually fell in love with running very much so. Cause for me, everyone's different, but for me the love of running happens in the longer distances. Did you read Born to Run? Great book. Amazing book. There is something special about running. And everybody has their own journey with it. And even ultra marathon running, those kinds of things. It's a, it is like many journeys, one that can pull you in. Like you won't be the same person after. And I try to be deliberate about making choices after which you will not be the same person. And so I'm nervous about like the ultra marathon running world. I have to talk to you about Johnny Cash. I mean, when people ask me what my favorite musical thing is of all time, you know, it's a very difficult question to answer, of course, but I'm pretty quick if I'm not allowed to pick anything by Tom ways, I'm pretty quick to say, Hurt by Johnny Cash, the performance, the whatever you call it, whatever the heck that is, because that's not just a song covered by an artist. That's a human being at the end of their life. That the rawness of that, I mean, just the, there's also a music video, which for a lot of people adds a lot to it. For me, just the music alone is, I mean, the guitar, every choice on that, see the few things I've heard about it, it seemed like almost accidental. I mean, like little subtle choices here and there. Can you maybe comment on that to the degree, I think you had a huge role in sort of bringing Johnny Cash back from a different part of his life. It's like bringing something out that wasn't there before. And it was incredible. It was a celebration of a really special musician and that's totally new kind of celebration. Now Hurt is just one of the songs that's an amazing celebration of Johnny Cash, but Hurt is like at the peak of that. So what was that like putting that song together? Maybe it might be nice to listen to it because I freaking love that song. And as a guitarist, I just, the simplicity of it, it seems like every choice contributes to the greatness of the song. ["The Greatness of the Song"] ["The Greatness of the Song"] Simple, it's crisp, but it's dark too. ["The Greatness of the Song"] It's one of the greatest opening lines of any song. The shape. That's that. Yeah, to see if I still feel. Yeah, I'm talking about the lyrics. I don't even mean the performance. The words are. ["The Greatness of the Song"] But those words out of Trent Reznor are not the same. They have a different meaning coming out of Johnny Cash's mouth. ["The Greatness of the Song"] What have I become? Written probably for a young man. I think he was 20 when he wrote it, Trent. ["The Greatness of the Song"] Anger, regret, pain. ["The Greatness of the Song"] The way the guitarist played, the choice of instrument, the layers there, the freedom to give him, to use the voice that's fading. It's not fading, it's changing. Maybe he's losing some aspects of his voice. And it's almost like shaking a little bit and it's a little bit out of tune in parts. How much of that was deliberate? How much was, like, how do you give Johnny Cash the freedom to do that? How do you find that together? Is there any insights you can give? I think it's a case almost of like the right, pairing the right role with the right actor, you could say. The song lyrics, the reason we chose the song was because of the lyrics, purely about the lyrics. And at that point in time, both Johnny and I would send each other songs of possible ideas to record. And that was one that I sent him, and he didn't respond to initially. I would send him, at that time we would burn CDs, and I would send him like CD of 20 songs or 25 songs. And then, and he would send them to me. You burn a CD for Johnny Cash and you send him of different songs. Of like songs to consider recording. Yeah. And we would send these back and forth. And then that I had heard on one of the ones that I sent him and he didn't respond. And usually if he didn't respond, we didn't go back to it. And that one, I remember I sent it again and I put it first on the next CD. And when we spoke about when he listened to the CD again, he didn't respond. I said, check out that first song again. I really feel like that one could be good. What did you see in that song? It's the lyrics. It's the lyrics. Because I feel like nobody, there's very few people in the world that would see these lyrics in Johnny Cash's mouth and think this is a good idea, including Trent Reznor. Yeah. I know that Trent had trepidations in the beginning. But if you listen to the words, if you forget the music and if you forget what Nine Inch Nails sounds like, and you just read it like a poem, and then you imagine a 70 year old man reading these lyrics, it'll be profound. It's profound. So that was the, based on lyrics that started the journey. And then at this point in time, Johnny was not in great health. And sometimes I would go to Nashville and record with him at his house. Sometimes he would come to California, but he was coming to California less regularly. And because there were so many songs we wanted to try, he would start sometimes recording just a straight acoustic version. Like he would have someone play guitar, he would sing, and they would send those to me and we would discuss, like, is this one to build on? And that was when we said, I don't wanna record this one until we're together. I feel like we should do this one together. So on the next trip to California, we recorded it at my old house. And I mean, all the songs we recorded felt special. So I can't say this one felt special, but lyrically it just, it's more the lyrics have such a profound sense of regret. What have I become? Yeah, and to hear, when you're 20 years old, talking about regret, it's heartbreaking, but it's heartbreaking in a different way because you have a whole life to figure it out. When you're looking back over your life at the end of your life with regret, it's brutal. It's brutal. So that was the initial spark of doing it. And then when we recorded it, I believe it was two guitar players, if I remember correctly, maybe even three, Smokey Hormel, Matt Sweeney, and Mike Campbell, I believe. And Ben Montenge was playing the piano in my living room as we were doing it. And we cut the basic track and with Johnny singing, and then Johnny probably sang over that basic track a few more times. And then we comped his vocal and then built up the drama and you didn't get to the part, but at the end of the song, it gets very loud. The music gets very loud. It's subtle because it's not anything that takes your ear and the vocal is so powerful that you don't really think about what's going on. But it's building the whole time musically. It's building and it even gets distorted at the end. It gets really like overpowering. And that's part of the emotion of it. Yeah. It's a... I will let you down I hear almost anger and frustration. If I could start again A million miles away A million miles away I would keep myself I would find a way And it just brings out the clean vocal. I mean, it's so simple, so incredible. And it's interesting to have a young man's lyrics in an old Johnny Cash voice and heart and mind. I had... Are you a fan of Tom Waits? Of course. Tom Waits, when he was younger, had his song called Martha, but there's a bunch of songs he's written when he was young. It was like, how does a young man have that like melancholy wisdom? The song Martha is about an older man calling a woman he used to love that she's now married and he's married. And they're having that conversation. They haven't spoken for 30 years and they realize that there's still love there. And it could have been a different life, a different world where they could have been together. And here's like a 23 year old Tom Waits writing so beautifully about something that's very... I've had a lot of people like tell me how real that as an older person looking back at that love that you had and realizing it wasn't, it was really, it's still there. Inklings of that love are still there. I think there's a... When a young person writes a sad song, they almost seem more willing to go to a more hopeless place because they have a long journey ahead. So much time. And older artists tend to wanna look at the bright side of things, which also I think comes from the wisdom of aging. It's a more realistic position. So it's not uncommon for younger people to write. I think even in the Beatles, you'll see like they're very heavy lyrics, middle to late era Beatles, which is still, they're in their early 20s, I guess. Wow, that's hard to think about. So much accomplished. Unbelievable. And they went through the full journey from fun to darkness in the span of a few years. You mentioned lyrics. So you've obviously produced albums with incredible lyrics. I think you've mentioned the interesting characteristics of hip hop, of rap, is that you're writing poetry to rhythm versus writing poetry to melody. So that's like one way to think about it. And I'm a fan, I mean, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, I'm a fan of poetry period. Is there something about highlighting the poetry of it, the power of words as you did with Hurt? If I have to put it again, it's a Tom Waits song that's like less than a minute long, that I always go back to, it's one I really love. It has just a few lines. It's called, I Want You. And all it is is him saying, I want you. I want you, you, you. I want you, you, you. This is a 22 year old Tom Waits. All I want is you, you, you. All I want is you. Give you stars above, sun on the brightest day. Give you all my love, if only you would see. I want you, you, you. All I want is you, you, you. And then he hums for 20 more seconds. Beautiful. So, so some, man, that young man, like, for people who don't know Tom Waits, you should definitely listen to him. And his voice sounds very different now. And it's interesting to see the evolution of a human voice, the artist over time, because that's a young, like boy-like voice, hopeful, less clever, less witty, more simple, that simplicity is there. And he's not, I mean, that takes guts to be so simple, I would say, lyrically and musically. Is there, sort of laying that out on the table, is there ways that you like to highlight the voice, the lyrics, or is there's no one rule? So do you, what is the thing that makes music special? Is it the rhythm, the melody, the, or is ultimately the lyrics are always there, or the idea? You just asked me five different questions. I don't care, I'll just get back. It's not about you, Roberto. I see that. You don't want the answers. I don't want the answers. You just wanna ask questions? Okay, I'll listen. I look forward to your comments, the internet. Okay. You have the greatest producer of all time in front of you, and he can't shut the hell up. That's right, friends. But you do value lyrics. Is there a way to celebrate lyrics? I value lyrics if the lyrics are important. I'm not a lyric person. I'm very much, whatever the thing that makes the thing good is the thing that I'm drawn to, for me. For a long time, lyrics meant very little. I would say from the- Wait, really? In the beginning? Yes, yes. From the earliest days- Fight for your right to party, Beastie Boys? Yeah, it was fun. I thought they were good lyrics, but it wasn't what was important. I mean, it was in a, in a, almost a novelty way, not in a serious way. Early in my career, I was much more focused on the rhythm, first the rhythm. And I would, if the lyrics weren't good enough, I would be aware of it, but it wasn't the driving force for me. And eventually over time, then melody became an important piece, which it wasn't in the beginning. And then lyrics became more important over time, but it's always been a, always changing what draws me in. And one of the things I found as it relates to lyrics that can give a lyric a different power has to do with rhythm, where if there's no drum, the lyrics tend to mean more. So earlier, what you were saying about if it was just acapella, you felt Marvin Gaye in a different way hearing the acapella. Can you comment on, I mean, in terms of one of the greatest albums ever. ["Acapella"] Why does it sound so raw? Her voice. She's just a great singer. But this is, you're not doing anything else. You're doing the, there's, there's, there's, there's drumming and then there's just a single beat. And then it builds. ["Acapella"] ["Acapella"] It gets simpler, but it feels like it's a giant orchestra. ["Acapella"] There's backing vocals. ["Acapella"] The anger. I love it. ["Acapella"] It just, there's something about such a powerful voice and the instruments not getting in the way. I mean, the same with her and Johnny Cash. Is there, why does it sound so raw? It's the same as the hurt. There's a, it feels like you're in the room with them. It feels like they're not even singing. They're like, they're literally freshly mad and angry. I think those are the things that make great singers sound like great singers. It's not, it's not anything that, that's happening in the studio. I mean, we're, I would say the only thing that us in the studio can do is kind of get out of the way and not, not ruin it. You know, it's like, that's, that's what comes through of these, these people. I should also, before I forget, there is a lot of song choices on that CD. I would love to see the full options on the CD that you sent to Johnny Cash that I love. So, Solitaire Man is one of my favorite choices made there. Is that, is that a Neil Diamond song? It's funny you talk about them as songs, because I tend to, I tend to listen more to albums than songs, so. If you really, that's what you're doing in your head. You're pulling up the album, essentially. No, I'm, I'm like, I'm going to that song, but I don't know, I've never listened to that song, but I know that when that, when that song comes up in the sequence of the album, it has a really powerful effect in me. Let's see what it does if you just start it. If you could read my mind, Oh, so interesting. Wow. You know that ghost is me, and I will never be set free as long as there's a ghost that you can't see. That's beautiful. Such a beautiful choice. Beautiful melody, such a beautiful melody and haunting words. That's sung so simply. I have to, I mean, so I was born in the Soviet Union. When, when you, when you're growing up, there's a few bands that kind of, I mean, they're probably forbidden still, but they seep in and you get like bootlegged and they somehow take over the culture of the young, of the young folks such as myself. So on the metal side, it was Metallica and Iron Maiden, and on the, I don't know what you call them, but Beastie Boys, I remember hearing Fight For Your Right, and it was just like, for some reason that stuck, as it did for a lot of people in Russia, it's like, wow, America is when you get to say, fuck you to the man, the rebellion, the freedom. I probably heard it a few years after it was released because it kind of, it dissipates the culture. You get the bootlegged, I mean, it's hard to get your hands on, but I just remember, I mean, I wanted to kind of bring that up because it was such a personally important song to me, and yet probably you didn't even think of that. You probably thought of it as its role in the culture here in the United States, like in terms of musically. I was, you know, 20, 21 years old, and we just... Well, you were that kid too, right? Yeah, we were just making fun songs for our friends. There was no expectation. So that's just a fun song. Yeah, no one thought, we never imagined anybody would like any of it. One of the greatest albums ever. Yeah! I have to, I love this so much. I just remember, this is America. I didn't even know, I didn't even understand the lyrics, to be honest. And the lyrics are ridiculous. So hearing that, and hearing Metallica, Master Puppets, I was like, I knew I'm going to have to end up in America one day. I mean, maybe now that I'm more mature, or maybe a little bit more mature, I realized that was kind of the longing for freedom. It felt like, at least at the time, if this is allowed, then anything is allowed. And I think that the rebellion of it, I guess it's also fun. I just loved it. If you look back to that, because you were that person, not just the producer. Yes and no. Even to us then, it was still satirical. It was. Oh, absolutely. But isn't music in part, you're dancing in the line, it's part satirical, part serious, in the sense you're losing yourself in the satire. Anytime you go over the top, isn't that part of the... Or is it explicitly satirical? I mean, girls, there's a lot of ridiculous songs in that album. I don't know. I just think it was definitely to make each other laugh. We were trying to make each other laugh. We weren't trying to make a point. We were trying to make each other laugh. But that person, how's that person different than the person today in you? The person that produced that record? I wouldn't say so different. It really is that I like things that make me laugh. I like ridiculous things. It's the same person still. I think so. Is it strange just how many incredible... I don't think I would make that today, but I understand why we made it when we did. It's in the vocabulary of ridiculous that would make sense to do. For the right artist today, could make something ridiculous and gives you that feeling. I mean, there's