EP24 Manifesting the Muse with Rick

What this episode is about

This content explores the nature of creativity, drawing on historical perspectives and personal insights through the lens of a quote attributed to Mozart about the spontaneous flow of ideas. It delves into various interpretations of creativity, discussing its significance in human civilization and the metaphysical aspects that suggest inspiration may come from a higher source or the muses of creativity.

Key takeaways

• Creativity isn't just for artists—every novel solution in life showcases our innate human ingenuity.
• Mozart's best ideas emerged in solitude, reminding us that creativity often thrives in quiet moments.
• The fear of a 'creative drought' reveals a deep-seated anxiety about our own imaginative reservoirs.
• Historically, creativity was viewed as divine inspiration; today, we dissect it like neurons in a lab.
• Rick Rubin's 'The Creative Act' sparks debate: is creativity a mystical force or a scientific phenomenon?

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dan Carlin (Host) · 2 h 1 min speaking
• Rick Rubin (Guest) · 52 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 15:00: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Rick Rubin, Alexander the Great, Sir Ken Robinson
2. 15:00 – 30:00: The Sex Pistols, JFK assassination, Le Cicero
3. 30:00 – 45:00: Book Soup, Neil Strauss, Rick Rubin, Tower Records
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00: Book Soup, Alexander the Great, Tower Records
6. 1:15:00 – 1:30:00: Tetragrammatin
7. 1:30:00 – 1:45:00: Le Cicero
8. 1:45:00 – 2:00:00: Audible
9. 2:00:00 – 2:15:00: The Godfather, Roots
10. 2:15:00 – 2:30:00: Rick Rubin
11. 2:30:00 – 2:45:00: Alexander the Great
12. 2:45:00 – 2:52:39: Rick Rubin

Notable quotes from "EP24 Manifesting the Muse with Rick"

• Sentences cut out but the quote as put together is wonderful and it's symbolic of something we're going to talk about today and the quote is when I am completely myself entirely alone or during the night when I cannot.

  about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · at 0:13

• How can we categorize this scientifically and I read people like sir the late Sir Ken Robinson who was talking about how the schools Crush creativity and the things we can do…

  about Sir Ken Robinson · at 6:13

• Afield from what you would think a music producer would consider to be sort of his Lane Rick has no Lane and that will become apparent in this extended conversation that we're…

  about Rick Rubin · at 7:02

• We want to talk about history if you can imagine I've always said if Alexander the Great had a podcast you would be catching that moment sort of for like the insect Frozen in…

  about Alexander the Great · at 8:27

• Is what that we know what happened you know something fairly recent history the JFK assassination I don't know what do you think well you know you I had a moment with you like this once like I was.

  about JFK assassination · at 23:09

• Eight years ago when I decided I want to write a book about creativity I went to Book Soup which is a great bookstore in Los Angeles my favorite wonderful bookstore yes it's…

  about Book Soup · at 42:21

• And when I first came to California and I would go to Book Soup pretty much most evenings I would go to Tower Records on one side of the street and then I would go to book soup…

  about Tower Records · at 43:06

• Start a podcast which will be called tetragrammatin and tetragrammatin will be where I have the conversations about everything and at first I was thinking maybe I need of…

  about Tetragrammatin · at 1:25:43

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Rick Rubin — Person · Main guest · 7 mentions · first at 4:43
  Central interview subject discussing creativity, the muse, art-making, and how recorded works function as historical time capsules; also referenced as author of a creativity-focused book.
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Person · Referenced creator (historical example) · 5 mentions · first at 0:07
  Used to frame the episode’s opening theme: the mysterious, uncontrollable origin of ideas and inspiration, aligning with the discussion of the muse and creativity.
• Neil Strauss — Person · Referenced collaborator (co-writer/interviewer) · 2 mentions · first at 40:45
  Mentioned as the collaborator involved in capturing interviews/content for Rubin’s book project; identified explicitly by the host for listeners.
  Involved and this is Neil Strauss the guy by the way folks Neil Strauss is the guy who wrote the book with Rick I should have said that ahead of time so back to the original question do you read about creativity do you study the.
• Alexander the Great — Person · Historical reference (analogy) · 3 mentions · first at 8:29
  Invoked as a vivid analogy for recordings/podcasts as 'frozen in amber' time capsules—capturing a moment of a person/era as if it could be replayed.
• Sir Ken Robinson — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at 6:16
  Cited as an authority on creativity and education, specifically the argument that schooling can suppress creativity and how it might be restored.
• Le Cicero — Person · Referenced historical figure (attribution uncertainty) · 2 mentions · first at 20:35
  Appears indirectly via the famous line about history as agreed-upon fables/lies; used to underscore epistemic uncertainty in historical knowledge (though attribution is debated in the dialogue).
  Mean this is your Frozen enamor moment and there's a great line from the ancient Roman orator Cicero who said writing is the only true form of immortality wow now in his era…

Companies & orgs

• Book Soup — Company · Referenced business · 5 mentions · first at 42:26
  Mentioned as a favorite bookstore in Los Angeles, significant for its late hours and influence on the guest's move to California.
• Tower Records — Company · Referenced business · 2 mentions · first at 43:08
  Mentioned alongside Book Soup as a significant cultural landmark in Los Angeles for music lovers.
• Audible — Company · Referenced service · 1 mention · first at 1:58:53
  Mentioned in passing as part of a broader discussion on media consumption.
  Albums when I was very young and I listened to audiobooks before there was ever an audible I would buy cassette you know books on tape yeah I liked listening to books on because yeah and I loved it and one of the things that I noticed is.

Products & tech

• Tetragrammatin — Product · Upcoming project · 2 mentions · first at 1:25:46
  Mentioned as the name of a future podcast by the guest, intended to cover a wide range of topics beyond music.

Places & events

• JFK assassination — Event · Referenced historical event · 1 mention · first at 23:15
  Used as an example to discuss the challenges of knowing historical truths.

Media & podcasts

• The Sex Pistols — Media · Influential punk band · 2 mentions · first at 18:25
  Significant impact on music and culture
  Where I'll play a piece of music for them usually something from my youth and I'll you know take the Sex Pistols you play The Sex Pistols which is musac now basically it's…
• The Godfather — Media · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 2:09:32
  Mentioned as an example of media that captures a moment in time, similar to music recordings.
  Brought up in your book that I just love and it's this idea that what these were let's just talk about a recording but it could be a television recording a movie that someone…
• The Beatles — Media · Influential music group · 1 mention
  Pioneers of modern music and creativity
  Amber moment of a time in other words if we want to talk about history if you can imagine I've always said if Alexander the Great had a podcast you would be catching that…
• Roots — Media · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 2:11:53
  Mentioned in passing as part of a broader discussion on media and history.
  Things I mean let me take an example of roots the groundbreaking TV series from the 1970s it was such a phenomenon I remember my family getting together and it was a…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:02 it's hardcore history I have always loved the quote from Mozart and I think it's abbreviated I think it's a couple of different sentences cut out but the quote as put together is wonderful and it's symbolic of something we're going to talk about today and the quote is when I am completely myself entirely alone or during the night when I cannot sleep it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them end quote I think many of us can relate to that at least the latter part right nor can I force them but if you're in a field where creativity is required for you to prosper eventually you start wondering about this thing creativity there's other ways to put it you could say Insight or originality or novelty I mean there's there's multiple different ways to try to Define this thing that is so wrapped up in the condition of Being Human that one could

1:19 easily make a case that all human civilization is the result of creativity over Millennia you know laid upon itself right Generation by Generation by generation depends on how you define creativity of course if you were going to write a book on the subject of creativity and I don't mean like a book about other people's creativity I mean the concept what would it sound like would it sound like a scientific book would it sound like an instruction manual would it sound like tips I mean I have one on the great uh creative people over history and their working habits or the habits that they had in order to get in the right frame of mind to do their creative work or would it sound kind of metaphysical you know something along the lines of the Greek idea of the muses you know the creators of inspiration the ones who sort of sprinkle your brain with the original thoughts I read some stuff from the Hindu religious

2:26 text once that suggested it was sort of an opening up to the Divine to be inspired from somewhere else right the inspiration didn't come from your own brain it came from without and the people who could do this really well were people that could sort of open that door to the realm where while the Greeks might say the muses resided if you go on Wikipedia and you look up creativity it'll blow your mind all the different ideas out there and I have a couple books like that too where they're getting into like neuroscience and dopamine and frontal lobe uh uh working with other parts of the brains and in Creative people you see more of that I mean but when you read a lot of the accounts from the people who actually do this creative work there's this real sense of no knowledge where this stuff comes from just like the Mozart quote I mean I read a quote once too from a comedian who said and I I don't know if this is true

3:19 or not and I'm and I don't remember the quote really well but it was something to the effect of every comedian has the same fear and the fear is that that reservoir of material that's inside you that creates the jokes the stuff that you make a living out of that just you know you do better than other people that that will dry up one day and one day you'll go there to you know get a new set of you know creative materials you know being produced by your you know creative assembly line in your psyche and it will be empty and it's a sign of how little you know about you know what it is that could lead you to a fear that someday it might run out so I study this stuff as many of you do and I also think that we place too much emphasis on creativity for obvious artists I mean if you're a painter you might be a very creative person obviously by our modern standards but no one thinks about how much creativity it

4:10 takes just to get through life for people who don't consider themselves creative at all any novel solution you come up with for a problem is an example of human creativity at work I think you can see the same sort of thing going on in the animal kingdom too at a lower level you see Apes doing things that are creative original novel but as I said if you were going to write a book on this what would it sound like music producer and that is a weird very narrow term to describe somebody with a much wider Vista and experience makeup but known as music producer Rick Rubin has written a book called the creative act a way of being and at the moment he's doing the book circuit so I think we're like the last people in the world to have Rick on but he is in a you know he's worked with everybody he's known I would call him a creativity amplifier but he's a very creative guy in his own right he has an image a Public Image is sort

5:09 of a Zen uh kind of a character right a a meditator a big beard um sort of a metaphysical sort of a cast to him he seems a little Eastern mysticism-ish but this book was one of those things where when you read it and Rick had sent me before this talk two reviews a good review and a bad review for the book and the bad review was talking about how the book was and I think I'm quoting the review woo-woo so sort of you know out there um but if you think about the concept we're talking about here that's why I brought up the Mozart quote and all those other things to begin with it's a hard subject to talk about without it being sort of metaphysical sounding I mean the concept in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance I mean it was religious I mean that's what creativity was it was just simply God speaking through you I mean there's there's a lot of connections between inspiration and the Divine if you study it long enough I I

6:09 feel like it's in the modern world where we sit down and try to figure out now how can we categorize this scientifically and I read people like sir the late Sir Ken Robinson who was talking about how the schools Crush creativity and the things we can do to sort of reinstill it I went on Wikipedia uh and read as I said about creativity and the stuff about neurotransmitters I have a book on Geniuses and how they can sit there and try to do you know statistical uh evaluation you know 20 of the people in this class turn out to be you know more original thinkers it's interesting stuff but if you're the person trying to rely on the creativity none of that stuff matters to you you're just trying to figure out what it is where it came from how I can amplify it and get more of it and Rick Rubin can be very helpful at that he's also a fascinating person to talk to who consumes more content information

6:59 history politics I mean things far afield from what you would think a music producer would consider to be sort of his Lane Rick has no Lane and that will become apparent in this extended conversation that we're going to have now and yes we're going to tie it into history with Rick Rubin

7:25 so um I had thought that there's a historical angle to this that you brought up in your book that I just love and it's this idea that what these were let's just talk about a recording but it could be a television recording a movie that someone produces or certainly music and audio that what happens there is you've got a time that's frozen in Amber and that Frozen in Amber means that the so let's just take Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones on something like Exile on Main Street that is a representation of where that band was in the late 60s and when Mick Jagger comes in to record his tracks he was just out doing something in the late 60s he's living that time period as a person of that age and then when we listen to it today as you pointed out in your book we may get a very different impression and feel than someone who listens to it right after release but what we're really getting no matter what

8:17 like if you listen to the tone of his voice and the things he's singing about and the lyrics he came up with you're getting a little bit of a Frozen and Amber moment of a time in other words if we want to talk about history if you can imagine I've always said if Alexander the Great had a podcast you would be catching that moment sort of for like the insect Frozen in in in the Amber you get a chance to see and feel like a time capsule almost um how does that strike you like when you look back on some of the recordings you did and you listened to them and then they're 30 years ago maybe does it bring you right back to you remember for the people at you know you may know these guys now and they may be 55 years old but that recording is of a voice of a 22 year old or 23 or how much does this act as a time capsule for you when you re-listen to things very much I rarely re-listen to things unless there's a reason

9:11 so I I don't spend a lot of time listening to things that I've worked on because I'm always I'm always working on something new so I'm either listening to the new thing or just listening to things I like and new things that I like because I like learning about music all the time and being surprised by music so if there's a reason for me to listen back I do listen back and when I'm listening back I'm usually put back in more often than not put back in the place of recording either having uh picturing the place that we recorded picturing what was going on that day that maybe not in great detail but some sense of of what the feeling was in the room um and maybe some particular I'll still be surprised by things I'll hear things that we may have uh poured over a long time deciding and they may completely hit me by surprise when they happen and that's a great feeling of of not being um I get to experience it in a way that um

10:18 in a in a new way in in a way like hearing it for the first time it's a funny funny combination of both familiarity and feeling of like I'm hearing it for the first time and and sometimes I'll hear uh I'll be in a coffee shop and I'll hear a song come on that I produced and it'll strike me in a certain way and sometimes I'll hear a song come on that I've listened to that I love that that I have no uh had no connection to other than I listened to it a million times and I hear it and I start thinking wow where where did we record this you know like I I remember like I I it's too familiar for me not to have recorded this but I didn't record it it's you know Led Zeppelin let's say which I've never recorded I never got to work with them it's you know what it is it's a variation on how a person listens to music who wasn't involved in the production process at all right you could be walking around here something

