The Daily Stoic - Rick Rubin on The Creative Act Part One

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

In the first of a two-part interview, Ryan speaks with Rick Rubin about his new book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, the importance of allowing creativity to happen rather than willing it into existence, working with the unique facets of the artist’s ego, the importance of changing up the way that you do things, the phases of the creative process, and more.Rick Rubin is a renowned American record producer and the co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, founder of American Recordings, and former co-president of Columbia Records. He has produced albums for a wide range of acclaimed artists, including the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, Public Enemy, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Audioslave, Rage Against the Machine, and Johnny Cash. He has won nine Grammys and has been nominated for 12 more. He has been called "the most important producer of the last 20 years" by MTV and was named on Time's list of the "100 Most Influential People in the World".Part two of Ryan’s interview with Rick will air on February 22nd for subscribers, and March 1st for non-subscribers.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short Passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are,

and also to find peace in wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. Hey, it's Ryan Holliday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. Because it was like seven or eight years ago now, I was out in Los Angeles to see my friend, Neil Strauss, doing some marketing work on what's actually one of my favorite books of his, The Truth, which I think was selling the pain and porch to a great book about relationships. And so I was there to see Neil, we're supposed to have lunch. I get there and he's like, okay, we're gonna go to lunch,

but my friend Rick's gonna be there. I was like, great, right? When you're supposed to meet someone, and then they're like, oh, this other person's crashing the lunch, you never know how it's gonna go. But it's not like I had a choice in the matter. And so we pull up at some restaurant in Malibu. I think we take a golf cart, nails golf cart there.

And it turns out I very much know who his friend Rick is. I just never would have assumed that that's who would be dropping into lunch. It was the one and only Rick Rubin, probably the greatest record producer of all time, other than the fictional Bruce Dickinson of Blue Oyster Cole Fam, of course. But Rick pops up, Rick is a familiar face to me because I've seen like every episode of VH1s Behind the Music, and I watched the Jay-Z 99 Problems video, of course. And he is an iconic guy. He's both an iconic image, but also an iconoclastic artist.

He produced some of John and Cash's best work. He helped popularize the Beastie Boys and Run DMC in El O'Cool J. He helps the Red Hot Chili Peppers come up with Under the Bridge, one of the great songs of all time. He's worked with Rage Against the Machine in Lincoln Park and Erosmith and the Chicks, or formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, Neil Diamond, Tom Petty, one of the greatest forces in the history of music. And such a positive force in that it's not about him, it's about the work,

the creative work that he helped those people do. And as it happens, you'll hear in today's episode, Rick, and I talked about the book that has now just come out at that meeting, both he and I were working on creative projects. And I apparently didn't click about either of them, but it's so funny that this is all come full circle now. And I'm excited not just to bring you this interview, but tell you about his amazing book, the creative act, a way of being, you know, Rick could have very easily written

like a celebrity tell all, a sort of a music memoir. And instead he wrote a book about something I think is much more timeless. And in other sense, less timely, like less salacious, less provocative, less newsworthy. But I think more deeply relevant and important. And I really enjoyed the book. We do a deep dive into that and to philosophy

in this wonderful episode of the podcast that was supposed to go an hour. And instead, it went two hours. So I'm bringing it to you in a part one and a part two so you can fully digest it. And I think you're really going to like this interview. You can follow Rick on Instagram and on Twitter. He has this great account repost basically one sort of creative quote a day, which he then deletes in a sort of very mandala fashion. It's, I love following it.

You can follow him at Rick Rubin. You can check out the creative act of way of being, which we carry here at the Painted Porge. And you can also sign up for all things Rick at tetragramaton.com. That's T-E-T-R-A-G-R-A-M-M-A-T-O. And here's part one of my interview with Rick Rubin. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music

or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, I was gonna tell you as we get started, so my youngest is turning four in a month or two. And we were in the car, I was taking him somewhere, and he was like, I wanna listen to something very loud. And I said, okay, and I put on system of a down. And Chop Sui, and it was like something went off in his head, like it was like, you know,

the first time you try ice cream, or the first time you realize something exists that you didn't know existed before. And it was like, oh, you like heavy metal. Okay. It's something genetic in it, watching it click was very fascinating to me. That's awesome. And that's a great song where even if you're an experienced heavy metal fan grown up and

hear that, if you're not prepared for it, there isn't anything else quite like it. Totally. Yes, it's, even if you listen to heavy metal your whole life, it's a different kind of heavy metal. It's definitely radical. Well, I was, I loved the book. I thought the book is amazing.

