The Singular Life of Rick Rubin

24:17I have no technical ability whatsoever. My primary asset is I know when I like something or not. It always comes down to taste. I'm there for any key creative decision. He summed up the drive behind his life's work very simply. I'm just trying to make my favorite music. And so think about that line. I'm just trying to make my favorite music. On one of these podcasts I was listening to, he was asked, do you have any advice for young people? And he says, the only advice I have is to not listen to anyone and do what you love and make your favorite things. Be the audience. Be the audience. Make the thing for you, the audience.

24:55you can't make something great with someone else in mind so then we're going to get into his early life so he had three main loves that he discovered really early his love of music his love of magic and his love of professional wrestling so he's got to pick one right he obviously chose music but his love of magic and his love of professional wrestling he uses those influences in his work he did it from a very young age he still continues to use it to this day and so it says Ruben spent his formative years in the hard rock glory days of the 1970s. I loved ACDC, he said. The group's minimalist approach would show up years later in his sonic approach to recording rock records, and even in the way he constructed hip-hop albums.

25:34And this is what he says, there's so little adornment. So going back to that main theme, simplify his push for minimalism, just I want the essence of the song and nothing more. In fact, he talks about something that's very interesting. Let me find my note on it real quick. This is really one of the clearest ways he described on like why he constantly simplifies like why i'm not a producer i'm a reducer is the way of thinking i'm not a producer i'm a reducer that's a really fascinating thought if you if you sit there and think about it for a while this is the reason he simplifies he says often when you're in the studio there'll be an idea that we need to add layers to make the song seem bigger but what we discovered is sometimes the more things you add the smaller it gets and a lot of that is counterintuitive you need to discover it in practice and so back to his early life it says ruben immersed himself in the world of rock and roll.

26:20He had the requisite long hair, the leather jacket, and a position as a lead guitarist in a punk band. One part of the lifestyle, though, he avoided entirely was alcohol and drugs. And on the Peter Tia interview, they talked about that for several minutes, about why so many people, including Rick, worked with, they died of drug and alcohol overdoses. And so there is a discipline. And it seems weird, because you look at the guy, maybe you hear him speak, he seems kind of calm and mellow. but he has extreme levels of discipline. And part of that discipline is just avoiding things, like not trying to be brilliant, but avoiding obvious dumb things, obviously things that are not good for your life.

27:01No one thinks, hey, heroin's good for my life. Hey, excessive cocaine habit is good for my life. Drinking all the time is good for my life. And so it says one part of that lifestyle he avoided entirely was alcohol and drugs. Ruben had a discipline and focus rare for someone his age. And he just explains it very simply like everything else. I just didn't want to give up any of my time. I was deeply into something, meaning music. So his love of music kept Ruben from the need to distract or entertain himself with drugs. Before music, his deep focus was on magic. From the time I was nine years old, I loved magic.

27:33Even though I was a little kid, I'd take the train from Long Island into Manhattan and I'd hang out in magic shops. I still think about magic all the time. Ruben's fascination with and love for magic and music was something that delighted his endlessly supportive parents so this is good his mom and dad just they were he had dreams not dreams his idea is like you can't make money in music like that was just gonna be a hobby so he's like originally he's like i'll go to nyu then i'll go to law school and the idea is like i'll just have a day job and then i'll make music as a hobby and the day job just allows me to fund my hobby and no matter what like the fact that he his parent he told his parents he's gonna be attorney and he switches off he's gonna be i'm gonna be this music producer i'm gonna go to california i'm gonna do all these things his parents like, okay, that sounds good to me.

28:16So says his parents were endlessly supportive who showed the same devotion to their son as he did to his passions. Ruben's mother would drive him to concerts in New York City, wait outside the venue until the show was over, no matter how late the hour, and then drive her son home for a few precious hours of sleep before waking him up for school the next day. And then his quote for his senior year, they say his graduation quote was pretty prophetic. And it gives you an idea of who this person is. I want to play loud. I want to be heard and I want all to know I'm not one of the heard. And so now we get into the founding of his first company.

28:51At the beginning of every section, there's like these quotes, this advice from Rick Rubin. This is the first one. The key to it is doing what you believe in as opposed to what you think is going to work. There were never any plans to make anything happen. I just did what I liked and believed in it. And luckily it all worked out. And so the birth of him making music and him eventually founding Def Jam is because he just saw a gap in the market. It wasn't anything more complicated than that. Ruben began his career as a DJ, throwing parties in his NYU dorm room. The move from DJ to producer resulted from a dearth of good material for him to play.

29:27I didn't know anything about the record business, but I recognized that hip-hop records that were coming out that I would buy as a fan and the music that I would hear when I go to the club were two different things. what I set out to do as a fan he repeats it was to make records that sounded like what I liked about going to a hip hop club so his point is this is very think about the top down nature of most industries top down nature of the music industry at this time it's like no this is what we're making but that comes from like executives or other cases like this is what we're pushing out where what's taking place in these underground hip hop and metal clubs that he's going to and this is the early 80s.

30:09That is the bottom up. Because as the DJ, you play something, you get immediate feedback from the audience. The record executives are separated from what the actual customer wants, right? It's like, no, we're pushing this down the channel. Where Ruben's like, why don't we just make records that we like, and we know we like them because when they get played at this closer and people go crazy. Again, that's like a simple idea that you can build a very valuable company around. I remember hearing Elon Musk give this interview one time. There's a documentary that Elon watched and I happened to watch it too.

30:38It's like, who killed the electric car, I think it's called. And GM had done an electric car and they, they made maybe like, I don't know, like a thousand, 2000, some small number like that. But that electric car had like a cult following so much that when GM closed the program, they repossessed the cars. You couldn't own them. If I'm not mistaken, they were leasing. I could be mistaken on the details, but the punchline, I remember correctly. And so the people were so distraught that GM forcibly removed their cars from them that when they went to be impounded and essentially GM destroyed the cars, they held a candlelight vigil.