just a sense when you make so many different albums, then you look back at that creation, it can feel like a different person created that. But you're making it seem like if you travel back in time or maybe do a memory replay, you'd be able to hang out with a teenage and a 20s recruitment. I think you're just fine. I don't think I was so different, honestly. That's hilarious. It's funny, I ran into someone recently in Costa Rica, who I hadn't seen in a long time and who I knew from the New York days when... those days. We spent a couple of hours talking and she said, you're exactly the same person that you were then. I have a short, a recent confirmation that that's the case. That's beautiful. Tim Ferriss asked you about who was the most successful person you know. That's the definition of success, I would say. It's exactly the same person. You haven't lost yourself or rather you found yourself early on. I would say there are aspects of me that have changed for sure, but I can't say that it's necessarily better. It's different. I would say at that time I was more confident than I am now, and I'm very confident now, but then I had an unrealistic confidence and I think now it's a little more based in reality. At that point in time I had never been depressed. And then once you go through a depression, well some people I know in my case, when I went through depression afterwards I was a different person than I was before. And I feel more grounded now than I did then, and I probably relate to the artists who, so many of the artists I work with suffer, so many artists suffer because that's part of what makes an artist great is their level of sensitivity, that the same thing that makes an artist uncomfortable, other people don't feel at all. The time you were depressed, what was the darkest moment of your life? What took you there? How did you get out? It was triggered by a person making a comment about something to do with work that didn't matter. It was like to anyone else, they would hear that, and it would just be like, okay, we'll deal with it next week, whatever. But for some reason I took it in a way that I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. Even beyond the rational part of it, of understanding, even after the problem that came up was solved, it somehow undermined something in me and made me feel very vulnerable in a way that I hadn't felt before. And it spiraled. How did you get out? I did a lot of different kinds of therapy. Starting with alternative therapies, I was seeing, I would say, between seven and eight doctors and or therapists a week. Acupuncture, talk therapy, herbs, any possible modality. I tried everything for a long time. And nothing seemed to have an impact. And then finally, I'm wary of taking any Western medicine. I'm not a drug taker or drinker or partier in any way. And I found a psychopharmacologist who was a psychic. But because she was a psychic, I was okay to see her. I'll listen to a psychic, but I'm not going to listen to a psychopharmacologist. But the fact that she had the psychic, that made her fit into my worldview. And she recommended antidepressant, which went terribly wrong in the first night that I took it. And then that set me on a journey of looking for the right antidepressant, which was a long and painful process. What the heck of a journey. Every one that I took made me sick. Everyone. And then finally, I don't know, five months later, six months later, I found the magic one that worked for me. And it shifted me out of the depression. I took it for, I can't remember, six months or a year, and then weaned off and was okay. And then I had another event some years later. I think I took it again for a short period of time and got out of it. And I've not needed it since. Were you able to kind of introspect the triggers that led to the events? Or is it random events of life? I think it's more that because of the way that I grew up, I never had to deal with much controversy. And when I was challenged, I didn't have any ability to deal with it. It's like, you know, Jonathan Haidt talks about, it's like that. So you've actually also mentioned like business sometimes gives you stress. So this was business related stuff. Yeah, it was a business related thing. It just made me feel bad. One of the sadder things about art and music is that it's often interleaved with business folk. I suppose that's the way of the world if you have a capitalist system, but it makes that business folks rubbing up against artists can sometimes destroy a fragile mind and soul. To me, like one of the best representations of an artist, honestly, is Johnny Ive, the designer from Apple. And he's just so fragile with his ideas. And you talked about like when he has ideas, he really wouldn't show it to Steve Jobs or anybody except for the small design team because he was so nervous that it would break. Give it a chance. Give it a chance to grow. And it seems like the outside world, business people, PR people, people have not lost themselves in the passion of creating, but instead are kind of representing or like making deals, all that kind of stuff. They can kind of trample on those little ideas. And it's sad to see. It's really heartbreaking to see because you know how much trampling there's going on. It's one of the main jobs. My job as a record producer is to keep the voices away from the artist, from all the people who are really on their side but don't know, whether it be people, anyone on the business side who doesn't make things, they're excited to do their part. They're excited. When you deliver the art that you make to me, then we can start the project. But there's nothing to sell if the art doesn't happen in the right way. And it has to be protected. And it can't happen on the same kind of a timetable that business can. It's just a different thing. Art doesn't come in a quarterly way. And that doesn't apply just to music or it applies to art, it applies to all creative pursuits. This is generally the case at MIT. It's just there's the administration, and then there is the professors and students. And the professors and students are the creative folk. They create stuff, they dream, they have wild ideas that go on tangents and so on. They have hopes and they go with those and they get on these weird passionate pursuits. And then the administration can often just trample on that. And they set up bars in all kinds of ways that you think you're not actually hurting, but you really are. And I won't mention why, but because this happens to everybody. And I have a large amount of leverage at MIT now, but even I get a little bit of pressure in such stupid ways. Be careful. Be careful. We really want your career to succeed. Be careful. And that little pressure to an artist, do you want to go acapella? Do you want to do a country record? Be careful. You're already a superstar. Be careful. And then in that way, you kind of push people like flock of fish into one fish tank where they're all the same. And it's sad to see. And obviously in the modern world, there's nice mechanisms to protect, to let artists flourish a little bit more because they get to put themselves to the world and get a little bit more confidence, maybe different funding mechanisms, all that kind of stuff. But it's a tremendous problem that the voices that don't understand interfering with the process is huge. The other side of it is in success, there can be a lack of reality where all of the people around the successful person just tell them everything they do is great. And then they don't have anything to bump up against anymore, they don't have a realistic sense of how things work or how things measure. So both sides are really important, both avoiding the voices getting in the way and having a trusted group of a sangha, a group of people who can say, I don't know if that's as good. You can still say, I don't care what you think, that's fine. But it helps to hear it. It helps to have, if someone who you respect tells you something isn't good enough, it's helpful. When you know it comes from a place of love, when it comes from a place of wisdom. And not from a place of fear, not from a place of, oh, this doesn't sound like it's going to do as well as your last thing. That's not the point. The point is on this quest for greatness, are you living up to your ability? By the way, is there something interesting to say about your worldview? Because you mentioned psychic and sort of the ways we can be healthy, the ways we can grow and how much maybe medicine or science has the answers. Is there some interesting way to describe that worldview? I would just say I'm open-minded. I believe anything's possible. And if I was going to trust in any practical information, it would be something thousands of years old. There's wisdom in that history. Yeah. It's more tested. It's not always right, but at least it's been somewhat tested. Well, science is also tested. The thing I'm a little bit skeptical of sometimes is just the hubris that often comes with the modern, with the latest, the newest, this feeling like you figured it all out. Everything that's been done in the past has no wisdom. And we basically solved every problem. There's nothing else to be solved. I mean, that's the defining characteristic of any age is like we've solved all the problems there are, we have the final answers, and our parents are all stupid. That kind of energy. Yeah. You have to be extremely, extremely careful with that when it talks about, when you think about something as complex as the human body or the human mind, you have to be very, very careful. I believe we know close to nothing. Yeah, exactly. Close to nothing. That's about anything. About anything. That place of humility is a good place to start to figure it all out. And in the end, we'll still know almost nothing. Yeah. I don't think we need to know. It's like we need to see what works. So we need to see what works for us. It's interesting to know. I know on the art side, knowing how it works isn't what makes it work. The magic of it isn't how it works. The magic is the magic. And the magic happens in a way that's intuitive and accidental at times or incidental where you're trying many things and all of a sudden something works and you don't know why. And it's okay not to know why. It doesn't really matter why, as long as it does the thing that you want it to do, whatever that is. Yeah, that's so weird. When you know the components, you still... Yeah, the magic. What's the magic? Where is the magic? We know the components for stuff I care about, artificial intelligence. We know the components of a powerful computing machinery. Where does consciousness come from? What is that? Where does the brilliant moments of insight come from? What's that? Even in simple games of chess or in simple... Where do those breakthrough ideas of taking the big risk that doesn't make any sense and then all of a sudden it becomes something beautiful? Yeah, we don't need to understand why. It just happens. It just happens. And often the things that end up breaking through don't break through in the way we thought or turn out to be a third iteration of something that we thought was an entirely different thing. We don't know. And I think if we embrace that not knowing, we'll have a healthier experience going through life. You made a lot... It's not just music, everything. Rearranging the chairs, the furniture as well. You've done, like I said, the documentary, I guess you would say, with Paul McCartney. And you've done a podcast yourself, a broken record podcast, and you've done conversation too. So what have you learned from that process about the art of conversation? And also maybe what advice would you give to this, to me about what to do with conversation? What is interesting to you about conversation? One of the things that I like is to not feel like there's any stakes or that it's actually... Almost that it's not happening. Like the fact that when I came in, you were setting up cameras made it less good for me. I knew that that would impact the conversation in a negative way. The best version of it would be if we didn't see the cameras and we didn't see any technology and we were just sitting at this table having a conversation. Maybe even if we were mic'd beforehand, it would be okay if it was necessary. But then we were just sitting here having a conversation, no people in the room, nothing, and feeling like we're just having a conversation. I feel like it would get closer to the relaxed feeling. Same thing we do in the studios. You've heard of red light fever. When artists get nervous, they play a song great and then the tape starts rolling and they can't play it. We're all to some degree like that. When you were with Paul McCartney, were you cognizant of cameras? We had the room black. Everybody who was working there was dressed in black. Everything was invisible. We were lit in a way where... Even though there were probably 20 people, between 12 and 20 people working in the room, within three minutes of starting the conversation, Paul and I were alone in the room. That was the feeling. On occasion, you'd hear a noise and it would be weird. We also had nobody was allowed to wear shoes because we were trying to create this intimate space. I know from in the recording studio, when we're recording, if even one person is there, that's just watching and not working. I'm usually there and an engineer is there technically making it happen. If anyone else is in the room, it's different because then it goes from this moment where the person is doing a performance to the sense or where the person is feeling something internally and we're capturing it to the other version is they're performing for someone. It's so interesting. To push back the alternatives here. One, about the third person, not to make people self-conscious, but I find that I'm so torn on that because sometimes when that person, Evan is in the room here. He's been in the room before. He's a huge fan of yours, by the way. He'll nod. He'll get excited. You can see that nodding. For some reason for me, he's like, yeah, you get excited together. That third person can be a really special. Having an audience when it's a friend or somebody that has that love in them. It depends on the performer. Some people really thrive in front of an audience. You're saying you like that simple intimacy of everything dissipates. I like the reality of it not being it. I want it to be as far from a performance as possible. Got it. I'll tell you a story. A story that just happened and it was viewed as kind of a, it seemed uncool in the moment to the person that it happened to. It wasn't at all. We were recording New Chili Peppers album, which is coming out, I think, any day now. I don't know what today's date is, but maybe by the time this airs, it will be out. The band was playing in the studio and it was ripping because they're incredible. One of the members walked through the control room after a particularly great performance. The engineer said, wow, that solo is really great. The person who heard this said, please don't say that and walked away. It just changed this feeling of we're in this place where we're doing this thing and there is no outside world. We're doing this for us. We're going as deep as we can for us. As soon as there's an acknowledgement to someone else, in a way, it breaks the concentration of being inside of it. That's so well told. Something about saying, wow, that solo is great, it reminds you that there's an outside world, but I feel like there's a way to enter the inside world as an audience. You just have to do that. It matters what you say. It matters how you look. There's these generic compliments, not generic, but they sound in the way an outside world would interact as opposed to that creative thing where you're dancing around the fire together or something. Actually, I can tell you there's another interesting one that happened to me and I didn't know this until I saw the film of it, which was a strange one. We were recording with the Avett Brothers. The song was called No Hard Feelings and it was this recording of No Hard Feelings. Such a great voice. So beautiful. My hopes and my doubts, the rings on my fingers and the keys to my house with no hard feelings. The sun hangs low in the west and the light in my chest won't be kept held a day any longer. When the jealousy fades away. So bright, so hopeful, so lighthearted. It's just hallelujah and love involved. Love in the words, love in the songs they sing in the church. And no hard feelings. No hard feelings. No hard feelings. No hard feelings. When my body won't hold it any more. Let it finally let me free. Where will I go? Does he sound as good as video? Yes, every bit. Take me south through Georgia rain or tropical rain or snow from the heavens. Will I join with the ocean blue or run into a savior true? And shake hands laughing and walk through the night straight to the light. Holding the love I've known in my life and no hard feelings. Lord knows they hide and hide. Much love for anyone. Can't be afraid in cold. Where someone's driving home under the burning sky. I'm finally learning why. It matters for me and you to say it and be it too. The life that is all we need. It's all it's all we need. Because it's meant to be. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies.