I was very excited to read it. And if I could summarize it for people, tell me if you think this is right. But I felt like the embodiment of this book or your creative approach, you've read Zen in the Art of Art, I'm sure, right? I don't know if I've ever read that. I know I've had the book, but I don't know if I've ever read it. It's a wonderful, fascinating book. In any way, he talks about the sort of Zed approach, archery, obviously, it's in the title. And he talks about not letting go of the arrow, like deliberately or intentionally. He says,

the string should fall from your hands, like ripe fruit from the tree. And that's what I kept thinking of as I was thinking about your approach to the creative process. Is that in any way in the ballpark? It sounds great, I hope so. I love the way it sounds. Yeah, because the Buddhist talk about this idea of willful will.

When we're too intentional about what we're trying to do, instead, it's like the difference between pursuing something and setting something up to ensue. I feel like your approach is how do you allow creativity to ensue rather than consciously trying to be the thing. Yes, it's about allowing it to happen. Setting the stage, inviting it to happen, and also recognizing that we're not in control. So, respectful and patiently await whatever's going to come.

Do you believe in the muses then or something sort of otherworldly that visits us? I think there's something otherworldly going on. I don't know if I would view it as visiting us. I think it's always there. It's more like a frequency that we can tune into. And sometimes we can tune into it. And sometimes we can't imagine the old days of AM radio when you would try to tune in a radio station that would faintly come in. And especially if you were driving, let's say you're driving across country and you didn't really know know what stations were where, and you're just kind of hunting around on the dial,

and then you kind of hear some noise, and then you can get something to kind of come in. Sometimes it's conflicting with another station, and it's like that. There's a frequency out there of information that when we're lucky, we can tap into it and and it's something you can get better at the more you practice it. I love that metaphor because is it one of the most wonderful feelings in the world to go back to when that was technologically how we got music or talk radio or whatever when when you when you fully like fully connected to a station, and it just came in super loud, like you just got it,

and it went from Fuzz to surround sound music. I love that feeling. It's great, and I can remember when I first got a digital a radio where you could put in the number of the station instead of it just being an analog dial and the excitement of really being able to lock right in on the station easily was exciting too. It didn't make it less, you know, sometimes when you have to work hard to get something, it's better. I didn't mind being able to get the music directly at that time.

And then when you think about that metaphor you mentioned to doing it in the car, it's like you're, you lock into it, but then you're moving. And so it never lasts for very long. Like you're driving across the country, you tap into a station, but you only get maybe an hour or two with each station before you've gotten too far away from it, and now you've got to find the next one. Because there is something ephemeral, I feel like, about tapping into the creative process. It doesn't last.

No, absolutely true. And it comes and goes. It can come very quickly, and it can go very quickly. And there's an energy that comes up when there's a band playing live in the room and we're playing a song over and over again and it's okay, nothing special. And then when it does start becoming special, once you realize what's happening, it's a little scary because we don't know what changed to get this to happen. And we don't know how long it's going to last.

And once you've noticed it, in some ways, it's harder because now we're thinking about it. I don't want this to stop. Where when you fall into it, it just sort of comes. Sometimes it comes out of boredom. You play the same thing over and over again. And you kind of stop thinking about it. And then at some point, it starts jelling in this way

that you can't explain because technically, it's not much different than it was two minutes ago. No one in the room can say this is what's different. It just goes from pretty good to transcendent. And in those moments, once you realize it's transcendent, there is this fear of, I hope we can make it through the whole piece. You, you talking the book, I guess it's a John Lennon quote, but you said there's a sort of a rule of like, when you start a song, try to finish it that day, is that sort of like, you've got, you landed on the station, you know, like, download as much as you can while you, while you can.

Yeah, I heard that linen quote a long time ago, and I didn't, um, fully understand the power of what he was talking about until recently from, from working on things for a long period of time. In the early days, I would have thought of that as more of a work ethic point of, if you start something, finish it. But over time, I've come to realize that when you're in a particular groove of energy when there's either you're getting an information download, or whether you're playing something in a particular way,

if you come back later to try to recreate that, it's not so easy. And it may actually be impossible. Earlier in my career, I would focus more on the content in the writing stages. And then in the performance stage or in the recording stage, it was only about documenting this thing that we already wrote. And I still like that method, but now I'm much more attentive to recording all of the moments leading up to that quote unquote performance time because often the first time that it's played can never be recaptured and it's actually better the first time. Before I was still trying to get it right, now I'm not trying to get it right anymore.

