#492 – Rick Beato: Greatest Guitarists of All Time, History & Future of Music

19:36Lex Fridman:And taking a tangent upon a tangent, you also have a course on ear training.

19:39Rick Beato:Yes, but my course is for relative pitch, not to be confused with perfect pitch.

19:43Lex Fridman:Is it fair to say that relative pitch, as far as the thing you would learn, is more useful for musicians? Yes. Can you explain the difference between the two?

19:50Rick Beato:Relative pitch is basically learning how to identify pitches relative to a stated tonic or something that you've heard, or just relative to each other. if you hear a note and then you hear another note after it you can recognize let's say it's a minor third interval so if you're on the note a the next note would be c so once you're given a reference note you can use relative pitch to to identify the relative nature from one pitch to another

20:19Lex Fridman:and of course intervals make up scales and intervals make up chords and so that if you develop to any degree uh relative pitch you can understand you can hear the music better yes so what what does it take uh since we're taking attention on attention what's uh what does it take to train your ear what's uh a tldr in the course before people go out and sign up it's just

20:47Rick Beato:practice basically you start with intervals typically with small intervals like minor second, major second. So minor second would be half step, major second would be whole step.

20:56Lex Fridman:Are you listening to the tone one after the other or two of them together?

21:00Rick Beato:Both. So played separately, it's called melodic intervals, right? Like a melody. And harmonic intervals are played like a harmony together. So you have to be able to identify them both, both ways.

21:11Lex Fridman:What's an early journey? Like we'll give people a preview of what they should, like what does that look like? What does practice look like?

21:17Rick Beato:Well, my course, it will play you an interval and then you identify it by clicking on whether it's, you know, a major third or minor third or major sixth or minor sixth or perfect fifth or tritone, whatever it is. And it will teach you gradually over time how to recognize all the intervals.

21:35Lex Fridman:So you listen to a melodic interval or harmonic interval. How quickly does the ear in the various age groups that we humans are in, how quickly does the ear learn the different intervals? Is it a week, two weeks, a month, two months, five years?

21:55Rick Beato:I think you do it pretty quickly. If you practice within a couple months, you can really make a lot of progress on it if you practice daily.

22:06Lex Fridman:What benefit does it have to you as a musician in general?

22:09Rick Beato:Well, it's great if you want to hear a chord progression, if you're trying to figure out a song, and you can say, oh, that's going from the six minor chord to the four major to the five major to the one major. You can just identify it immediately, and then you figure out what the first chord is, then you know what the rest of the chords are, because they're in relation to whatever that first chord is. And for learning solos, for example, or learning melodies, being able to sound something out.

22:34Lex Fridman:Now, do you recommend people couple that with music theory in terms of education, the education journey?

22:42Rick Beato:They have to be taught together because these terms are really music theory, right? Those intervals, major, second, minor, second, major, third, minor, third, perfect, fourth. So as you're doing that, and then once you learn the intervals, the 12 intervals in an octave, then you learn them both melodically and harmonically, so played together and separate. then you learn chords and so then you learn to identify major minor diminished augmented suspended chords things like that well you're basically learning music theory at the same time with that because learning music theory is just the name of things in music so there's the sound

23:23Lex Fridman:of things there's the name of things and then there's the haptic like playing the thing right probably so playing chords playing scales you have i believe a course on scales and on chords Yeah. Okay. Since we're doing the tangent, let's go. How do you recommend people, there's a bunch of people listening to this that are curious about how they can start in playing guitar, maybe even playing piano, maybe playing other instruments. Although guitar, of course, is the greatest instrument of all time. What are the early steps of that journey? What do you recommend people do in general?

23:56Rick Beato:Well, if you're a beginner, getting a good beginner guitar course and learning, first of all, the open chords in first position. A lot of songs can be played that way. A lot of old songs can be played that way. Maybe not new, modern songs necessarily. So learning a few chords and with an eye towards maybe playing a song? Yeah. You learn the chord shapes and you learn how to strum basic patterns to begin with. I think the first thing for learning guitar is actually how to position your fingers so that you don't mute strings that you don't want to mute. That's the hardest thing for people to do, basically, is to get their fingers arched to where they, if you're playing a C major chord, your index finger is on the first fret of the B string and you have to have that open E string ringing there.

24:45Rick Beato:And it's hard for people to make those micro adjustments. adjustments you take it for granted like you've been playing guitar for i don't know how many years forever right forever yeah and you don't even think about stuff like that when you're playing a guitar solo every little thing that you do if you're playing your comfortably numb guitar solo you have to out of midair strike the string that your fingers on to play the note and these are all fine adjustments that you're doing i'm just a hobbyist recreational player but

25:14Lex Fridman:wow, you're taking me all the way back. You're right. It's the haptic, the physical aspect of it is really tricky. Comfortably numb is a good example. But if you do lead, you have to get a super clean sound. Now that's both when you're playing fast, you want it to be super precise. But when you play slow, when you have one note and you're holding it and you're bending it, it better be really clean. And for that, I guess you have to really place the finger in the right place plus there's the well there's the calluses so it doesn't hurt and then the positioning of the string on the curvature of the finger where does it fall like how much do you bend

25:57Rick Beato:the finger you have to have enough of flesh on it to actually raise the raise the string and pitch

26:03Lex Fridman:yeah otherwise it yeah because you're lifting it with part of a flesh and of course you have to decide depends how ocd you are do you want to be like the perfect the proper musician or do you want to do a hendrix uh so the thumb over the top way over the top yes and so like you if you have a fretboard here i think the more like classical guitarists the very proper perfect uh perpendicular alignment of the the fingertips to the fretboard versus like hendrix is like fuck it you nerds i'm gonna do it with the messiness is part of the magic of course like bb king is also kind of messy looking in terms of his positioning of the fingers but his tone is incredibly clean yes super clean so like that teaches you that maybe any position can converge towards a super

27:01Rick Beato:clean tone you just have to figure it out i think a lot of it has to do with how they wear their guitars if you wear your guitar low if you're hendrix and you're wearing your guitar that's true if you're wearing it lower lower then you you can't get your fingers on top of it like that and the thumb acts as a way to mute the lower strings from ringing if you're playing through a loud amplifier so there's so many other micro adjustments when you're playing leads because you have to kind of mute the other strings that are so they don't ring out if you're playing the first note and comfortably numb and the solo at the end and you're at the ninth fret of the g string and you bend that if you bend that g string and you accidentally hit the b string under it you don't want that ringing so you have to kind of angle your index finger so it to mute to mute that so all these micro adjustments that you don't even think about i mean you're not thinking about that lex when you're playing it you've done it so many times that these things are just part of your of your brain that's why this is such a great brain developer for kids to learn instruments

28:09Lex Fridman:yeah of course you have to solve that puzzle it must be really frustrating in the beginning like holding a cord yes like all of them and it hurts too right it does you're doing acoustic guitar not for that long though for like a week couple yeah couple weeks couple i don't want to

28:28Rick Beato:discourage anyone you know it's it's actually pretty easy to learn basic stuff right but the

28:33Lex Fridman:the pain is temporary i guess is the point i'm trying to make it is uh so so what else so the physical component play a few chords where does the journey continue if you're learning guitar

28:44Rick Beato:well then it's like if you play electric guitar then you get into single note playing and stuff like that that's where it gets to me where it gets really fun you know you have single note playing that with riffs if you think of back in black right that has a riff embedded in the in the actual melody or many songs that have riffs the hendrix stuff that has chordal riffs and you're moving up the neck and and uh involving all the fingers and things like that so there's it really depends on what you want to what styles you want to play so you're thinking about song learning so

29:19Lex Fridman:different components of song learning so riffs and songs lead and songs and then you have finger

29:26Rick Beato:picking if you have stairway to heaven songs like that how about wanting to learn that that involves finger picking because the you have to isolate certain notes of the chord and play to it together

29:38Lex Fridman:you know and multiple times there's a few crossroads you get to select things uh so i guess you're speaking to the fact there's the if you're righty there's a right hand you can use your fingers or you can use a pick correct and it's a choice you make and sometimes you use both

29:55Rick Beato:because in stairway to heaven you're using the fingers at the beginning or fingers and pick hybrid they call it hybrid picking and then later on you're using the pick to flat pick

30:06Lex Fridman:the picking patterns on the music theory front do you recommend people learn scales and chords and

30:11Rick Beato:like the theory of it uh later on i would say i wouldn't say necessarily right right off the bat I think learning songs is the first thing that you should do because you want to keep people motivated. So you get them to fall in love with music and playing.