11:15 from 30 years ago and flash back as a part of your life and go oh my God what was I doing 30 years ago what was I doing when I used to listen to that song every day and and I think it has a has it's it's in a way it's an emotional time machine if you think about it it is and I I think I I speak in the book about these the things that we make are like diary entries and um one of the things that's helpful about knowing that is so many artists are precious about the things they're making to a point where it's nearly impossible to put anything out um there's some great artists who you know have great success and then it might be three or four or five years between projects and it's not because they're not great and it's not because they can't come up with beautiful things to share during that window of time it's usually some issue of not feeling feeling like it's not good enough feeling like it doesn't

12:16 it doesn't portray who they are forever you know it's it's uh it's not historically the best work they believe they can ever do in their life and if they don't believe it's the best work they could ever historically do in their life then why share it I'll keep working on it until it's the best thing in history but it doesn't really work that way because it these are diary entries and all it can be is a true reflection of who we are today and if we wait too long it starts losing its charge it doesn't get better with time your relationship to it changes because the thing that the person who started the project and the person who's finishing the project are two different people so if you're finishing and you're not related to the person who started the project it can be very difficult to finish it and and you can feel like well this isn't really for me it's like it's not for you it's for you six months ago or

13:23 it's for you one year ago and finding those um those ways in where if you made something and you feel excited enough to play it for your friend that's a good time to put it out into the world like if you're excited enough to play it for your friend that's the highest level of um it being ready I almost feel like that's directed at us a little bit because it describes our situation pretty darn well let me let me throw another Dynamic though that comes into play that I know you're very familiar with but from an artistic standpoint there's that you know when you put out something that is um and I don't like anything I do so I mean I'm not the right person to talk but but if you put out something and people enjoy it and they say wow this is the best thing you've ever done or whatever they might say the problem is with the following work is that the best work you've ever done becomes the expectation

14:24 for the next work and all the subsequent work right in other words if you have an a paper or you hit your or you're a Salesman and you hit your monthly quota and far exceed it well your next monthly quota is going to have that as the Baseline and so I always feel like they're you know you're always chasing the dragon a little bit on this thing and at some point you're going to hit a wall because there is no way to continually outdo yourself forever and I feel like that becomes something that holds you up like we've we'll sit on shows for months that would have been fine shows by our standards eight or nine years ago but the expectation level of the quality has been raised and truthfully in our medium if you go listen to podcasts in 2006 you know the year after we started the quality level is so low that if I go listen to show one two three four Hardcore History they said they're cringy to me now but at the

15:18 time by the standards in that day they were considered good I know you work with a lot of artists who had a lot of previous success before you worked with them how does one deal with this dynamic because it seems to me to be absolutely ubiquitous in art um the best way to say it is your old work isn't better or worse than your new work and your new work isn't better or worse than your old work your old work was a reflection of that time you you said it you said it yourself it's like in the context of the world that you were in that was great and you can't look at it as well I can go back to uh 2005 and redo something from men I mean you could do a new episode now and it would probably be very different and probably much more in depth and much more detail but it wouldn't be the same thing as the thing that happened in 2005 that is as you said um Frozen in Amber and sometimes it's those um

16:24 it's an iterative process it's it's those early ones that may not be uh at the same level that you're at now that allow you to get to the level that you're at now and doing it in public is part of it the fact that those exist the fact that there's a history there is is part of the power of it that the growth exists that you as an artist continue to make things and put them out and yes um we're all of us as artists are always trying to beat our past work which is a very Noble uh and reasonable goal I'm not I'm not so interested in trying to beat anyone else's work but any any possibility of beating my own work is exciting it's like any any uh any possibility of expanding what I'm doing or finding a new way to do it or to reach someone different than we were reaching before and and when I say that it's that never happens intentionally it always happens as an outgrowth of whatever new uh method we found of

17:43 working that's exciting us because I never do anything based on what I think the audience is going to think I always do it based on what I think I don't know what the audience is going to think um and I can't assume what the audience is gonna think and I'm I'm I don't think I'm smart enough to assume what anyone else is going to think all I can do is be true to what I feel and I try to make things that I feel to the best of my ability um and then you know you let the chips fall where they may well and the audience changes doesn't it I mean for example uh I constantly had discussions with people where I'll play a piece of music for them usually something from my youth and I'll you know take the Sex Pistols you play The Sex Pistols which is musac now basically it's elevator music and I'll play it for people for some young person or one of my kids and they'll look at me and go okay I don't really see the big

18:37 deal and they don't see the big deal because they weren't there when it came out it doesn't hit them the way it hit me because there's been a hundred thousand bands that have been influenced by The Sex Pistols and have used elements of them since and as far as that kid is concerned it sounds just like all that other stuff they've heard we always talk about um what we're doing here and what every podcaster is doing is is creating something that is etched in digital Stone and because it's etched in digital Stone the various people that are going to come across that inscription in stone may not even be alive yet and the way they're going to react to that work is going to be so different that there would have been no way to try to create a work for someone a hundred years from now you know you mentioned Zeppelin for example how could Led Zeppelin have known in 68 or 69 or 70 that what they were writing had to stand the test of

19:28 time right don't they have to just write for their contemporary era and let the chips historically fall where they may absolutely all you can do is be in the moment that's all there is is the moment all there is is the present moment there is no past there is no future the the benefit we have the uh in the present we can experience the past that's all it is and when we experience the past we're not really experiencing the past one of the things I wanted to talk about with you which is I don't I don't know that we could ever know anything about history how much can we know we don't know we don't really know about what happened last week from the sources we have telling us what happened last week we don't really know so how can we possibly know what happened 300 years ago or 500 years ago or a thousand years ago how can we know they're stories we may like the stories that might be fine but at best

20:33 they're interesting stories history is a set of Lies agreed upon right um well but you know is that is that is that a is that a uh known yes yeah history is a set or history is a set of fables agreed upon I think Napoleon may have said that but every time I say so and so said this someone corrects me because that was wrong too so that's a perfect example of what you're talking about but but here's and you know it's it's funny because this is a debate that historians have at the highest levels can we really know any of this and the problem is is eventually if you start to Naval gaze that long enough you you eliminate the need for the historian at all and it becomes a sort of a prophecy where you destroy your own you know your own specialty um I remember asking James Burke the famous science historian something to that effect and his answer I kind of thought he was going to answer the way

21:27 we're talking now but instead he he shocked me by saying no we can know and a lot of this is cross-referencing right so you so you say if you just just have one data point or One Source it's not that useful but if you can start to cross reference it so imagine today the way our life is now in a future historian trying to disentangle all the pieces well if the only thing that made it through the historical window was one news channel right you would have a very different view of History than if the historian in the future could cross-reference you know Fox News with NBC news with you know the more sources you have the more you're able to construct some sort of a connect the dots image that looks like something if and but like this this Viking show that we just completed there's a lot of times in the story where there's one person telling it to you there is no cross-referencing there is no way to cross check what you're

22:19 reading there's a wonderful line um that at a book um uh uh by Pierre Briant on on ancient history and he started the book off with a famous quote and I forgot who said it but he said even if it's not true you have to believe in ancient history and I think his point is is that if if you start questioning it too much we don't know anything and if we don't know anything then there is no history and if there is no history what you know how do you write anything about the past so what you've said is fundamentally true but I'm not sure what our choices in the matter are does that make sense absolutely and and and I think as long as we're um taking these stories in as stories and as it may have been this way or someone said it was this way that's realistic but to think that this is what that we know what happened you know something uh fairly recent history the JFK assassination I don't know what do you think

23:22 well you know you you I had a moment with you like this once like I was telling you that I had read something by a very well-known and respected music historian and he had said something about you and a on a famous uh musician you know maybe doing something once upon a time and I mentioned it to you and you sat there with this look on your face and you started rubbing your chin and you said that's very interesting because that never happened and I remember thinking okay now do I now discount everything I've ever read from that person I couldn't figure out and it wasn't one of those things where he could have just gotten something wrong it was an invention and I thought okay now what am I supposed to do with everything else this guy's ever written so so you and I have had that moment where I I got to look at the sources and and had I been doing a show I would have quoted that person verbatim as a source

24:11 and would have assumed that what they said was true so I think that backs up what you just said a bit and to defend the show is it it's It's Entertainment it's interesting it's thought provoking one of the things that I love about what you do is you call you say that you're not a historian and and I think that um that's uh it's a bold thing to say and it's a true thing to say and I I'm wondering if anyone who calls themselves a historian is actually telling the truth do you know what I'm saying I don't know if that's possible I say I don't know anything about music it's it's I really think so much of um our downfall is in thinking we know things we don't know and this can lead to an interesting thing an interesting conversation about belief um and and I'm I got this from listening to your your new podcast there's a part where you're talking about belief and the power of belief that there was a

25:22 religious belief that fueled a great strength in a in um well this is the Vikings right creating a sort of a yeah yeah their belief in Valhalla and all those sorts of things right eating at the table with Odin so so whether Valhalla does or doesn't exist the power of believing in Valhalla gave the Vikings a a strength and power um maybe fortitude would be the word that others didn't have and so much of what we do as creative people is rooted in belief now it doesn't matter whether it's true or not it's not it's not about truth it's about belief and we we believe things into existence as artists as creative people we're believing things into existence if we didn't they don't exist and without our belief they they will never exist but through our belief we make the things that we make and get to share them reminds me of the concept when we talked about this in some of the history shows too of magic

26:39 and I think I had said something to the effect once probably in a more eloquent way that just because you and I don't believe in you know in their quotes magic doesn't help us if the people in the past in an entire Society did because the the collective belief in Magic has a power to create a reality based on that right so if if you believe that that water is hot instead of cold when you know you you dip your feet in the ocean uh you're going to base everything that you base on that idea differently and it creates a different reality based on something you could turn around today and go well all those people were completely deluded believing something that was completely untrue but the reality that they created is based on that magic or whatever so if you don't understand that it's very hard to start getting into the mind instead of the people who lived once upon a time I mean if if you're going to go off to the

27:34 Crusades and fight and die because God wills it it was the saying that the pope had said in the Battle Cry that everyone took up and if you believe that all your sins will be washed away if you go on this Crusade we may think that's silly but a lot of these people went and did that giant historical thing because they believed in that level of magic so you're right this magic creates a belief that then impacts reality even though the magic itself may not be real and and if it does impact reality who's to say it's not real do you know what I'm saying in some ways the fact well the impact is real for sure right the impact it's like where's the line do you know what I'm saying if it's it seems like if you believe in magic and Magic happens because you believe in it who's to say Magic's not real well and now we're talking about something that I think dovetails well into the into the point of your book

28:33 creativity and um and the idea you know those of us I I think it was um I think it was comedian Jan Hooks was talking about once the difference between just fooling around creatively when there's nothing at stake and then getting to a point where you realize wait a minute this is what's putting food on the table for me so it's kind of important that I not just understand it but try to figure out ways to improve it uh have it more often intensify it I mean let's talk a little bit about the Muse and the idea behind the Muse for those who don't know the Muse goes back to ancient Greek history and it's and mythology and it's all about this idea that there is something out there that influences people's art and creation and it's well why don't you explain it rick what is the muse when you hear that term it's something that's coming from outside of ourselves that inspires us to make the things that we make and there's

29:33 a there's a uncontrollable magical element in the Muse sometimes we think of the Muse as a as a female character that I think that's how it was in ancient times that's how it was thought of yes um but now when we say the Muse it it doesn't have to be uh in human form it's the energy that that it's like a it's like the breath within the breath so so this is interesting to me right away because you had sent me a couple of different reviews about your book and one was a very positive one about all the great things that are in it and then another one was that could have been written by a very Terra Firma sort of person who thought and I think I think the term they used was that it was a little woo-woo but when I think of where this creativity comes from I think it is almost inherently this woo-woo concept because we don't know and you can't I mean you can't you can say you can create with a sort of a connect the dots

30:36 I mean when you and I were kids we had all these models model airplanes or whatever and they came with these directions that said you know put slot A into into section b or whatever I think there's people that think that you can do that with creativity but the magic comes with that thing where all of a sudden you're stuck on something and then boom this weird thing out of nowhere hits and you go well where did that come from I mean isn't there something sort of in the whole creation process no matter what your own sort of Bedrock personal beliefs on things like magic and whatever are isn't there I mean that's what the Muse sort of represents doesn't it absolutely it's it's always magical it's always spiritual how how often does it occur I I've never asked you this do you say something in your improvisation as you're working on your show how often do you say something and surprise yourself

31:31 by what you've said it happens pretty often actually and and and that's kind of how we sort of inch our way to where we're going because I never know I you know what we do is like sculpting out of clay but you have no conception what you want to make and as you're making you yourself are looking at it going Hmm this kind of looks like this or this guy and and and some of some part of you may say well it's kind of looking like a dog so I think I'll make a dog but but if you go that route you know a month down the road you're gonna go you know I don't really think it looks that much like a dog I put seven legs on it so maybe it's a horse or you know I mean I I think that that process of discovery when you're especially doing it the way we do it where there's no scripts and it's all improv you find out I mean this is where your book really resonated with me because we rely on that sort of weird magical thing

32:25 every step of the way I mean some writers will write something and the magic happens during the writing process and then during the recording process there's no magic because the magic happened when you were writing we don't write so the magic happens while we're recording and that's why we end up I mean the show that's part one that we just put out recently of this Viking thing I thought that was only going to be part one and I thought it'd be about four hours well of course you know it isn't and that was no planning at all we really do take it where it takes us and um and I think that that's part of that magic you were just talking about I think that's part of why the show is as great as it is and as different as it is and for the for the people who don't understand the magic they couldn't bring out this kind of material because they think it's just an intellectual act I'm just I'm learning

33:22 something and I'm regurgitating what I'm learning that's not what it is it's some whole other thing you've taken in a tremendous amount of data to start with to work from and then you're weaving your way through it as a jazz artist essentially you're you're you're doing a jazz saxophone solo with your voice with all of these Melodies which would be the stories that that you have and they're they're stringing together not with your um I I don't remember which is the left side which is the right side of the brain but it's not the side of the brain that does the the thinking it's something else it's not coming from thinking there's thinking involved but that's not primarily what's going on in this process you know it's funny because I think sometimes this is a lens question or the way you explain a question so for example if if I got some and I want to say engineer but then I can hear Engineers saying there's so much