I'm trying to get the one. And sometimes the one, I would say even in those days though, I would listen back. We'd work on a song, we'd work on the arrangement. We'd play it many times, and then maybe we'd have a revision. Let's change this part and this part. And then we would change the two parts, and then we would keep playing, keep playing, keep playing. And let's change now later in the day,

let's change this part and this part, we change those parts. And it keeps getting refined as we work over the course of the day. And sometimes we would listen back to one of those earlier takes before it had those refinements and say, it's just better. It's just better.

Even though it doesn't have those details we liked that came later, you give up the detail for the whole in that case. Also sometimes we'd see, okay, can we keep that original take, that magical take from earlier before it had the revisions and can we incorporate the revisions into it through editing or another way? Sometimes we could, sometimes we couldn't.

But I came to learn it was less about getting all the parts right than getting the overall energetic feeling right that has more power than any of the individual elements. The um as Gen Z says it's all about vibe right I think when I think about your your work I think of you as like a master of vibe. Do you feel like your superpower is or your special ability is to determine do you feel like your superpower is or your special ability is to determine what is the, like, could the average person tell the difference between the takes that you're talking about, or is this a skill that's been refined for you over thousands and thousands of hours? Both. I think the average person could tell, and The thousands of hours make you better at it, but but it's it's pretty apparent. It's pretty apparent We it's not uncommon

For us to sit around in the room with all the people involved and Listen and we say okay. We have three different versions. Let's listen We listen all three and then everyone looks at each other's like okay, we have three different versions. Let's listen. We listen all three. And then everyone looks at each other, it's like, okay, it's version two. Like every, it's not like anyone, or someone might say, well, I thought it was version two

up until the end. And then at the end version one might be better. Let's check that out. And then we do check that out. So, and it's, it's never, I would say it's almost never my word. It's the feeling in the room and it becomes very clear that that's the one that just has the feeling. There could also be, you know, in the case of where you played something 50 times, there could be one version that really works in a particular way, slow moody version and one works that same

song that works in a more energetic, lively way. And there could be some question about which is the better, both of those are great at what they are, which is the better way to go. And that's more of a taste issue. I feel like I've gotten lucky with my books. I know some people who sort of first book came out and it sold right out of the gate, millions and millions of copies. I feel like I got lucky in that mind of sort of steadily sold and have sold more year over year,

but that sort of transformative, immediate life changing upper echelon, it's probably very hard to continue creating and to not become self-conscious about what you do once that's happened. Absolutely. We see it happen to artists all the time. is historically in the record business, there's the sophomore slump of you put out a first grade album. You have you've had your whole life to write your first album. And then you have this little window to write your second album. Now all and he went from nobody watching and nobody caring to all of a sudden the focus is on you. and no one's really prepared for it. So it's difficult for everyone. And then when you have great success, again, who do you talk to about it?

The appearance don't know about that. You're all of your trusted advisors don't really know about that, and the ones that do on an industry level have different motivations than you as an artist. So it's very difficult to get any helpful information on how to deal with it. Yeah, I imagine Ego hits you on both extremes there. So the Ego of like I did it, I have the Midas Touch, you know, everything I do is gold and amazing. That's like sort of an artistic death sentence. But so is the, I can never measure up, I can't do it again.

Everyone's watching, you know, it's impossible. You have to find some way to be present and both very committed, and also as you talk about in the book, kind of detached from all of that external stuff. to talk about in the book, kind of detached from all of that external stuff. Absolutely. And I recommend artists to engage or re-engage with why they want to do it in the first place and really find their love when it goes from the thing you love to the thing you do for work. It's an issue. And to get back to that, I do this because I love this more than anything. I do this not because I got a good review, not because I sold a lot of copies. I do this because this is what I do. It's what I've always wanted to do.