30:29Lex Fridman:All right. And that takes a couple months, three months? Depends on how motivated they are.

30:35Rick Beato:So you recommend practicing, what, every day? Every day. My son Dylan, when he started learning the guitar a couple years ago, So I said, it's better to practice 10 minutes a day, seven days a week, than to practice one day for an hour, which is roughly the same amount of time.

30:52Lex Fridman:Yeah, but it usually turns into something longer. But otherwise, like if you're a busy life, you know, taking a day off, that day turns into a week and then a week turns into a month and all of a sudden you haven't touched the instrument for months.

31:05Rick Beato:which is why i leave my guitar on a stand all the time so that if i walk by it i'm like okay i'll just pick it up for a second and then that second turns into 10 minutes and an hour two hours all

31:17Lex Fridman:right we gotta talk about this dylan video so this might be one of the earliest that's the first one

31:21Rick Beato:that's the first video on the channel it was actually before the channel because this actually blew up on facebook and then i put it on youtube after uh so if it's okay yeah okay dylan we're gonna do the hardest ear training test of all time are you ready right oh now i just a quick backstory on this i made this for my friend shane's wife who wanted to see because shane i was a friend that i was producing and he was there and dylan had come down the day in the day and i said oh check this out and i played this stuff he's like that's amazing can you make a video so I can show my wife? And I was on the way to a school board meeting because I was on the school board at Dylan's school.

32:08Rick Beato:And I said, Hey, Dylan, come downstairs. I want to make this video. Take one minute. Just need to do this thing for my friend Shane. And he's like, I don't want to. And I said, come on. So take one minute. I don't want to. So I said to my wife, I'm like, would you tell Dylan to come downstairs? I want to do this video. Take one minute. she's like Dylan go downstairs and he had he has a mouthful of candy there because he was eating candy so if you look at him he's he's literally has a mouthful of candy while he's doing this

32:36Lex Fridman:and we should say on Facebook it went quite viral yeah like got

32:43Rick Beato:I don't know 80 million views something like it had like 250 ,000 comments something like that insane how old is Dylan here he's eight eight years old

32:51Lex Fridman:yeah can you actually give some more backstory about like how you discover that Dylan has

32:55Rick Beato:perfect pitch so when dylan was about two he i was doing a facetime with my brother john and and i was i was like check this out john and i played the stone in love neil shone's solo from journey and and i was like check this out and dylan would sing along and and my son my brother john was like wow dylan can sing all the notes and i was like yeah and then i played black dog zeppelin and dylan would sing that and it's like dylan's got a good ear and then john and i were like, well, we have good ears too. So maybe we could have done that when we were that age. So a couple of more years goes by.

33:28Rick Beato:Well, he was about three and a half and I'm in the car. I was like, Dylan, sing the Star Wars theme. And he sings it. And I'm like, that's in the right key. And I checked, I play it on my phone. I was like, oh my gosh. And then I asked him, play it, sing the Superman theme. Cause we'd been listening to John Williams soundtracks the week before. And he sings that. And that was in the right key. And I asked him another song. So I turned the car around and I go back to the studio. I go to the piano, I hit the note B flat. And Dylan says, Star Wars. Star Wars starts on a big B flat major chord, but it's the note B flat is the main one that you hear.

34:05Rick Beato:And then I played the note G and he goes Superman. And that's the first note in the trumpet part of the Superman theme. And then I realized that he had perfect pitch. And then in five minutes, I taught him the name of the 12 notes, which he already knew, but he just didn't know the names.

34:19Lex Fridman:Oh, so you just associate the names to the thing he knows. What do you think is this in his mind? Because it's not just individual notes. He can like hear everything. Yeah. What is that?

34:29Rick Beato:He doesn't see colors. He just says every note sounds completely different.

34:35Lex Fridman:Wow. Like you said, maybe it's a language thing. Yeah. It really is. He just learned the language.

34:43Rick Beato:Yeah. The language. It's like, it's like perfect. It's like native music fluency. If you think of it like that. So let's listen to some of this. Turn around. Here we go. As fast as you can. We're going to start with single notes and we're going to do some intervals then chords. Okay, here we go.

34:58Lex Fridman:A. C. B flat. C. B. A flat.

35:03Rick Beato:Okay, good. Two notes at once. Here we go. C flat. Great. How about this? B flat A. Great. What about this? E flat. A flat.

35:14Lex Fridman:This is incredible.

35:19C. B flat.

35:20Rick Beato:And then how about this? E flat. What is it? E, E flat. Correct. He's annoyed. He is annoyed. The part of this, when I play these next chords, that's really, I think, why the video went so viral. The next part of this, where I play these super complex polychords. Okay, I'm going to do some polychords for you. These are really going to be hard. You ready? What's this? C augmenta for D flat augmenta. Okay, sing a B flat.

35:54Very good.

35:55Rick Beato:What's this chord?

36:03Rick Beato:A flat major for A major. Great. Sing an F sharp. Excellent. What's this chord?

36:14Lex Fridman:A minor for D flat major.

36:17Rick Beato:Great. What's this chord? He had nine over F major. He had nine over F major. So I had to look at my hand to make sure that that's what it was, because they're all in inversions. So I think the reason that this went so viral is that the more that someone knew about music, the more that they shared the video, because these polychords. So the people that were the best musicians would look at it, I was like, oh my God, you know, C augmented over D flat augmented. And the second chord was A flat major over A major, but they were both in inversion, right? So it was like a first inversion, A flat major chord, first inversion, A major chord.

37:03Rick Beato:And then A minor over D flat major, and then E add nine over F major. And for an eight year old, I mean, for anyone, plus they're all close voiced. They're all just right next to each other. it's not like you know where you can hear them clear it's all in the mid-range of the piano so you have to really listen and and you have to die he has to dissect each one like what are the notes being played there and and what is like what's the theory because he's actually using music theory

37:32Lex Fridman:to dissect them it must be in his brain those components of the chords all sound different like very clearly different yes it's truly incredible the human mind is incredible and So you're saying like some part of that is the things you hear in the first few months of life.

37:51Rick Beato:I did a thing where I played what I call high information music. High information music would be Bach, well-tempered clavier, fugues, anything Bach. And I would play the well-tempered clavier and I would play. I have a friend, Turkish pianist, who's one of the greatest improvisers I've ever heard. It's named Aydin Essen. And I would play Aiden's improvisations for Dylan. It had very sophisticated harmony and linear things in it. And Keith Jarrett and mainly jazz classical and modern classical music. And then we would listen to rock music once he was born. I'm talking on my wife's stomach before Dylan was born, starting at 15 weeks for 30 minutes a night.

38:38Rick Beato:and then when Dylan was born I would sit with him for an hour every morning and listen to music and I would look at him in order for this uh for them to hear these phonemes apparently and develop this language or get the the language as acquisition has to involve the social brain so when kids look at you you're when a baby's looking at you they're looking at your mouth And they were getting social cues from that. And this is also another component of saying, this is where this word stops or starts and stops. These are how the phonemes are separated from one another. These are how they're connected.

39:20Rick Beato:So I believe that all kids are born with perfect pitch. And then around nine months, they begin to lose it. If you don't engage their social brain, making these pitches. I never played pitches for Dylan. I said, this is a C, this is a B flat, this is a G. I just played complex, high information music for him and played with him.

39:40Lex Fridman:And that applies maybe even more generally to high information language.

39:45Rick Beato:Yes.