 There are no right answers for anything involved in art.
 It's, we're all trying experiments to find a way.
 And even for the things that I work on,
 I don't have a set way that I do anything.
 Every, I come to every project blank.
 Maybe you're just a meat vehicle
 and you're channeling ideas from somewhere else.
 I believe we know close to nothing, close to nothing,
 about anything.
 If we embrace that not knowing,
 we'll have a healthier experience going through life.
 The following is a conversation with Rick Rubin,
 one of the greatest music producers of all time,
 known for bringing the best out of anyone he works with,
 no matter the genre of music or even the medium of art,
 or just the medium of creating something beautiful
 in this world.
 And the list of musicians he produced includes many, many,
 many of the greats over the past 40 years,
 including the Beastie Boys, Eminem, Metallica, LL Cool J,
 Kanye West, Slayer, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Dixie Chicks,
 Aerosmith, Adele, Danzig, Red Hot Chili Peppers,
 System of a Down, Jay-Z, Black Sabbath.
 I can keep going for a very long time here.
 Most importantly, Rick is just an amazing human being.
 We became fast friends, which is surreal to say,
 and is just an incredible honor.
 I felt truly heard as a person when I spent the day with him
 eating some delicious Texas barbecue, talking about life,
 about music, about art, about beauty.
 This was a conversation and experience I'll never forget.
 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
 To support it, please check out our sponsors
 in the description.
 And now, dear friends, here's Rick Rubin.
 Are you nervous?
 I'm not shaky, but I would say I feel uneasy.
 And I feel like the sooner we start talking,
 the more relaxed we'll get.
 Yeah.
 Well, maybe we should sit in this moment
 and enjoy the nervousness of it.
 Let me start with Nietzsche.
 He said, without music, life would be a mistake.
 What do you think he means by that?
 Let's talk some philosophy.
 Let's try to analyze Friedrich Nietzsche from a century ago.
 It seems like music has the ability
 to bring us so much depth in our soul
 that's hard to access any other way.
 And without it, there would be a loss,
 beyond the pleasure of it.
 It feels like it's a window into something else.
 Something that no other medium can express
 quite the same way.
 I would say not as automatically.
 Something about music can do it automatically.
 Maybe poetry or maybe certain abstract forms
 can get us there.
 But there's something about music
 that really can get us there quickly.
 But it's also the time, the place, the history.
 There's something about, a lot of my family's still in Philly.
 There's something about driving through Jersey
 and listening to Bruce Springsteen.
 And then you just, I'll get emotional.
 Like listening to I'm on Fire.
 One of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs,
 there's a haunting kind of strumming to it.
 It's not a strumming, it's actually picked.
 It has a country feel to it,
 almost like a Johnny Cash feel actually.
 And it, I don't know, makes me feel,
 so for people who don't know I'm on Fire,
 that song is, I guess, a love song to a woman
 that you can't have because she's married
 or she's with somebody else.
 Which I guess is quite a lot of love songs.
 But there's something about the haunting nature
 of the guitar and then it has to be driving through Jersey.
 And I feel like everyone has fallen in love
 with a Jersey girl at one point in their life.
 I don't know if that's true for her,
 but I feel like that.
 I haven't either, but I just feel like that.
 There's something about Bruce Springsteen
 is like, yeah, I've been there.
 And that just takes you to a place of emotion
 that you just, that captures love,
 that captures longing, that captures the heartbreak
 of just the way time flows in life
 and the fact that it's finite.
 And just all of that in a single, simple song.
 What else can capture that?
 Yeah, I don't know.
 But it's true that there's a connection
 both between time and place and music.
 Certain music growing up on the East Coast
 didn't really resonate with me
 until I spent time on the West Coast.
 Eagles being an example.
 When I lived in New York,
 the Eagles didn't really speak to me.
 ZZ Top didn't really speak to me.
 And then when I started spending time in California
 and driving through Laurel Canyon,
 all of a sudden the music of the Eagles
 felt appropriate somehow.
 And I started listening to it more.
 Got it, so not until you went out West,
 can you understand the sounds of the West?
 So it's really like New York has a sound.
 What other places have a sound in the United States?
 I think every place does.
 And that said, sometimes we can get an experience
 through music of a place.
 We can resonate with the music and not understand why.
 And then maybe when we go to the place where it was created,
 it's almost like we have a knowingness of that place.
 It's not a strange place anymore.
 Yeah, Stevie Ray Vaughan with blues and Texas blues.
 You can just listen to Texas Flood and just,
 again, there's this like a woman you're missing,
 a broken heart and somehow that connects to the place.
 The Eagles, what song of the Eagles connects with you?
 Are we talking about like, Take It Easy
 or are we talking more like Hotel California?
 I'm thinking Take It Easy, but both are great.
 Yeah, there's certain songs when I started learning guitar
 when I was young, that's like,
 I would like to be the kind of person
 that not only knows how to play this song,
 but understands the song and like,
 have that song be something I played 20 years ago.
 And I've lived with that song for a while.
 Like Hotel California is an example.
 Obviously there's the solo,
 but there's also the soulfulness of the lyrics,
 which I still don't understand.
 And it could be about anything.
 And as you get older,
 I feel like the meaning of the song could be anything.
 Yeah, I think that's true.
 I think that's the beauty of them.
 I think when the person wrote them,
 they may have had one interpretation,
 but it's not contingent on us getting that interpretation
 to like it or resonate with it or feel it.
 In some ways, the best art is open enough
 where the artist gets to have their experience
 when they make it,
 and then the audience gets to have their experience
 when they listen and they don't have to be the same.
 And then it connects thousands or millions of people together.
 There's a togetherness of music when you share that music,
 when you're listening to stuff together, like in a car.
 First of all, the car is a sacred place.
 So I work in part on autonomous vehicles
 and you start to think,
 well, what are the things you lose
 when the car stops being the central part of American life?
 The car ownership.
 It just feels like the car when you're alone,
 it's like a therapist thing, session,
 because you get angry at other humans
 and then you get to sit in your own anger and emotion.
 You get to listen to the song on a long road trip
 and remember, like run through your memories,
 the heartbreak, I don't know, the one that got away,
 but also like the beautiful moments, all of it.
 Yeah.
 And all of that in the car.
 Yeah, driving also serves another purpose
 and it's one of the things that we can do that
 we have to pay attention enough not to crash,
 but typically can essentially run on autopilot enough
 where we could be thinking about something else
 or concentrating on something else.
 And the difference between concentrating on something
 or trying to solve a problem
 when you're solely trying to solve a problem
 versus when you have some little task
 that's keeping you occupied,
 I find if I have some slight,
 something slight to take care of,
 it frees a more creative side of my mind
 to better solve problems.
 You know, I'm kind of jealous of people
 that found that in painting, for example.
 They'll be drawing or painting
 and listening to, so that's the small task you do.
 You're coloring in the lines.
 It's like this gentle, peaceful, slow process
 that requires just a small fraction of your mind
 and then you can listen.
 Some people listen to podcasts that way.
 Some people listen to music that way.
 Yeah.
 How do you do it?
 How do you free your mind?
 Running is one of them.
 There's a process.
 So most freeing of the mind for me
 has to go through a process of a bit of pain for a bit.
 So doing something difficult,
 it's just like an airplane taking off or something.
 So that's, like for example, running,
 the first few miles would just be just,
 first of all, the physical aspect,
 which is like, ah, you're so fat, you're out of shape,
 you're this, this, this, this, this, this, this,
 you're out of shape, you're this, this, this,
 getting old, this, that.
 Okay, that slowly dissipates.
 And then the demons come in who are like,
 you should be, you should be getting this and that
 and this done, you haven't gotten it done.
 You're like breaking promises,
 all those kinds of voices coming in.
 And after that, maybe mile four, it's like, fuck it.
 You just run, run with the wind at a very slow pace,
 but with the wind.
 And then you could think.
 So it's the footsteps, the physical activity,
 then you could deeply think about stuff,
 ideas, sort of design, whether it's program design stuff,
 or like high level life decisions,
 all those kinds of things.
 I would say running.
 I used to build bridges from toothpicks.
 I used to be a thing, it's an engineering.
 I guess some people like glue together airplanes
 and stuff like that.
 But the bridge is such deeply honest work,
 because at the end of it, you're gonna have to test that bridge.
 And you're gonna see how good your work was.
 The little details, but also the big picture.
 Do you use glue or no?
 Yeah, I use glue.
 So it's not pure physics.
 It's materials engineering too.