31:11And so Elon said that, and I heard him in an interview one time, he goes, when's the last time somebody held a candlelight vigil for a product? That one simple sentence. Clearly, there's a demand here. If I can build an electric car and make it affordable, people will respond. When is the last time you heard of people having a candlelight vigil for a product? So I just love, I'm completely obsessed with these basic observations. Like, oh, that's pretty simple. I can actually build a very valuable company, a very, very valuable life just off that. And Rick's like, well, this is weird. I'm buying hip hop albums, right?

31:43And they sound one way. But when I go to the club, people are going crazy for hip hop albums that sound completely different. Why don't we just make more of those? And so he says, I just saw this void and I started making those records just because I was a fan and wanted them to exist. so this is where he starts Def Jam he's like alright so he does a song it's called It's Yours it's one of the first things he produced and again because he's a fan he knows what he likes and he clearly knows because he's going to the clubs what other people like he's like okay I'm going to make this record I'm going to make an album just because no one else is doing this so I have to do it his goal here is I'm just going to break even I just want to cover my costs so I can keep making records watch what happens next this is wild it's just incredible This is another example of like one opportunity leading to the next opportunity leads to a next opportunity.

32:30You can't skip steps. Like you've got to get that first opportunity. Then once you get to that, like I think about it, like climbing stairs or maybe climbing mountain. Like once you get to that next peak, you look around the corner or look over and you're like, oh, there's something else farther away. I couldn't see at the very bottom of the mountain. But now I can then I can reach that. So it says Ruben approached the production of the song from a fan's point of view. Ruben borrowed$5 ,000 from his parents to press the single, imprinting Def Jam records on it. And he says, I was planning on putting it out myself strictly for the purpose of breaking even, making back my costs.

32:59That was always my plan. As it turned out, this record was a hit. It sold 100 ,000 copies in the New York area. That was a very big deal. That is insane. And then he does something. He did something smart, too, on the sleeve. So when you're buying a physical record, right, it's literally a record on the sleeve that the record comes in. Then he put Def Jam Recording and put his address. The address for Def Jam was his dorm room. And that's going to open up the next opportunity. The single sleeve listed Ruben's New York address. And that launched an onslaught of demos being mailed to him, which helped fuel the fires of Def Jam.

33:38So I'm going to get to why that was so important. First, he's realizing, hey, this business is screwy. Despite the song's success, Ruben never made a dime on the record. So this is all coming full circle because in that podcast I did on Jay-Z, Jay-Z talks about it. He's like, listen, man, I studied. The reason I came in the game independent, I own my own record label, which is extremely rare when Jay-Z did that in 96, because he studied the founding of Def Jam and he learned from it. He read that book. I think it's called Hitman. Hitmen or Hitman. And it talks about all the people that were making the music and putting the music out and doing all the work.

34:12None of those guys got paid. It was all the record executives and the CEOs that came through you know this is a tale as old as time. This is where we are in the story. So essentially like we're living through right now what Jay-Z is going to learn from 10 years later. So it says enter Russell Simmons. So this is going to be Rick Rubin's co-founder. This is also going to be the guy Russell Simmons that Jay-Z talked about. He's like he was an informal mentor for me. I go to meet with him when we're getting signed to Def Jam. I'm sitting across the table from him. I don't want to be your artist. I want to be you.

34:44I want to be the hip hop mogul. There was no such thing as a hip hop mogul until Russell Simmons appeared. He was the very first hip hop mogul. So it says, enter Russell Simmons on the recommendation of some other record owner. So some other record owner, record label owner is the one that's going to introduce Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons. And the reason that Rick wanted to meet with him, because that guy said of Simmons, no one promotes rap records better. Rubin felt that while most of the rap records at the time weren't any good. See that thing, same thing pops up. A lot of stuff's out there is mediocre.

35:14So I'm thinking, hey, most of the rap records aren't very good. The ones that were good always had Russell Simmons name on them. So he's the manager of the best rap acts around in Ruben's opinion. That partnership would revolutionize hip hop began with a simple meeting. They meet at a party and Russell's talking about, hey, that album you just produced, the one he sold 100 ,000 copies, I love it. He said it was his favorite record and he was excited to meet me and he couldn't believe that I was white. There was nobody white doing anything in hip-hop. And here was his favorite hip-hop record made by a white guy.

35:45I was really excited to meet him. He was already a mogul of rap music, even though there was no business. It was just a small underground scene. The two became fast friends. We did everything together. We would be together in the studio every night. Ruben and Simmons shared a love of hip-hop, a vision of where they felt it should head, both musically and commercially. And one other thing, both had hit records under their belts, but no profit to show for it. And so they both arrive at the conclusion, like this is dumb. These people aren't paying us, so let's just do it ourselves. And so it says Def Jam was set up to overcome business obstacles.

36:22Instead of going to somebody and asking them to, this is Ruben talking, instead of going to somebody and asking them to do things that needed to get done and not getting them done, it's just easier if we take on the responsibility. It wasn't going to get done unless we did it. So Rubin needed an artist to launch Def Jam, the hip-hop version of Def Jam, right? The one he's doing with Russell Simmons. And the reason I said it's the importance of stacking one opportunity on another is if he'd never had that hit single and if he never put his address on it, he would have never met LL Cool J. So that's one opportunity he had to get to before he got to his next opportunity.

36:57This is the next opportunity. Rubin had just the right artist to launch the new formalized partnership, A young rapper whose demo was one of the hundreds that had been sent to his dorm room. LL Cool J, who is 16 years old at this time. And Ruben's giving us context of just he's in the very early days of what is now a gigantic industry. The hip hop industry is massive. He says there were no stars in rap music. It was really just a work of passion. Everyone who was doing it was doing it because they loved it. Not because anyone thought it was a career. We just tried to do something we liked. How many times has he repeated that?

37:33We're not even one quarter of the way in the book. And he said, I just did something I loved. Just try to focus. Like, I'm the first listener. I'm the first customer. We just try to do something we like. There was no expectations whatsoever. The only hope was that we would sell enough records to make enough money to make another record. So the partnership between Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons is only going to last for a few years. But while they were together, they actually, they were well matched. because it's really important to find a partner that has the skills you lack. So Rubin is going to be in the studio with the artist making the records, and then Simmons is going to be the one promoting them.