And I'm going to continue doing it with the same head that I went into it in the first place that allowed me to be successful in the first place. So it's helpful to remember what gets you there. And usually what gets you there is the first thing that gets snuffed out in success. Yeah, yes. Cheryl Straid once talked about the difference between writing and publishing, and I think about that all the time. I tell me. I love writing. That's what I got into this for. Publishing is the the byproduct of writing. And if you're thinking about the final stage, you are probably neglecting the important stage,

which is what you would call the creative act. You're not being in the creative mode. You are thinking about the packaging and the position. Not that that's not important, but you're thinking about publishing, which is necessary, but not sufficient. Absolutely, and there's a time for it, but it's not when you're writing. I would say it's never the time to do it when you're writing. Not that, not that, sometimes it's okay. It's never the time to do it when you're writing. That when you're in the writing stage,

there can be no other concerns other than what's the most interesting thing to me here and now. That's all. And then when it's done and there are no more creative decisions to be made, and the book is written and you have, it may not be the final final final version of the book, but where you know exactly what the book is, you've said what you want to say and you feel good about it. That would be the first time to think about, okay, what could a cover look like? What could the marketing look like? Who's the audience for this?

If you start thinking who the audience is before you start writing, it's going to really muddy the water. Our friend Neil Strauss, maybe he got this from you, but he told me, this is before I'd even written my first book, I think he said, the first draft is just for you. So he's like, don't think about what the publisher is gonna allow you to say or not, what legally you're allowed to say,

what's gonna get you in trouble or not, what legally you're allowed to say, what's going to get you in trouble or not, what's going to do well or not. You got to do the first draft wholly from a place of passion and love and immediacy. Then afterwards, once you're looking at it, you can go, hey, maybe I don't want to say that about that person. It'll really hurt their feelings or maybe, hey, this is too much this way or that way. You can get that in the polish, but you shouldn't be... Anytime you're thinking about what other people are going to think while you're doing it,

you're neglecting doing the thing. That's great. I didn't know he said that and I didn't... He didn't get that from me, but it's beautiful and accurate. It's just a like-minded approach. It also is soon as you get into while you're making something, getting into any kind of self-censorship, you're really creating a dangerous, it's like you feel like you can't be yourself. You know, you can't be you. And that's a very dangerous place to be for a creative person. Yes. Well, Yogi Barris said,

you can't hit and think at the same time, you know. And I think when you're self-sensoring or you're worried about this or that, what you're doing is thinking and thus not hitting. You go. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the

world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Cotopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discussed their entire journey from day one,

and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery. So my favorite story in the book is the story about the man in Calcutta drawing water from the well. And somebody comes along and tells him,

there's a more efficient way to do this, use this sort of pulley system and he declines. I think about that because I started as a research assistant, so I learned like somebody else's methodology of writing, I learned Roberts, and so I do all my research on on no cards, like these are my no cards, so I do them all by hand,

and it is so inefficient and so painstaking and my hand writing gets worse every year because this is basically the only place that I write things by hand other than, you know, our interview notes. But there's definitely tools that would be better than the way that I do it. But there's something special and sacred to me about the way that I do it. And I loved that story. It's great. And I would say the book would recommend that you try one of the new methods as well.

Yes. Just because yes, but any time you get attached to a method for a romantic reason, you know it works. Yes. And I'm not suggesting using another method because it's easier or saves you time. But maybe by experimenting with the other method, you learn something new about your process that you didn't know. And that's always good. It's great to refresh yourself all the time. It happens anyway. I mean, we're not, you're not the same person who wrote your first book. Sure. So if you're using exactly the same methods

that that guy was using, might not be optimal. No, it's changed a ton, but I would clarify. Your book is full of paradoxes. I think much more Eastern than Western, your book sort of embrace of paradox instead of sort of singular permanent truth. Because then you tell the story from about the man in Calcutta and then you have this wonderful little poem on page 104 and you say beware of the assumption that the way you work is the best way simply because it's the way you've done it before. And both of those are true.

you've done it before. And both of those are true. Yes, that's negative capability. Keith said, the mark of genius was the ability to have two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time. Beautiful. And I feel like there is something inherently paradoxical about art, which is like sometimes you do it this way, sometimes you need to do it this way. Sometimes it's all about deliberate practice and putting your ass in the seat and doing it, and then other times the idea comes to you in the shower. Yes, and I think you can extend that beyond creativity to everything in life. I don't know that there's a right way to do anything. I think there's the way we know, and there's maybe a better way, and maybe we'll find out

someday. Do you feel like your methodology or how you think about time in the studio has changed? I mean, you've been doing it 40 years, 50 years? How long? Something like 40 years. How much has your methodology changed? I don't think it changed so much. The main difference is in the early days, I didn't understand as well what was and wasn't important. So I probably put more effort into things that meant less in the early days. I spent a lot of time in the recording studio over the course of my life. For the first 20 years, I was in studio for, you know, 12 hours a day, at least six if not seven days a week. And in those days,

usually in New York, it rooms with no windows and just like no life. Yeah. And now I aim to spend like from maybe five hours is about the amount of time that I can really focus with all of my attention. Whereas before, because we were in the studio, we felt like we were working, even when we weren't working. So it's like you get to the studio and you order lunch.