 Because the way you want to do it is you actually
 split the wood as thin as possible
 and then glue it back together,
 because the glue is really strong,
 except for the arches and things like that.
 So you're building arch bridges,
 which is a whole nother skill,
 because you have to bend the wood.
 And it's so cool, because the thing can hold
 thousands of times its weight.
 And then you get to watch it explode
 at a certain point from the pressure.
 And when you do a really good job,
 it doesn't explode in a kind of some weak point
 that you didn't anticipate, just kind of starts cracking.
 Everything cracks, everything explodes.
 It's just pieces fly everywhere.
 And it's literally hundreds of hours of work
 just explode in front of you.
 And that's a metaphor for life maybe.
 And it's all for nothing,
 except for the journey that you took to get there.
 And no one understands.
 Speaking of which, back to Nietzsche.
 These questions are ridiculous.
 So you're gonna have to try to figure out
 what the heck I'm trying to do here.
 So Nietzsche also said a line I love,
 which is, and those who were seen dancing
 were thought to be insane
 by those who could not hear the music.
 Do you, Rick Rubin, ever feel crazy?
 Or maybe you're the one who's sane
 and everybody else is crazy.
 You know that the dancing, the joy of the music,
 of just feeling the music
 and everybody else just doesn't understand.
 And this doesn't have to be literally about music.
 This is about art, about creation.
 I would say I feel different.
 And it's hard to say, it's like,
 which side of the equation is crazy, you know?
 Did you ever find a group of people
 that you get, that get you?
 Yes.
 Is that what producing is essentially?
 Is you try to find the moments
 when you just get each other?
 No.
 I would say they're definitely,
 certain artists with certain temperaments,
 when you're around them,
 it feels like you can finish each other's sentences.
 You know, just see the world the same way.
 Comedians as well.
 And that's not essential for the two of you together
 creating something special?
 No.
 So it could be attention too?
 It could be anything.
 There's no rules.
 It'd be like, think of it like a coach.
 A coach could bring what they have to bring
 to any talented individual
 and help them find their way.
 And sometimes it's the right coach for the right athlete
 really works and other times there's a mismatch.
 Have you seen the movie Whiplash?
 I did.
 I saw it when it came out,
 so I don't really remember it well, but I did see it.
 So there's a coach type of figure
 who is pushing a drummer to create,
 to grow as a musician,
 but also to create something special.
 I don't know if it's even special music skill-wise.
 It's a special moment.
 I don't know what he's trying to create.
 From one perspective, it's just an abusive,
 a person who selfishly gets off on being abusive
 to those he's with.
 But from another perspective, the way I saw that movie,
 it's just the two right humans finding each other
 at the right moment in life
 and risking destroying each other in the process,
 but maybe something beautiful will come of it.
 Do you think that's a toxic relationship?
 Or is there, does some of that movie resonate with you
 as that sometimes is required to create art?
 That kind of suffering?
 Yeah, it doesn't.
 Well, there's suffering involved,
 but not that kind of suffering.
 Not for me.
 There are some people who that's their process
 and that's whatever works.
 There are no right answers for anything involved in art.
 We're all trying experiments to find a way.
 And even for the things that I work on,
 I don't have a set way that I do anything.
 I come to every project blank and see,
 I really listen to what the artist plays and says.
 And through what they explain they wanna do,
 help find the best way to get there.
 Was it implicit in the movie
 that the mean teacher liked being a mean teacher?
 You said the way you described it was
 that he got off on treating people this way.
 Do we know that to be the case?
 I don't remember that in the movie.
 But we sometimes project that onto people,
 who are really rough on students.
 You start to think, well, maybe,
 maybe that is fundamentally who they are.
 And if it's fundamentally who they are,
 that there must be some pleasure in it,
 or it's an addiction of some sort.
 But it could be also a deliberate choice
 made by the teacher.
 It also could be a lineage like,
 you know, in the Zen tradition,
 there are sort of the mean Roshis,
 who if you do something wrong, take a physical action.
 And it's just in the lineage,
 it's considered that's how you teach.
 I didn't come from that lineage.
 So I'm much more of a,
 I feel like it's more of a collaboration
 between people working together
 to make the best thing.
 It's not a boss slave relationship at all.
 It's much more of a, let's find our way.
 And we agree at the beginning of the process
 that if either of us or any of us
 don't like what's happening, we say it.
 And the goal is to keep working
 till we get to a point where we're all really happy with it.
 It's like if we make something that an artist likes
 and I don't like, or that I like and they don't like,
 we haven't gone far enough.
 In terms of lineage, the ones that seek destruction
 and the ones that seek happiness
 all come from the same lineage.
 We all came from fish.
 So somewhere in you, deep down there,
 there's the other stuff too.
 It's just that you haven't been yet, by the way,
 because you said every new project,
 including maybe starting today,
 is an opportunity to channel, to plug into something
 that was always there and you haven't gotten a chance
 to plug into.
 You mentioned listening.
 How do you listen to a person?
 How do you hear a person?
 When you first come in, like we just met,
 what's the analysis happening?
 But I mean, with me is one thing.
 I'm an artist of sorts.
 I program and I'm just, I'm human, I guess.
 I guess we're all creating art.
 How do you see, like, how do I bring out?
 So for people who don't know,
 I mean, obviously everyone knows that you've produced
 some of the greatest records ever,
 but the way I see that is you just brought out the best
 in a lot of interesting artists.
 And so in order to bring out the best in them,
 you have to understand them.
 You have to hear the music of their soul.
 Hopefully I'm not being too romantic here,
 but just like, is there something you can say
 of how difficult that is if there's a process,
 if there's tricks, if it's luck?
 I think it starts with this, again, coming in blank,
 like not having any preconceived ideas,
 being open and really listening,
 listening and not thinking about what you're gonna say next
 or what your opinion is or any, you know, not,
 basically being a recorder and just hearing what comes in.
 And then once you hear what comes in,
 processing that information and trying our best to do that
 without any of the beliefs that we might have
 to impact what that is.
 You know, if I ask you a question, I don't wanna hear,
 I don't wanna listen to you and have any reaction happening
 when you're speaking and wanna be as neutral as possible.
 For me, my goal is not to form an opinion,
 it's to understand.
 So if anything, I would draw you out further
 and just ask questions to really understand.
 And if you say something that somehow triggers me
 in a way that that's, you know, I wonder how he came to that,
 I wouldn't challenge you, I would ask,
 like how did you find that?
 You know, how did you get to that place?
 Form a place of curiosity, you would try to figure out.
 Yeah, I wanna understand who the person is
 and through questioning, we can usually get there
 or through just spending time together,
 you find out who the person is.
 What about finding out and figuring out
 how to then take the next steps
 of bringing out the best in them?
 Like, is it just trial and error?
 Like, let's try this.
 It's definitely trial and error.
 It's always trial and error.
 You afraid of making a mistake?
 Like, let's add this instrument, let's remove this instrument.
 Let's try. Let's add this line,
 let's remove this line.
 Let's try and let's be open.
 So one of the, we don't really have rules,
 but one of the agreements in the studio is
 any idea that anyone has will always demonstrate it.
 We'll always try it.
 Because I can describe to you an idea
 and you can think that's a terrible idea.
 Let's not do that.
 And then I can play you the idea
 and then you can say, oh, that's really good.
 And it's completely different because we,
 when we're told something,
 we have to imagine what that is
 and the way you see something and imagine it
 and the way I see something and imagine it
 are completely different.
 So you say a thing and now there's two humans
 that play that thing in their mind differently
 in their imagination.
 And then there's a cool creative step.
 And when you actually do it
 to see how it differs in the imagination
 and then the difference or the commonality
 will be like an exciting little discovery together.
 Well, so many groups of people
 making things together in a room,
 one person will suggest something
 and someone else in the room saying,
 that doesn't sound like a good idea.
 Let's not do that.
 And then they move on.
 The testing of every idea is really important.
 And that's how you get to see,
 oh, that's not at all what I thought it was gonna be.
 Happens to me all the time.
 I know because someone else suggests,
 why don't we do it like this?
 And I'll think that sounds bad.
 And then I'll think, okay, let's try it.
 And then we hear it.
 And then eight times out of 10,
 it's nothing like I imagined and great.
 And you try not to have an ego about the fact
 that you thought it was not a good idea in your head.
 There can't be any ego in this.
 It doesn't, if everyone's there
 with the purpose of making the best thing we can,
 there's nothing else.
 There are no, there can't be any boundaries to that.
 So there's a moment I saw with,
 I know you don't love talking about
 previous things you've done,
 but it's cool to dive in there.
 I'm fine to talk about maybe.
 To sample it.
 Anything?
 We'll see.
 I have this pain I gotta talk about.
 I'll think of something ridiculous
 that would make you change your mind.
 You mentioned, I saw a video of you with Jay-Z
 at WorldCamp99problems where you suggested
 acapella opening the song with acapella.
 Just no instruments, just voice.
 That to me, I mean, that's one of the characteristics
 of the things, of the ways you've brought out
 the best in artist is doing less.
 Sort of the tending towards simplicity in some kind of way.
 So that choice of acapella is really interesting
 because I could see a lot of people think
 that that's a bad idea.
 But it turned out to be a really powerful idea.
 Can you maybe talk about the simplicity?
 How to find simplicity?
 Why you find simplicity is beautiful.
 It does appear to be beautiful.
 What is that?
 Yeah, I don't know where it comes from.
 It has been with me from the beginning of my work.
 The very first album I ever produced,
 the credit I took was reduced by me
 instead of produced by me.
 For that reason, I like the idea of simplicity.
 I like the idea of getting to the essential.
 And I have a better idea now
 that I've done it for a while,
 but at the time it was purely an instinctual thing.
 And part of it is a sonic,
 there's a sonic benefit,
 which is the less elements you have,
 you can hear each of the ones that are there
 and they can sound better.
 And the less there are, the more space they could have
 around them and the more you can hear their personality.
 If you were to record 10 people playing the same guitar part
 and you listen to it, it would sound like guitar.
 And if you record one person playing a guitar part,
 it sounds like a person playing the guitar.
 It's different than just guitar.
 And often in the studio,
 the idea of building upon things
 and adding layers to thicken, to make it sound bigger,
 sometimes the more things you add, the smaller it gets.
 So a lot of it is counterintuitive
 until you just in practice see what works.
 To try it, to try removing stuff until it's just right.
 It's the Einstein thing,
 make it as simple as possible, but not simpler.
 That's such a, like finding a stopping place.
 Just keep chopping away and chopping away.
 Yeah, there's something we also like to do
 called the Ruthless Edit, which is,
 let's say you're at a point where it can work for anything,
 but I'll give you the example with an album.
 We've recorded 25 songs.
 We think the album is gonna have 10.
 Instead of picking our favorite 10,
 we limit it to what are the five or six
 that we can't live without.
 So going past even the goal
 to get to the real like heart of it and then see,
 okay, we have these five or six
 that we can't live without.
 Now, what would we add to that
 that makes it better and not worse?
 And it puts you in a different frame
 when you start with building instead of removing.
 And you might find that there's nothing you need to add.
 Sometimes.
 Sometimes something happens when you get to the real essence.
 Then when you start adding things back,
 it becomes clear that it was just supposed to be
 this tight little thing.
 Can I ask you like a therapy question?
 So you mentioned somewhere that one way to kind of think
 about music to get into music is to look at the top
 like 100 albums of all time and just go down the list
 and like just take it all in like one piece of artwork.
 So I was doing that for a while.
 It's a cool experiment
 because unfortunately I have to admit I've gotten lazy
 and stopped taking in albums as albums.
 And I looked at one interesting top 100 list,
 top 500 actually, which is put together by Rolling Stone.
 And they put, this is the therapy session part.