38:07And he was really, both of them were really gifted at their respective strengths, right? So it says, Rubin would then pass the baton to Simmons, whose promotional expertise pushed the fresh new sound of the music onto the airwaves of local hip-hop stations and into the city's hip-hop clubs. Simmons had a talent in old school hustling. So they wound up selling so many of these singles that CBS Records gets their attention. And they offer a development deal with a$600 ,000 advance, which is more money than they could ever even imagine at the time. And so it says time would prove this deal to be merely a foot in the door that they would kick open a year later.

38:47But for 20-year-old Rick Rubin, it was a major milestone. I sent a Xerox of the check to my parents. That's when this stopped being a hobby. And so then Russell Simmons has a really smart marketing push. He's like, let's make a movie about the story of the early years of Def Jam because we're just a few years into the story. That movie he winds up getting made is Crush Groove. And it was a movie, but it was really content marketing for Def Jam and their artists. You can actually find the entire Crush Groove movie is on YouTube right now. I was actually watching it last night. And Rick Rubin plays Rick Rubin in the movie.

39:22It's fantastic. Crush Group was a marketing vehicle Russell Simmons dreamed up to introduce their label and artist roster. So it introduced the world to people like Fat Boys, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, and Run DMC. And the reason I'm bringing this to your attention is the next sentence that I double underline that I think is extremely important for all founders or anybody trying to get attention to their work, right? Russell really cared about finding new ways to expose their music to a bigger audience. It's very creative. And the person I think did this the best out of anybody in recent memory to me is Michael Bloomberg.

39:58And I didn't know that before I read his autobiography. It's Founders 228. If you haven't listened to it, the main reason to listen to that podcast, other than the story is insane. The fact that he owns that company, it's still a private company, makes billions of dollars a year right now. Michael Bloomberg had a lot of creative ways to get his product in front of potential customers. And that skill is the foundation that allowed his business to grow into a large, extremely profitable business. But it's just so clever the way he thought about these things and what he actually put into work. Very similar to this.

40:31The idea is like, who's going to think, hey, I'm starting a record label. I've sold a little bit of singles. Clubs like my music. The radio likes my music. I have, you know, four or five acts signed to my record label. All of them are going to be super famous in their own day, but they're not famous yet. And it's like, hey, let's make a movie. This is 1988, maybe 80, somewhere around there, 86, like mid to late 80s. How the hell did you even figure out that idea? Like, that's remarkable. And so on the back of some of the success of their music that they had put out, they wind up finding a Warner Brothers studio agrees to fund the$3 million film budget.

41:06So it says Warner Brothers agreed to finance the$3 million film budget. The picture is Greenlight led CBS, who they had signed their deal with, to change the terms of their original development deal. These are the people that just gave them 600 grand, right? Now they changed that like, wow, you guys are getting real popular. They changed the original development deal with Def Jam, signing Def Jam to a$2 million distribution deal in what Russell Simmons described as the greatest opportunity in the whole world. And again, this is happening in 85. So that they signed that deal in 85. So think about that.

41:36Within one year, they go from$600 ,000, this is amazing, can't believe this is happening, to signing for$2 million and having a major motion picture studio agree to finance$3 million of what is essentially content marketing in the form of a movie. And it winds up being a smart investment by Warner Brothers, by the way, because they spent$3 million on the movie and the movie winds up making$11 million at the box office. one of the biggest hits that Rick Rubin's going to have in this point of his career, like a mainstream hit. Beastie Boys winds up being the first hip-hop album ever to go to number one, which he produced.

42:08But he has the idea to do this crossover song between Run DMC and Aerosmith. And Run DMC is kind of well-known at the time. Aerosmith is like orders of magnitude more famous. And this would have never happened if Rick Rubin didn't have an excessive, excessive amount of self-confidence this is something that is talked about over and over again by the people he works with that he believes so much that he makes you believe very similar to that steve jobs quote i just read to you earlier and so i'm going to get into this it says rubin's desire to work with rum dnc dated back to the early 80s when rubin upon hearing the group's first music had boldly commented this is the real shit but i could do it better and so that level of self-confidence right you need that that level of self-confidence is mandatory to even approach.

42:55So he's like, yeah, not only can I do it better, I'm going to convince Aerosmith, who were, again, world famous. They're like operating in a completely different world than Rick Rubin. He's like, okay, well, I'm going to sell both Run DMC and Aerosmith on Walk This Way. So it says Rubin sold both groups on the idea. And once they were together, it was interesting. This is what he says. It was interesting because it was two very different cultures. We were all kids, but Aerosmith was already Aerosmith. They carried themselves in a different way than we did because they were real rock stars and we were college students.

43:26It was an awe-inspiring experience for me because I grew up on Aerosmith and I loved them. I also knew how great they were. So I became fairly... And then think about this, how crazy it is. Like I admire them. They're almost like my idols. And yet when he gets in there and running the production of the music, he still applies his excessive... I wouldn't say control because that's not the right word, but it's like his high standards. So he says, So I became fairly demanding with what I asked them to play and contribute. Both sides really didn't know what to make of it. And so this is another example of something that Ruben uses for his entire career.

44:01He wants authenticity, just like other humans. Like he wants it to be really simple. So his vision for the music, for what they're doing with Run DMC and Aerosmith, is also the vision that he applies over and over again. His vision was to capture something raw, musical, and ferocious. the music that we liked wasn't glossy and shiny he said it sounded rough and raw authentic it was raw like a documentary so it's like i'm not making a movie i'm making a documentary that's interesting it was raw authentic we use that word raw over and over again it's not glossy and shiny it sounded rough and raw and then on the very next page he continues to elaborate on that perspective The music we were making wasn't slick.

44:42There's a homemade and handmade quality to it. So think about that. Because music is a product that gets to scale, right? It's not just one person's listening to it. How many people have listened to Walk This Way over the life of that song? Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people. So I thought that idea was really fascinating. It's a handmade product at scale. A handmade product at scale. So after that, he gets the biggest opportunity, the biggest breakthrough of his early career. And that's when he's going to produce Beastie Boys' album, Licensed to Ill. This winds up being what he's working on.