34:30 creativity involved in engineering Dan you don't know what you're talking about but I try to think of the most Terra Firma people that I can think of and how one would explain creativity from their point of view and and there's a Steve Jobs explanation of creativity and I juxtaposed his definition next to one of yours and I think you're both saying the same thing from a different Viewpoint so the Steve Jobs quote is the famous one if you've ever read books on Steve Jobs he said creativity is just connecting things when you ask creative people how they did something they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it they just saw something it seemed obvious to them after a while that's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things and the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they've thought more about their

35:23 experiences than other people unfortunately that's too rare a commodity a lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences so they don't have enough dots to connect and they end up with very linear Solutions without a broad perspective on the problem the broader one's understanding of The Human Experience the better design we will have now that's sort of maybe an engineer's way of explaining the magic without saying magic and you said as artists we aim to live in a way in which we see the extraordinary hidden in the seemingly mundane then challenge ourselves to share what we see in a way that allows others a glimpse of this remarkable Beauty yours is an almost Zen way of explaining a very Terra Firma Steve Jobs I have a BMW in the lobby so you'll be inspired kind of way is this just a question of different people trying to explain magic with different terms absolutely we're saying exactly the same

36:26 thing and it's just uh we're choosing different metaphors but we're saying the same thing so let me ask this gets me to you a little bit because you know one of the things about your book is it's a real reflection maybe inevitably of of what it's like to be talking to you personally and you know there's a we talked about history earlier and how many myths and weirdness and things that they get wrong and that can include biography like about yourself but there's a let's call it a a snazzy candy coding wrapper around who you are Rick that's got a very sort of a Zen feel to it where does that come from I mean were you this way in high school I mean where did where does this what is this tone that one Associates in popular culture with Rick Rubin come from I think the fact that it's known that I learned to meditate when I was young and that I speak of it in um as having such a profound impact on my life

37:25 probably is part of it the beard is another part which was not intentional in any way it just when I was in college I decided to stop shaving and this is what happens when you if you decide to stop shaving um but there would know there was no thought behind it or method behind it um yes but when I'm but when I'm with you forget the beard forget the Imaging for you have a very like when we'll talk about creativity your your approach to it is so there's a very buddhistic kind of feel to the way you approach opening up your soul to the universe so that it can allow this magic in is that how you worked in your very early years I mean were you having conversations with the Beastie Boys like like the kind of conversations you have with bands now about magic and creativity and and the source of things like new ideas I probably didn't have conversations with it with anyone about it then but I recognized that that was the

38:30 underpinning of why the things that got made got made it's always been um um I I might not have understood how magical it was then but over time the more the more I've been exposed to it the more obvious it is that everything we're dealing in is Magic and it's beyond us and we're uh we're really blessed to be part of this um this process and and to to live in a way that allows it to come through us which is um a real it's it's work you know it's not um doesn't come easily let's say it does and it doesn't come easily it's so hard to talk about this so I took so long to write the book we're talking about things that are really hard to explain it's hard to understand they're hard to explain well and that's why I think I got so much out of it uh because I think when you've been through I mean we I joked with you that that we have a whole bunch of shorthand terms in-house here for when this happens or how we're going to

39:43 deal with that and they're all things that that you would invent the terms as needed over the years but when I'm reading your book I'm going well Rick Rick's talking about these same terms I mean these are the and they're the sorts of things that if you've ever been working and you've encountered what you mentioned in the book you nod your head and you go oh yes I know what that's all about I wonder if it would have the same sort of impact on somebody who's reading your book as as a as a jumping off point for starting and they know none of these things through their own experience um so they can't nod their head they just have to sort of take it on faith how you know do you read much about the creativity itself because I find myself buying books on this as a as an attempt to try to figure out how to amplify or or enhance or um expand my own creativity do you buy books on creativity Rick do

40:37 you study creativity well I'm at the time that I decided to work on this book which was probably about eight years ago I went to and you did it with Neil right you did it with Neil well when I first started no I started um with the first writer that I worked with his name was Verlin klinkenborg and I worked with him for four years and Neil was involved from the beginning but he wasn't working on the book with me he was just my friend who would continue the interviews because Verlin was at Yale teaching so Ron was in another place he came we spent 10 days together mean Berlin he he interviewed me a lot and we started like getting to the material and then when Berlin left um he said okay I'll start I'll start working on what we talked about and I said well I feel like we haven't scratched the surface of the information so I'll keep doing what we were doing with Neil and we'll send you all the material so Neil

41:42 was involved from on a content capture basis from the beginning but Verlin was originally the the professional writer involved and and this is Neil Strauss the guy by the way folks Neil Strauss is the guy who wrote the book uh with Rick I should have said that ahead of time so so back to the original question uh do you read about creativity do you study the concept or is this just something where it's almost studying magic in a weird way might be as important as studying history that you don't believe happened you know what I'm saying well I I'm I'm I started telling that story because in eight years ago when I decided I want to write a book about creativity I went to Book Soup which is a great bookstore in Los Angeles my favorite wonderful bookstore yes it's actually one of the reasons that I moved to Los Angeles Book Soup you're kidding me and it's true at the time believe it or not in I guess it would have been

42:44 1989 and 1990 while New York was the city that never sleeps there were no bookstores that were open late at night and my life was I was living a late schedule at that time and Book Soup was open till midnight and when I first came to California and I would go to Book Soup pretty much most evenings I would go to Tower Records on one side of the street and then I would go to book soup on the other side they were both open till midnight and when I when I start and I never really liked California once I realized that there was a book soup this that there was Book Soup and it was open until midnight it kind of changed my view of California because I really like spending a lot of time in bookstores and um and I could not do that in New York Book Soup is not a big bookstore either you you add Book Soup to the Bodhi Tree down there and they had a couple of fun little places in La at the time I went to the Bodhi Tree at least three

43:49 times a week the entire from the day I found it until it closed my favorite bookstore yeah very unusual the reason the reason the reason I was telling the story about uh Book Soup is eight years ago I decided I'm going to write a book about creativity and I think okay I'll do a little research let me see one of the books about creativity there are eight years ago there were no books about creativity there was actually one only one and it was by twilatharp the uh choreographer and it was called the something habit the art habit I can't remember what it was called now but that was the only one I could find and it was really rooted in dancing it was really about dancing um but that was the only one I could find and since the idea it's one of the things I talk about in the book I never made the connection before this specific connection but when a night when when you have an idea for something if you

44:53 don't move on it or if you don't move on it quickly someone else is going to do it not because they're stealing your idea they're all the books that have come out about creativity since eight years ago when I started they're not people who stole my idea it just means this is something that there's a real need for there's a real interest in this and um so so during that time I would on occasion look at creativity books that came out but anytime there was one I would read a little bit of it and I would say oh this is so not what I want like this is not what I want I was looking for a book closer to to the creative act which didn't exist the oh there there's one other I I don't know that you'd call it a creativity book but it's a book about writing called um oh the Julia Cameron book uh the artist way the artist way is a book to uh get over writer's block and and and um it's primarily for writers

45:58 and that's another book that I think is now 25 years old and I guess now we think of it as a creativity book but at the time when there was before there was a genre of creativity books it was a book on how to write you know I'm looking at I wrote down a couple of different examples of ways one might write a book on creativity right what the different approaches like I have one called daily habits and it's a book about what other people who are creative do to get into the right frame of mind and the right place there are there are more creative books that are a little like the A to B to C you know you do this you do that you do and then there's many that have that sort of metaphysical sort of feel to it I noticed in yours that that you grab a little bit from each of these approaches right at one point it will seem like you're reading something very amorphous and we're talking about the universe and

46:52 the Muse and all these sorts of things and then all of a sudden you'll turn the page and you have a book on habits or if something isn't working you have practical advice like try speeding it up try slowing it down I mean things that I would consider to be more what an it you know what a what a grounded engineer would want I want some instructions on this and you include those as well well is there any one way to teach people about creativity or must you hit them from multiple different angles because everyone's different well I don't think that you can teach people about creativity it's um what what the book is is it's a glimpse into a way of thinking about things that allow you to be creative I wouldn't call it I wouldn't call it teaching creativity though I would say it's um it's about learning to be yourself that's what the book's about the book's about learning to be yourself and the there are aspects

48:01 if in learning to be yourself if you're going to be making something where having practical engineer like advice is helpful and I think that those things are helpful when I read the book those are the least interesting parts of the book to me but for some people it's the best part it's you know those are the most helpful parts I know that the parts that are less uh grounded are the ones that have the power to change things in a big way now that said a small positive habit can change your life so you know deciding to uh what was an example of a practical one taking three big breaths when you wake up in the morning um can have great power as well the the ones that change the way you think about the world I think are the ones that allow you to access the um the real creative spirit that I want to say where the work starts doing itself it's funny thing to say because it's the hardest work in the

49:12 world you'd never stop it's a it's a it's the most uh full-time job you could ever have and when it's working it happens by itself yeah you go from a moment where you're you're you know and this can the order can change sometimes it starts by pulling you and then you push and other times you're pushing and then eventually it takes over and pulls um and you know we had mentioned earlier I mean when I was doing improv many many years ago I remember a teacher who was helping teach us who was saying the more you do this the more you will walk around 24 hours a day seven days a week starting to find little things in other words it's like a muscle that you develop and over time you become very good at at ruminating when you're not working about the various seeds of things that you'll need when you work to draw from but you know and I've maybe unfairly you know I use my engineer example but maybe unfairly

50:17 um sectioned off creativity as something painters do or musicians do or writers do but in reality I mean this entire civilization that we've built over thousands of years involves creativity on every level I mean an engineer is a perfect example there's tons of creativity that goes into designing a new car for example but we only think perhaps of being Mozart or Monet or someone like that but I mean I was watching a special the other day on primates and they were showing how these primates use creativity to develop solutions to problems they have so this is almost an innate quality wouldn't you say absolutely we're all creative beings we do it every day we we can't survive without creativity that's that's the the thing that has allowed us to flourish as a as a species has been our creative nature so let me talk about building layers because I thought about this in terms of creativity I thought

51:17 about the difference between somebody and and maybe this can get into more of a hardcore history sort of view of this but I mean I thought about how your creativity is enhanced by being exposed to other people's creative works so um and I think I'd mentioned this to you earlier like if if when I was a kid I watched every Twilight Zone episode and all the Twilight Zone episodes uh have these wonderful writers who who write from weird angles that make little popping sounds in your brain as you start thinking about and that's what they're supposed to do as you start thinking about the very interesting weird Concepts that they write about but the fact that I have a couple hundred or however many it is Twilight Zone episodes in my brain sort of adding a layer of examples of creativity little jumping off points I mean I feel like then when I'm doing my work it's infused by that in a way that if I was a a

52:13 person in the Middle Ages trying to write something and yet I had none of those things as part of the foundation you know to sort of Infuse my writing that the writing would be different how much how much of what we do today is is and I think you you said it you said um I'm looking at the exact quote um you would you had talked about the nothing begins with us you said in your book The more we pay attention the more we begin to realize that all the work we ever do is a collaboration it's a collaboration with the art that came before you this is a fascinating concept for me because you know it ties you into works that you have no connection with I mentioned the stones and Exile on Main Street but the fact that I listened to the stones in Exile on Main Street somehow unconsciously influences what I do can you talk about this a little bit I mean the fact that we're all building upon you know we all stand on the shoulders

53:08 of giants as the old saying goes we're standing on the shoulders of giants and everyone else we're we're taking in whatever we notice on a daily basis could be could be a great movie great television show but it also could be the way the the light reflects off of a building that we're looking at and how the light changes over the course of the day when we're driving and sometimes we have to put down the little flap because the sun's in our eyes why is it at that time of day how does it change the way we perceive everything how much more difficult is it to drive based on the sun's position how different is it to drive at night than it in the day how how different is it to drive at night with your lights off instead of your lights on we're always working in concert with everything else that's going on everything that we notice everything that we see and all of the great work that's come before us definitely plays a role

54:08 anything anytime we see something or read something that changes our mind about something it changes our mind about something we're now a new person and now we're moving through the world as this new person and every day where new people there's some part of us that's um the same and there's some part of us that's always changing and when we come into this world I believe we come in as more of a blank slate and then through the things that our parents read to us as children or the sounds of the music of the day that happens to be playing and then once we start choosing the things for ourselves the the books that we choose to read or the TV shows that we choose to watch or the movies we choose to watch or the museums we choose to go to or the places we choose to travel to and the things we choose to see all of those things impact us and when we're making whatever it is that we're making when we're making dinner

55:15 all of that that came before us goes into the choices we make we don't know it it's not a conscious thing we're made up of these experiences and these experiences that have either pulled us in or pushed us away great example would be that the movie Jaws I don't know if you know this but people were not afraid of sharks before the movie Jaws now there's a percentage of the population that are afraid to go swimming in the ocean because they're afraid of sharks whether it's a shark infested area or not all because of a movie changed our world to be afraid of sharks I'm glad you brought that movie up too because there's a wonderful creative aspect to that movie that I always use as an example in my own work which is uh and many people may not know this but the shark didn't work right the the the the mechanical shark rarely worked and so Spielberg who had all of these ideas for scenes where the shark was going to

56:23 appear had to figure out ways to write the scenes without the shark because the shark so rarely was available and it turned out that by doing that it created a building suspense in the film that wasn't there in the original treatment for the movie because they assumed you'd have a shark to work with and it worked out better because of it so it's almost a turning lemons into lemonade kind of an idea there that I um and and we do that all the time in the works right creative ways around problems that crop up and all this um I wanted you know because we had talked just a second ago about how maybe call it an advantage that people right now have over people a long time ago because we have all these other works that we can draw on and that influence us and when you were talking all I could think of is the Pink Floyd lyric you know where it says all that you touch and all that you see is all your life