 And this has to do with simplicity too.
 They put Marvin Gaye's What's Going On at number one.
 Spoiler alert.
 So I'd like to maybe get your opinion on that choice.
 The reason Marvin Gaye is really interesting,
 it'd actually be cool to play what's going on
 in a second, but when you just listen to his like acapella,
 just listen to his voice, it is really good.
 Like people, it makes me wonder if it's possible
 to pull off like most of his songs with no instruments.
 Like in many parts, there's so much soul
 in just Mercy, Mercy Me, What's Going On.
 There's so many songs that you could just be like,
 I want to play that song.
 There's so many songs that you could just be like,
 I wonder if you could just like, just go raw.
 Or maybe in parts or maybe do what you do with Jay-Z,
 just open up with nothing.
 Anyway, there's something so powerful
 to a great soulful voice.
 Do you mind if I play it real quick?
 No, please.
 What's going on?
 This is probably one of my favorite songs.
 I mean, it's up there.
 Yeah, what's happening?
 Brother, what's up?
 Hey, I'm not.
 Hey, I'm not.
 Yeah, brother, like, stop, I'm right on.
 I'm sorry.
 That voice.
 There's too many of you to cry.
 Brother, brother, brother.
 There's far too many of you dying.
 There's some just very subtle backing vocals.
 You know we've got to find a way
 to bring some loving into day.
 Hey, part of our lives.
 This one hurts.
 Father, father, we don't need to escalate.
 I wonder who the father he's talking about is.
 Oh, that's interesting.
 I mean, I have so for people who don't know,
 his own father ended up killing Marvin Gaye.
 Yeah.
 I mean, that one is really painful.
 I mean, for a lot of people, your relationship with your father,
 your mother, I mean, there's different dynamics,
 but it's almost like part of life is resolving
 some kind of complex puzzle you have
 with the people you love, the people close to you,
 or the people who are not there, all those kinds of things.
 That's so much pain in that we don't need to escalate.
 Father, father.
 I never thought if it's,
 I always thought it's his father directly.
 Yeah, I don't get that.
 It could be, but I feel like it's more
 masculine spirituality.
 Like a father figure or just broadly some kind of spirituality.
 Could be like God, father God, mother God, you know, like could be.
 I don't know.
 But there's so much, it's like both hope and melancholy.
 You're saying war is not the answer.
 It's like you don't tell your father war is not,
 your blood father war is not the answer.
 It's strange conversation.
 It's a bigger conversation than a personal.
 Don't you think it feels like war when it's personal?
 What's the difference between,
 war is personal too.
 It's only leaders think about war in a geopolitical sense.
 Yeah.
 When people that fight wars, you lose your brothers.
 I mean, death is just right there.
 So it might feel just like that.
 But yeah, there is a dance between like the personal and like talking to the
 entirety of the society.
 It's like John Lennon.
 Imagine like also a song or is that, is that a hopeful?
 Is that cynical?
 Is it like melancholy?
 Like heartbroken?
 Like you, you hope you wish things would be a certain way and they're not.
 Yeah. I don't know.
 John Lennon is giving up on the world in imagine.
 Yeah, I don't know.
 No, it's an interesting question.
 There's another John Lennon lyric.
 In let me think of what it is.
 Take me a second.
 Different songs keep coming into my head.
 Not the one that I'm looking for.
 And you keep pressing next.
 Once I'm, once I'm taken across the universe,
 everything's going to change my world.
 And when I hear that,
 I hear it is hopeless,
 but I don't think I don't believe that that's
 well, it may be how he meant it,
 but I don't think that's how it's normally taken.
 And it's also the taker.
 is important.
 I'm generally optimistic and hopeful.
 So I always like look for the hope in the,
 actually the harshest love heartbreak songs
 are always somehow hopeful to me.
 That's a love song.
 To me, like a song about losing love
 is a song about the great capacity for love
 in the human heart.
 That's what I hear.
 So to me, losing love is exciting.
 Cause it's like, that means you really cared.
 That means you felt something, you feel something,
 you can sit in that pain.
 And that pain is a reminder what it means to be human.
 When you're that, what is it?
 We're just listening.
 The only man who could have reached me
 was the son of a preacher man.
 So it's like that early love or something
 or partially sexual or whatever.
 That's not as interesting to me.
 It's fun, it's great.
 But it's that heartbreak.
 That's a reminder that it can go deep.
 Although that's a damn good song.
 Have you ever heard the Detroit mix
 of the Marvin Gaye album?
 No.
 Call it up.
 By far better.
 Mind blowing.
 I just heard it recently, blew my mind.
 ["Mama, Mama"]
 Oh wow, reverb.
 Distant.
 ["Mama, Mama"]
 Interesting.
 ["There's too many love you cry"]
 ["Brother, brother, brother"]
 ["There's far too many love you die"]
 Feels like it's all around the room more.
 ["We know we've got to find a way"]
 ["To bring some loving here today"]
 More voices, more voices.
 My father.
 ["You see war is not the answer"]
 He's layering his own vocals.
 ["You know we've got to find a way"]
 ["To bring some loving here today"]
 Feels like there's multiple people singing.
 ["Don't punish me with brutality"]
 ["Talk to me so you can see"]
 ["What's going on, what's going on"]
 Yeah, it's beautiful.
 Seems to have more energy.
 If you listen to the whole album,
 even though you just said you don't listen to albums anymore,
 the Detroit mix of the whole album changes the album a lot.
 I mean, that felt,
 so that's the opposite of acapella, I would say.
 Yes.
 There's layers, there's,
 and maybe, I don't know if you remember,
 if memory serves me correct here,
 he produces this own album here, Marvin Gaye,
 was the producer on this, I believe.
 I believe so, and this one sounds more like
 it's a get together,
 and the whole album sounds more like a get together,
 where it's a group of people in a room
 playing music together,
 whereas the album version sounds more like a recording.
 This sounds less like a recording
 and a little more like a party.
 Now you had a series of conversations with Paul McCartney,
 which is amazing that people should watch,
 but is there, this is continuing our therapy session,
 is there a case to be made that what's going on
 is number one album above the Beatles,
 White Album or Abbey Road above, Pet Sounds,
 can you still manage case?
 There's always a case.
 I mean, there's always a case.
 Every, there's no, in reality, in art,
 there is no metric that makes sense.
 So you could put numbers on things,
 but it's like, is this apple better than this peach?
 Like, it's not really a fair comparison.
 But if you just had to keep one
 to represent the human species,
 that's the way I think to the aliens.
 So I think it's a very personal decision.
 I think you can make your choice
 to represent the human species and I'll make mine, you know?
 Well, I would pick the Beatles over the Beach Boys.
 So that's my, if I became dictator of the world
 and was talking to the aliens,
 but I don't know the full historical context
 to the impact of the music.
 I don't know if that's something to consider,
 like this kind of thought experiment
 of imagine what it was like back then to create,
 to go into the studio, to do such interesting work
 in the studio, as opposed to like listening to just
 as a pop song almost from,
 because I've never been able to understand
 Beach Boys, God Only Knows.
 The song God Only Knows?
 God Only Knows, but all of it, the album,
 the Pet Sounds just-
 In My Room?
 In My Room?
 Pet Song.
 Is that, what's your favorite on the album?
 On the Pet Sounds album?
 Pet Sounds.
 The opening track.
 Do you mind if I play it?
 Please.
 It's too fun.
 That's part of their trip though.
 You open the heart with the fun.
 It's possible.
 Original mono and stereo mix versions.
 What's the opening song?
 Wouldn't It Be Nice?
 Yeah, that's the song.
 Yeah, that's the song.
 This part is good, man.
 And then back to fun.
 We could say goodnight and stay together.
 Wouldn't That Be Nice?
 Wouldn't It Be Nice to wake up together?
 But we're not.
 There's heartbreak in this one too.
 Still, to me, like George Harris,
 like, is that the way the album,
 While My Guitar Gently Weeps?
 I mean that, the Beatles, it's so hard to,
 depending on the day, I'll say a very different song,
 that's my favorite song, but I often return to
 While My Guitar Gently Weeps is my favorite song.
 Spectacular.
 And anything George Harrison, honestly,
 something, something in the way she moves.
 What would you classify that?
 There's like several Beatles songs,
 categories of Beatles songs.
 So that's like the melancholy love songs or ballads
 or something like that.
 Yesterday, Let It Be.
 What's, do you have favorites?
 So from your, like how have you changed as a man,
 as a human being, as a musician and music producer
 ever having done that lengthy interaction with McCartney?
 Hmm.
 Anytime you're around someone who's such a hero
 and you spend time with them and they're a human being,
 it helps put perspective on everything.
 Oh, that they're just human.
 Well, obviously.
 I mean, everyone's just human.
 And, but I remember the first time I got to see
 Paul McCartney play live, it was in a stadium
 of 70,000 people and he started playing
 and I started crying.
 And I couldn't believe I was in, even with 70,000 people,
 I couldn't believe that this man walks the earth
 and that I'm in the same place as him
 and he's the person who wrote that and played that.
 And now he's here playing it for us.
 Mind blowing.
 That's the voice.
 That's the, I.
 It's overwhelming.
 Is it inspiring or is it, like,
 cause sometimes when you have, and I've gotten a chance
 to me, I mean, I love people in general.
 Like every, every person is fascinating to me,
 but yeah, when you've been a fan for a long time
 and you meet a person, sort of,
 I'll just remove present company, is you,
 it's like, oh, they're just human.
 So there's both, it's both inspiring that
 just a simple human can achieve such beautiful things,
 but it's also like almost wishing there were gods
 moving around us.
 It's somehow peaceful.
 It's more comforting to know that there's, you know,
 there's bigger fish.
 I'm just a small fish and then there's bigger fish
 and they will take care of the ocean for us.
 I think we're all capable of being big fish.
 I don't think that there are special people.
 I don't think it's like that.
 I would make a case.
 So the variety of artists that you worked with
 and brought the best out of,
 it does seem that you're out of this world.
 So do you think you would know,
 like, if you're the same kind of species,
 maybe you're just a meat vehicle
 and you're channeling ideas from somewhere else?
 I feel like I'm channeling ideas
 from somewhere else 100%.
 But I think-
 Have you asked questions about where from?
 I believe we all are though.
 You know, I believe we're vehicles for information
 that when it's ready to come through, it comes through.
 And the people who have good antennas pick up the signal.
 But if, I'm sure you've had an experience in your life
 where you've had an idea for something
 and you've not acted on it
 and eventually someone else does it.
 And it's not because they're doing it
 because you had the idea and they stole your idea.
 It's because the time has come for that idea.
 And if you don't do it, someone else is gonna do it.
 It's being broadcast by whatever the source is.
 Whatever the source is.
 Yeah, I tend to see humans
 as not quite special in that way.
 Yeah, it's different kinds of antennas walking around,
 listening to ideas and ideas that are,
 I like the notion of Richard Dawkins of memes.
 It's kind of the ideas of the organisms
 and they're just using our brains to multiply,
 to select, to compete, to evolve.
 And humans, we really wanna hold on to the specialness
 of our body, of our mind, but it's really the ideas.
 So if Fred Krueger was born two centuries ago,
 you wouldn't be a music producer.
 You'd be, I mean, maybe, but you have an antenna.
 And if no signal's coming in,
 or you'd be hearing potentially a different signal.
 Is there-
 I think we all have our own antenna for whatever it is
 that we, you know, maybe not everyone has tuned
 into their antenna to see what it is
 that their strength in bringing through is.
 I'm lucky in that it found me
 because I didn't know that it was a,
 I didn't even know this was a job.
 I sometimes wonder, I mean, a lot of young people,
 a lot of people wonder, like, what's the purpose
 and the specs of my antenna?