45:16Winds up being hip-hop's first number one album. It's the first time it's like, oh, wow, this is the very beginning of an industry that's going to grow even larger. Think about this, 10 years later, Jay-Z is still looking at it. That's why it's so important to like, in my opinion, to go back and study the very beginnings of industries, right? We've done this, you and I have done this together. beginning of Silicon Valley. Not only is like the computer chip industry, the personal computer industry, the software industry. I just did a podcast on the very beginning of the aviation industry. I've done like 13 podcasts on the very beginning of the American automotive industry.

45:49There is so many things that just happen over and over again. They're all making different things. Some people are making computer chips. I'm making software. Some people are making planes, cars. Rick Rubin's making hip hop music. It's the same thing. You think it's too late. There's over and again. People are like, oh, you know, it's too late. The ship has already passed. No, these things take forever. So at this point, we're in the story. Ten years later, Jay-Z's like, hey, I can't say that I thought I was going to get rich off rap. All I knew that it was clearly, clearly going to be a lot bigger than it is now before it goes away.

46:19And then think about the growth between 1996 when he said that and in present day, you know, 25, whatever, 20, 25 years later, it's still growing. So he was just dead on right about that. So just want to pull out one thing from this section. And then I want to transition. I got a ton of highlights with the book, but I want to go through my notes that I have actually written on all these talks that he gave, because I think I'm going to forget to do that. And there's a lot of valuable things. So maybe I'll just give you like a stream of consciousness of Rick Rubin's ideas, and then we'll jump back into the book.

46:47So this is Rubin talking about, and the reason I want to read the notes is because this is something that he talks about over and over again. It's only done when it can't be any better. But once something's done, just like give it the time to be what it needs to be, but then move on. He's got a really interesting way to not have regrets, which I think is very powerful for us because having regrets is so detrimental to you. It's so common in humanity and also detrimental to us. So it says Ruben maintained total autonomy over mixing the record and it was in no rush. He says, listen, I would love for it to be done, but the reality of the creative process is it takes however long it takes to be great.

47:25Very similar kind of echoes with these fights that Walt Disney would have with his brother. His brother was his partner. His brother's running the money. Walt Disney's obviously making the products. And he says, I'll tell you what it costs when it's done. We're innovating. I don't know why these things pop to my mind when I read these certain sentences that always draws back to something else you and I have talked about. But that's what I thought of there. He's like, listen, I would love it if it would be done. You know, I clearly don't want to be spending more time and money than it needs to but it's not perfect yet.

47:52It's not what I'm, I'm not happy with it. And he was right to do that because he held onto it till he was ready. And then he releases it and it just opens up opportunity for literally millions of people in the future. That's how crazy, like that's how we, you and I know, like if you have founder mentality, like you know the world's not static. We can push it, we can bend it. We can actually influence the external world. It's crazy. At this point, he's mixing and he's recording this album in a recording studio that used to be an old Chinese restaurant. And it was like this biggest dumpy place because they don't have a lot of money.

48:25And you're just able, even without the best equipment, the best resources, he's able to make something truly, truly great. I find that personally extremely inspiring. And then before I jump to my notes, I just want to read one sentence to you that I double underlined. I just said, listen, we're still so, so early in all these things, in the Internet, in podcasts, in just a million different, in technology in general. So it says rap music as recorded work was just eight years old. Okay, so I'm just going to run through a couple, like give you a stream of Rick Rubin consciousness. You can download.

49:00I don't even know if these ideas are really related. I just thought they were so interesting that when I heard them, I pressed pause and kept rewinding until I wrote it down. Basically, I'm reading you like, oh, I need to remember this. Like, I don't want this to just disappear. Like, I want to have a record of it so I can go and reference it in the future. And maybe it gives me an idea. You know, maybe it doesn't give me an idea today. Maybe it gives me an idea, you know, 10 years from now, five years from now, whatever it is. So he has this idea he calls the ruthless edit. Again, his whole thing is you got to do more to get to less, right?

49:29Less is better, but you got to do more to get there. So he says, listen, you made 25 songs. You need 10. Do not pick 10. Ask yourself, what are the five that I absolutely cannot live without? And then before you add anything else, ask, what could I add to these five that I cannot live without that would make it better and not worse. So that is the idea of Ruthless Edit. I love that idea. This was, this might be my favorite thing he said, because I have, I have this like negative internal monologue that I think is absent from Ruben. And I think if I learn how to adapt like his mindset more than my own mindset, I'll have a more, like I'll have more enjoyable experience for the rest of my life.

50:11Right. So he says, do you have an engine of constant dissatisfaction? Like, do you have this constant self-criticism that, oh, I could have done better, which is very common that I've heard a lot of people have. But his answer was really surprising. He says, no, I'm pleased with the work that we did. I'm excited to keep working. It's fun. I don't know what else I'd do with myself. I like making things. It's fun. I feel like, oh, this is so good. This is so good. I feel like it's my reason to be on the planet. so I just keep doing it. And he elaborates like how do you arrive at this where you just don't have regrets?

50:47If it could be better, I would have kept working on it. If it could be better, it's not done. I have done everything I can to make it the best it can be. I can't do more than that. So there's nothing to be critical of. And this is his framework for his music, this mental model that I think I'm going to remember and take with me. My work is almost like a diary entry. Everything we make is a reflection in a moment of time. It could be a day. It could be a year. It is a reflection in a moment in time. So it's like, I can't go back. His point is like, I can't go back and listen to stuff I did 25 years ago.

51:25Like, oh, I do it differently now because I did it to the best of my ability as that version of Rick Rubin. It is a diary entry. It's not perfection. I like that idea. I think that's actually really, really helpful. And he also says something really, really smart. He just nails regret. It's just a fantastic explanation of why it's something you have to do. You don't want this in your older life or when you're older, rather. And so they're talking about this song that he did with Johnny Cash before Johnny Cash died. And it's called Hurt. And it is a cover of the guy from Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor, wrote the song when he's 20.