39:46Lex Fridman:And it starts before they're born. I think I saw some of these incredible scientists that work on the neuroscience and neurobiology, the psychology of language in early life. I think a big part is in the mother's stomach, you're listening to the mother speak. Yes, that's right. So that's how, on the language side, you're picking up the language already. That's right.

40:13Rick Beato:And you're picking up the musical language.

40:16Lex Fridman:So native music fluency, you could call it. So if the mother's sitting back and listening to Bach and some bebop jazz, you have a pretty good chance.

40:27Rick Beato:Much better chance.

40:29Lex Fridman:Okay. All right. So as we unwind our way back, Joe Pass and bebop, you were funny enough talking about what is bebop jazz. and people like Joe Pass and in your own life, your dad was somehow listening to that kind of incredibly complex and sophisticated music.

40:49Rick Beato:But wasn't a musician.

40:50Lex Fridman:Wasn't a musician. Which was very weird.

40:52Rick Beato:We never, I have six siblings and we could never figure out why dad liked really sophisticated jazz.

41:00Lex Fridman:We just took it for granted at that time.

41:01Rick Beato:Yeah, just took it for granted. And my dad passed away in 2004 and we never really talked about that, but he and I used to listen to music together all the time. I mean, but we put on a record. I sit on one side of the room. He'd sit on the other and not say a word. Listen through the whole side. A, I go flip it over. Listen to side B, never say a word and then get up and go do stuff. And we did that all the time.

41:25Lex Fridman:And so the first time you impressed your dad was with the Joe Pass song, right? And by the way, we'll have to go to this song because people must have forgot. People just think you're like a good communicator or something. They don't realize how good you are at guitar, how good you are at actually a lot of instruments, but guitar, especially, and there's this video, the greatest guitar solo period. Can you give me some context for this particular intricate, complicated solo? Who's Joe Pass?

42:02Rick Beato:Joe Pass was a guitarist. He lived from 1929 to 1994. And he was one of the greatest bebop players and solo guitar players. So he made a record that this is off of called Virtuoso in 1973 that my dad gave me for Christmas when I was in 10th grade. And he said, and this is not like my dad, my dad worked for the railroad. He was very, you know, few words spoken born in 1919. He said, if you ever learned to play guitar like this, you've accomplished something with your life. And I was like, what? So this record state was unopened until about March after Christmas. And one day I was like, okay, I'll open it up and I put it on.

42:44Rick Beato:I start listening to it. and uh i was like whoa this is kind of cool and so i said i think i can figure out some of this stuff so i figured out this thing is it by by ear mostly just by ear i didn't know any of the chords

43:00Lex Fridman:or anything if you can listen to a little bit here if you go back to that brother brother to

43:05Rick Beato:brother gino vanelli thing with carlos rios playing that stuff is incredibly hard this i'm starting i don't know any of these chords so i start out i don't even know what that chord is but i figured it out i i just and it's weird i mean look at that weird bar so you were just

43:20Lex Fridman:finding um like playing around putting your fingers on the various positions right trying

43:26Rick Beato:every combination of fingers i'd never played that chord it's a weird looking chord yeah and but i kept i moved my fingers around till i heard to where it sounded like oh that's it definitely and i looked at my hand i was like what is that i had no idea what it was so you were connected to

43:42Lex Fridman:You were really connected to the music. And so that's why you can hear. It's not necessarily, you didn't have perfect pitch. No. Not even relative pitch.

43:53Rick Beato:No, I did not.

43:54Lex Fridman:Yeah.

43:54Rick Beato:No, I didn't know anything about intervals. I didn't know anything about music theory, anything. This is all just. You're just like playing around with different shapes. That's amazing. I mean, look at that weird bar there. But then you get into these things.

44:12Rick Beato:So that stuff there, I could figure out. And then this. That stuff I could figure out. And then these things here. Those are just inversions of an... But I didn't know that. I'd heard Joe play that on the record. This is the last song I had there. I'd listened to a bunch of times.

44:35Lex Fridman:So you just replay over and over and over and over. And you're like trying to replicate it.

44:40Rick Beato:Yes, and I'm memorizing every different chord shape, all chord shapes that I had never played before.

44:46Lex Fridman:Would you recommend people do something like that on a really complicated song?

44:49Rick Beato:Yeah, but there's so many YouTube videos that you can go and just learn it without having to. Yes, I would recommend.

44:57Lex Fridman:I feel like the struggle. The struggle is where it's at. This is true for education in general. There's all these educators that try to make learning easier and more fun and all that kind of stuff. great wonderful but part of the thing is the struggle absolutely but yeah let's uh

45:22i heard licks like that all over this so i knew that that was and then these licks here

45:34Rick Beato:he plays a lot of ideas like that that's basically a c9 chord in the top notes of it

45:42Rick Beato:So all these are just inversions of the same chord. So if I could play that, then it's just figuring out the single notes, okay? So.

46:04Rick Beato:Okay, so if you just take this first part here, when he goes. So this intro part

46:11Lex Fridman:You make it sound so simple when you break it down And by the way, Joe Pass, incredible guitar player Like this is obvious And he improvised all this He could have played it like this But you know, the first

46:25Rick Beato:Was the individual note That's hard Maybe he's playing it like that That sounds more realistic

46:42Lex Fridman:The amount of different genres that you were able to replicate is just incredible.

46:47Rick Beato:This is just taking the needle, moving it there, then going back a little, oh, there. And then by the end, the record was so scratched.

46:57Rick Beato:It was, but it was worth it. When I played it for my dad, he couldn't believe, I mean, he didn't say that's amazing. He was just like, hmm, pretty good.

47:08Lex Fridman:So what was the role of bebop jazz in the history of music? It seems like it was influential in your life. Another guy, you had an incredible interview with Flea. People should go listen to that one. It's a great conversation. One of the things that surprised me is just how many musical genres influenced Flea. And the guy showed up in a Miles Davis t-shirt. That's right.

47:29Rick Beato:And Miles Davis played with Charlie Parker when he was 18 years old. And Charlie Parker was really his mentor. Can you explain to me why with many of the folks you've interviewed and in general out there in the world of jazz, all roads lead to Miles Davis?

47:48Lex Fridman:Why he's such an influential figure?

47:50Rick Beato:because he was the greatest innovator in the history of jazz. He was at the forefront of all these different styles of jazz. I mean, he started as a bebop player, and then he had records like The Birth of Cool and Modal Jazz and Hard Bop and records like Bitches Brew, where he started to, I guess you would call fusion. You start to get these records. You had two main groups of Miles Davis. You had the Miles Davis 50s quintet and the Miles Davis 60s quintet. Now, Miles made records with many people, but the 50s quintet had John Coltrane in it. I mean, different piano players could be Wynton Kelly, but Paul Chambers in the bass, Philly Joe Jones in the drums.

48:34Rick Beato:And that particular group was made just incredibly important records. And then he had his 60s group, which was Herbie Hancock on the piano, Ron Carter on the bass, Tony Williams on the drums, and Wayne Shorter on the saxophone. And they made all these incredibly important records.

48:58Lex Fridman:I forget who said it in an interview with you, but they talked about Miles Davis, his music feeling like, I think toes hanging over the cliff or something like this. Meaning like there's always a risk, there's a danger that you're willing to make to fuck it all up live. And that feeling is what creates the aliveness of the music. like can you speak to that just the creating in the music the feeling like you're on the edge like you're challenging the possibilities of what can happen and it all can go to shit and

49:40Rick Beato:because of that it feels alive well when i interviewed ron carter that played in in miles's 60s quintet i asked ron because ron did records he played bass on 2200 recording famous records and I said did you guys ever rehearse with Miles no never I said so you what what we do he goes we just show up at the studio and he'd have the charts put them on the stand and and we would you just roll and I said would you listen to it after no and I said well what about your what about the the live records that you did at when you'd record at clubs and things like that he goes we never knew that we were recording he goes maybe i'd see a microphone a different kind of microphone in my bass amp he goes then months later a record would come out and i'd see and i was on it and i would take it down to the union and say i played on this record so you could get paid for it but he said we didn't even know we were recording yeah so miles was always about you know don't think about it just just play that's crazy that was on purpose that was done on purpose not to

50:51Lex Fridman:Not to do the rehearsals, none of that. Yeah, he wanted people to just feel it, play it. Thought is the enemy of flow, as Vinnie Caliuda told me. Thought is the enemy of flow. How do you make sense that Flea, the bassist for the Ray Hot Chili Peppers, is influenced by bebop jazz?