And you, you know, it's like you're, it was more like clocking in time. Yeah. And now I don't clock in time. And we make it a point we eat before we get there. We work like, like it's a military operation, and we get out as soon as we can. Not because we don't love it, but because there's life, there is life beyond.

And if we get on a roll and something starts going good, we could work all night. If that's what it takes, but it's not the standard. The standard is we come in, It's not the standard. The standard is we come in, we know what we're doing, we get it done. And then if something's magical, we're not gonna let it disappear.

You know, we're not gonna let that go. Yeah, I've worked on a couple of books for these different rappers over the years. And it changed my understanding of rap music when, you know, they're talking about grinding in the studio and being there till three in the morning, and then spending time with them and realizing that they got to the studio at 1 a.m. though, right? Like, or they got there at four, but everyone played video games and shot the ship for five hours and then went in the booth. It's the difference between working and working is one we often gloss over, I think, in all domains.

And there's also, I could make an argument for the opposite as well. I got to work with AC DC at one point. And and they were very professional at what they did. And they spent a great deal of time sitting on their chairs in their position where they were going to be playing drinking coffee and smoking and not playing. Yeah. And and I can remember I was younger then and more impatient and feeling like, why are we not playing? And they knew exactly what they were doing. Because they knew, okay, we're going to put, it's almost like doing a sprint, you know, we're gonna put all of ourselves into this thing and we can do maybe three sprints, but we can't do 30 sprints, they won't be as good. We can do three sprints and then we can sit and talk and drink coffee for two hours and then maybe we could do two more sprints.

And I remember being frustrated feeling like, what are we doing here? We're here all day and no music's happening. And I would look into the control, I was in the control room, they were in the live room and I would look through and I would like point at my watch and Malcolm Young, the guitar player who's really the leader of the band would hold up his cigarette and he's like point to his cigarette. It's like let me just finish my cigarette

and then they still wouldn't play for another hour. It was always like uh where let's have a cup of tea you know yeah i was speaking of paradox there's the there's an ison hour quote that i love where he says plans are worthless but planning is everything and it may be that all of the all of the different methodologies are you know totally inconsequential or impossible to replicate. But what matters is that you have one that you do. It's almost like a placebo. Like what matters is you have a thing that you stick with and you can change it. But what matters is that you have something,

you can't just be winging it. Agreed. I think having your way to do things, I know if I don't set a schedule for myself of what I'm gonna do during the day, I end up not doing very much. And if I set a schedule, I'll do everything on the schedule. Sometimes begrudgingly, but I will get through

it. And I think if we put our, one of the things I recommend in the book is like creating the equivalent of creating office hours, having a schedule to work, we say, I'm going to sit down for this. It could be 20 minutes, it could be three hours up to you. What that window is, how you want to do it, but make a commitment show up every day. And then there's no excuse, regardless of whether anything gets made during that window. You're not waiting for the right moment to start. You're starting and you're doing it every day

and you're doing it at the same time every day and you're building the habit of, I'm gonna sit here every day, even if it's just to sit here and be bored, something eventually, something good will eventually come from that practice, whatever it is. Do you know Stephen Pressfield? I do.

His line, you gotta put your ass where your heart wants to be. I love that. That's great, that's great. He's great, His books are great. Oh, they're the best. They're best. You know what's amazing about a book like Gates of Fire is that it was only like, I don't know, 20 years old or 30 years old.

But it feels like it's like a thousand years old. Like when somebody does something, I guess even the war of art. But when somebody does something and it's both very timely, but also without a place in time, that's something incredible about what art can do, where it can be everywhere and nowhere, current and timeless at the same time. Those are the things that speak to me the most when I can hear a piece of music that I love music that is outside of time. And it can, and one of the things about using

organic instruments is a piano sounds like a piano a hundred years ago and it sounds like a piano today. Sure, and it'll sound like a piano in a hundred years. If you use the latest sounds, the newest sounds, the sounds of today, then tomorrow they'll sound like the sounds of yesterday. So it's a very delicate line to work with the newest of sounds, because it can end up sounding very dated. If you listen to music from the 80s, invariably it sounds like that's the music of the 80s, because of it just has a dated sound.