57:11 will ever be you know and all these things that make up who we are but you had said in the book something that I think about all the time and you'd said and I'm quoting not using my big quote Voice or anything but there are those who approach the opportunities of each day like Crossing items off a to-do list instead of truly engaging and participating with all of themselves our continual quest for efficiency discourages looking too deeply the pressure to deliver doesn't grant us time to consider all possibilities yet it is through deliberate action and repetition that we gain deeper insight and I think all the time about how you know because we have so many things to do and so many distractions and we're so much more easily bored that we don't perhaps and when I say we I don't mean every individual because obviously there are exceptions but I think most of us think less deeply and concentrate less

58:06 intensely than we otherwise might and I wonder if there's any Downstream societal effects from something like that right I mean someone was telling me the other day someone came a worker came to do some stuff in my house and he looked up on the bookshelves and said how happy he was to see books on the bookshelf and I said to him what else would you put on a bookshelf and he goes I go into houses all the time there aren't any books in them anymore and I wonder what the downstream impact on us all from less deep thinking less deep concentration less books and all that will be I mean maybe one could make an argument that from a standpoint of deep human creativity and deep human thinking that people in the past had a somewhat Edge on us now does that does that ever occur to you this idea of just I mean monks could sit there and contemplate stuff we don't do that very much anymore is there a cost to that

59:02 absolutely but there's both a cost to the lack of contemplation and to the lack of um trusted sources of information I'll tell you a story I was listening to uh I don't know much about classical music I like classical music very much but I don't know much about it and I was listening to a classical radio station and a piece of music came on that was a chanting like um uh a beautiful a beautiful piece of of religious music and I shazammed the piece of music and what came up in the Shazam was it was the piece of music but it wasn't the recording that I heard and if you know much about classical music um like that now if you if there's a if you want the rolling stone song painted black you look up paint it black you'll find the Rolling Stones version there may be one or two other cover versions I'm not sure but not many whereas In classical music there is this Canon of material and there are many many many

1:00:11 recordings we don't have the bach recording of Bach pieces we have many different great uh orchestras and pianists versions of the bach pieces or or cellists or our violinists so it's always being interpreted by uh a new artist who's collaborating with Bach and making a new a new piece out of box music they're collaborating with a dead man yes and so I heard this this uh this beautiful chanting piece and and I found out the name of it but when I listened to the first one that came up it wasn't the one that I heard and it didn't have the same magic in it as the one that I heard which is why I shazammed it in the first place so I started thinking about okay how do I find the best recording of this because now I know the P the name of the piece of music and I remembered back to my days of going to book soup and Tower Records on a you know probably five nights a week um between you know one or the other or

1:01:21 both um and there was the Tower Records on one side of the street and then on the side where Book Soup was two doors down Three Doors Down from Buck soup was Tower classical which also had videos and I went to Tower classical and I would spend time in Tower classical back in those days and there was a book called The Penguin guide to classical music and it was a big uh probably a thousand pages had a black cover and there was a new edition that came out every year and if if there was a piece of classical music that you liked you would reference the Penguin book to find out what was considered the best recording and they would usually have the best recording and then another interesting recording and maybe uh if there was another one that was of Interest different than the best one um or a reason to particularly care about an alternate version they would have that too so it was the definitive

1:02:23 place to go to learn about to learn about classical music I would I would hear a piece I would refer I would go to the store they had probably uh six or eight copies of the book behind the desk all dog dog-eared and and well worn kind of like um phone books and you take one and you could shop in the store and then if there was a piece that you were excited about you would read the section and then it would help you determine which one to purchase because there might be a dozen versions of the same piece by different people so uh recently I had this experience hearing this this uh this chanting music and I look up the Penguin book online and it turns out the Penguin book is has not been imprinted in print since the probably 1998 uh was the last year of the penguin guide and and then I researched is there what do people use now and there's no answers I can't I can't get any information and the Penguin guides no

1:03:32 longer available and luckily I know people at penguin now because my book is being published by penguin so I called my editor at penguin said uh there was this book this reference book that was really important called The Penguin guide to music classical music it's no longer in print why is it no longer in print what happened and he researched and came back to me and he said um that one came out of the UK office um maybe you could speak to someone in the UK office and I called a friend who works at an editor at penguin in the UK and I asked them about it and they said oh that was part of they said in back in 1998 um a third of all of Penguin's books were reference books and starting in around 1998 we stopped doing reference books and I said why'd you stop doing reference books and they said well because of the internet and now with the internet we don't need to put out these annual reference books because it's just all

1:04:41 online and that it thinking about that it went from my concern about not being able to find the piece of classical music I want because the book's not in print to realizing in 1998 the Library of Alexandria got shut down and now we're we're basically going on crowd-sourced opinion for everything there is no there is no definitive reference source anymore since the Internet it's over well okay so let me I think that leads into something I want to ask you about because I uh there was an interesting thing on Twitter that somebody had uh shared some artwork and I retweeted it thinking it was very interesting and then got some not nasty but disappointed responses by people who were artists that were that were upset that I was retweeting artificial intelligence created art and I thought about this a little bit and I thought well what does Rick think about artificial intelligence art I read a story the other day and I

1:05:54 think it's absolute BS at this point but maybe someday it won't be that you know a giant chunk of the content that we consume in two years is going to be artificially created will artificial intelligence ever make music better than people or art better than people I mean what are your thoughts on this uh according to one of my artistic friends this this looming death threat ahead of them in terms of what they do for a living what are your thoughts on that it's a little bit like the conversation we had about magic and the Muse and for people who don't who aren't involved in working with The Muse they don't understand the Muse and they think that's a made-up thing art essentially is a um it's a made-up agreement and it's a made-up agreement rooted in concept an idea the idea the the idea behind the piece is what the the pieces are is a outward reflection of a concept and at the as far as I know the things

1:07:10 that are being generated by AI are not rooted in an original concept so I don't know I don't really know that that it functions as art functions it could be something decorative it could be something interesting could be something beautiful but I think what breathes in art as as I understand it is what's behind it what's behind it is what makes it interesting and I don't know that what's behind AI art is interesting if you put it up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art if you put up some artificially created works and you put them up next to works by you know known artists if it you know I think there's two sides to this and I think you break it down very well in the book there's there's the side from the artist side and then there's the side from the one who is viewing or experiencing the art I certainly think that what you just said applies to the artist side of this but if the art ends up move and I'm not trying to defend air

1:08:21 I'm just thinking about it but but if the art ends up moving you somehow is at least half of what we consider the goal of art being accomplished I mean if it ends up moving somebody on the receiving end absolutely if it if it works for you it's great there is no there's no saying what is and isn't it's it's in it's always in the eye of the beholder oh boy it does make it look like you know obviously for our shows we use a fantastic artist a guy named Nick lay and I can't imagine ever replacing Nick lay with some sort of computer algorithm um no matter how nice the the and how fun it might be to play with I was I was online I'm not technically sophisticated enough to know how to use it but I was I was interested in the idea of being able to set the parameters myself say I want to have the Starship Enterprise attacking Roman legionaries and show me a picture of that somebody somebody did it for the show we just did where I had

1:09:18 mused about what it would be like if the Vikings today attacked Laguna Beach or Malibu or something like that and somebody put it into the computer AI algorithm and spit out a picture of that and I remember looking at it going holy cow now an artist could have painted that certainly but to be able to sit there and just go you know I wonder what that would look like and 30 seconds later it's there in front of you it's a very weird time we live in Rick it's super cool it's it's super interesting and cool um I'm not sure it's art it's something it's definitely something but I don't know that I would call it art okay so then that gets to something where when we're going from like a visual like a painting slash medium let's go to music with that same sort of thing so we go from a time period where you and I are young people growing up and it's the 70s and the really really fantastic bands out there that everyone

1:10:18 you know pays attention to are virtuoso performers that took many many years to create their talent and their craft and everything and of course Punk came along and kind of blew that out of the whole water but now fast forward and then you get the era where hip hop and rap music come around where these people are the equivalent in my mind of like Homer and the old way that poetry used to work you know in the ancient world um and then you move forward to where we are today I mean I used to joke that if I just had the loops with the drum track and if a a certain sort of GrooVe and this and I could make music too and now people are so what do you think about the the creativity that is almost like let's call it cyborg-like where you have a human being working with a computer to create something I mean what do you think of that kind of um partnership for lack of a better word I I love it and and I um the the record

1:11:17 that really changed the world in many ways was um I feel love the Oh Yeah from the 70s that was yeah that was done by Giorgio moroder and the the music was completely uh generated it wasn't played by people although Giorgio did control the parameters of the machine that was making the sounds but it was the first big record that was all generated through a machine and um and and then craft work also they were a Prague rock band who turned into this machine based band and it's incredible music and in in both of those cases there's a there's a collaboration between the human and the Machine or how the machine how the way a human uses technology in a new way this was actually one of the things I wanted to ask you about which was is is technology always the reason that the next chapter of History differs from the last chapter of History is it always a technological change that that makes the next War different

1:12:35 from the last war or the flow of information different than how it used to be is it always a new technology comes and the world changes is it always the case I think you could substitute several different things for technology I'm not going to disagree with that statement at all but there's also differences in organization and approaches and you know and you might consider that to be part of the feedback loop between technological changes and how humans then respond so we just talked about a possible collaboration between computers and human beings well I mean if you look and there's also just to be honest there's also and this probably applies to Art music also there's there's also this sort of dynamic of um of cause and effect so if for example we're going back to Ancient Warfare and you talk about the dominance of of a weapon system like Alexander the Great type phalanxes right 16 ranks of people

1:13:38 holding 21 foot Spears in giant blocks of people and you think to yourself well nothing's ever going to defeat that well that prompts of course someone try trying to come up with some way to do that and then when the Roman Legions figure out the right approach to doing that and it's partially technologically oriented but it's also organizationally different and also from an artistic standpoint if we can use military in in a in an artistic sense it's also coming up with a creative solution to a problem that bedevils your military how do we defeat this giant Phalanx um and you come up with a way and when you do it's it's a melding of Technology right a certain kind of sword for example with a certain kind of shield and then you you mix that with certain changes in how you do things right smaller units that are more independent right that can outflank you and handle terrain differently and all

1:14:34 these things can combine because you have a need right cause and effect um call and response you have a need and and those things fuse together into in military history you would call it a weapon system but the weapons system is is several things that are fused together and some of it is creativity some of it is technology some of it is the way you do things and then one might make the case as we currently have drone Warriors who are in you know small rooms in places like Kansas who are fighting though from those small rooms on screens that look like video games in the Middle East right does that change the nature of those people as Warriors well I think it does but that again is a creation of a new weapon system the melding of techno apology with approaches with people I mean if you imagine trying to hand that Roman legionary a device that looks like a PlayStation controller and say go out and kill the enemy with this

1:15:31 I don't know how many years it takes before somebody can do that because you would have maybe had to grow up with video games you might have to have you know an entire personal relationship with the technology in the state of the times to understand what you do so in other words I think the answer to your question is that technology is a part but what technology does is re-plastify we plasticify if you will the whole thing where then everything remolds itself around the new technology so that you can best use the new technology to do whatever it was was prompted by the need to have a sort of a cause and effect does that make any sense absolutely that's a great that's a great description I can remember you had an episode where you talked about the um the people of the step who who were great Horsemen and their advantage was they could do things while on Horseback that other people couldn't do

1:16:24 right and you know you could try to and I love that example too because people tried to emulate it and lots of countries had mounted archers but there's a difference between a mounted Archer that you know you comes into your your training school at 21 years old and you start teaching the art to compared to a Comanche that grew up on Horseback so much that he's bow-legged right so I do think that that that and to me that's almost like um that's almost like you know that's when the try before modern technology totally overwhelmed um aspects of of military history like that there were various peoples all around the world that could do different things that we would almost consider to be minor superpowers today uh and that's my my favorite example is the is the nomadic horse archers of the step that were supposedly the inspiration for the Greek myth of the centaurs wow that's beautiful you know I'm looking over the notes now

1:17:25 and I'm seeing that that we've covered a lot of the stuff I wanted to cover but I'm it's a good time to take a break and just ask you know where should we go what what haven't we sort of uh uh delved into that would be fun or that you would like to see us go into um because we got a lot of notes for this show so so the more notes we have the harder it is to pick anything out specifically um anything you'd like to get into I mean we didn't talk much about you as a background or any of the music that you've been working on we didn't talk about what you personally I mean I was curious uh because obviously being a music producer you're you're involved as in our in art creation just in that role but is there anything else you're enjoying doing that I don't know about I mean I don't know do you sculpt do you paint do you uh do you you know the Pricks haven't been around for a long time is there a reunion in our future of

1:18:15 that man um so so maybe we could talk about any anything that that sounds like we didn't touch on already or that you'd like to get into okay I have a load of things for us to talk about yeah yeah you you why don't you why don't you drive the car for a minute and I'll try to follow it yeah okay um let's talk a little bit about how we decide to continue or not continue what we're doing and the reason I'm I'm asking you this is um you had a podcast called common sense which you did uh alongside hardcore history for a very long time and then Common Sense stopped and I just want to talk about that I wasn't expecting that okay um well you know the way you said it common sense stopped might be a very good way to describe why Common Sense stopped um this this gets sort of to the reason that we thought about talking about that sort of stuff to begin with it was based on certain assumptions and for me

1:19:25 hardcore history is a brand new created for a podcast kind of program whereas Common Sense was something that is a deliberate Evolution from what I used to do on the radio for many many years and the tagline you know all those commercial talk radio shows always have a tagline um when you start the top of the hour so anyone who hasn't heard you before gets sort of the one sentence or two sentence rundown about what you're all about and I can still remember it because I used to say it every day you know at the start of all three hours and it was uh we are your independent alternative to the partisan voices you normally hear now you'll hear radio show hosts say stuff like that all the time but they don't really mean it um we did mean it and my basic assumption was that you know there is a huge problems in American government for example that need to be addressed but they are bipartisan problems and in order to