52:01OK, so he writes the song when he's 20. It's all about regret and pain and all this other stuff. And so Rick Rubin is going to say, hey, coming out of Trent Reznor at 20 is one thing. Coming out of Johnny Cash when you're 70 years old, you're at the end of your life, it has a completely different meaning. And so Rick Rubin just nails regret. I'm just going to read it to you. When you're 20 years old and talking about regret, it's heartbreaking. But it's heartbreaking in a different way because you have your whole life to figure it out. When you're looking back over your life at the end of your life with regret, it's brutal.

52:34It's brutal. and I love that he repeated that the way he ended it's brutal it's brutal he said it twice it's the thing we have to avoid at all costs because at that point there's nothing you can do about it here's another random idea for you the first thing that risk Rick asks when he's working with somebody else is what's the first thing that got you into music so understanding of why are you doing what you're doing it's so important we talk about that all the time not only for us to know why we're doing what we're doing, but then to explain that to your customers. Customers resonate. They want to know why you're doing what you're doing.

53:09Another great line, this one comes from the documentary. He says, these things that we don't understand and cannot explain happen regularly. And so these things that we don't understand and we cannot explain, they happen regularly. Another great line, negativity is the enemy of creativity. Now he talks about how magical music is, why he thinks magic and pro wrestling they all combine they all understand the same thing and he says they allow you to understand principles of how there is the surface reality where i think most people spend their time that's what he's saying and then there's this whole other bigger story going on behind it so think if you think of you watch a magic trick you see it happen you can't believe and he's like that's what most people like oh i can't believe that that's what they're focused on rick is always focused on like what's the actual story happening behind it same thing we listen to an album he He knows I had to do that song a thousand times.

54:03Wrestling, it's almost like theater, like live theater. Like you're engaged in what's happening in the ring. I'm interested in like, what's the story? How did they, they wrote out the storyboards. Who are the characters? What roles are they playing? What are the psychological effects they're doing? And so that idea, there's always this whole other big story going on behind it. Then he talks about the importance of ignorance, of being naive before you try something. This has popped up over and over again in the history of entrepreneurship. There's so many examples, like the founder saying, hey, if I knew how hard, if I knew what I didn't know, I would never start it.

54:33If I knew how hard this is going to be, how long it was actually going to take, I wouldn't have ever started. So he says the amateur mind possesses a valuable lack of knowledge about rules. When matched with passion and gumption, gravity ceases to exist and new things take flight. That's just fantastic language. When matched with passion and gumption, gravity ceases to exist and new things take flight. So he talks about using what he learned from professional wrestling in the early days of his career as marketing. There's a video they played in the documentary, that's happening in 1985 when he's trying to go out and promote the Beastie Boys album.

55:03And he's like yelling into, he's getting an interview on the streets of New York with the Beastie Boys and a reporter. And he's like super hype. And you hear that. And he's like, people don't realize like I was just copying the bad guy wrestler character that I grew up on. He goes, that was performance art as a way of marketing. And so he's yelling, he's talking to the reporter. It's not like in a rude, I mean, not really like I mean, I didn't take it as like a mean way but he's like oh i'm obviously talking over your head this interview is over because he's like the bc board is the most important thing to ever happen to music you know if you've ever watched professional wrestling it's like they're over the top like this is the best thing ever happened like this is the most important thing it's completely provocative i guess is the point and the follow-up question to this is interesting they're like well he was asked like using over-the-top professional wrestling marketing efforts did it matter to you that a lot of people didn't understand what you were doing.

55:55So people thought, oh, this guy's a jerk. Maybe this guy's crazy. He's yelling, saying he really believes the BC boys is the best thing that ever happened to music. You know, how can you say that? There's a Beatles. There's all these other people that existed before that. And so he's like, did it matter to you that a lot of people didn't understand? And he had a one-word answer that was perfect. Never. Let's go back to this unbelievable self-belief he had. They interview his college roommate. And he said, Rick was the most confident 19-year-old I ever met. Even if he didn't know, he said and acted like he knew.

56:27Another thing I love from the documentary, he has, I mean, this shouldn't be a surprise to you and I at this point, but he has extensive historical knowledge about his industry. So in the documentary, it shows us like this beautiful library, like this two-story library he has in his studio. And it contains all kinds of things like artifacts. Not only is it like he takes, he's got a lot of old books in there, music movies he's essentially taking using the world as a classroom i guess is the way you think about this use the world as a classroom and then apply like all the ideas you're using to your work and he actually has a copy of the very first record that ever mentions the word hip-hop the industry that he is partially credited with founding and he went down and tracked the record the first time that the word hip-hop ever ever appeared in recorded music was in 1968 almost 20 years before the founding of Def Jam.

57:21And what I was what I was interested in about that is in the documentary. So we already go into like you clearly see he'll constantly ask his artists to go back like he's working with Linkin Park at the time. And he's like, hey, go back and listen to all these records. And it's records that were made like 30 or 40 years before. And what was interesting is how some people didn't. So he's meeting in 2018 with this rapper called Little Yachty. And he's a young kid. So I'm not like at the point, I think he's like 22 or something like that when he's when he's recording this so when he's doing the documentary so no shade to him but like he blew up real fast and hip-hop and has since disappeared and it shouldn't make it shouldn't exactly be surprising that he disappeared because this is what he says in the documentary i don't know nothing about the history of rap i was born in 1997 why do i know need to know about what somebody else did why do i need to go research somebody else and so this idea which is like it's normal for humans to fail to learn lessons of history.

58:16That's why people that study history, that make it a part of their lives, for the rest of their lives, just have a massive advantage. This is a very old idea. Cicero said this over 2 ,000 years, almost 2 ,000 years ago. To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. Little Yachty had remained a child, and his career has suffered as a result. Going back to great ideas that Rick Rubin said, he says, all the most interesting things happen when you are making stuff no one else is making. A few more great quotes from this documentary. This says somebody describing Rick Rubin, which I love this line.

58:49He's living in four different centuries at once. Another great description of him, kind of this reality distortion field. I don't think that he's backed in reality at all, which is probably one of the reasons he's so successful. And then two more lines from the documentary, which I think is just the perfect mentality to have. My reason, this is Rick talking, My reason to exist is to be of service. And then the last thing, mainly I'm a researcher. I'm always looking for a better way to do everything. And I never accept whatever the accepted version of something is as, oh, that's how it's supposed to be.