51:11Rick Beato:So his stepfather was a jazz bass player. And when his parents got divorced, he was born in Australia. And then they moved to New York. Then his parents got divorced and his mom married his stepfather, who was a jazz musician. And then they used to have jam sessions at their place. And Flea loved it. It was kind of like my upbringing with my dad playing jazz all the time. And once it gets inside you, it's just there. And so he is heavily influenced by jazz musicians.

51:52Lex Fridman:Yeah, his impression was just hilarious. I mean, he's a character. His whole physical way of being is a character. And his impression of just upright bass is just fun to watch.

52:00Rick Beato:His intensity, when he picked up his bass during the interview, he's an intense guy and funny and really emotional. and um and he picks up his bass and there's a fierceness that you immediately feel and he starts he talks about how he practices and then when he starts doing slapping stuff he gets it's so into it and i'm just sitting there going whoa wow yeah he talked about his practicing routine with you

52:30Lex Fridman:and one of the things he's like i have to practice the slap and yeah no there's differences in the structure of the different bands but usually like the bassist has a vibe to them i don't know if we can put words to exactly what that is the kind of energy that drives the band to me the bass is one

52:49Rick Beato:of the only instruments that when you play a bad note everybody notices i started on the bass

52:55Lex Fridman:as a kid oh interesting yeah but you also play drums you also play yeah but my first instrument

53:01Rick Beato:was the cello in third grade and then i switched to the bass in sixth grade and my i majored my undergrad degree is in classical bass so i i always think of myself as a bass player first and i always think the bass is the most important instrument because strong words because as much as i love to play the guitar and i love to play the guitar more than anything i think but the bass really defines what the quality of the chord is because you can put the root in there you can put the third of the chord in the bass you put the fifth in there you can play a lot of notes and whatever you play in the bass kind of defines what kind of chord it is so the bass

53:39Lex Fridman:player has a lot of power i have to go back to the beginning of our conversation what what do you think are some of the great solos of all time can we can we put a few into consideration you have a great list on top 20 rock guitar solos of all time yeah so i put comfortably numb is my

53:57Rick Beato:favorite is my top one yeah on that day right on that day yeah right now the day later i would have said it's the second solo okay but i did the first solo because because nobody talks about that solo and that solo is equally great and when david gilmore when i played it for him and we talked about it in my interview with him it was just to watch his face when he listened to it was incredible i mean i'm thinking to myself it's like i'm sitting with david gilmore and he's listening to comfortably numb and he's hearing it he's played it a million times live but how many times has he gone back and listened to it on the record probably not for a long time and then he's hearing he's like oh maybe you just don't look back when you do great things you don't look back miles never looked back he never wanted to hear the old stuff he always moved on there was this

54:52Lex Fridman:funny moment um where you where you made a video why david gilmore will never be on the channel and then you ended up, of course, interviewing him twice. He's one of the greatest guitar players of all time. What do you think is at the core of his genius?

55:06Rick Beato:He has just an incredible melodic sense. He knows how phrases should be put together. There's a flow to his ideas that I think is just incredible. It's the same with Hendrix. This flow, how one idea leads to the next, how there's space between them. It's just like speaking.

55:29Lex Fridman:That's why I read about Miles Davis. He was very good at understanding tempo and the value of silence. And I think David Gilmour doesn't always play fast. Right. But he does a lot with less. Yes. And some of that is also on the more technical side, probably the tone of the... I mean, he's one of the most uniquely recognizable tones in all of music. Yes. What do you understand about what it takes to shape the tone that is David Goodman?

56:04Rick Beato:He has a very sophisticated setup for his tone. And that was one of the things when I went to his studio and I said to him, so David, is there anything I'm not supposed to see here? I mean, he never sits down and shows people his gear and he laughed about it. But there I am sitting there right next to all these pedals. And I asked his tech, Phil, I said, these are the same ones he used on the records he's like yeah his tech has been with him for like 50 years and i mean the exact ones yes it's just hard to it's hard to imagine that those things still of course though they he's just kept it yeah this is his vincent echo that he played through and this is this you know these are all the same effects pedals and wait is this the same high watt amp yeah is this the same yes yeah you get some new stuff but uh but they keep all their own gear and that's uh i mean he's did he does sell his guitars for charity but like he has a black strat that is a it's a signature version it's like he's got a copy of his old one so to him it sounds exactly the same plays the same well of course they converge towards

57:14Lex Fridman:that kind of hardware but there's so many tiny details over the years you see the final result of it but there's a there's a journey there of of exploring and of course he's not i guess he's

57:27Rick Beato:not doing any soft like no emulation no he does do emulation actually he does he has this thing and this is i asked him in the first interview about this there's a little rack thing that i had heard that he used but i asked him for sure it's called the zoom 90 30 I put out a short where he talks about it. I said, so that Zoom 93, is that a real thing? Because I've read about it. He's like, yeah. And he talks about how when he's sitting there recording on his own and he runs Pro Tools himself. And so he'll be sitting there. There's no one there to help him. He's like, I'll just plug into this thing and then he'll play a solo with this model.

58:05Rick Beato:It's like a kind of nineties modeling, early modeling thing. And he'll play a solo and then after a while you hear the solo and it's like well i'm not going to replay that that sounds great you get used to the sound of it and that's what it is so people always talk about oh well he couldn't have used that he's recording through an amp and because it sounds great and uh and then he's like yeah yeah so that's what i use and then i have i have the video of it right there and it has his presets dg1 and dg2 and you know whatever what's your

58:36Lex Fridman:process for preparing for interviews like that. You've done a few legendary people. I never prepare for interviews.

58:44Rick Beato:Because I ask people things that I'm interested in knowing. So just letting your curiosity just pull you forward. And I can think of a hundred questions to ask David Gilmore. But I always ask my questions based on what they say to me. But I do make a playlist of songs that I want to talk about. So that kind of guides me. is that because i want to make sure that i there's specific things that i need to play to so that you can jog his memory because anytime you play something that somebody recorded even 50 years ago they'll remember if they don't remember the exact specifics they that that brings it to life to them again and they can they can kind of piece together some aspects about it and they can really talk he can talk about the phrasing and the you know the kind of melodic direction of

59:44Lex Fridman:things like that so there's a lot of tiny details that go into a particular song whether it's in the production or how it's played how it was composed all that kind of stuff and you don't know what those are ahead of time no you just know the song and you just are looking to jog their memory and maybe your own curiosity of like how did you do this or how did what this sound or that That you make it look easy, but you have to have a depth of knowledge. You're saying you don't prepare.

1:00:12Rick Beato:I have an incredibly good memory. Exactly. That's what it is. I can remember when records came out, who produced them, where they recorded them, who was the engineer, what songs are on it. And not only that, but the people I'm interviewing know that I can play all the parts of all the instruments. because I've done breakdowns of their songs, which is why I get the interviews with them in the first place, really.

1:00:39Lex Fridman:But the actual skill of the interview, the thing you're not saying, the preparation, is the you, young, listening to bebop. That's right. It's the background. Now it's the soul carrying with you, being able to radiate the love of the soul of music.

1:00:57Rick Beato:I will say this, Lex, is that the other thing is that most of these people have a really good sense of humor. When I was, when the first time I interviewed David in New York, my brother John came along and he is a massive David Gilmore fan. That's his biggest influence as a guitar player. And so he said, you're interviewing David Gilmore? I'm coming. I was like, all right, come on, come on down. So my brother John's standing about five feet away. And John is a sales guy, but he's a great guitar player. I said, John's like, I was like, this is John, this is David. This is my brother, John. David, great to meet you, buddy.