1:20:23 address them we almost have to sub subscribe take our differences and put them aside for now because differences and disagreements are built into the pie in any sort of Representative system that that comes with the territory it's not a bug it's a feature but we need to you know there's not to change subjects because it's not a change of subject but there's a book by um Yale notar I think he's I can't remember his Harvard or Yale but Lawrence lessig who's a law professor and he wrote a book called Republic lost and I love the way he did it because he he assumed the same thing that these problems these systemic problems require us all to sort of work together to solve right we need to we need to fix the boat from sinking before we can talk about the direction we want the boat to go and the way he did it was one page let's imagine the left side of the page would be the arguments from why we need to do

1:21:19 this to people who are more liberal and then on the right side of the page would be the same Arguments for why a conservative person would want to do this also implying that it's going to take both sides to fix systemic problems and The Common Sense Show was based on this too this idea that the problems that divide us are less important than what we need to do I mean think about it's like an infrastructure thing we're arguing about cleaning out the barn here so that we could continue to Stable horses in it and and the Assumption was that you know for a while I thought we were winning on that front I mean I really thought we were and then things went sideways and they didn't go sideways because of anything any politician did or anything like that they went sideways in your yours truly's personal opinion because of us and once I decided or thought or assumed or or concluded that the problem was stemming

1:22:20 from us well then I couldn't figure out what the solution for that was where there's all sorts of practical solutions for corruption in government and money in politics and gerrymandering and and long-serving politicians and partisanism I couldn't figure out what to do if the problem is us now I may be wrong about that but that sort of shut down the program for me because the entire premise under which I had labored and not just with the podcast but in the entire radio show that it grew out of right we are your Alternatives you know to the partisan voices you normally hear um if not proven because because it's possible that that was a correct statement in the middle 1990s but by the time the show sort of ended if it's ended um I didn't feel like that was a true statement anymore so what's the old line you know the problem dear Brutus is not at our stars but in ourselves and that's kind of what I concluded and that sort

1:23:20 of short-circuited my whole approach because I don't know how to fix us does that make sense interesting it does I I also would be really curious to hear if the show continued on based on that assumption which would be um not so much you knowing what the solutions are uh but but being able to clearly address the problems to to to speak the problems as you see them in the hopes that a solution can be found you know sometimes identifying the problem is the biggest piece of the creative puzzle do you know if you see if you see if we're working on a project and something's not right and you know it's not as good as it could be or it's not making you feel something that you thought it was going to make you feel knowing what to do you know knowing what why where's the Splinter in this why why am I not getting what I mean what I want from this um is really helpful so I'd be curious to hear that and the

1:24:36 re the reason I asked also is because I've been doing a podcast called broken record for about five years I think and the way that that started was my friend Malcolm said he wanted to do a music podcast and if I wanted to do with him so that seemed like a fun idea so I started doing that music podcast and we did that for this time and then recently I've come to realize because originally I didn't think it was going to be a interview show I thought it was going to be more of more like revisionist history more like his show yeah this is Malcolm Gladwell by the way we should say yeah this was going to be more of a story to I thought it was going to be more of a produced storytelling thing and which I think maybe all of us thought at the beginning yet it turned into being an interview show and and um and it's been really fun to do and because broken record is so specifically a music show and it always

1:25:32 set out to be a music show I realized I like to talk about things outside of music just as much and um so I've been thinking I'm gonna start a podcast which will be called tetragrammatin and tetragrammatin will be where I have the conversations about everything and and at first I was thinking maybe I need of specific podcast to talk about this subject in another specific podcast to talk about this subject and another specific podcast talk about this subject and then I realized it's probably more interesting if I just have a podcast where I can talk about anything that's interesting to me and talk to people who are interesting to me wherever they come from so that's what tetragrammatin will be and it'll it'll end up having music interviews as well because that's interesting to me but it's not what it's about it's a it's a piece of the puzzle instead of it being the puzzle I think that provides a

1:26:34 lot more freedom for you to do it that way than than Common Sense which was specifically geared towards a specific attitude and part of the problem too Rick in the times in which we live which I truly believe um we're going to look back on in 20 years as one of those times where people go crazy collectively I mean uh the way that you and I would look have looked back on the McCarthy era you know from the 1980s when those people just look crazy right I mean you just look back and you go everything went nuts for a while I think those things happen in human history and the reason it comes into play in The Common Sense discussion is because part of the Common Sense discussion was finding common ground but in an era where everyone goes nuts and both sides think that we are in apocalyptic situations in terms of the stakes than to try to walk some line where you try to see both sides is the equivalent of trying to see both the

1:27:32 Nazi and the Communist Viewpoint and people don't stand for that and I understand that but at the same time I think 20 years from now someone's going to say why didn't we do a little bit more trying to find common ground because obviously you know everyone's being radicalized the the ballast of society which is the middle has has seen both edges the left and the right Edge from the middle be co-opted towards the extremes because people turn to the people in the middle and go now is a time for choosing as the old line goes right that wasn't wasn't that a Ronald Reagan thing from the early now is a time for choosing well those of us who try to see both sides then become instead of part of the solution in the minds of many during this crazy time like the McCarthy era we become part of the problem in those people's minds and so I do think that 20 years from now what you're saying about common sense

1:28:25 might absolutely be the way most people see it I get accused of things like both sides areism that's a word now both sides areism but in my mind without both sidesarism you have one side ISM and how is that any different from what everybody else is doing I think the only reason that uh I don't I wouldn't say that people today are crazier than they've ever been it's the inputs that they're getting that is is getting this result so in some ways the time for a Common Sense Show that speaks reasonably and open-mindedly about both sides is maybe the only thing that could ever solve the problem because the the finger pointing and that the reason people are so divided is because the stories that they're being told on each side the stories on each side are so uh against the other side instead of rooted in any reality on both sides well let me just say I don't I've never had a problem with people speaking their

1:29:39 true beliefs right I mean my problem in in the modern media landscape the way it is right now and I have deep experience in in this subject is the fact that so much of what is is turning people against each other and increasing the the temperature in our society is done purely for commercial reasons purely for money um they used to call it back when I was in radio they used to call it heat right heat and heat equals engagement now heat means arguments right and being deliberately provocative for the sake of creating things like anger because I remember them explaining to me you know my whole radio career was me arguing with consultants and program directors and everything like that because they would say things like uh we need to keep people listening through the break well how do you keep people listening through the break you piss them off right and then they're angry and then they want to

1:30:31 hear what comes and especially if you piss somebody off and and then a caller calls up to deal you know aggressively with you because you piss them off but your point of view was the one that the original listener liked so they get pissed off at the caller people love heat he he they would scream at me heat heat well that's not legitimate heat which I have no problem with that's manufactured heat you look at somebody I mean I'll give you perfectly and I'll I'll name names Tucker Carlson is a deliberate provocateur for money and that drives me crazy especially drives me crazy when people consider themselves and I'm using air quotes here Patriots people who want to see the country you know do well and succeed and Thrive and yet for the sake of money I can hear the program directors off stage going heat heat I mean this is this is a systematic problem a systemic problem we've created with um a commercial attachment to the

1:31:28 creation of anger that would not otherwise be there and everybody does it because there's you know elements on the liberal side of thing that the things that that also benefits from the same problem right the need to create ongoing engagement and now with the knee and you know this too with the need to have little Snippets that you can then share on social media as a part of the way you produce a show well now you want that heat to carry over into different mediums so I feel like the difference between and this this plays into what you're saying right the fact that technology has then introduced something can you imagine what somebody like a Joseph McCarthy would have been able to do with the tools available today right or a father Coughlin or somebody like that and so I think what you're seeing is and I do think we almost recover from an earlier era and then the technology changes like we talked about with

1:32:20 military things earlier there's a cause and effect but the new technology allows old old um old monsters to be reconjured and I think when the spell is broken like the McCarthy era spell was broken when the famous representative said you know have you no shame and it was literally as as though the the cloud dissipated I think we'll probably have a moment like that again and just like you and I in the 1980s looking back on this era I think people 20 years from now will think we were crazy right now but I think you know we're living in an era where we're all guinea pigs I mean you know I'm raising and you're raising children we're raising children in this time period there is no precursor there is no example I mean we you know when we were trying to figure out what age you allow your kid to start getting on social media you can't say well when I was a kid we didn't get to be on social media

1:33:10 until we were 18 I mean we're Flying Blind here and we're all as a society a guinea pig to what happens in a society with these sort of tools and not just the sort of tools that we can use for ourselves but let's remember when we were kids the Soviet Union back in those days days would freak out because there was one radio station radio free Europe that used to beam across the Iron Curtain and that would would destabilize the Soviet Union it would freak them out well can you imagine today well I think maybe we're almost seeing it with some of the stuff going on in the war in Ukraine right now but these are you know we talked about technology these are new elements that humanity is trying to figure out how to deal with and the problem that I see is not the new technology but the pace at which it continues to change so just as Society with its plasticity begins to react and change and adjust technology changes

1:34:07 again if this isn't too fast for we humans to handle then it will be at some point does that make sense absolutely and there's some sense of when things change and we adopt a change quickly we miss that maybe the thing that we're changing to isn't better than is is not better than what we had before now sometimes that's the case or sometimes there's a version of it where there's some aspect of it that's better but it's not universally better that was the case with I mean at the time that asbestos was created it was this Wonder of science that was going to make fireproofing cheap and buildings all over uh all over the world started using this material and then 30 40 years later we find out it's a carcinogen and now you have to have people with hazmat suits to come in and take it away if you have if you're unlucky enough to uh have a building that has that stuff in it so we keep seeing these

1:35:16 man makes these breakthroughs but we don't really understand them and we adopt them before we before we really understand them and we're very quick to either Embrace something that maybe we would want to be slower about embracing or reject something that we're really quick to reject oh we may find out that cell phones fall into that same category uh somewhere down the road and and but here's the difference maybe between something like Asbestos and something like um some of the other stuff we were talking about cell phones might be a good example you can pivot on a bad decision like thalidomide or asbestos you can say wow we had no idea we're going to phase out the use of that imagine trying to phase out the use of cell phones or social media I mean sometimes we have no options sometimes there is no I mean it's almost like with certain technological developments it's almost like the spikes where it says you

1:36:14 know do not back up or your tires are going to pop some things are once you're through the veil there's no going back and some things you can pivot on I think asbestos is an example of a decision human beings can make and then decide they made a mistake and and double back and there's some things where I think you're along for the ride and as I always say in the podcast you know you go from pushing a development to having that development pull you and I think some of these things um they're not going to change so the question is can Humanity change I don't know and when there's a to double back to the idea of being a financial interest in pulling us apart if there's a financial interest fighting the idea well it's the in the environment's a perfect example I mean if we want to talk about improving environmental problems sometimes it's difficult because cutting down a forest is instant money and and

1:37:06 impacts people's lives now sometimes for the better whereas long-term preservation of a forest is a much more amorphous thing where we have to subvert you know our needs of the moment and our possible gains in this lifetime for long-term gains and I'm not sure that the way human beings developed from you know neanderthals to now is necessarily hardwired for that sort of an approach um what are your thoughts on that well it I had I hadn't experienced this morning related to this I was walking on a beach in a remote place where there were no Footprints it was a place where nobody walks I was walking and I was noticing the way um the erosion water was coming from under the sand and then creating these vein like structures in the sand that went that went really long distance they were very beautiful and it felt like oh this is like what what's this looks like a tree and this looks like our veins and

1:38:13 this looks like whatever this system is however uh life works on the planet I'm getting to see an expression of this how life Works in this moment and and I realized that it's rare to be in a place that's less trodden like this one or untrodden in this case and if this same place had 50 or 100 people walking back and forth on it over the course of the day what I what I got to see today would have been invisible and I'm thinking about in our Suburban world and in our Urban world how little we get to see of what what uh creation has to share with us we get to see something else we get to see man's creation but we only get to see man's creation and there's something about being able to see um I remember hearing a story it would be years and years ago I was in Hawaii and I was listening to the um the local public radio station in Hawaii and there was an old Hawaiian man who maybe was 100 years old

1:39:40 he talked about the islands of Hawaii and he was out on a boat looking back at his Island and he said all of the things over the last hundred years that man has built on these islands that I can see now from the boat none of them were more beautiful than what was here before none of them that is a telling line I think um and and and something that I think a lot of people feel that loss without knowing that that's what they're feeling so for example my dad was a was a really poor kid he grew up in the Bronx in a in an apartment with a bunch of people I mean it's really one of those old stories you know you used to hear from the depression and then um when the Korean war came around uh you know they drafted people and if you didn't want to be drafted you could you could enlist and by enlisting you had to serve a little longer but you had more Choice over where you went and so Dad joined the Navy and they said to

1:40:44 him in the in in the Bronx where would you like to go and he says far away from here as possible and so they sent him to Honolulu in 1950 and my father spent the rest of his life trying to find Honolulu in 1950 somewhere else and my mom says my mom said when he first went back it was probably early 1960s and she he said he just fell down on the ground and cried because it was this this wonderful memory he had of this special place for a poor kid from the Bronx who'd never seen palm trees had been destroyed in his mind I mean he would go all over the world later in life trying to find something that reminded him of that experience and you know there's there's an element to explore here too about the you know what you just mentioned about the the untouched sand and all these sorts of things well this is an economic question too because you talk about a poor kid today living in a concrete jungle somewhere where the vast majority

1:41:42 of what they're exposed to is this man-made stuff that you talked about and not the part of the world that humankind up until relatively recently not only saw but perhaps mostly took for granted right the way we take the giant skyscrapers for granted that if you pulled a person out from the Middle Ages and took them to Chicago or New York or someplace like that that's the thing that they would notice it's it's true I'm I'm just taking in what you're saying it's amazing I know I know sometimes I say it and then I try to decide did that make sense no it made perfect sense it's beautiful you had other things you wanted to get into got me on the common sense thing now okay let's talk about um are you in Rick are you enjoying are you enjoying the the your foray into all this new technology too because you know as a guy who's a music producer you're not usually the dude out front and in these Productions you are are you