59:23It is an endless search. So let's go back to the early days. Stowe's early career. He hasn't left Def Jam. He hasn't left New York to go to California. Started like the second part of his career. And so Chuck D, which is the main, I guess, rapper in Public Enemy, and he's like, okay, I got to sign this guy. I got to work with him. And this is really just the value of persistence. Feeling that Chuck D was the next greatest artist, Ruben had to convince Chuck D of all that. This is Ruben describing that. He considered himself a grown man with a family and a regular job. I put his phone number on a post-it note on my phone and I would call it every day and just keep bugging him, saying, we really have to make a record.

1:00:02It's time to make a record. it took six months until Chuck D said maybe and think about the alternate reality because Public Enemy becomes one of the most influential hip-hop groups of all time they're hugely influenced to all the artists to come after them and the idea is like no I didn't even Chuck didn't even think it was possible he's like I you know there's no such thing as a career in rap and then not like that it's for like young kids I'm too I'm old I'm a family I got a normal job and if it wasn't for Rick Rubin's persistence there's a very real possibility that Public Enemy never existed And again, I think that's another example of him transferring his confidence to the abundance of confidence that he has on other people.

1:00:38That's just extremely valuable for people to do that. It's almost like a version of an act of service. It's like, I believe in you so much, I'm going to make you believe in you. So at this point, he gets interested in saying, hey, I want to also produce a lot of rock records. This is going to cause a split of Def Jam. But before I get there, it goes back to this obsession with simplicity. He says, it doesn't matter who I'm working with. I apply the same basic forma, keep it sparse, strip down the sound to something straightforward, but powerful. And so this move by Rubin to go more into rock is actually going to cause a rift.

1:01:15And I wrote, this didn't take long because you figure their partnership only lasted, what, three, four years, if that. So it says this shift was an indication of the growing distance between the partners of Rubin and Russell Simmons. And so what he's about to do here by instinct is something that is mentioned a lot of times by people that admire him like he had the money the fame and the success of Def Jam who at the almost the peak of the popularity says nope you're causing me to compromise what I want to make so I'll just leave it all he leaves Def Jam Russell still runs it and so they wind up having a meeting Rick says he can still remember where they went and having this conversation even many decades later and he so he says he asked Russell do you want to leave and he said no and I said okay fine I'll leave Ruben said if I would have stayed, it would have been completely different.

1:02:00I don't know if it would have been the same successful thing that it is. The reason I left Def Jam had to do with mine and Russell's vision of our company growing apart. Ruben said that he and Simmons had been stepping on each other's toes a lot and kind of growing apart creatively. They weren't communicating. I felt like my vision was being compromised, and I'm sure he felt like his was too. Reflecting on his time with Def Jam and the label's influence on the hip-hop scene, Ruben said, it really was a wave. We just happened to be a good spot on the wave. The wave was coming. And that was really interesting because the way he said, he's like, listen, I was just the right person, the right set of skills, the right point in history, but that wave was going to happen with or without me.

1:02:35That's exactly what convinced Paul Allen and Bill Gates to stop focusing on school and going all in on Microsoft. And so there's a fantastic paragraph that's in the biography of Bill Gates called Hard Drive, but it says, Gates and Allen were convinced that the computer industry was about to reach critical mass, and when it exploded, it would usher in a technological revolution of astounding magnitude. They were on the threshold of one of those moments when history held its breath and jumped, as it had done with the development of the car and the airplane. And this is the punchline. This is the most important part.

1:03:07They could either lead the revolution or be swept along by it. So one of the most successful albums that Rick ever produced was The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magic. I just got a couple highlights from this chapter that I think are just applicable to all kinds of great work in all kinds of fields so the first thing is the importance of differentiating your product so it says uh they declared that the red hot chili peppers have never been part of any movement or any collective thing or any existing category we just try to create our own categories another line from this it says it's not about being this is rick talking about what when he was working on this album it's not about being fancy it's about serving the song it's not about being fancy for our purposes it's about serving the customer and this is the band describing what's like working with rick on this album his participation was incredibly nonchalant he just comes by and chills out sometimes horizontally he's got a pen and paper and it's somewhere between a nap and a meditation so that that line's kind of funny it's like some comes by sometimes horizontally so there's you'll see this in documentary i saw this in an ad samsung did for Jay-Z's album like a decade ago, where Jay-Z invites the producers that worked on his album.

1:04:16It was like Pharrell, Timberland, Rick Rubin. They're all in the studio in New York City, and they're playing the album, and Rick just lays down on the couch and kind of closes his eyes and taps his feet. So that's something he's been doing for a long time. They said he has an incredible head for arrangements. And again, part of that, at this point, he's 20 years into his career, no, maybe 15 years into his career. How much music has he listened to? How much music has he studied? He, again, he has this encyclopedic knowledge, historical knowledge of his industry. And I think it's really important for two reasons.

1:04:46One, no one can, once you establish a space of knowledge, no one can take it from you. And two, it's going to constantly inform that historical knowledge of studying the great work that came before you is going to constantly inform all the work that you do for the rest of your career. And then this is Rick Rubin describing why he refuses to chase fads or trends. This was fantastic. He says, the newest sounds have a tendency to sound old when the next new sound comes along. But a grand piano sounded great 50 years ago and will sound great 50 years from now. I try to make records that have a timeless quality.

1:05:23And so one of the things that he did that he helped Red Hot Chili Peppers was, was their bassist is probably the most famous bassist of the world. It's this guy named Flea. But what Rick is about to say here is I really think it goes back to what he was talking about at the beginning of the book. The role he plays is like, listen, every band player, every person on the team, you know, is focused on their role. I'm the only one that's not concerned about your role, but how your role affects the whole. So it says Rubin described the evolution that occurred. Up until that time, Flea's bass playing was a particular style.