1:01:33Rick Beato:And, you know, John's like, he's a sales guy. And so during the interview, I was like, hey, John, what was I going to ask David? Ask him about the Gilmore effect. Oh, yeah, that's right. And the Gilmore effect is my thing that I say in the comment section when people say anytime anybody plays anything technical. Oh, yeah, that's great. But I much prefer David Gilmore. And so I always call it the Gilmore effect. Anytime I have like Yngwie Malmsteen, anybody that has chops that I interview, the negative comments are always, well, I prefer David Gilmore. And I said that, I told David that he's like, well, maybe they should keep their opinions to themselves.

1:02:17Lex Fridman:Yeah, a lot of these folks have really wonderful personalities with a trusted person to be able to reveal that personality. So Comfortably Numb at the top on that day, what else is up there? Stairway to Heaven, Hey Joe. In that list, your top Hendrix solo was Hey Joe.

1:02:34Rick Beato:It's the first guitar solo I ever learned, so I had to put it on there. So I don't necessarily do these by... I do those in kind of how important they are to me and my development. So there's always a biographical component to these lists. Number three was Kid Charlemagne, a Steely Dan solo, Larry Carlton. An amazing solo, extremely difficult to figure out. Probably, there's two solos on the list that are just about, are very, that one I can play. Well, there's a few solos that are very hard to play. Stone in Love by Journey by Neil Sean is very hard to play some licks. There's a song, there's a solo by a guitarist, Carlos Rios, that people don't know.

1:03:21Rick Beato:It's a brother-to-brother Gino Vanelli song, but it's very hard to play and figure out. And that people don't know the solo. So I put it on my list because I knew a lot of people were going to watch it and they're going to know what the solo is.

1:03:34Lex Fridman:For me, the sentimental one, my first solo is Mr. Crowley, Randy Rhodes. I like the musicality of Mr. Crowley, that there is a melodic component to it. You're playing really fast, but there's a melody to it. And also there's like a legendary nature to the brief time we had Radio Rose. It's probably one of the greatest guitarists ever.

1:03:56Rick Beato:56 to 82, I think. Terrible. He was an absolute brilliant guitarist, had his own style. We should say he's the guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne, the band. Yeah. And that Mr. Crowley solo is a great solo. great solo and um he's incredibly influential as a guitar player um to for metal guitar players and um i love randy rhodes uh another guy so one of my favorites is uh mark knoffler yes and i did have mark knoffler on my list songs the swing that's right you did now i had it high on the list and i'll tell you why i would have had it had it lower because it's one of the early ones because I want people to be like, okay, oh, this is a serious list.

1:04:48Rick Beato:So Rick's going to talk about serious stuff. So, and Rick's going to play along with all these things.

1:05:05Rick Beato:So I wanted to kind of state that at the beginning of the video. I mean, I made the video in one day to do 20 solos. I think I played 19 of them, but the heart solo that I had on there, Nancy Wilson, I played the video of. And I tried to get a couple of my friends to play the Ice Cream Man Van Halen solo. So I called Dweezil Zappa and I was like, Dweezil, can you play the Ice Cream Man solo? I'm making a video about it. He's like, oh, I'd have to practice that. And I called my friend Phil X, who's an amazing guitar player. And he's like, no, I'd have to practice that. I was like, come on, man.

1:05:37Rick Beato:Can you play Ice Cream Man? the opening lick of ice cream man that he plays is very hard to play because it's an incredibly long stretch and it hurt my fingers to do and eddie would turn his guitar up like this to to play and plus it's a tricky it's just it's a tricky rhythm and and it's such a big stretch

1:05:59Lex Fridman:it's like man i can't that hurts my hand i just love that that's the van halen solo you have

1:06:06Rick Beato:the top 20. See, I have to do some... Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's so many Van Halen. My God, it could be... I could pick 25 different Van Halen solos.

1:06:15Lex Fridman:But to me, I mean, there really is nobody like Mark Knopfler. I mean, there's a unique guitarist. There's something about his tone. Speaking of Gilmore, there's just the tone, the care, the timing of the notes, his improvisation, like the live performances of Salt in the Swing that's been actually going somewhat viral around recently his pretty old live performance of Salt in the Swing for me Brothers in Arms these kind of soulful mournful type of solos he does really really well also the interesting instrumentation of La Romeo and Juliet just so many truly one of the greats

1:07:04Rick Beato:Now, obviously, the intro to Money for Nothing is one of the greatest, almost impossible to recreate that because of the sound is so unique and it's just improvised. It's so cool.

1:07:19Lex Fridman:Yeah. There's certain songs like Europa by Santana. Santana can have that tone, too.

1:07:25Rick Beato:Yeah.

1:07:25Lex Fridman:That Mark Knopfler makes me really just how clean it is. I think he beats B.B. King in my book In terms of the cleanness of just Pure beauty of a single note Like a power of a single note I don't know anybody who beats Mark Knopfler

1:07:42Rick Beato:Well, that thing about Being able to recognize somebody from a note

1:07:47Lex Fridman:Yeah

1:07:47Rick Beato:You know? When I hear Brian May I can immediately recognize it's Brian May Incredibly melodic The tone that he has Gilmore, Hendrix everyone that we're talking about van halen it's just they have that one note it's oh i know who that is and that's that's why we're talking about them that'd be

1:08:08Lex Fridman:funny that'd be a good uh video bb king you hear one note as a test of like how quickly can you recognize just a solo starts playing that's a great i'm gonna make that video tomorrow

1:08:21Rick Beato:tomorrow lex the day after tomorrow you'll see it i would love to see that you say can you recognize these players by one note by one note yeah i think it's i think we're being a little

1:08:31Lex Fridman:too aggressive with that i think you need like two or three or four or five i guarantee you so i i was going to do a video last week where i was going to play uh songs in reverse okay see if

1:08:43Rick Beato:you can recognize these songs in reverse and i had my two assistants come in it's like do you know what song that is they're like oh that's adele like what then they're like oh that's that's nirvana instantly they could recognize like well that's not worth making yeah it's so obvious you hear the tone of the voice backwards forwards it doesn't matter you know it is okay so it's

1:09:01Lex Fridman:about the tone yeah how could you possibly know from a single note it's i guess van halen you can

1:09:09Rick Beato:one note of a bb king's vibrato you could know I'm gonna What I'll do is I would separate the guitars I'll use I can actually separate the tracks And I'll just play one note

1:09:20Lex Fridman:You think you get From a single vibrato You can know it's B.B. Camp Yes Well we'll see Put it on record I'm skeptical I'm gonna do

1:09:28Rick Beato:I'll do 20 of them Can you recognize these guitarists From a single note?

1:09:32Lex Fridman:Could you recognize Stevie Ray Vaughan? Absolutely Versus Eric Clapton? Yeah Alright right. You might be right. You might be right. Quick 30-second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfriedman.com slash sponsors. We've got Uplift Desk for my favorite office desks, BetterHelp for mental health, Element for electrolytes, Fin for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, back to my conversation with Rick Beato.

1:10:17Lex Fridman:What do you think is the best Eric Clapton song? One of the things we haven't mentioned so far is the importance of lyrics and maybe meaning of the song and what it represents. So, in that sense, Tears in Heaven. Well, the story behind that is heartbreaking. And then I personally really love the sound of Wonderful Tonight. That's a great song. That's one of my favorite Clapton songs. And I, as I was like listening to it, just doing a whole personal journey, introspection, knowing that I'm going to talk to Rick Beato, listening to just a bunch of songs. And I learned, it's embarrassing that I didn't know the stories behind the music, But I learned that Eric Clapton was married for a decade to the same woman that George Harrison was married to.