 What am I put on this earth to do?
 Like if, you know, I can live a thousand lives,
 there's so many trajectories,
 and imagine the greatest possible trajectory
 that reveals the most beautiful thing
 I can possibly create in this world,
 live in the most beautiful way, what is that?
 I feel like that's a good exercise to think about
 because it's also liberating to think
 that you can do anything.
 I mean, that, more and more, I suppose that's kind of life.
 It's like society is pushing conformity on you.
 You know, I thought I had my own flavor of conformity.
 I thought I'm supposed to be following.
 And then early on, I would say like in the late 20s,
 you realize, wait a minute, you don't have to tell,
 you don't have to do what teachers tell you to do,
 what parents tell you to do, what society tells you to do.
 You can, like, I would never wear a suit
 if I listened to like my colleagues in community
 who think a suit is like the symbol of, what is it?
 A symbol of conformity actually, which is hilarious.
 But it's actually a kind of rebellion
 and everything else of that nature,
 doing these silly podcasts.
 I have a question I have to ask.
 Sure.
 Because you brought up the suit.
 Yeah.
 Do you wear the suit?
 Is this your daily uniform outside of podcasting?
 So for the longest time it was some kind of suit.
 And then recently, coinciding with going to Texas,
 there's a, I'm such a loner, I'm an introvert.
 And there's a bit of a hiding from the world
 when I wear other stuff.
 I really want to,
 to not make fame, recognition, money, all those things,
 a motivation at all.
 And the world kind of wants you to make those motivations.
 Not the world, but I would say maybe the Western world
 and maybe America, maybe a capitalist system does.
 That's a choice to buy into that or not.
 Right.
 It takes a brave person, a person of character
 to not buy in.
 And I'm like a baby deer trying to find its legs.
 You don't have to buy in.
 Because I love people and I think I'm kind of an idiot.
 And so when other people say, do this and do that,
 there is a pressure there.
 It's actually very difficult to not listen necessarily
 to the advice of others and yet keep yourself fragile
 and open to the world.
 It's easy to be like, I'm always right,
 just kind of sticking a ground.
 But if you want to be like vulnerable,
 if you want to connect with people
 and just wear your heart on your sleeve,
 then you're going to listen to them.
 I mean, that's the double edged sword of it.
 And but then again, that pain,
 like if you don't let it destroy you,
 you can grow from that.
 Has fame affected you at all?
 Did you unplug from the system at some point?
 Same.
 I've always been sort of removed.
 I don't feel like I'm part of any system.
 Do you feel famous?
 I'm aware that when I go out,
 people say nice things to me, which is great.
 But that's about it.
 That's about as far as I can go.
 But it doesn't affect your art about your creativity
 or your thoughts.
 Like when you're sitting alone and thinking about the world.
 It can't.
 It's a destructive force.
 The thing, the reason that you're who you are
 and the reason that you're finding the success
 you're finding is because you've been true to yourself
 to get to that stage.
 So to start changing that,
 to either conform to someone else's idea
 of what you should be doing,
 it just seems like it doesn't make sense.
 Do you have a sense of who you are?
 Because I don't necessarily have a...
 I don't know.
 I know that I really like making good things.
 And I know that I'm crazy about it in that
 it's like an obsession.
 And I want things to be as good as they could be,
 whatever it is.
 And if I finish a music project
 and I have a window of time where I'm not working on music,
 I might be moving the furniture around in the house.
 I'm always looking for a creative outlet
 to find a way to make something better.
 Or there was a period of time
 where I was in a weird corporate situation
 that didn't allow me to flourish.
 And I turned, I focused the creativity in on myself
 and I lost a bunch of weight and changed my life.
 So that was the kind of art,
 like you've gone through a whole process of losing weight,
 getting in shape, getting healthy.
 That was a kind of creative act.
 It certainly was.
 It wasn't an intentional creative act,
 but I had a lot of energy.
 And I just, a series of events happened.
 I read a book.
 At the time that was my heaviest,
 I weighed about 318 pounds.
 And I'd never been, I'd been sedentary my whole life,
 basically laying on a couch working on music.
 So I've never been physically active in my life.
 And I read a book about a guy named Stu Middleman,
 a runner who ran a thousand miles in 11 days.
 And I thought, wow, I get out of breath
 walking to the corner and another human being
 can run a thousand miles in 11 days.
 I feel like I have bad information.
 Clearly I'm doing something wrong.
 And I reached out to a person that Stu mentioned
 in the book, Phil Maffetone.
 Who was a legend.
 I really appreciate him as well.
 He's math 180 method too.
 He's such an interesting, I think he focuses on.
 Heart rate training.
 And he was the first person to talk about essentially
 a paleo keto diet 40 years ago.
 For a person who's going to be healthy,
 who can exercise and actually perform at an early level.
 He's the first person when I, you know,
 talk about heart rate training him
 and other endurance athletes he influenced.
 He gave me permission to like run slower.
 Yeah.
 It was the first time I realized,
 oh, I can run long distances if I just run slower.
 And then I take that seriously.
 And I actually fell in love with running very much so.
 Cause for me, everyone's different,
 but for me the love of running happens
 in the longer distances.
 Did you read Born to Run?
 Great book.
 Amazing book.
 There is something special about running.
 And everybody has their own journey with it.
 And even ultra marathon running, those kinds of things.
 It's a, it is like many journeys,
 one that can pull you in.
 Like you won't be the same person after.
 And I try to be deliberate about making choices
 after which you will not be the same person.
 And so I'm nervous about like
 the ultra marathon running world.
 I have to talk to you about Johnny Cash.
 I mean, when people ask me what my favorite musical thing is
 of all time,
 you know, it's a very difficult question to answer, of course,
 but I'm pretty quick if I'm not allowed
 to pick anything by Tom ways, I'm pretty quick to say,
 Hurt by Johnny Cash, the performance,
 the whatever you call it, whatever the heck that is,
 because that's not just a song covered by an artist.
 That's a human being at the end of their life.
 That the rawness of that, I mean, just the,
 there's also a music video, which for a lot of people
 adds a lot to it.
 For me, just the music alone is, I mean, the guitar,
 every choice on that, see the few things I've heard about it,
 it seemed like almost accidental.
 I mean, like little subtle choices here and there.
 Can you maybe comment on that to the degree,
 I think you had a huge role in sort of bringing
 Johnny Cash back from a different part of his life.
 It's like bringing something out that wasn't there before.
 And it was incredible.
 It was a celebration of a really special musician
 and that's totally new kind of celebration.
 Now Hurt is just one of the songs
 that's an amazing celebration of Johnny Cash,
 but Hurt is like at the peak of that.
 So what was that like putting that song together?
 Maybe it might be nice to listen to it
 because I freaking love that song.
 And as a guitarist, I just, the simplicity of it,
 it seems like every choice contributes
 to the greatness of the song.
 ["The Greatness of the Song"]
 ["The Greatness of the Song"]
 Simple, it's crisp, but it's dark too.
 ["The Greatness of the Song"]
 It's one of the greatest opening lines of any song.
 The shape.
 That's that.
 Yeah, to see if I still feel.
 Yeah, I'm talking about the lyrics.
 I don't even mean the performance.
 The words are.
 ["The Greatness of the Song"]
 But those words out of Trent Reznor are not the same.
 They have a different meaning
 coming out of Johnny Cash's mouth.
 ["The Greatness of the Song"]
 What have I become?
 Written probably for a young man.
 I think he was 20 when he wrote it, Trent.
 ["The Greatness of the Song"]
 Anger, regret, pain.
 ["The Greatness of the Song"]
 The way the guitarist played,
 the choice of instrument, the layers there,
 the freedom to give him, to use the voice that's fading.
 It's not fading, it's changing.
 Maybe he's losing some aspects of his voice.
 And it's almost like shaking a little bit
 and it's a little bit out of tune in parts.
 How much of that was deliberate?
 How much was, like, how do you give Johnny Cash
 the freedom to do that?
 How do you find that together?
 Is there any insights you can give?
 I think it's a case almost of like the right,
 pairing the right role with the right actor, you could say.
 The song lyrics, the reason we chose the song
 was because of the lyrics, purely about the lyrics.
 And at that point in time,
 both Johnny and I would send each other songs
 of possible ideas to record.
 And that was one that I sent him,
 and he didn't respond to initially.
 I would send him, at that time we would burn CDs,
 and I would send him like CD of 20 songs or 25 songs.
 And then, and he would send them to me.
 You burn a CD for Johnny Cash
 and you send him of different songs.
 Of like songs to consider recording.
 Yeah.
 And we would send these back and forth.
 And then that I had heard on one of the ones
 that I sent him and he didn't respond.
 And usually if he didn't respond, we didn't go back to it.
 And that one, I remember I sent it again
 and I put it first on the next CD.
 And when we spoke about when he listened to the CD again,
 he didn't respond.
 I said, check out that first song again.
 I really feel like that one could be good.
 What did you see in that song?
 It's the lyrics.
 It's the lyrics.
 Because I feel like nobody,
 there's very few people in the world
 that would see these lyrics in Johnny Cash's mouth
 and think this is a good idea, including Trent Reznor.
 Yeah.
 I know that Trent had trepidations in the beginning.
 But if you listen to the words, if you forget the music
 and if you forget what Nine Inch Nails sounds like,
 and you just read it like a poem,
 and then you imagine a 70 year old man reading these lyrics,
 it'll be profound.
 It's profound.
 So that was the, based on lyrics that started the journey.
 And then at this point in time,
 Johnny was not in great health.
 And sometimes I would go to Nashville
 and record with him at his house.
 Sometimes he would come to California,
 but he was coming to California less regularly.
 And because there were so many songs we wanted to try,
 he would start sometimes recording
 just a straight acoustic version.
 Like he would have someone play guitar, he would sing,
 and they would send those to me and we would discuss,
 like, is this one to build on?
 And that was when we said,
 I don't wanna record this one until we're together.
 I feel like we should do this one together.
 So on the next trip to California,
 we recorded it at my old house.
 And I mean, all the songs we recorded felt special.
 So I can't say this one felt special,
 but lyrically it just, it's more the lyrics have such a
 profound sense of regret.
 What have I become?
 Yeah, and to hear, when you're 20 years old,
 talking about regret, it's heartbreaking,
 but it's heartbreaking in a different way
 because you have a whole life to figure it out.
 When you're looking back over your life
 at the end of your life with regret, it's brutal.
 It's brutal.
 So that was the initial spark of doing it.
 And then when we recorded it,
 I believe it was two guitar players,
 if I remember correctly, maybe even three,
 Smokey Hormel, Matt Sweeney, and Mike Campbell,
 I believe.
 And Ben Montenge was playing the piano in my living room
 as we were doing it.
 And we cut the basic track and with Johnny singing,
 and then Johnny probably sang over that basic track
 a few more times.
 And then we comped his vocal and then
 built up the drama and you didn't get to the part,
 but at the end of the song, it gets very loud.
 The music gets very loud.
 It's subtle because it's not anything that takes your ear
 and the vocal is so powerful
 that you don't really think about what's going on.
 But it's building the whole time musically.
 It's building and it even gets distorted at the end.
 It gets really like overpowering.
 And that's part of the emotion of it.
 Yeah.
 It's a...
 I will let you down
 I hear almost anger and frustration.
 If I could start again
 A million miles away
 A million miles away
 I would keep myself
 I would find a way
 And it just brings out the clean vocal.
 I mean, it's so simple, so incredible.
 And it's interesting to have a young man's lyrics
 in an old Johnny Cash voice and heart and mind.
 I had...
 Are you a fan of Tom Waits?
 Of course.