1:42:38 enjoying that well the this is the book is the first time that my name is on the front of anything and it's an interesting experience because I'm always a back room person I'm always on the back I'm never on the front um and it's interesting it's interesting I I suppose the fact that I read or hear from people who are getting something from the material that makes me feel really good so I it it's serving its purpose most art uh at least the the art that I've been involved in doesn't really have a purpose it's more um to Thrill or to give having to give an experience or to feel something more deeply but it doesn't really have a um purpose beyond that and this book has a purpose Beyond nice words it has a purpose to inspire people to want to make things so the fact that some people have read it and said this inspires me to want to make things that feels really good because it's um fulfilling its promise

1:43:54 it's your moments Frozen in Amber also I mean this is your Frozen enamor moment and there's a great line from the ancient Roman orator Cicero who said writing is the only true form of immortality wow now in his era that was the only medium but but the concept can be expanded to many different areas I mean my mom was an actress and she was active in mostly in the 1970s and every now and then some old show will come on with with her in it and I will see my mom from the 1970s when I was a kid right and and that's that moment Frozen in Amber also this is your moment Frozen in Amber and your views as they exist right now um which may change over time but but you'll be able in 20 years to look back and say this is who I was and what I was thinking during this eight or nine year period where I was putting this thing together your moment Frozen in Amber yeah and and I see it as that and I know that it's um I talk about it in the book

1:44:56 it's it's all changing it's all always changing this is a moment in time tomorrow will be a new one I'll be different tomorrow maybe there'll be some similarity let's see I wanted to ask you about um talking about theater of the Mind and I want to talk about audio books versus what you do um how would you describe the theater of the Mind well when again to hearken back to when you and I were growing up radio was the old-fashioned medium by then and yet television didn't have the kind of reach that it has now and so I was a sports fan still am but I'm a sports fan as a kid and there were games that I wanted to um pay attention to that weren't being televised and so you would find yourself employing the old medium because maybe the game was being broadcast on radio and all of a sudden you begin to understand the elements that radio brings to the table you know I I think when we were kids we thought of it as an inferior

1:46:09 medium but it's a different medium and the different medium is obviously because without showing you the pictures without you able to see them your brain makes those things up and partly based on how good the person who's calling the game is right I mean part of what makes a good radio announcer of a ball game in the 1970s is being able to bring you there without being able to see what is there and of course in that era we were still living in the fumes of like Orson Welles type radio and all these kinds of things where they did things with radio that they don't do with audio now or or actually a better way to put it is didn't do with audio before things like podcasting and stuff got started um used it in a different way um theater of the mind is the ability to conjure feelings thoughts images and sort of paint a picture for you with words that brings you into the scene there's um there's a lack of a need for that as

1:47:14 much when you've got the visuals but when you don't have the visuals you know it's like covering up your eyes and then finding out how much you're hearing or your sense of touch or your sense of smell can help you um and and how you come to different sorts of ways of adjusting your senses that you have left when you take one of them away and I think theater of the mind is a wonderful way to touch back to some of the really fantastic artists of an earlier era who figured out how to use a medium that just sent something into your ears and allowed you to create what it was you saw and the interesting thing is you could have five people in a room surrounded by the radio listening to the same thing and all five of them have a different mental conception of of the picture that's being painted and to me that's theater of the mind I love that and I love how much more power that has than an image and an image yes an image

1:48:15 it contains a thousand words or but if you look at an image we all see a much closer representation when we look at an image then when we hear a story because when we hear a story where where collaborators with the story we're filling in we're picturing the story based on our experience there's room for us the listener to be part of the story because as you said five people hear a story and they they all picture something different it's a beautiful do you know do you know um the cube experiment I don't think so but why don't you tell me maybe I'll recall it but it doesn't ring a bell okay it's a it's a psychological let me see if I if I um yeah it's a psychological I'm still enjoying the I'm still enjoying the idea of a radio listener as a co-creator that's a wonderful mental image sorry yeah it's true it's true it's like where we in audience true in music it's like the difference between hearing a piece of

1:49:32 music and closing your eyes and listening to it and seeing what comes up for you or watching a music video a music video is much more leading it takes you much to uh to a specific it's the difference between prose and poetry poetry is more open to interpretation just by the nature of the language um anyway the the cube visualization we can we can do this together now okay you ready close your eyes all right and imagine a desert picture the desert got it yes okay in the desert there's a cube okay I'm there okay there's also a ladder all right there are flowers all right there is a horse okay and finally there is a storm all right okay describe the cube to me well it was kind of a Rubik's Cube so small mm-hmm tiny little handheld Cube dwarfed by the ladder and the horse and the flowers Maybe okay um did it have colors like a Rubik's Cube I think so that's a good question okay okay um the what this experiment does is each of

1:51:38 the images represents something either something in your life let's say or an aspect of your life and the the answers are very different I remember when I did this the first time mine um I saw a black metal cube and it was a big Cube and it was um sitting in the desert and um and I remember I was with a group of maybe six people who all imagined this at the same time then we we all described what we saw and and I remember when I heard what other people's descriptions of the scene looked like it was hard for me to believe that that's what came from the same cues you know we've all got the same cues yet the images that I saw were so clearly to they were so clear to me when I was looking at and these images were so clear to them what they were looking at and they were so radically different and um the cube represents you and it's how you see yourself and then a latter represents you the latter represents your friends

1:52:59 the flowers are children or it could also be your creative Offspring so if you say that you're you the cube is small and it's being overwhelmed by the flowers or the latter and the flowers that and the horse your friend I'm I'm a horse the horse is your uh your passion so it would be your romantic relationship but it could also be your your whatever your passion is but typically we think of it as the Romantic relationship and the storm oh described the storm I live in Oregon so it just looked like an Oregon storm in the middle of the Sahara so so sort of low clouds some fog that kind of thing okay but but nothing like uh it didn't wreak havoc or destroy the cube or anything no just rained yeah okay so the storm is your current problems and how you view them so for some people the you know you say a storm and there's a lightning bolt and it destroys the cube or or takes out the horse it it really it we we all have our own

1:54:15 oh so so you see yourself as this small small Rubik's Cube is a small a puzzling a complicated puzzle and then the the flowers and the latter are your friends your children and your creative Offspring your work you see yourself basically um absorbed by those things have taken over your life well but what if those are the important things and uh yeah it's beautiful it's beautiful I feel like I've just gone through a therapy session yeah and there's no right or wrong answers to any of this this is more like just you get to learn about yourself through the process um there's a book about it called the cube that explains you know that can go into deeper deeper deeper depth on each of the each of the ideas but it's what's interesting to me about it is how Vivid the images we create are and how it couldn't to me it couldn't have been anything else it was so obvious what I was looking at like my

1:55:26 cube is a black metal cube and and um impenetrable and it couldn't have been any other equipment and I remember one person had a uh a transparent Cube that was floating over the desert and spinning it's like how can that be how could anyone have that fascinating and and that and this ties directly into the idea that theater of the Mind allows you to decide what's your own Cube storm horse and flowers looks like absolutely and that we and that there's something beautiful about um allowing allowing an audience to find their own story I'm working on a um a documentary right now about Rodney Dangerfield who I grew up loving and there are so many of the um standard accepted rules of documentary Making that holds the hand of the audience and walks them through and Spoon feeds them and I'm not doing any of that and and I'm I'm really and always with everything I make I always give the audience the most credit

1:56:44 I always assume the audience is really smart and understands everything they understand what things I don't understand so what if I make something that I like I I feel like I'm going to learn about it through someone else telling me what it is okay I wanted to ask you about did you read the audiobook for your book did I read it what do you mean yes did you were you the audio were you the reader of your audiobook yes I tried not to be but they insisted yes I was the reader of the audiobook okay tell me about that experience because it's very different than what you do yes yes and and it was it was difficult honestly to try to find my own voice it's funny one of the people who read it a friend of mine said it sounded like he did the whole thing in your quote voice and I thought well I was basically quoting wasn't I the whole thing um yeah yes I I did I I found I found it difficult to find what my voice was

1:57:51 reading my own work because I don't write my stuff that I that I record so yes uh it was uh and I would I would suggest that I got better at it as we did it more so maybe the book if you listen to me voicing it sounds better as we go on but I found that to be quite a challenge yeah I I did it from my book and it was one of the most difficult things I've ever done in my life I don't know how good it is um I'm too close I felt the same way but it it took yeah and I worked on it for months and months and months um and I still can see you know a million ways to make it better if I had more time it's an interesting thing and and I think back I've been a fan of audio um my whole life and it's not just music I remember I went through a phase in my life where I only listened to comedy albums when I was very young and I listened to audiobooks before there was ever an audible I would buy um cassette you know books on books on

1:58:58 tape yeah I liked listening to books on because yeah and I loved it and one of the things that I noticed is that it's a it's a very particular skill set an author who can read their work in a way that is com that it's it's compelling and often what I would do is try to find a lecture by the author about the subject of the book that's not them reading the book but just them talking about that subject and I I found the ability to communicate the information was better when they weren't reading the book and just talking about the subject then the reading of the book because the reading of the book is such a specific skill set that unless we're trained voice actors we just don't have that yes I can relate to that really well because I think I I think when you speak for a living um especially when you speak unscripted for a living like any craft that you do for a very long time you've sort of internalized

2:00:12 all the different elements of it and you don't think about them anymore and all of a sudden then having to read like you said your own work and do audio I'm in the same medium I've always been in you would think that all of the skills that you've acquired over the years in speaking to an audience through their ears would apply but only a few of them did I found it to be almost a different art form entirely yeah it's fascinating so it's such an interesting thing and um and I I think that goes into making music as well it's it's the same it's like we're not when we're making music we're not trying to get it right we're trying to convey a moment which is what you're doing on your on your podcast you're conveying you're conveying what you have to say about this material in this moment and I and I imagine we I asked you this earlier but I don't think we it may have been before we started if you were to

2:01:16 record the same podcast that you just released the same five hour story a year from now if you would record it a year from now how different would it be and my guess is 20 different 30 different it would be different you know it's interesting too there's a there's another element to this and it's it's the it's the filter right or the or the lens so I had a guy get a hold of me a couple of years ago and he said I want to do a movie about the the naval battle the battle of Jutland that you talked about as one little section of their of your first world war series and I said to him I said I don't have any there's no copyright on historical events I said you don't need my permission uh to do it he goes I don't want to talk about it though I want I want to take the lens that you viewed it through and I want to make a movie about that and I thought that it never occurred to me before but that's your Cube thing or or the Orson

2:02:18 Welles or the five people listening to the radio and all getting a different mental image thing um in a different form because he could have just done a movie on the Battle of Jutland but he didn't want to he wanted to do a movie on my take of the battle of Jutland which I thought was rather I thought about that many times since because that what that shows is that you could talk about the Battle of Jutland 900 different ways all of them being factually accurate and yet totally different yes yes and that goes back to the AI the AI point is that the AI could spit out the 900 different versions but why does this person want your version I don't know the answer to that that's why the art resonates it resonates not because you have the same data as as the 900 other people who could tell the story it's because you tell the story the way you tell it and that's what's interesting at least to that person and

2:03:24 to me you know that it it makes me think of something Rick I mean I'm the difference between I mean I feel like one could make an argument and I could take both sides of this argument I'd be curious where you fell the idea that we're making more creative works and I'm not sure more creative works is the same as more art but we'll we can revisit that as as a group of people we're making more art and creative Works than ever before in human history more people have access to the tools including the distribution tools right when we were kids if you didn't have some sort of a in with uh The Gatekeepers whether that was the TV networks or the movie Producers or the of the newspapers or whatever you were out of luck nowadays people just go straight from creation to public display through many different channels that are available so you feel like there's much more content out there than ever before

2:04:19 but then you look back at the kind of content they created thousands of years ago where there was certainly less people doing it less ways to do it less tools to do it less ways to show it off and yet those are many of the things that if you go to an art museum are on display how do you think about the quantity versus quality idea in art creation are we the most creative generation that's ever lived or is that a weird way of looking at it it both it's both it's a weird way of looking at it and it's true yeah not it's not necessarily better but but the fact that more people can create seems like only a good thing I can remember something Tom Petty said to me who in the studio and I heard a song from the 60s that I never heard before it was a it was like a a group that put out one seven inch single and just a cool psychedelic song and it was really good and no one ever heard of this group

2:05:20 and they never did anything again and Tom said you have to understand in the 1960s to go into a studio and record a record you had to be really good anyone who got to do that was really good the bar was high just to be able to get into the studio and record because we didn't have any of the tricks or technology that allowed technology to help the process so if you couldn't do it on the floor in the studio the same way that you couldn't do it live in a nightclub you couldn't do it you had to play at essentially a level that could wow a crowd or you wouldn't have the chance to ever even set foot in a recording studio so so what that tells us is the bar was high there was there's definitely less of it but because the bar was high the level of Entry was high and there's less to Wade through now I don't know if there's more great stuff than there was in the 60s but there's an exponential amount more

2:06:39 to choose from I don't know if the cream is better worse as good I can't say I will say because of streaming the nature of of streaming has changed our relationship to music whereas before when you bought an album or you bought a CD you had some you made the investment in it first of all you bought the thing this even goes back to before recorded music you bought a song you'd buy the the the the music the sheet music for a particular song that you liked and then you'd sit at the piano and play that music and sing it with your friends and then and then there was wire recording and then there was wax cylinder recording then there was the 78 and then the lp oh then the seven inch vegmy LP then uh cassettes eight tracks then CDs in all all of that whole story from the beginning up until streaming you bought the song you wanted or the collection of songs you wanted now with streaming it's more like water

2:07:53 it's ubiquitous it's always available you're paying to have access to it but you're not paying for the the the one you want you're paying for uh uh the key into the library and because of this it's changed the way we've consumed things because now even if there's something you love your favorite artist puts out a new project it doesn't have the same durability that it had when you bought the vinyl or when you bought the CD it's different when I say durability in terms of I don't mean uh stand the test of time I mean in our attention span and it's not just our It's a combination of our attention spans are getting shorter but also we're living on a conveyor belt with all of these things going by constantly so before we made the commitment that we picked the one that we wanted and we took it home and we lived with that now there's this flowing stream of things going by us so even the one that we love