1:11:12Lex Fridman:And that this woman was the muse, the inspiration for so many of the legendary songs of rock, including Wonderful Tonight, including Layla, and including George Harrison's something. Yeah. legendary song also the same woman is she the greatest muse in rock history probably yes this is great uh so in your interviews of musicians and producers i think the thing you're ultimately fascinated by is their whole the process the the the recording the production the songwriting the different elements of the process so uh are there examples of different things that stand out to you from all the interviews you've done.

1:12:04Lex Fridman:And by the way, all the recording and production you've done yourself. So on the recording front, on the production front, on the songwriting process front, just things that pop into memory.

1:12:15Rick Beato:When I've interviewed the guys that are the producers, like Rick Rubin, Daniel Anwar, Brendan O 'Brien, Butch Vig, the thing about producers, as opposed to people that are musicians, If you're in a musician, even if you're David Gilmore, you do a record and then you tour and then you do another record, maybe years go by. But producers are working on multiple records, you know, sometimes at a time. Rick Rubin could be working on multiple records and and the variety of things that they do. You can talk to. I mean, I can talk to Rick about the Chili Peppers and I can talk to him about Johnny Cash.

1:12:54Rick Beato:I could talk to him about Tom Petty and all these records that I love. And there's just so many interesting stories that, I mean, these interviews could go on for days with Rick and the variety of records that he worked on. And there's so much knowledge to be gained, for me at least. And I think that the craft of production and recording engineering is something that is not well documented. Especially since there's no, there's so few studios nowadays where there used to be a mentorship thing where you go and you work as an assistant engineer and you work your way up. I interviewed a guy named Ken Scott that worked with the Beatles.

1:13:41Rick Beato:I interviewed him at Abbey Road Studios just two months ago. And he started as a tape op when he was 16. He started on the Hard Day's Night record with the Beatles. And he worked his way up. And he said the first time he ever recorded an orchestra was he recorded I Am the Walrus, the orchestra part. He set up the mics. And I asked him, I said, so where was the band? Standing right behind me, the Beatles, right behind him. The guy I'm interviewing at Abbey Road recorded I Am the Walrus there. I mean, he recorded many Beatles songs. And he was 18 years old. And I mean, I just can't I can't even fathom that.

1:14:20Rick Beato:They have a little cafe in the basement of Abbey Road. And I said, did the Beatles come in here? He goes, oh, yeah, they come in here and get coffee. And I remember when they got two microwaves that like the first microwaves in 1965. And they were amazed by them. And it's hard to imagine that I'm talking to people that worked on these historic records, but, you know, they all start with a blank tape or an empty hard drive. And then you've eventually filled them up with this music that you can never imagine it not existing like Stairway to Heaven or whatever it is.

1:14:56Lex Fridman:yeah it's funny like looking back even probably for them just to realize they've created that magic is hard to believe yeah because you look at a blank thing and then magic comes out and you don't even you don't even understand i you don't understand probably a lot of these artists don't understand where that came from they're channeling some deeper thing when i interviewed brian may he told me i can't remember if this was if we talked about it on camera or not but we talked

1:15:26Rick Beato:about Bohemian Rhapsody. And at the very end, there was a thing where he was depressing his whammy bar a little bit. And it sounds like the piano is out of tune. I never noticed it before he mentioned this to me. And he said it always bothered him. And there's always something about these songs that bothers people. Even these songs. Little things, yeah. Right. There's always little things and they sit and they hear it and they're like, oh man, I wish I'd bent up a little higher on that or whatever.

1:15:57Lex Fridman:I mean, there's certain moments in songs that are just unlike anything else. And Bohemian Rhapsody, when Freddie Mercury sometimes wish I've never been born at all, and then guitar comes in, I mean, there's just nothing like that. Yeah. I don't even know. I mean, that whole thing, you've done videos on it, it's an incredibly complicated composition. It's crazy that a popular song, popular rock song, could be this operatic, so complicated. The other thing akin to that moment is Phil Collins with In the Air Tonight, the drum bridge. What is that? I don't understand how you can create that. What is that?

1:16:50Lex Fridman:Why is that so magical? Why is it so singular inside a particular song and in rock history, period? Like these moments. Musically, I don't understand how you create them. Because it might be bigger than musical. It might be cultural, a bunch of different elements. And plus it's him filled with, like I've seen live performers. He has like a headset. He does something. He's like a telemarketer or something. Like this whole vibe and look to him. He doesn't look like a rock star.

1:17:19Rick Beato:But he is. those are hooks when you think about it right it's like it's as much of a hook as any as the chorus of the song or any song that drum thing is something that people wait for and they air drum to it everybody air drums to it and it is a hook and those are hard to create those are those moments are really hard to create and usually they're done by accident yes it's hard if you chase it

1:17:44Lex Fridman:you're not going to get it. Yeah. And your conversation with Sting, he said something about how modern music is simpler, more minimalistic, and the bridge is gone, I think he said. And he said he thought that the bridge is therapy. Yes. It's like a chance for you to reflect, I guess, on the verse. Right. Before the chorus comes in. That's right. It changed my view of the bridge, I suppose, the therapeutic nature of it, at least lyrically. You think he's onto something?

1:18:20Rick Beato:Yes. The value of the bridge? The bridge is a place, I think, where you can kind of change the frame of reference of a song. You could probably do anything, I guess. Lennon used to, he would have some kind of biting lyrics, like, we can work it out. So McCartney writes the, you know, try to see it my way. Do I have to keep on going until I can't go on? And then, but the bridge is very Lenin. Life is very short and there's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend. I've always thought that it's a crime. So I'll ask you once again. I mean, it's very, you know, very Lenin-esque. That was really a kind of a real collaboration between the two of those.

1:19:03Lex Fridman:This is where different parts of the band can clash in interesting ways. I mean, the Beatles are the epitome of that. Each individual Beatle is a great talent in their own right. Yes. How were the Beatles able to create some of the greatest songs of all time all before they turned 30 years old?

1:19:23Rick Beato:I have never been able to figure that out. But I have a theory that because PA systems were so bad back then And the Beatles, people screamed so loudly that the Beatles thought, okay, we don't, we don't need, we can't tour anymore because we can't even hear ourselves. So we're just going to be a studio band. And maybe because of, we have all these great late Beatles records are from 1966 on just because they had bad PA systems. and they had no monitors you know they're in shea stadium people are screaming so loudly they can't hear themselves they're like okay forget this we can't tour we'll just make studio records so that's what they did and in that one year like from august 6 1965 they put out help then in december 3rd they put out rubber soul of 65 then then august 5th they put out revolver so within Since 365 days, they put out three, I think, 14 song records.

1:20:29Rick Beato:So they wrote and recorded three incredibly important records. They were in the studio. It's like working out. They're practicing their craft every day, writing songs, trying to outdo the other ones. And so you had the perfect thing of four supremely talented musicians, songwriters, singers. and then the best producer you could possibly have, George Martin. And it was just a perfect storm. I think that when I would talk to friends that would just play in local clubs and they'd play four hour sets, five nights a week, and they never lost their voices because they're always working those muscles.

1:21:13Rick Beato:And same with the Beatles. They were always in the studio singing every single day doing takes and and i think that that was part of it at least but you also have this

1:21:25Lex Fridman:theory that uh you know that the greatest productivity that musicians have is before they turn 30 the greatest sort of creative genius that can come out of the human mind

1:21:40Rick Beato:musically is before the age of 30 i think it's the same in mathematics as well that you have this fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence up until you're about, you know, in your late 20s, 30 years old, and then crystallized. So you're using the crystallizes, you're using your life experience to write things. So you'll find that composers, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart wrote their most important works at the end of their lives. Beethoven, the late string quartets, the Ninth Symphony, things like that. So they have a whole lifetime of experience that lead up to this and there's not they're not improvising but things for improvising writing pop songs and that i think when your mind is really most active and your brain processing speed is at its pinnacle that this is my theory that people can uh come up with those kind of ideas same with improvising i think that most jazz improvisers not all but most do their best improvising before age 30.

1:22:46Rick Beato:Creating something new.