 Tom Waits, when he was younger,
 had his song called Martha,
 but there's a bunch of songs he's written when he was young.
 It was like, how does a young man
 have that like melancholy wisdom?
 The song Martha is about an older man
 calling a woman he used to love that she's now married
 and he's married.
 And they're having that conversation.
 They haven't spoken for 30 years
 and they realize that there's still love there.
 And it could have been a different life,
 a different world where they could have been together.
 And here's like a 23 year old Tom Waits
 writing so beautifully about something that's very...
 I've had a lot of people like tell me how real that
 as an older person looking back at that love that you had
 and realizing it wasn't, it was really, it's still there.
 Inklings of that love are still there.
 I think there's a...
 When a young person writes a sad song,
 they almost seem more willing to go to a more hopeless place
 because they have a long journey ahead.
 So much time.
 And older artists tend to wanna look
 at the bright side of things,
 which also I think comes from the wisdom of aging.
 It's a more realistic position.
 So it's not uncommon for younger people to write.
 I think even in the Beatles,
 you'll see like they're very heavy lyrics,
 middle to late era Beatles, which is still,
 they're in their early 20s, I guess.
 Wow, that's hard to think about.
 So much accomplished.
 Unbelievable.
 And they went through the full journey from fun to darkness
 in the span of a few years.
 You mentioned lyrics.
 So you've obviously produced albums with incredible lyrics.
 I think you've mentioned the interesting characteristics
 of hip hop, of rap, is that you're writing poetry to rhythm
 versus writing poetry to melody.
 So that's like one way to think about it.
 And I'm a fan, I mean, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen,
 I'm a fan of poetry period.
 Is there something about highlighting the poetry of it,
 the power of words as you did with Hurt?
 If I have to put it again,
 it's a Tom Waits song that's like less than a minute long,
 that I always go back to, it's one I really love.
 It has just a few lines.
 It's called, I Want You.
 And all it is is him saying, I want you.
 I want you, you, you.
 I want you, you, you.
 This is a 22 year old Tom Waits.
 All I want is you, you, you.
 All I want is you.
 Give you stars above, sun on the brightest day.
 Give you all my love, if only you would see.
 I want you, you, you.
 All I want is you, you, you.
 And then he hums for 20 more seconds.
 Beautiful.
 So, so some, man, that young man, like,
 for people who don't know Tom Waits,
 you should definitely listen to him.
 And his voice sounds very different now.
 And it's interesting to see the evolution of a human voice,
 the artist over time, because that's a young,
 like boy-like voice, hopeful, less clever, less witty,
 more simple, that simplicity is there.
 And he's not, I mean, that takes guts to be so simple,
 I would say, lyrically and musically.
 Is there, sort of laying that out on the table,
 is there ways that you like to highlight the voice,
 the lyrics, or is there's no one rule?
 So do you, what is the thing that makes music special?
 Is it the rhythm, the melody, the,
 or is ultimately the lyrics are always there, or the idea?
 You just asked me five different questions.
 I don't care, I'll just get back.
 It's not about you, Roberto.
 I see that.
 You don't want the answers.
 I don't want the answers.
 You just wanna ask questions?
 Okay, I'll listen.
 I look forward to your comments, the internet.
 Okay.
 You have the greatest producer of all time in front of you,
 and he can't shut the hell up.
 That's right, friends.
 But you do value lyrics.
 Is there a way to celebrate lyrics?
 I value lyrics if the lyrics are important.
 I'm not a lyric person.
 I'm very much, whatever the thing that makes the thing good
 is the thing that I'm drawn to, for me.
 For a long time, lyrics meant very little.
 I would say from the-
 Wait, really?
 In the beginning?
 Yes, yes.
 From the earliest days-
 Fight for your right to party, Beastie Boys?
 Yeah, it was fun.
 I thought they were good lyrics,
 but it wasn't what was important.
 I mean, it was in a, in a, almost a novelty way,
 not in a serious way.
 Early in my career, I was much more focused on the rhythm,
 first the rhythm.
 And I would, if the lyrics weren't good enough,
 I would be aware of it,
 but it wasn't the driving force for me.
 And eventually over time,
 then melody became an important piece,
 which it wasn't in the beginning.
 And then lyrics became more important over time,
 but it's always been a, always changing
 what draws me in.
 And one of the things I found as it relates to lyrics
 that can give a lyric a different power
 has to do with rhythm, where if there's no drum,
 the lyrics tend to mean more.
 So earlier, what you were saying about
 if it was just acapella,
 you felt Marvin Gaye in a different way
 hearing the acapella.
 Can you comment on, I mean,
 in terms of one of the greatest albums ever.
 ["Acapella"]
 Why does it sound so raw?
 Her voice.
 She's just a great singer.
 But this is, you're not doing anything else.
 You're doing the, there's, there's, there's,
 there's drumming and then there's just a single beat.
 And then it builds.
 ["Acapella"]
 ["Acapella"]
 It gets simpler, but it feels like it's a giant orchestra.
 ["Acapella"]
 There's backing vocals.
 ["Acapella"]
 The anger.
 I love it.
 ["Acapella"]
 It just, there's something about such a powerful voice
 and the instruments not getting in the way.
 I mean, the same with her and Johnny Cash.
 Is there, why does it sound so raw?
 It's the same as the hurt.
 There's a, it feels like you're in the room with them.
 It feels like they're not even singing.
 They're like, they're literally freshly mad and angry.
 I think those are the things that make great singers
 sound like great singers.
 It's not, it's not anything that,
 that's happening in the studio.
 I mean, we're, I would say the only thing that us
 in the studio can do is kind of get out of the way
 and not, not ruin it.
 You know, it's like, that's,
 that's what comes through of these, these people.
 I should also, before I forget,
 there is a lot of song choices on that CD.
 I would love to see the full options on the CD
 that you sent to Johnny Cash that I love.
 So, Solitaire Man is one of my favorite choices made there.
 Is that, is that a Neil Diamond song?
 It's funny you talk about them as songs,
 because I tend to, I tend to listen more to albums
 than songs, so.
 If you really, that's what you're doing in your head.
 You're pulling up the album, essentially.
 No, I'm, I'm like, I'm going to that song,
 but I don't know, I've never listened to that song,
 but I know that when that, when that song comes up
 in the sequence of the album,
 it has a really powerful effect in me.
 Let's see what it does if you just start it.
 If you could read my mind,
 Oh, so interesting. Wow.
 You know that ghost is me, and I will never be set free
 as long as there's a ghost that you can't see.
 That's beautiful. Such a beautiful choice.
 Beautiful melody, such a beautiful melody and haunting words.
 That's sung so simply. I have to, I mean,
 so I was born in the Soviet Union.
 When, when you, when you're growing up,
 there's a few bands that kind of,
 I mean, they're probably forbidden still,
 but they seep in and you get like bootlegged
 and they somehow take over the culture
 of the young, of the young folks such as myself.
 So on the metal side, it was Metallica and Iron Maiden,
 and on the, I don't know what you call them,
 but Beastie Boys, I remember hearing Fight For Your Right,
 and it was just like, for some reason that stuck,
 as it did for a lot of people in Russia,
 it's like, wow, America is when you get to say,
 fuck you to the man, the rebellion, the freedom.
 I probably heard it a few years after it was released
 because it kind of, it dissipates the culture.
 You get the bootlegged, I mean, it's hard to get your hands on,
 but I just remember, I mean, I wanted to kind of bring that up
 because it was such a personally important song to me,
 and yet probably you didn't even think of that.
 You probably thought of it as its role in the culture here
 in the United States, like in terms of musically.
 I was, you know, 20, 21 years old, and we just...
 Well, you were that kid too, right?
 Yeah, we were just making fun songs for our friends.
 There was no expectation.
 So that's just a fun song.
 Yeah, no one thought, we never imagined anybody would like any of it.
 One of the greatest albums ever.
 Yeah!
 I have to, I love this so much.
 I just remember, this is America.
 I didn't even know, I didn't even understand the lyrics, to be honest.
 And the lyrics are ridiculous.
 So hearing that, and hearing Metallica, Master Puppets,
 I was like, I knew I'm going to have to end up in America one day.
 I mean, maybe now that I'm more mature, or maybe a little bit more mature,
 I realized that was kind of the longing for freedom.
 It felt like, at least at the time, if this is allowed, then anything is allowed.
 And I think that the rebellion of it, I guess it's also fun.
 I just loved it.
 If you look back to that, because you were that person, not just the producer.
 Yes and no.
 Even to us then, it was still satirical.
 It was.
 Oh, absolutely.
 But isn't music in part, you're dancing in the line, it's part satirical, part serious,
 in the sense you're losing yourself in the satire.
 Anytime you go over the top, isn't that part of the...
 Or is it explicitly satirical?
 I mean, girls, there's a lot of ridiculous songs in that album.
 I don't know.
 I just think it was definitely to make each other laugh.
 We were trying to make each other laugh.
 We weren't trying to make a point.
 We were trying to make each other laugh.
 But that person, how's that person different than the person today in you?
 The person that produced that record?
 I wouldn't say so different.
 It really is that I like things that make me laugh.
 I like ridiculous things.
 It's the same person still.
 I think so.
 Is it strange just how many incredible...
 I don't think I would make that today, but I understand why we made it when we did.
 It's in the vocabulary of ridiculous that would make sense to do.
 For the right artist today, could make something ridiculous and gives you that feeling.
 I mean, there's just a sense when you make so many different albums,
 then you look back at that creation, it can feel like a different person created that.
 But you're making it seem like if you travel back in time or maybe do a memory replay,
 you'd be able to hang out with a teenage and a 20s recruitment.
 I think you're just fine.
 I don't think I was so different, honestly.
 That's hilarious.
 It's funny, I ran into someone recently in Costa Rica,
 who I hadn't seen in a long time and who I knew from the New York days when...
 those days.
 We spent a couple of hours talking and she said,
 you're exactly the same person that you were then.
 I have a short, a recent confirmation that that's the case.
 That's beautiful.
 Tim Ferriss asked you about who was the most successful person you know.
 That's the definition of success, I would say.
 It's exactly the same person.
 You haven't lost yourself or rather you found yourself early on.
 I would say there are aspects of me that have changed for sure,
 but I can't say that it's necessarily better.
 It's different.
 I would say at that time I was more confident than I am now,
 and I'm very confident now,
 but then I had an unrealistic confidence
 and I think now it's a little more based in reality.
 At that point in time I had never been depressed.
 And then once you go through a depression,
 well some people I know in my case,
 when I went through depression afterwards
 I was a different person than I was before.
 And I feel more grounded now than I did then,
 and I probably relate to the artists who,
 so many of the artists I work with suffer,
 so many artists suffer because that's part of what makes an artist great
 is their level of sensitivity,
 that the same thing that makes an artist uncomfortable,
 other people don't feel at all.
 The time you were depressed,
 what was the darkest moment of your life?
 What took you there? How did you get out?
 It was triggered by a person making a comment
 about something to do with work that didn't matter.
 It was like to anyone else, they would hear that,
 and it would just be like,
 okay, we'll deal with it next week, whatever.
 But for some reason I took it in a way that
 I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me.
 Even beyond the rational part of it, of understanding,
 even after the problem that came up was solved,
 it somehow undermined something in me
 and made me feel very vulnerable in a way that I hadn't felt before.
 And it spiraled. How did you get out?
 I did a lot of different kinds of therapy.
 Starting with alternative therapies,
 I was seeing, I would say,
 between seven and eight doctors and or therapists a week.
 Acupuncture, talk therapy, herbs,
 any possible modality. I tried everything for a long time.
 And nothing seemed to have an impact.
 And then finally, I'm wary of taking any Western medicine.
 I'm not a drug taker or drinker or partier in any way.