1:05:54He was famous for it. He was considered one of the best bass players in the world because of his style. But when we started working together, that bass playing that made him one of the best didn't necessarily serve the songs in the best way. This reminded me of when I read that gigantic like 600 page biography of Michael Jordan. And Michael was a fantastic individual basketball player, but he couldn't get past the Detroit Pistons in the playoffs and he failed year after year. year. It wasn't until he learned how to be the best teammate, play as a team, not just an individual person, that they actually got able to get to the next level.

1:06:28That same process is very similar to what Rick is describing us here. He's like, listen, he's well known. At that time, they thought Michael Jordan was the best basketball player in the league, but he hadn't won a championship because the best players don't win, the best teams do. But when we started working together, that bass player, that bass playing that made him one of the best didn't necessarily serve the songs in the best way. It was more about the bass being great. It was more about Jordan being great. And the song is more important than the bass. And the team is more important than the player.

1:06:55So that's me obviously trying to tie that all together. Starting with that record, Flea changed the way he played. And so he says, this is what Flea said about that. He goes, I consciously avoided anything busy or fancy. I avoided saying, hey, I'm Flea, the bitchin' bass player. And then he said, he goes, I tried to get small enough to get inside the song as opposed to stepping out. The focus is not on me. So one thing I really admire about studying Rick Rubin was that he doesn't rest on his laurels. He's always looking for the next challenge, right? You could just say, I'm going to produce the same rap records over and over again.

1:07:29I already had some hit rock and metal albums. Let me just do that. He's like, no, no, I need another challenge. I need to keep challenges how you keep growing and adding more skills, right? So in 1994, he's like, I'm going to work with Johnny Cash. And the way he decided to do this is fascinating. So since in 1994, Rick Rubin was focused on a great challenge, resurrecting the career of country music legend Johnny Cash. With Rubin's trademark production by reduction approach, the albums would bring the legendary Johnny Cash his first platinum success in years and showcased a more raw side to him.

1:08:05Rubin explained how he came to work with Johnny. He says, it seemed like it would be a fun challenge to work with an established artist. but I wasn't interested in working with a legend at the top of their game. I'd been thinking about who was really great, but not currently making really great records. What great artists are not in a great place right now? So Johnny and Rick meet and Rick tells Johnny his blueprint. Rubin had a real simple plan. Wherever the magic is, we will follow it. And so this is the first of their hit albums together. It says it was recorded in Rick Rubin's living room.

1:08:40Cash recalled there was no echo, no slapback, no overdubbing, no mixing. It just goes back to the production by production, right? No overdubbing, no mixing, just me playing my guitar and singing. I didn't even use a pick. Every guitar note on the album came from my thumb. And this is just great. I just love that this happened. So it says, we had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Or excuse me, Johnny Cash had nothing to lose and everything to gain in wearing his heart on his sleeve. I know I'm 62 years old and I've been around twice and now it looks like I might have a third shot at a new audience.

1:09:14He found Rick Rubin helped him find that new audience. So MTV winds up putting Johnny Cash's video for the first song and it becomes really popular to an age group that probably didn't even know who Johnny Cash existed. Or much less all the hits that he had, you know, 20, 30, 40 years earlier. And the album won a Grammy. And this is the crazy part. what I mentioned earlier, how Rick can just imbibe, like he can take the confidence that he has. And again, I think it's like, you can clearly transfer your emotions, both good and bad to the people around you, right? But this idea where you have a legend, somebody that had already got to the top of their profession and still having doubts about their ability.

1:09:54Rick made me have faith in myself again. He made me believe in myself and my music, which I thought was gone forever. he's working with a different band. I just want to pull out one sentence here because I thought it was fantastic. And he's describing, this guy named Williams is describing what it was like working with Rick. Williams described being put to a recording regimen wherein Rick Rubin made us record every track about 50 times each to obtain the good dynamics. That is a main theme that we should take away from Rick Rubin. Less is more, but to get there, you have to do more. He uses that same idea over and over again.

1:10:31I moved ahead to another project. This guy Donovan that's in this band says, what you hear is 14 songs, but there's 86 songs that you haven't heard. Once the project began, I started writing daily. I wrote 100 songs over a period of a year and a half. So again, the public praises people for what they practice in private. They are praising these 14 songs. They didn't see the 86 others that I had to do and never use just to get to the right 14. and then there's just some great stories in the book like uh he decides hey i'm gonna get together tom petty so there's a fantastic picture in the studio of tom petty rick rubin and johnny cash and so this is the album i think that song uh is on her they played on the lex freeman podcast i thought it was fantastic just to watch rick listen to it was really interesting to me so it sounded very different and you know johnny's like uh johnny's known as a cat or as a country as like a country like music legend and yet because his sound had evolved he wasn't getting the like the attention or the the support of his industry and so this just made me laugh out loud so it says the music got major airplay on college radio and alternative rock stations upon its release but no love from traditional country radio but the rest of america loved the album ironically the album won a grammy award for best country album celebrating the achievement in the fuck the system fashion.

1:11:54Rick Rubin ran a full page ad in Billboard featuring the classic photo of Johnny Cash, middle finger aimed at the camera, with a caption that read, American Recordings and Johnny Cash would like to acknowledge the Nashville Music Establishment and Country Radio for your support. And so Rick Rubin talks about the importance of selecting the people that you work with. You have to make sure you like them. You have to make sure you admire them. There's no point in working with somebody that you don't like, admire, or trust. And as a result, It's not just this is not, oh, this is business. Like that's no, it's not true.

1:12:26This is extremely personal. What we're doing is extremely personal. And so there's a there's this band called System of a Down. And one of the artists in System of a Down talks about like, what was it? What's it like working with Rick Rubin? He gives you his whole self. And so it says production with Rick doesn't mean you're going to sit in the studio. It might mean you go to a record store or you go to a beach or you go for a drive. You bond as people first. And then you put these songs and Rick's like the song doctor. If you play something for him, it's like going in for a checkup. He's like, here, take a couple of these vitamins and see how you feel.