2:09:13 still it still has the Disposable quality of the stream that's going by with everything in it same is true on uh with movies you know when when we were young The Godfather came out and Godfather everyone you know saw the Godfather every single person you know saw the Godfather and when it came time for the Academy Awards The Godfather wins an Academy Award and everyone you know saw it and today if you look at what's uh they're they're now 10 used to be five now there's 10 movies up for an Academy Award this year I have a feeling if you look at the list of movies at the Academy Awards this year you will have seen none of the 10 movies and nobody you know has ever seen any of the 10 movies that's a big shift that's a big shift in the way we're consuming um content and there is not a a right or wrong or better or worse it's just uh a reality of the shift I love the fact that anything that I can think of from

2:10:35 childhood from at any point in my life that I loved hearing in the past that I can be driving in my car and just think oh I want to listen to a blondie today I can listen to Blondie now I don't have to find a record store that still has the Blondie vinyl I can just hear it and I love that ability and as someone who makes things it's sad to feel like I'm I'm doing just as much work as I did when I made something that everyone heard and lived with for years and now it it feels like it comes and goes very quickly not because it's any uh different worse better it's just the the the situation has changed both both technically the situation has changed but also as people we've changed but I feel like we've changed more in relation to the technology the technology has changed us but this Rick ties perfectly back into our conversation earlier about things like information and whatnot because you know there are certain

2:11:48 things I mean let me take an example of roots the the groundbreaking TV series from the 1970s it was such a phenomenon I remember my family getting together and it was a multi-night affair uh heavily publicized lots of media attention and we would sit there every night and watch this thing and the next day everyone would be talking about it because everyone saw the same thing and it's similar with the news thing I had a conversation once with a guy in the news business like I was at the time we were talking about uh the conver the idea about shared information that we all agreed upon and we were joking about how um the information that we were consuming let's just say it was the New York Times in the 1970s that that information might not have been true but 85 percent of the public or more believed it was which gave you a shared um a shared point of reference to have discussions over the water cooler with

2:12:48 that when that goes away then all of a sudden you lose the ability to have conversations because everyone starts yelling about you know whose Source are you using because I've got my sources and you've got your sources and it's a similar thing with music because when I was growing up we all heard the same thing and it was part of your it was part of a generational experience to grow up listening to this or to that and everybody heard the same songs but there's a balkanization of content now so that you and I may have grown up in the same time period but may not have heard the same music at all that would have been pretty much impossible when you and I were growing up it's an interesting thing to think about the pros and cons of that absolutely the the phrase that I've heard used to describe it as consensus reality and at one time that phrase was actually in the book The creative act and and I realized

2:13:40 when I when I thought more about I was trying I like that term by the way consensus reality well I liked it until I understood what it meant I mean I understand what it means I love it's a great phrase but what it's describing is what you described about the New York Times in the 1970s it may have been true it may not have been true but we all agreed that this is what we're going based on and I don't really I don't think I want to live in a world of consensus reality I want to live in a world of reality as I as I see it or as I can uh based on what I can experience so and I and I don't think there's a I I don't know that we can ever know what's right or wrong so just because everyone agrees to something if it's wrong I'm not sure how helpful that is unless all it is is a capitulation of saying it feels like a a more negative version of me saying you know I don't know anything I know I don't know anything

2:15:01 but I'm not making believe in another story that I don't know to be true for the sake of being on the same page as everyone else that seems worse I feel like it's better to accept we just don't know so I'm flashing back to a conversation I had with a mentor of mine back in the news business who was teaching me the craft at the time and he was talking about something similar to this which was allowing people to create their own reality a little bit and he was explained to me why it's important in the news business to explain to people what they're seeing and what the news means and everything and he was saying in the same way that you wouldn't go into your auto mechanics garage and start saying well I have a different opinion about what this carburetor does and and you wouldn't want to tell a professional who works all the time in this that that's his livelihood and he thinks about it all

2:16:01 the time and he studied it you wouldn't want to contradict him just because you had a different opinion on the carburetor unless you knew something about it of course he said in the news business this is what we do we follow the context well he said most of the public doesn't have the context they don't know you know we were um he was a big guy in the Charles Manson case as it was unfolding and everything he knew Manson and he was talking about how if you didn't fill in the gaps for the public they didn't know the background of the story now that doesn't mean you couldn't have your own opinion on it without even knowing the background but he would have said well then why should I listen to you if you have an opinion about the story but you don't know the background and I have an opinion on the story and I do know the background and if you knew the background you your opinion might be closer to my opinion so it it's an

2:16:45 interesting I see both sides of that and you know you and I are both kind of non-conformist that way and I would never want anyone telling me what to think but I do sometimes read things by members of the public and think How could somebody get it so wrong and and I don't mind so much unless that person then is given a seat on some news commentary program and starts giving the how can that person get it so wrong idea to a bunch of other people that think that guy has it right so I mean it's an interesting dichotomy the way this stuff works in an entire Society on an entire culture-wide level true I I don't have I don't have an answer for it I don't I don't have a um I I'm starting to understand why the breakdown of all of our institutions and systems is uh like at one time I would if the punk rocker in me would feel like well that's good yeah I know and I get that way sometimes too and the grown-up in me is like hmm this

2:17:56 is messy and it's going to hurt people is it better if everyone just goes on believing the the false narrative and just you know moves along who knows you know I don't know I don't know it's an interesting situation but I know that I can't I can't really speak for anyone else I just know for me I feel more comfortable believing whatever crazy thing I believe in then uh tempering my creative spirit by following the ordinary uh tenants that were that we're told of how things work you know I'm I'm just as like I will tell you I'm not a flat earther but I'd love to hear the argument for it do you know what I'm saying I'm not I'm not uh yeah you know I don't know that I I believe in UFOs but I don't not believe in them you know I don't I don't I don't if someone tells me they were abducted by a UFO I want to hear that story I'm curious you know I I don't know what I I don't know what I know I don't know what's

2:19:12 real I don't know what to believe um I'm not an expert at anything I'm just going on and and I like when um I was I was a vegan for 22 years card carrying vegan and it was hard at the time that I was vegan it was harder being a vegan than now now there's a lot of vegans when I was a vegan do you do you you got left out of restaurants it was difficult it was a difficult way he had very little options and it was difficult and I truly believed that eating vegan was the best diet for me and best for the planet now I'm a carnivore and I mostly only me after 22 years of not having any mean and I feel better I lost a hundred and some odd pounds of of weight and I have a new experience now I when I was a vegan I probably converted 40 people to being vegan now I eat meat I'm not if you're a vegan that's fine it's it's fun you know do do what you like but I I had bad information and now I found information that is

2:20:31 that's working better for me you know I it's funny because I think if you took this to a a democratic kind of a question right and said well if we ask the public uh how do you feel about being allowed to pick and choose any sort of reality in in what you're consuming versus having a consensus reality like is that the right word consensus reality um I think what I think is a lot of people would say uh I'm for a consensus reality as long as it's my reality I want everybody to have my but I think most people if you gave them the Democratic choice would not want to give up the ability to pick and choose like an A La Carte Buffet the things that they want to believe are true and the things that aren't true now I've I've definitely been with a bunch of people in my life who are elitists about this and would say that some people like Rick Rubin and Dan Carlin should be able to do that but some people are not

2:21:32 qualified to do that and I don't know I don't know what you do with that I do think that plays into some of the idea now that you see in modern society where people think that any kind of expertise is something you don't need to have that that my view on what that carburetor does is a non-technical person and a non-car person is just as good as what a what a real qualified you know engineer who works on carburetors things but I do think that that might be the trade-off right that might be the cost of being allowed on your part or on my part to think differently that way and this is truthfully this is almost where things like the Bodhi Tree come back into the conversation the Bodhi Tree folks was a bookstore that is very hard to describe that existed in Los Angeles for a while but it was the place you went for stuff that was just you know Eastern oriented might be meditation or something but it

2:22:25 also would have stuff that was just wild I had a friend who said your job was to close your eyes spin yourself in the circle and then go wherever the dizziness LED you but the the difference would be that if you wanted to be outside the consensus reality in the 1970s or something you had to go to weird places and strange locations and sources to do that now you just have to turn on your computer and go online and it's all over the place and I can't decide if the pros outweighed the cons but I think it goes back to what you and I were saying about the difference between Asbestos and cell phones I don't I think the cat's out of the bag on that and the only way it ever goes back is with some totalitarian government like North Korea that says no no this is how it's going to be and you don't have any choice but I'm fascinated by the trade-offs I have I have a very specific example related to your carburetor

2:23:16 example um about the heart we we all learned in school how the heart works and there's a book there's a doctor named Dr Thomas Cowan who's a brilliant guy and he's definitely an alternative thinker and he's got a book called the heart is not a pump and he explains that every medical book that tells us how the heart works and everything we learned in school is wrong and that it's actually an entirely different system than than all of the heart doctors in the world think and I find it fascinating now if he's correct which is possible I'm not saying he's I'm not saying he's right I'm not saying he's wrong but it's possible what happens then if if he's right what happens now if you ban his material that's not what we teach in school that's wrong do we miss out on the possibility that actually someone realized that the Earth is not in the center of the solar system that it's actually the Sun

2:24:44 the person who discovered that was put to death for believing that no I don't think he was put to death are we talking about Galileo I don't know if it was Galileo the original heliocentric let's look up who who was the original heliocentric person oh Copernicus I don't know who that was I don't remember but but it's but I see but I see what you're saying so so it's it's the dichotomy though the dichotomy is this is that every time anyone broke the mold when it comes to the official way of thinking you're going to see one of these people that we celebrate as a great innovator and a great thinker and and they and they change the way we see science or whatever it might be the problem is is for every one of those people you also have people that were I mean my favorite one of my favorite and you you'd probably like this as an alternative way to view possibilities there are people out there who say the entire historical

2:25:40 dating system that we have is wrong and that all these things that we think happened are based on things that were mere images of each other in other words we'll think we have two separate events but it's really separate sources talking about the same thing and I read one of them once that was saying something like the Middle Ages were not really the Middle Ages they were I mean I mean in other words totally asking you to rethink the entire way we've we've constructed the linear timeline of humanity and that it's not that way now I'm fascinated with that just as a as a conceptual tool but that to me would be an example of you know the the counter example of Someone Like A Galileo or a Copernicus so for every guy who upsets the the uh the way of thinking in the correct direction there's a lot of people who proposed a bunch of stuff that looking back on it now you go well that was crazy and sometimes it's

2:26:31 difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff you know absolutely do you remember Apple's uh think different oh sure it was 84 I think it was wasn't it 1984. I um I don't remember I remember they had John and Yoko they had all different uh people who thought differently and uh changed the world because they thought differently and I'm thinking how today Apple would not have that same ad campaign and I still live in a world where they think different campaign is true yeah you do you do well but I mean to me that's what you bring to the table one of the things I mean if if I've done nine equivalent of whatever today as a record album and I'm looking to do something different and really break the mold I mean I'm looking for you I mean because that's what you're I mean that's what the and that's what the book is to me when you look at this book and this is what I mean about people who do this already for a living

2:27:28 being able to nod their head uh when they read this stuff is because without this book we're already trying to figure out some of these same Solutions and so when you bring up the problems we sit there and go I know exactly what that is um and by the way some of the solutions you come up with I really like and you know you and I have talked about uh different things like uh and by the way I don't like it as much as I thought I did when I first bought it now that I've gone through but like um um Brian Eno's a little card system and things like that um the little things like that that just make you turn things over a little bit and say hmm I I never thought about looking at it that way you're the best person I've ever met at that wow thank you it's it's um it's what's interesting to me I I always like considering what's possible and and I believe that anything's possible so taking off any restraints

2:28:28 and um removing all assumptions and starting from almost a dream like State like what could we dream what can we dream up that's um because I know if we can imagine it we can bring it into being the imagining it's the is the first piece and if we disincentivize imagining things and allowing the world to be what it what it can be instead of just what we think it is now is um it's a it's a beautiful way to to walk in the world it's the it's the world I want to live in you know you talk about and it's one of the chapters in your book planting seeds and uh and I'll tell the audience a story uh about you planting seeds so you and this is this is so different and this is part of what what you know when we talk of when Rick looks so Zen I just want to describe the difference between Rick and somebody who would be like a normal commercial uh producer or something a normal commercial producer who's working with

2:29:45 you for example which you and I were not doing but but may turn around and go um I want to show you something because it'll help us what we're currently working on whereas you take people and you took me the first time I ever saw virtual reality was with you and you said I want to show you something and we went in a car we went to somebody's house and I put on the virtual reality goggles for the first time in my life I was blown away I told you when we walked out of there I had 9 000 ideas pinging off of my brain after that moment and that was you that you plant that seed and then that seed goes in any direction and years later when somebody said to me hey have you ever thought about doing virtual reality have you ever seen virtual reality I said well funny you say that I have and I have some ideas those ideas Grew From either ground that you plowed in my psyche or a seed that you planted not for any commercial

2:30:34 reason not because we were working together and you wanted me to be better at our commercial Venture together you just Johnny appleseeded something in my mind that took root later and turned into that's why there's a thank you on the World War One immersive experience that we did because I don't feel like it would have happened without that seed and that's one of the things that you do for everybody that I find so intriguing and that makes you more of a Creator an amplifier than most of these people you work with when you give them a paycheck and say Hey you know help me out with this album make it sound differently um you're planting seeds for years down the road that may have nothing to do with you eventually I I'm intrigued with that absolutely I'm curious about things and I like the idea of sharing interesting things and and the thing that we what's funny about the um that immersive experiences I'll tell you