 And I found a psychopharmacologist who was a psychic.
 But because she was a psychic, I was okay to see her.
 I'll listen to a psychic,
 but I'm not going to listen to a psychopharmacologist.
 But the fact that she had the psychic,
 that made her fit into my worldview.
 And she recommended antidepressant,
 which went terribly wrong in the first night that I took it.
 And then that set me on a journey of looking for the right antidepressant,
 which was a long and painful process.
 What the heck of a journey.
 Every one that I took made me sick. Everyone.
 And then finally, I don't know, five months later, six months later,
 I found the magic one that worked for me.
 And it shifted me out of the depression.
 I took it for, I can't remember, six months or a year,
 and then weaned off and was okay.
 And then I had another event some years later.
 I think I took it again for a short period of time and got out of it.
 And I've not needed it since.
 Were you able to kind of introspect the triggers that led to the events?
 Or is it random events of life?
 I think it's more that because of the way that I grew up,
 I never had to deal with much controversy.
 And when I was challenged, I didn't have any ability to deal with it.
 It's like, you know, Jonathan Haidt talks about, it's like that.
 So you've actually also mentioned like business sometimes gives you stress.
 So this was business related stuff.
 Yeah, it was a business related thing.
 It just made me feel bad.
 One of the sadder things about art and music is that it's often interleaved with business folk.
 I suppose that's the way of the world if you have a capitalist system,
 but it makes that business folks rubbing up against artists can sometimes destroy a fragile mind and soul.
 To me, like one of the best representations of an artist, honestly, is Johnny Ive, the designer from Apple.
 And he's just so fragile with his ideas.
 And you talked about like when he has ideas, he really wouldn't show it to Steve Jobs or anybody
 except for the small design team because he was so nervous that it would break.
 Give it a chance. Give it a chance to grow.
 And it seems like the outside world, business people, PR people,
 people have not lost themselves in the passion of creating,
 but instead are kind of representing or like making deals, all that kind of stuff.
 They can kind of trample on those little ideas.
 And it's sad to see. It's really heartbreaking to see because you know how much trampling there's going on.
 It's one of the main jobs. My job as a record producer is to keep the voices away from the artist,
 from all the people who are really on their side but don't know, whether it be people,
 anyone on the business side who doesn't make things, they're excited to do their part.
 They're excited. When you deliver the art that you make to me, then we can start the project.
 But there's nothing to sell if the art doesn't happen in the right way.
 And it has to be protected. And it can't happen on the same kind of a timetable that business can.
 It's just a different thing. Art doesn't come in a quarterly way.
 And that doesn't apply just to music or it applies to art, it applies to all creative pursuits.
 This is generally the case at MIT. It's just there's the administration,
 and then there is the professors and students. And the professors and students are the creative folk.
 They create stuff, they dream, they have wild ideas that go on tangents and so on.
 They have hopes and they go with those and they get on these weird passionate pursuits.
 And then the administration can often just trample on that.
 And they set up bars in all kinds of ways that you think you're not actually hurting, but you really are.
 And I won't mention why, but because this happens to everybody.
 And I have a large amount of leverage at MIT now, but even I get a little bit of pressure in such stupid ways.
 Be careful. Be careful. We really want your career to succeed. Be careful.
 And that little pressure to an artist, do you want to go acapella? Do you want to do a country record?
 Be careful. You're already a superstar. Be careful.
 And then in that way, you kind of push people like flock of fish into one fish tank where they're all the same.
 And it's sad to see. And obviously in the modern world, there's nice mechanisms to protect,
 to let artists flourish a little bit more because they get to put themselves to the world and get a little bit more confidence,
 maybe different funding mechanisms, all that kind of stuff.
 But it's a tremendous problem that the voices that don't understand interfering with the process is huge.
 The other side of it is in success, there can be a lack of reality where all of the people around the successful person
 just tell them everything they do is great. And then they don't have anything to bump up against anymore,
 they don't have a realistic sense of how things work or how things measure.
 So both sides are really important, both avoiding the voices getting in the way
 and having a trusted group of a sangha, a group of people who can say, I don't know if that's as good.
 You can still say, I don't care what you think, that's fine. But it helps to hear it.
 It helps to have, if someone who you respect tells you something isn't good enough, it's helpful.
 When you know it comes from a place of love, when it comes from a place of wisdom.
 And not from a place of fear, not from a place of, oh, this doesn't sound like it's going to do as well as your last thing.
 That's not the point. The point is on this quest for greatness, are you living up to your ability?
 By the way, is there something interesting to say about your worldview?
 Because you mentioned psychic and sort of the ways we can be healthy,
 the ways we can grow and how much maybe medicine or science has the answers.
 Is there some interesting way to describe that worldview?
 I would just say I'm open-minded. I believe anything's possible.
 And if I was going to trust in any practical information, it would be something thousands of years old.
 There's wisdom in that history. Yeah.
 It's more tested. It's not always right, but at least it's been somewhat tested.
 Well, science is also tested.
 The thing I'm a little bit skeptical of sometimes is just the hubris that often comes with the modern, with the latest, the newest,
 this feeling like you figured it all out. Everything that's been done in the past has no wisdom.
 And we basically solved every problem. There's nothing else to be solved.
 I mean, that's the defining characteristic of any age is like we've solved all the problems there are,
 we have the final answers, and our parents are all stupid.
 That kind of energy. Yeah. You have to be extremely, extremely careful with that when it talks about,
 when you think about something as complex as the human body or the human mind, you have to be very, very careful.
 I believe we know close to nothing. Yeah, exactly.
 Close to nothing. That's about anything. About anything.
 That place of humility is a good place to start to figure it all out.
 And in the end, we'll still know almost nothing. Yeah. I don't think we need to know.
 It's like we need to see what works. So we need to see what works for us. It's interesting to know.
 I know on the art side, knowing how it works isn't what makes it work.
 The magic of it isn't how it works. The magic is the magic. And the magic happens in a way that's intuitive
 and accidental at times or incidental where you're trying many things and all of a sudden something works
 and you don't know why. And it's okay not to know why. It doesn't really matter why,
 as long as it does the thing that you want it to do, whatever that is.
 Yeah, that's so weird. When you know the components, you still... Yeah, the magic.
 What's the magic? Where is the magic? We know the components for stuff I care about, artificial intelligence.
 We know the components of a powerful computing machinery. Where does consciousness come from?
 What is that? Where does the brilliant moments of insight come from? What's that?
 Even in simple games of chess or in simple... Where do those breakthrough ideas of taking the big risk
 that doesn't make any sense and then all of a sudden it becomes something beautiful?
 Yeah, we don't need to understand why. It just happens.
 It just happens. And often the things that end up breaking through don't break through in the way we thought
 or turn out to be a third iteration of something that we thought was an entirely different thing.
 We don't know. And I think if we embrace that not knowing, we'll have a healthier experience going through life.
 You made a lot... It's not just music, everything. Rearranging the chairs, the furniture as well.
 You've done, like I said, the documentary, I guess you would say, with Paul McCartney.
 And you've done a podcast yourself, a broken record podcast, and you've done conversation too.
 So what have you learned from that process about the art of conversation?
 And also maybe what advice would you give to this, to me about what to do with conversation?
 What is interesting to you about conversation?
 One of the things that I like is to not feel like there's any stakes or that it's actually...
 Almost that it's not happening. Like the fact that when I came in, you were setting up cameras made it less good for me.
 I knew that that would impact the conversation in a negative way.
 The best version of it would be if we didn't see the cameras and we didn't see any technology
 and we were just sitting at this table having a conversation.
 Maybe even if we were mic'd beforehand, it would be okay if it was necessary.
 But then we were just sitting here having a conversation, no people in the room, nothing, and feeling like we're just having a conversation.
 I feel like it would get closer to the relaxed feeling.
 Same thing we do in the studios. You've heard of red light fever.
 When artists get nervous, they play a song great and then the tape starts rolling and they can't play it.
 We're all to some degree like that.
 When you were with Paul McCartney, were you cognizant of cameras?
 We had the room black. Everybody who was working there was dressed in black.
 Everything was invisible. We were lit in a way where...
 Even though there were probably 20 people, between 12 and 20 people working in the room,
 within three minutes of starting the conversation, Paul and I were alone in the room.
 That was the feeling. On occasion, you'd hear a noise and it would be weird.
 We also had nobody was allowed to wear shoes because we were trying to create this intimate space.
 I know from in the recording studio, when we're recording, if even one person is there,
 that's just watching and not working.
 I'm usually there and an engineer is there technically making it happen.
 If anyone else is in the room, it's different because then it goes from this moment where the person is doing a performance
 to the sense or where the person is feeling something internally and we're capturing it
 to the other version is they're performing for someone.
 It's so interesting. To push back the alternatives here.
 One, about the third person, not to make people self-conscious, but I find that I'm so torn on that
 because sometimes when that person, Evan is in the room here.
 He's been in the room before. He's a huge fan of yours, by the way.
 He'll nod. He'll get excited. You can see that nodding.
 For some reason for me, he's like, yeah, you get excited together.
 That third person can be a really special.
 Having an audience when it's a friend or somebody that has that love in them.
 It depends on the performer. Some people really thrive in front of an audience.
 You're saying you like that simple intimacy of everything dissipates.
 I like the reality of it not being it. I want it to be as far from a performance as possible.
 Got it.
 I'll tell you a story. A story that just happened and it was viewed as kind of a,
 it seemed uncool in the moment to the person that it happened to. It wasn't at all.
 We were recording New Chili Peppers album, which is coming out, I think, any day now.
 I don't know what today's date is, but maybe by the time this airs, it will be out.
 The band was playing in the studio and it was ripping because they're incredible.
 One of the members walked through the control room after a particularly great performance.
 The engineer said, wow, that solo is really great.
 The person who heard this said, please don't say that and walked away.
 It just changed this feeling of we're in this place where we're doing this thing and there is no outside world.
 We're doing this for us. We're going as deep as we can for us.
 As soon as there's an acknowledgement to someone else, in a way, it breaks the concentration of being inside of it.
 That's so well told. Something about saying, wow, that solo is great, it reminds you that there's an outside world,
 but I feel like there's a way to enter the inside world as an audience.
 You just have to do that. It matters what you say. It matters how you look.
 There's these generic compliments, not generic, but they sound in the way an outside world would interact
 as opposed to that creative thing where you're dancing around the fire together or something.
 Actually, I can tell you there's another interesting one that happened to me and I didn't know this until I saw the film of it,
 which was a strange one. We were recording with the Avett Brothers.
 The song was called No Hard Feelings and it was this recording of No Hard Feelings.
 Such a great voice. So beautiful.
 My hopes and my doubts, the rings on my fingers and the keys to my house with no hard feelings.
 The sun hangs low in the west and the light in my chest won't be kept held a day any longer.
 When the jealousy fades away.
 So bright, so hopeful, so lighthearted.
 It's just hallelujah and love involved. Love in the words, love in the songs they sing in the church.
 And no hard feelings.
 No hard feelings.
 No hard feelings.
 No hard feelings.
 When my body won't hold it any more. Let it finally let me free. Where will I go?
 Does he sound as good as video?
 Yes, every bit.
 Take me south through Georgia rain or tropical rain or snow from the heavens.
 Will I join with the ocean blue or run into a savior true? And shake hands laughing and walk through the night straight to the light.
 Holding the love I've known in my life and no hard feelings.
 Lord knows they hide and hide. Much love for anyone. Can't be afraid in cold.
 Where someone's driving home under the burning sky. I'm finally learning why.
 It matters for me and you to say it and be it too.
 The life that is all we need. It's all it's all we need. Because it's meant to be.
 I have no enemies.
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