1:12:57And the songs always feel better after his suggestions. And so you do. He's just so easy to be around. That's why people keep going back to him. And so one of the groups that kept coming back to Rick Rubin were the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And so they're building, they're doing the album Californication at this point in the book. And one of the guitarists had left the group and then he came back, but he wasn't playing as much. So this is going to remind me a few weeks ago, I think it was what, maybe episode 240, biography of Mozart that I did. There's a line, there's something that happens in that book that I don't think I'll ever forget.

1:13:29And it's the importance of like not really trying to find the most efficient way. Like sometimes just exposing yourself to hours after hours of hard work, like that's going to build up skill sets that other people that have not gone through all that time lack. And so he's coming back. I don't know how to pronounce his name, so I'm going to call him F. F felt somewhat rusty. I hadn't spent too much time playing guitar over the last few years, so my hands were weak. They didn't really get extremely strong until we almost finished recording. So that had an effect on my style of guitar playing during the recording.

1:14:01I was playing guitar constantly. I would go home and play for five hours after a 10-hour recording session. But the main takeaway there was the fact that his music, what he's saying is like, the music got better the stronger my hands got. the only way to get your hands strong is to actually put in the hours, right? And so that's exactly what happened to Mozart. There's this some kind of instrument called like the viola or something like that. And if I remember correctly, it needs like extreme right hand strength. And so a lot of Mozart's competitors that practice less than Mozart couldn't actually make the instrument perform to its best of its ability because they lacked the hand strength because they didn't practice.

1:14:38Mozart practiced, Mozart had the hand strength. Mozart then applies that talent that the people that don't practice lack. and he's able to get magic out of an instrument that his competitors did not. And then in just a few sentences, I really feel we get like this kind of blueprint that Rick Rubin, like the blueprint of how Rick Rubin works and that we can then apply to so many other things. And there's four things I picked out. This is how Rick Rubin works. Number one, he works on one thing at a time. Number two, he gives it his undivided attention. Number three, he only works with A players.

1:15:10His job is not to motivate you. A players motivate themselves. and number three, he tries to get his thinking as clear as possible. We found that for us, we need a producer to be devoted to us for a few months. That's what Rick does. We've got his undivided attention. He doesn't do any disciplining. We do it ourselves. I love making music and I love writing music and nobody needs to push me to do that. He's not the kind of person that gets distracted or comes to the rehearsal studio with something else on his mind or carrying his personal life into the studio. He is very focused. He's got a clear head about everything going on.

1:15:46So again, work on one thing at a time, undivided attention, only work with A players, and get your thinking as clear as possible. One of my favorite and funniest lines, it comes from David Ogilvie, talks about, hey, all great companies, all great institutions, they're run by a single formidable individual, and he has a better grasp of language than I do, but he says, search all the parks in your city. You'll find no statues of committees. Johnny Cash is talking about why some of the last albums he ever did were so great. The common theme I see in these albums is they were not made by committee.

1:16:15They were made by Rick Rubin and I. The guitarist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, that guy F I just told you about. Together F and Rick Rubin explored another genre of music to find inspiration. Me and Rick would work together every day and he's got, me and Rick would get together every day, excuse me, and he's got these CDs of hits from the 60s. So right now, at this point in the book, where we are in time, they are using ideas from work done 40 years before they are meeting. That's another one of Rick's standard MOs. He's constantly saying, hey, I know we're working in 1995. I know we're working in 2005.

1:16:53Go check out what was done in the 50s. Go check out what these guys were doing in the 70s. Go check out this other thing. And so we're going to see Rick Rubin use two parts of his philosophy here again. Persistence and then production by reduction. And so at this point, he's going to do the exact same thing. He's like, hey, who else was really good at one point, is really capable of doing great work, but hasn't yet, like hasn't shown that they can still do great work. So he goes and tries to work with Neil Diamond, and he just does it relentlessly. Ruben was eager to work with Diamond and unabashedly described his pursuit of the artist as stalking.

1:17:26At first, Diamond found Ruben's enthusiasm a little scary. I didn't know what to make of it. So eventually the persistence pays off. They start working together. and it says once they began working together Ruben insisted Diamond track all of the album songs playing acoustic guitar while he sang that's exactly what he said he's like listen a person with just strumming a guitar and singing sounded good 50 years ago just like a piano sounded good 50 years ago and if it sounds good 50 years ago it'll sound if it survived that long that idea that format survived that long it is more likely to survive 50 years into the future so he's like we're gonna all the other crap that your producers had to do with the bells and whistles we're getting rid of all that stuff.

1:18:03It's not necessary. And so it says the singer hadn't recorded like that since the 1960s, and he was reluctant to try it. Diamond would later concede that Rick was right. Ruben wanted to bring back the Neil Diamond who made those old records great with a stripped down sound. And then the way Neil Diamond describes Rick, I'm only including this because it made laugh. It says, despite his appearance, which can be really intimidating, Rick is a big, lovable bear of a man. The only problem I had was with his habit of hugging. At first, I was taken aback. After a while, I got to like it. He's like Father Earth taking you into his bosom.

1:18:45I don't know why that made me laugh. That's funny. And then towards the end of the book, I just realized as I'm reading this, I was like, oh, he's developed a very personal business philosophy. Rubin wanted freedom and not to have to punch a clock or work in a traditional corporate way. Rubin has always kept a full vision of a project in mind as part of his work. He thought about the artwork, the marketing, videos, brand building, and so on. The panicked music industry may be focused on how to sell music, but Rick Rubin has always been focused on making great music first. He is driven by what is really great.

1:19:24He's very hard to please. Having someone around you like that makes you want to bring something in that's fantastic and not just mediocre. And the effect of this very personal business philosophy is summarized here. Rubin attributes his success to very simple core principles. Try to understand culture as well as music. Surround yourself with people interested in music for the right reasons and be true to the things that you love. His great love and fandom for music has led to honesty and purity in his work. His impact has been felt by a generation of music fans who would credit Ruben with producing the soundtrack to their lifetime.

1:20:13And that is where I'll leave it. I absolutely love this book. I loved going deep on Rick Rubin, the mind and the philosophy of Rick Rubin this week. I'll leave a link down below if you want to buy the book and support the podcast at the same time. That is 255 books down, 1 ,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.