And that really is more because of technology than anything else. Yeah, to me, one of my favorite like timeless songs is The Night The Drove Old Dixie Down. It's like if you told me that that song was actually written during the Civil War, I would have believed you. Yeah, could have been. Could have been. And it might even be based on something from then. Well, I think it is.

But it's like, how did you actually tap into what feels like the reincarnated spirit of a thing? I mean, they're not even American, they're Canadian. Like the guy that wrote that song is Canadian and he's somehow capturing, you know, the southern feeling of defeat in the Civil War and managing to do it 100 plus years after the fact. That's what's magical about art when you manage to commune with spirits or a feeling that is no longer there. It's also interesting that when we think of folk music, we think of from Bob Dylan on, like that window, that's like the folk revival.

But that's a revival. That was a modern interpretation of old music. So even the music from the 60s, it was new music attempting to be like the music from the 1920s or the 1890s. Yes. And the best music usually has a historical, it's rooted in something timeless. And that the, when it's really exciting is when it sounds like it's timeless and it sounds like you've never heard anything like it before.

That's radical. It doesn't sound like a copy of something from the past. It sounds like this has the the roots and lineage of something from the past, but it's made into something radically new. made into something radically new. And an example of that would be there's a pianist from Iceland, Vickinger Olufsen, who's a he's on Deutsche Grammaphon classical, classical, young classical pianist. And if you listen to his, his music, he can play Bach pieces or Debussy pieces, and there's something about it where it's those same pieces. They're 100 or hundreds of years old. But when you hear his recordings of them, it's a modern record. Now, he's still playing a piano. It's not like he's

playing a modern instrument, but the way he approaches it, both from a rhythmic perspective in the way he plays, and in a technical perspective from the way it's recorded, it's modern and it's great. It's really refreshing. great. It's really refreshing. Yeah, I um, I felt that with um, one of my favorite songs that I think you've worked on, which is the the Johnny Cash Streets of Laredo song. That's like, that's what? Like a hundred plus year old song. And it feels, it feels like it's both very old and then it feels somehow newer and And then it feels somehow newer and more timeless than all the old versions. Yeah, a lot of the power of the Johnny Cash stuff is his ability to inhabit a song and tell a story in a way where when he says the words, you just believe him. It's just it's real. So in the past, maybe it was a singer singing, so the streets of Laredo, but when Johnny Cash sings it, it's not a singer singing it. He's telling you his story, the streets of Laredo in that case.

He's telling you his story, the streets of Laredo, in that case. Yeah. And I feel like to go to your point about sort of old, the timeless instruments versus the sort of more technological ones. The Trent Resner version of Hurt is obviously an amazing song. It's deeply personal. It's dark and beautiful and all these things. It would be a great, one of the greatest songs ever on its own. But then there's something about the cash version that strips it down

and removes whatever places it in some kind of scene or moment in time by maybe going to the more timeless instruments. I think it's a combination of that is that the Trent version was a modern record and the Johnny version was essentially a traditional record. But more than that is the nature of the lyrics and the sentiment of what's being said, you know, looking back over your life with regret when you're 20 years old has won valence. And when you're 70 years old talking about looking back over your life and all you see as regret, it has a different, it's much worse.

So the, so the, from a lyrical, even, and the song was selected for that reason that the lyrics had such great power, but the idea of a grown-up singing those lyrics versus a young person singing those lyrics changes how much power those words have. I'm glad you brought that up because it actually illustrates something really beautiful and powerful in the book. You're talking about how the personal is the universal. How could it be? It makes no sense that a deeply personal song written by a 20-year-old would be truer and more personal for a person that he had never met who'd lived a radically different life.

But somehow it feels truer and more of a Johnny Cash song than it does of the person that wrote it, which to me is the personal is the universal. Absolutely. And I think Trent would tell you it's Johnny Cash's song now. Yeah. I know that when Trent performs it now, he performs the Johnny Cash version. Really?

He does like the acoustic version. He does. Oh, that's so beautiful. Oh, I love that. I think about that. Obviously, the book that's influenced my life the most is Mark's Realist's Meditations. And what I think is so surreal about that. Obviously, the book that's influenced my life the most is Mark's Relic's Meditations. And what I think is so surreal about that book

is you have the most powerful person in the world 2,000 years ago, writing a journal to themselves, never intending it to be published. In multiple cases, he's speaking only of his personal experience. He's trying to give no philosophical lessons to anyone other than himself. In multiple times in the book, he's like posthumous, famous, worthless.