2:31:29 it's not something that I'm So Into it's more something that it sounded interesting and when I heard about it I I thought Dan might like this let's go check let's go check it out dude honestly it was more like it didn't give me any ideas you know kind of made me nauseous oh that's very funny so yeah so it's not it's not like I'm flying the flag for the things I love all the time although I do fly the flag for things I love but it's as much of take a look at this how did how does this how does this bounce off for you I felt it opened up an entirely New Vista of the idea of someone yeah it's fantastic it's fantastic I love that story I didn't really I didn't really know that I mean I know that we went to see to to my friend Chris milk's house and saw a very early version of the Oculus and um and I knew that you were interested but I didn't know that it actually came to anything that's great oh yeah and not

2:32:30 just that what what blew me away the most about the experience wasn't that milk was that Chris milk was a was a technologists he was looking at this from correct me if I'm wrong looking at this from a filmmaker Viewpoint and I several of the things that he said to me word for word stayed in my brain I remember him saying uh imagine every movie that's ever been remade already and I think Mutiny on the Bounty was one of the things that was brought up he said it's going to be remade and they'll remake it Star Wars they'll remake it in virtual reality he was explaining all of the filmmaker tricks I mean one of the things he said was uh if you're making a movie and the killers coming down the stairs and the family doesn't know the killers coming down the stairs you Pan the camera to the killer coming down the stairs but he goes in a movie that you're making with this technology you're going to have to figure out a way

2:33:21 to create a reason for you to turn your head and look up there and I just remember being fascinated with the difference between a way somebody who was trying to make a game or somebody was looking at this compared to just putting tools new tools in the hands of somebody who thought of themselves as an already existing art genre purveyor and and I mean like I said when we walked out of that house my brain was pinging with so many different ideas and and I always feel like that when I leave you you're an amplifier in that respect and um and I think that's why people are drawn to working with you because I think they walk away and go wow it's a completely different lens through which to view things and not your lens you open up a Vista to a wide and that's the difference too if I'm going and working with Phil Spector on a record album Phil's going to have Phil's Viewpoint Rick doesn't you don't do that you you

2:34:16 open up Vistas that that create chances for the artists themselves to re-see what they're doing and I think that that's not only is that a skill but it's it's a well that's why you would write a book on creativity I guess is what it boils down to I'm so glad you like the book that really it means it means the world I do well it it just it speaks to us because we do all this stuff all the time and you put into words things with we just have them some of this stuff is and that's what I think by the way that some people maybe read it and say well it sounds a little woo-woo try explaining this yeah try explaining inspiration right try explaining where inspiration comes from I mean the entire idea the entire creative act and the book is called the creative act the way of being the entire creative act is itself if you think about it absolutely it's magic it's a weird weird magic that's a good way to put it

2:35:12 that's what it is any other questions that you had my friend you had some things written down I'll I'll actually I'll ask you one last question in closing um I have two I'm gonna ask them both although I have a feeling I'm gonna I'll I'll read to you both of them and then you decide which one you want to answer okay all right yeah or if you want to answer them both it's fine but it's good I think this could take some time um okay no worries first one is this is rooted in in your newest episode is asking our today's superheroes yesterday's gods that's the first question and then the other question is how was the world different before land ownership hmm yeah those are very so so um give me the first one again the first one is are today's superheroes yesterday's gods so once so there's a historical theory that many of these people in history that are usually the words they use are demigods so you look at somebody like a

2:36:31 Heracles you know Hercules uh he was never a God right he was a demigod the son of a God and uh and and the idea is is that some of these people may very well have been uh real human beings who just did such big things that they were deified so and and literally deified in the case of an Alexander the Great who was deified Julius Caesar who was deified like you go read the the Roman accounts of of Julius Caesar after his death and they say Julius Caesar the god um because the things that they did seemed almost god-like the accomplishments and so I certainly think that there are some demigods who Once Upon a Time were real people so I mean I think I don't even think that's arguable to some degree I think that's true I don't know if that means Thor and um Zeus and all those people were once upon a time people but certainly like a Heracles could be or some of these other ones so I think the answer to that is we

2:37:31 may never know but it seems likely what was the second one oh the land ownership one but but also the question was like the role in society that superheroes play like uh Aquaman is you had to pick Aquaman just random man first one that came to mind um or uh Captain America or Superman or whoever whoever the or Batman did those in in the mines of young people do those characters fill the same role as The Olympian gods for example in Greece I don't think so but what I would say is that I think they so so I'll watch those films sometimes like a superhero film or or and I'll find myself getting almost Misty uh emotionally about it and the reason I'm getting Misty is because sometimes you'll see them do something in the in the film or the movie or whatever and you'll think oh my goodness wouldn't it be great if someone like this actually existed because when you look at you know you and I talked about

2:38:58 problems in the political system and and with humanity and all these kinds of things sometimes you think to yourself wouldn't it be great if something existed that could cut through all the BS and just solve this right Superman comes in and just fixes it right whatever there's I think there's a human longing to be able to wish that there was a solution like that read a solution that saw one answer to a variety of intractable unsolvable problems and I think superheroes especially when they're giving bad guys or evil or or they're do I think there's something very satisfying about that I think it plays into uh the history of media all the way back to at least Greece and probably oral traditions and tribal stories from way back where the good triumphs over evil there's just this feeling so often that evil gets away with evil and there's a sense you get almost misty-eyed when the right outcome

2:39:52 happens right and good triumphs and the bad guys get their due and the bad thing that was happening is solved and no longer is is hurting people so I mean I think there's that element of wouldn't it be nice wouldn't it be nice if that if that was there in terms of taking the place of God's I the reason I wouldn't say so is because a lot of these deities in pre-modern times if they were superheroes they would definitely sometimes be anti-heroes or flawed heroes or or um my favorite comic book superhero for lack of a better word in all the comic books was the guy that just appeared in the most recent Marvel film obviously very differently but it was a name or the Submariner and he's one of the the earliest um superheroes in Marvels it was like him and the Human Torch back in 1939 and what I liked about the guy was that he was a third Force he wasn't on your side he wasn't on the bad guy's side and

2:40:52 depending on what he was doing you might see him as good or evil and I loved the nuance and the character but but to be larger than life I think that's the attraction of the Gods but I think if you look at someone like Thor or even someone like the Greek gods sometimes they were being Captain America sometimes they were being Namer the Submariner and every now and then they were being Dr Doom right so so I think I think there's an element in the superhero thing now especially with ones like Superman and whatnot where there's just undeniably good and I don't think most of these um these uh uh these these gods or the various groups of gods I think they were much more amorphous characters and much more morally ambiguous than our superheroes are so I'm not sure I would go there the the gods of the past are are much less pure good than say the Christian God is today right um the Christian God today is more like

2:41:55 Superman the gods of the past much more morally ambiguous like a Submariner maybe um you had some thoughts about land ownership that's very interesting yeah what was what was what was the world like before landownership how did land ownership happen and how did it change the world so I actually read a lot about this because it's all part of my attempts to get to the nature of war and when you start studying human conflict you realize that it may predate Humanity so so the the path of studying this leads you further and further back in time until you're dealing with people I mean I think you could go back to neander at all times and you're talking about war um I'm actually studying primates now and seeing the roots of this um so when you talk about something like land ownership let's talk about two different kinds the modern kind where somebody gives you a title to some property and that that

2:42:58 means it's your property and if somebody invades your property you can hold up the land ownership and and seek redressive grievances from the authorities versus a tribe of pre-modern humans that considers this area to be their grounds and this is and you're probably talking about personal land ownership too probably more than this but but but the idea that that you that this is your farm that this is your territory I'm not sure there ever was a time when that didn't exist now there may be cultures that didn't believe in land ownership there's certainly um uh some of the Native American cultures have believed that it's ridiculous to think about how can you own this guy how can you own the mountains but I think you know I mean there are ancient peoples that that not only own their own areas but they'll they'll dig moats around it put Stakes up around it I I'm I'm not sure there ever was a time

2:43:56 uniformly even when we were hunters and gatherers that we didn't consider this or that area to be ours but it was hours not because through buying it but because you had it and you put a mode around it you wouldn't let other people come to it it wasn't like you had a deed to the land let me reverse the question what do you think about that Rick I don't I want to learn about it it's fascinating to me it feels like um a lot a lot changed and um the reason I'm asking more has to do with um the way animals move over the landscape and how when we started boxing off areas or creating uh creating cities we've displaced the wildlife and it's really impacted the whole ecosystem in a huge way that that's why that's where I was going with it but but I'm I'm just curious about it because it feels like no I wanna I wanna I wanna explore that because I've been thinking a lot about that too it's a great

2:45:04 subject to bring up and I'll and I'll tell you how I'm thinking about it so I have some weird interests like you do um and one of the things that I I find fascinating are uh orangutans the endangered species the Apes from Borneo and Sumatra and if you go look at what's happening to the orangutan it's it's a disaster and it's a disaster because the these are the largest animals that operate in in the high trees in the world right the biggest the largest um and their habitat is being destroyed now if you go look at what life is like in a place like Borneo it's like a lot of places it's quite poor and the people often live in the equivalent of shacks with uh with uh sheet metal roofs and stuff like that and and so to tell those people that they should not go chop down the forest nearby which allows them to potentially feed their family um seems to me to be something that most of us would would bristle if somebody

2:46:09 told us to do the equivalent in our society here and yet at the same time the re the entire planet right the collective planet is losing both the orangutans and the rainforest the jungle there which is bad for all of us so how does a modern interconnected Global Society deal with something like that it's like when a country like China or maybe India gets angry at the developed world for saying that they can't develop in the same way that we did right why can't they use coal to to bring themselves up to a higher level of industry and living standards we did but we used it at a time where maybe we weren't as aware of the collective damage as they are as they are now so you have to say to yourself if we in the rest of the world want jungle and rainforest because it's good for all of us and if we want orangutans what do we have to say to these poor people of Borneo um we're going to do for them to make

2:47:07 this worth their while and this is where I think you know it's funny because the most interesting political questions Rick are the ones that that run at 90 degree angles from what we want to believe so I I want to believe that our country for example can be autonomous and that we only worry about what Americans need and want because that's why we voted our legislators and all these kinds of things but in an interconnected world it's very difficult and you may have to turn around and go well we may have to you know globally have some kind of tax see this runs against my political beliefs but you may say we may have to have some kind of tax that that compensates people from like whether it's Brazil in the Amazon or whether it's Borneo that compensates these people so that they don't do something we don't want them to do but if if we were in those shoes 100 years ago we would claim it our sacred right to do

2:48:03 and so I feel like because you brought up the land ownership question as it relates to things like the animals and all that kind of stuff I think as this becomes a more acute problem I think we're being faced with some Stark choices and we may not like something like a Global Tax to pay off people so they don't cut down rainforests but at a certain point that might become a matter of life and death it already is for the orangutans yeah and it might be um what's interesting about it is if you look at what cutting down the trees generates to offset that is probably not um it's not that big of a deal do you know what I'm saying yeah it's like I think the the the bigger problem becomes uh just the corruption in the system is such that everything gets Amplified and um middlemend it and uh yes yes and you see that in Africa now I mean uh uh uh forget orangutans for a minute let's go to like chimpanzees

2:49:05 um in in Africa they kill chimpanzees for bush meat right and you say to yourself oh my gosh you're killing this endangered species for bush meat but that's a sign of how poor and how needy these people are right and how little you know my grandfather was a huge fan of Baja Mexico and he used to go down there once a year and bring all kinds of goods to the really poor part of Mexico and he used to say it is so poor down there that the amount of things that it it would take on our part to make a huge difference in their lives would seem almost insignificant to us but if you give this stuff to them to change their life and some middleman corrupt government steals it all well then your money was wasted and you didn't help the people you want to help so I think there's some stuff we could unpack here in another conversation agreed and and when you when you make the suggestion of some sort of attacks

2:50:00 my concern is it would be better for a person of means to take on this challenge as opposed to it paying it in tax to handle the situation and the reason I say that is I'm I don't have faith that the money that we pay in tax necessarily goes to the things that we want it to go for I agree with you 100 100 now let me suggest a different a different um a different way of doing it so I always love to go look at the earlier models and if you go look at how they were doing things in ancient Rome for example um one of the things he was both an expectation but also um something that people did where you would have a very very rich person who would solve some public problem or fill some public need let's I'm just randomly just throwing something out there let's say the sewage system is broken down in your town and the wealthiest person in the town fixes the sewage system at his own at his own expense then the payoff

2:51:05 for that it wasn't just meant to be something that was uh uh uh you feel good about yourself later there there would be statues put up to the person there would be celebrations of the per in other words there was a mutually beneficial circumstance where everybody got something for doing this right the the super rich person hardly noticed the expenditure the new sewage system got built he gets a statue or she gets a statue put up to to recognize their efforts and no one had to be taxed so I mean there's multiple ways maybe of doing this and I think you can find examples today with super rich people who sometimes do stuff like that interesting sounds good

2:51:54 my thanks to Rick Rubin for coming on the program today his new book is called the creative act a way of being and as I said I find myself nodding my head as I read it because so many of the things that he talks about are things that we deal with when we're putting together our work see if you don't feel the same way and I will say that if you ever wonder what it was like for all those musical acts and people that were working with Rick over the eras to work with Rick to talk with him to be with him to get a sense of you know what sort of information advice and perspective he's sharing I find that the book is a pretty good replication of that so why don't you check it out if you're interested in creativity Rick Rubin or any of the things we talked about today and everyone stay safe and thanks for joining us

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP24 Manifesting the Muse with Rick"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Rick Rubin (Guest).

What is "EP24 Manifesting the Muse with Rick" about?

This content explores the nature of creativity, drawing on historical perspectives and personal insights through the lens of a quote attributed to Mozart about the spontaneous flow of ideas. It delves into various interpretations of creativity, discussing its significance in human civilization and the metaphysical aspects that suggest inspiration may come from a higher source or the muses of…

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

15 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Rick Rubin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Tetragrammatin, Book Soup, Neil Strauss, Alexander the Great. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP24 Manifesting the Muse with Rick"?

The episode runs 2 h 53 min; the transcript is about 29,515 words in 165 timestamped sections.

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