1:22:48Lex Fridman:Yes. Truly novel that requires youth. It's just a theory though, but it seems to apply. What do you think about the 27 Club? A bunch of the music greats died at 27. Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse. Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain, of course. A big part of music history is linked to drug history. LSD, coke, heroin, weed.

1:23:22Rick Beato:Smoking. Smoking. I think about this a lot. If you go back and you watch videos, The Beatles, any of their movies, they're smoking all the time. The Get Back documentary, they're smoking constantly. Go watch any of the MTV Unplugs, Nirvana. Kurt Cobain is smoking every second that he's not playing, he's smoking. Every singer smoked every musician smoked nowadays i asked my son dylan dylan does anybody smoke at his high school he's like smoke nobody smokes he's thinking it was an absurd question

1:23:54Lex Fridman:and that was part of culture it was for everybody i mean i was that was a big transformation over the past 20 years and just everybody stopped smoking but i don't think smoking has the kind a hard negative effect that we're talking about i mean i almost would rather have them smoke than some of the other hard drugs maybe smoke it distracts them from the hard i mean heroin and coke i mean those things really and alcohol unfortunately can be easily abused i think it seems like it's the the life of a musician this dopamine thing of getting on stage and be being adored by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the high of that, and then the come down after is really hard life for just even neurobiologically of like, how do you deal with that?

1:24:50You have to be able to control the rollercoaster of your mind.

1:24:55Lex Fridman:And of course, drugs will be a part of that. And you think everything is allowed and everything is possible. And then there's also culture, depending on who you hang out with, that certain kinds of categories of drugs are good for your creativity. And so naturally start to abuse those drugs. I don't know. I think it's really interesting the role that drugs have played in the history of music. They have certainly been extremely destructive, but they have also certainly been productive. Muses, inspirations for some of these folks.

1:25:35Rick Beato:Oh, absolutely. Now, would we want to, you know, advocate people doing things like that to boost their creativity? No, I wouldn't. But just like smoking, which I think improved people's voices. i mean really the raspiness of it this is the reason that the that that so many these virtually every famous singer no matter what genre music jazz soul rock they all smoked nat king cole yeah miles davis too miles everybody smoked miles did well miles was a heroin addict too i mean yeah so many jazz musicians but miles had a sound to him

1:26:21Lex Fridman:You're right. I mean, smoking must play a gigantic role to that, adding some complexity to the voice. Yes. Yeah, some richness to the voice.

1:26:31Rick Beato:Nat King Cole, he smoked, I think, four packs a day. He died of lung cancer. A lot of heavy smokers, those singers. Frank Sinatra, heavy smoker. McCartney was a heavy smoker. Lennon, all those guys smoked.

1:26:46Lex Fridman:Yeah, it's hard to know, chicken or the egg. But I certainly wouldn't recommend doing drugs as a way to get better at music. No.

1:26:57Lex Fridman:But, you know, it does seem to go hand in hand. And some of it has to do with the period, with the time period, with the place. Because sometimes it's part of the culture. The drug is, like you're saying, smoking. If you're smoking now, that's going to be a very different experience than smoking 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago. It's a different vibe. So sometimes the drug is a deep, integrated part of the culture versus an actual chemical substance. The 60s, right? I don't know. They were on everything in the 60s. Yeah.

1:27:33Rick Beato:I mean, it has to account for something, Lex.

1:27:37Lex Fridman:On the songwriting front, you mentioned a story about Elton John recording. So he's one of the legendary songwriters. but yeah you've met him and you know something about the process of his um yeah because he was

1:27:51Rick Beato:recording in a studio in atlanta that i was working with the band that i was producing and he was i was in studio b he was in studio a and this band that i was working with they were called jump little children and so he had his assistant come in and ask hey is this are you guys jump little children yeah and then all of a sudden i couldn't see out into the live room elton walked into the thing. And we were getting ready to track and I'm pressing the button. Yo, where are you guys? What's up? I thought we're going to start this. And no one's responding. I can hear talking. It's like, what's going on?

1:28:22Rick Beato:Where are they? Then all of a sudden they come back in the studio and they were stunned. I said, where were you guys? Elton John just walked into our session and he said he's a big fan. He said to come over when we're done and hang out in Studio A. So we did. And he was there with Bernie Taupin. They were working on a song and we talked there for an hour and he was talking about recording two records a year and then they'd go on tour and they'd write and record the whole record in two weeks so bernie would give him lyrics elton would go out and spend 15 minutes writing all the melody he'd look at his lyrics and he was doing that that day bernie was there and they had a lyric sheet up on the piano and elton would go on and they just okay just record this and elton would sit there and and play and come up with the song in 15 minutes or so.

1:29:11Rick Beato:There's a great version of, I think, Tiny Dancer, where Elton is coming up with it. It's on YouTube. And he's just coming up with the music right there. And then the band, okay, here's how it goes, and they record it right then. They move on to the next song. It's really incredible.

1:29:28Lex Fridman:That's it, yeah. There's one that I've done the other day called Tiny Dancer, which is about Bernie's girlfriend. I just sort of ran it through and put two verses together, then a middle-eight, then a chorus and then back to the verse sort of thing. It happens very quickly. It sounds long but it sort of starts off. Blue jean baby, LA lady, seamstress for the band.

1:30:00Lex Fridman:Pirate smile, pretty eye,

1:30:06Rick Beato:you're married. okay it's really amazing that he just he's looking at it just the lyrics yeah and it's one of the he's one of the very few people that has the lyrics first and writes the music to it which to me is far more difficult 99 of songwriters write the music first and then they put the melody and lyrics to the finished backing track and maybe they write like lyrics they write like

1:30:35Lex Fridman:nonsense words kind of thing. And they figure out from there. Yeah, that's, I mean, I don't know what skill that is exactly. That's incredible. I mean, in that process, he makes it his own. Yes. Okay. You had an amazing interview with Kirk Hammett. I'm a huge Metallica fan. Same here. There's a lot of interesting stuff that came out of that from that conversation. One is the distinction between heavy metal and hard rock, which is very interesting. Of course, Metallica went through their own evolution. They had many periods. I mean, they've been around 40 years. Over 40 years, yeah. Crazy. The other thing is the downpicking, which was interesting, which is creating that really distinct sound.

1:31:25Rick Beato:James and Kirk's, the downpicking, I used to be able to do that. I just can't do that anymore. it hurts my thumb to do it. I think, honestly, I thought a lot about it. It's like, why is it so painful? Why is it so hard? It's from swiping with your thumb on phones. And I think it affects that basal joint there. And I'm serious. I think that that's actually right. Because I'm thinking like, why does that hurt so much to do that? All the downstrokes and stuff. It's got to be something. It's like, yeah, it's from swiping with the phone.

1:31:56Lex Fridman:The other thing that came through is that he's an improviser at heart. and that I think clashes with this kind of rigid structure that metal is. So there's a real soulful, melodic aspect to him. And he gave a lot of props to James Hetfield for just being a great composer, being a great musician and writer of riffs, of rhythm.

1:32:18Rick Beato:The improvisation part of it you don't think of because you have the finished songs that you listen to. But those songs are born out of improvisations, of jams, of little fragments of ideas, and then they craft them into these masterpieces.

1:32:37Lex Fridman:Also, you mentioned that this is weird that I didn't know that Hendrix used different gauges, strings.

1:32:43Rick Beato:Yeah, he was the one that talked about that, wasn't he? Yeah. Yeah, that was really interesting. See, these are the things that I like to learn from these interviews with these people. I'm like, what?

1:32:56Lex Fridman:I've never heard of that. It's like it's one of the ways you can find uniqueness of sound is by trying different things that are not. I mean, I guess Zappo is really good at this, right? Yeah. It's completely breaking out of what you're supposed to do, the ways you're supposed to do them and doing it completely differently. You often ask musicians what their perfect song is. First of all, it's an interesting question. What is a perfect song? Like one surprised me is Hans Zimmer said, God Only Knows by the Peach Boys.