It doesn't matter if you're remembered after you die, nothing lasts. And then somehow, he writes a universal, accessible, practical guide to living that resonates with ordinary average people 2,000 years later. Yeah, it's amazing how that works. I just had the book that probably inspired me the most is the Daudi-Jang Lao-Zu. Sure.

And also to 3,000 thousand years old I believe. And it was the no one really knows, but what we believe the story is, or at least one of the stories of why the book exists, is the old man Lao Tzu was leaving town, and a person, I believe, who was a guard at the outskirts of town, said, well, if you're going to leave, can you tell me what to do? He was the wise man, and he wrote these 81 things just for this one person. And that has, again, I don't know if that's true story. We don't know 3,000 years ago, It's true story. We don't know 3,000 years ago, but it was just a off-handed, this is what I know for one person.

And after the Bible, it's the most, the most published book in the world. It's like if you had asked him to put down the one thing he was going to leave to posterity to summarize all of his beliefs, first off the task probably would have been paralyzing. It would have been, or it would have taken years and years. But yeah, if that story is true, offhandedly doing it for a stranger, you know, in a few minutes or whatever before you are on your way, there's probably something that almost sounds like one of the exercises that you have towards the end of the book. Like, hey, put everything you know down in one quick thing,

but you only have 81 spots or whatever. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You hit the harder you're trying to hit the target, the less likely you are to hit the target. Yes, that goes back to the, what we were saying at the beginning about allowing it to happen, letting the, letting the string on the bow and arrow fall from your hand. It's the allowing. Mm-hmm. It's not, not getting in your own way.

Yeah, and not trying too hard. Trying, trying is the Trying is the problem. Now there's a time, you know, in the process where you, the way I like to do it is generate a lot of material without caring. When I say without caring, we care always. We want to make the best thing we can. Without any pressure at all, zero stakes, we're going to have fun, we're going to make things we like.

And we do that until we have enough stuff where we look at it, it's like, wow, there's a bunch of cool stuff here. Now, how can we put this in a form where we can share it? And still, it's still not a commercial concern. When I say share it, I mean, in a way that I can, you know, I can play it for you, let's say. That's all. It's not, there are no big stakes. It's like, I want to make something that I can show to my friends who do you think. That's all. It's like the editing and the polish and the refining and the making of the choices about

what goes on, what doesn't, what needs more work and what doesn't, that's where you're probably more disciplined, hardworking, intentional, because you're no longer in the purely creative, active phase. Yes. Once you've gathered the material and you know what it is, it's like if you think you know what it is before you start that limits what it can be. You can have a maybe a starting point of thinking, I think it making something like this, it turns into something like that instead and you recognize that that is better than this You follow the that you follow where the energy is and once you get to the part where you've done Following the energy now you have this stuff, but it's not in the form to share yet

That's when you can start thinking that we call that the crafting phase in the book. So the first stage is the seed phase where we're gathering ideas, the second phase is the experimentation phase where we're watering those seeds, seeing what they want to be on their own. We're bringing very little of ourselves to it where we're supporting their growth. And then in the third phase starts the craft phase where we start getting more involved ourselves. Like we have this, now we have this tree growing and maybe we realize if we trim these branches, more light's gonna come through and shine on the rest

of the garden, that would be a good thing. But up till then, we're just trying to get the tree to grow in the earlier stages. So now we're taking more of a hands-on approach. And then we still might go back and forth between that creative phase or crafting phase and our experimentation phase. They all run into each other. But one of the things that I learned from the book in working on the book is that that last phase, the editing and the getting ready to share it, you can do that on a schedule where as you can't really collect the seeds on a schedule, you can't really do the experimentation on a schedule.

You can start to have a schedule for yourself when you get to the crafting phase, but often you end up back in the earlier phases. So it's very loose, but it's not until you've really cracked the code of the thing that you're working on, and it's very clear to you, this is what it is, this is what it wants to be is what it wants to be.

And I want to be associated with this thing that it wants to be. I'm happy to, you know, bring this and bring this out into the world. That's when you can start thinking about, okay, let's have a timetable. We can finish it now because there's most of the magic part of it has already happened. I've found when I'm working on a book, there's an uphill part and a downhill part. I don't know exactly when it happens, but it's very obvious to me which phase I'm in.

So the uphill one is generative, it's tapping in as you're talking about, it's figuring out where it's going and all of that. And then there comes some moment where you now actually do have a sense of what it is. And you're more in the phase of finishing it, refining it, making choices about it. But there's the early days and the later days. And the early days are the harder ones because so much is unknown. And so much of it depends on, as we're talking about something other than us.

Absolutely. But once we have the material and it's on us to kind of put it together, it's a different puzzle. It's the jigsaw puzzle that the pieces are all there You just need to put them together, but it's clear what that puzzle is gonna be when you're done There's a picture on the box of what it's gonna be you do you know what I'm saying once you can envision the picture on the box And you have all the pieces to make it then it's just time and and

You know focused focused time and attention. Totally. Let me ask you a question. So you've been doing this a long time. You've worked with so many amazing artists. Obviously, you know what you're doing. How have you managed to stay humble and flexible? And I imagine there's this sort of stereotypical record producer

just like there's the stereotypical head football coach that comes in, I'm the boss, I know what we need to do. Listen to me, that's obviously not your style, but there's a human temptation there, I'm sure. Well, since every project they work on is so different, and since on a daily basis, I see something work that I don't understand. I could never have that feeling of it being about me. I know it's not about me because I do it all the time and I see I'm

happy to be there. I'm happy to witness it and experience it. I'm happy when a possible solution occurs that works. But I don't I don't feel like that has anything to do with me. And I'm just as happy if a better solution occurs to someone else in the room, as long as the project gets better, I don't care. I just want, there's no ego in it because we're all on the team working together for this thing, whatever it is, to be the best it could be. So there's no room for anyone to have any part of it be theirs.

It's none of ours, really. There's a, there's a lawsuit quote that I like that I wondered if it sort of approaches your philosophy which is those who do not know speak and those who know do not speak, right? That the sort of the wisest person in the room is sort of sitting back and letting things happen as opposed to trying to force them to happen.

Well, if we know that we don't know, we have great power, we're not trying to solve the problem. We're watching the not untie. We're seeing it happen. Is that sort of your approach like you're sitting back and seeing it happen? if ACDC wants to smoke cigarettes and drink tea for five hours before the the the the work comes, you're you're like, I'll take that ride. Well, I'm better at taking that ride now than I was then 25 years ago because I didn't understand it as well then. Now, I'm ready to take the ride with any of the artists I work with as far as they want to take it. And if anyone involved in the project thinks it can be better than it is, I want to see that.

You know, just because I think it's good if someone else involved thinks it can be better, I'm up for that. I'm not in any hurry to finish anything. I want it to be the best it could be. Right, right. And so if you're going into each project as a student, you will learn and grow and change. If you go into every project as the master, maybe they will learn, but you won't learn.

There's that Zen story about the master and the student and the student says, tell me what I need to know. And he starts to pour water in the student's cup, but the cup is already full. And so no more water can go in. Beautiful. So you feel like every time you walk in the studio, you're still learning?

Absolutely. Every time, and I'm continually astonished on a regular basis by what happens. What do you find that is the most? What do you find astonishes you? Is it how different people work or is it, what is it? More what works, because when if someone says, I have an idea, I wanna do this, and you hear the idea and it sounds bad. Like when I imagine what's being said sounds bad.

And like, okay, let's hear it. And then they demonstrate it and it's great. And that's an example of where the language of explaining things doesn't do it justice. One of the things I talk about in the book is always, make a model, always, don't talk about it. Show what it is that you're doing. Don't say the kind of article you want to write.

Write the article, show me the article, then we talk about the article. And what's great about that also is it takes it out of the personal. You know, if you have an idea, it's your idea. And then we could argue about your idea. And that's personal. Whereas once it's on paper, it's outside of you and it's this thing that we're collaborating on together to make it be the best it could

be. It's not, we're not talking about your idea now, we're talking about is this sentence the best sentence it could be? That's not a slide against you. That's we're working together to make this sentence the best it could be. It's, it's like in improv, you're supposed to say yes and or I forget what the exact phrases, but you're supposed to, you're never supposed to shut down the direction of a scene or a person's character, you're always supposed to encourage it. And then you can redirect it however you want to. But if you stop,

you're ruining it in some way. Yes. And the time to redirect it would be after the person who's experimenting with it realizes themselves that it's not what they want it to be. Like at that point, then it might come up like, well, what else can we do? Yeah. Because anybody have an idea. But we want to try every idea. We want to see where it leads. Because you never know. You really never know what's going to work and what's not going to work.

Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.