1:33:25Rick Beato:I was surprised by that too. But I thought it was like, yeah, okay, that's a perfect song for sure. The first interview I ever did was with Peter Frampton in 2018. And I asked him in that interview, what's a perfect song? And he said, Whiter Shade of Pale. And I was like, ooh, that's a great song. And then I thought, I'm going to ask that to people just to see what they, now people are prepared if I ask that.

1:33:48Lex Fridman:But it's like, they're willing to go out on a limb and say it. Yeah. Like, if you ask me, I don't even know. I guess you just say it, whatever, right? Like, what would I even say? What's a perfect song? Yeah, I would go. See, I feel the pressure. Right? Because the problem is, the reality is, it changes day by day, like minute by minute. I.

1:34:15Lex Fridman:Yeah, I would probably. I'm sorry, but I would have to go Mark Knopfler. And I would probably go. Is it really cheesy to say the obvious thing? I would go Salt-N-Z Swing even though like I'm tempted to say Europa but then like

1:34:31Rick Beato:Salt-N-Z Swing hits on so many levels because it's got a great melody, great lyrics and then multiple great guitar solos and it has such a unique sound to it. The other thing is that it sounds very different from other Dire Straits songs I mean it's like early Dire Straits Strat Tone and then you think of like Money for Nothing as a Les Paul and it's a totally different kind of vibe than him playing on salt and the swing but that song's amazing

1:34:59Lex Fridman:plus it's about music yes so it's like there's a there's a meta aspect to it but then there's also like we're talking about this guitar stuff but leonard cohen hallelujah and leonard cohen in general like these songwriters that go super simple on guitar and there is just uh what's that called singer-songwriter type. I told you off my, one of my, maybe the music guests, that's a dream guest, is Tom Waits. I've wanted to talk to Tom Waits for a very long time. And I've gone through different periods of, you've met me at a point in my life where I've given up on it a little bit. That's when it's gonna happen.

1:35:46Rick Beato:Once you give up on it, it's gonna happen. Yeah. Yeah. Why Tom Waits won't be on your podcast. Exactly. Exactly, dude. This is my moment. Tom, come here. Let's do it.

1:36:03Lex Fridman:I want to see it. I'm such a fan of this Apple artistry on the musical front, which Tom Waits has. But I'm a sucker for great lyrics. Lyrics, to me, is such a big part of great songs. And he's another example. He has a song called Martha. It's about a love story that didn't work out. And it's an older man calling the woman that he was in love with and basically reminiscing about, thinking about what would have happened if it worked out, that kind of thing. And then I loved that song for a long time. And at some point I found out that he wrote that when he was in his early 20s. And you realize it's similar with the Beatles.

1:36:50Lex Fridman:Like, these guys somehow are able to capture the human condition so masterfully. And they're kids. Yes. I don't get it. I don't understand it.

1:37:02Rick Beato:I can't speak for Tom Waits, but in the Beatles' case, they went to Hamburg. They spent time on their own. They played cover gigs that were eight hours long, and they lived. Yeah, they've lived. They've lived life.

1:37:15Lex Fridman:Yeah.

1:37:15Rick Beato:It's not like kids today.

1:37:19Lex Fridman:Now you're on a porch. You also had an amazing interview with Billy Corgan, the Smash of Pumpkins. He is definitively one of my favorite musicians. I love Billy. You asked him an interesting question about how he creates this melancholy feeling that permeates a lot of his songs. And he jokingly said that the secret is all about the seventh and the ninth. um so like musically chord wise what do you think about that you think he's onto something he's talking a little music theory there yeah seventh and ninth over the chord that he's

1:37:56Rick Beato:playing so if you're playing a c chord he's singing a b would be the seventh d would be the ninth and he does use a lot of those notes but almost all these people that we're talking no all these people that we're talking about use these notes and this is why their songs i and when I interviewed Sting, I call them surprise tones. And Sting's like, I like the way you use the word surprise. Notes that are outside the chord that are dissonant with the chords that they're playing. And that creates emotion. Dissonance equals emotion. And that's, that's what I like. I want music to be, to depress me.

1:38:32Yeah.

1:38:32Lex Fridman:What is that? I don't know. But melancholy, and I think you articulated in the interviews, it's not actually that depressing. There's something about that melancholy feeling that is somehow the other side of the coin of happiness. It's a kind of longing. Yes. There's a hopefulness to it, that aloneness that you feel. I mean, that's actually like one of the intimate connections you have with music is when you're alone. I think there's a social way of listening to music when maybe a concert and so on. but there's this there's nothing like you're alone in the car driving listening to like whatever it is bruce springsteen uh i think louis ck has a bit about that it was a bruce springsteen but he's sometimes has to pull over to the side of the road just weep or something like this it's just there's some there's something about that sometimes a song just connects with you and i don't know nothing like a melancholy song could do that it's you think about like maybe things you regret or how life could have worked out and sometimes it's not even about like it's not even real it's just connects something to the in the soul the the uneasiness that we all feel maybe the loneliness we all feel that underpins so much of the human condition

1:39:48Rick Beato:it just connects with that i don't know what that is there's a kurt cobain lyric it was on the in utero record from the song francis farmer the chorus part is i miss the comfort of being sad and i was like yes i miss the comfort in being sad i was like yeah that's it right there in terms

1:40:09Lex Fridman:of love songs somehow i find powerful that kind of desperation so like i've always connected with Pearl Jam's Black. Oh, amazing. That line, a friend of mine was going through a breakup, so I was listening, and he's the one that introduced me to Pearl Jam during that whole period when Pearl Jam was huge with 10. That line is someday...

1:40:36Rick Beato:Someday you'll have a beautiful life. Someday you'll be a star in somebody else's sky. Why, why, why can't it be, can't it be mine? Oh my God, that blows me away That's an amazing line The delivery is incredible on it too

1:40:55Lex Fridman:Eddie Vedder, one of the great frontmen of all time And that whole period, that whole moment in history Of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder That captured, that was the 90s That was one side of the 90s That just, this singular moment in history Who do you think are the great frontmen? In history of music. Freddie Mercury. Robert Plant. Freddie Mercury, number one, probably. Steven Tyler. Jim Morrison. Jim Morrison. Yeah. Roger Daltrey. Well, we have to say, I have to say, we have to say, James Hetfield. James Hetfield. I mean, there's nothing. I mean, I have to talk to you about this. I mean, this is the greatest, I think, the greatest concert of all time.

1:41:42Lex Fridman:This is their historic performance in Moscow in September of 91. This is shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed. Plus, we should mention ACDC and Pantera were there too. And about 1.6 million people were there. Now, by the way, there's some kind of reporting that it was half a million people, 500 ,000 people. That's somewhere I've seen statements like that. that's a ridiculously inaccurate statement so it's a free concert so any official counts don't count it's uh it's it's definitely over a million it's very likely to be 1.5 1.6 million people and this moment in history that i think they channeled it's like whenever great music the metallica was firing on all cylinders at the very top of their game and they meet this moment in history and this place in history that was a defining part of the 20th century collapsing and you have these people who are um for a moment through music are able to escape the fear the anger they feel the all of it there's also political social cultural moment meeting the musical moment and the the set list i was just i was i listened to several times over the past few days, just taking myself back into that moment in time.

1:43:07Lex Fridman:Listen to this set list. Enter Sandman. Creeping Death. Harvester of Sorrow. Fade to Black. Sad but true. Master of Puppets. Seek and Destroy. For Whom the Bell Tolls. One. And Whiplash. Look at that. How is that? That just... That's my kind of set. Get the fuck out of here. This is amazing.

1:43:28Rick Beato:That's my kind of set right there.

1:43:30Lex Fridman:I don't know if you could think of anything that could beat that.

1:43:32Rick Beato:I think that the guys in the band would say that too. That was, I mean, they were really at their peak. The Black Album had just come out then. And that must have been so, so exciting.

1:43:45Lex Fridman:I mean, Woodstock was big. There's certain moments in time that really, really meet the moment. Are you a fan of live, like big?

1:43:54Rick Beato:I used to be, but at this point, I can't, you know. i'd much rather see people play in small clubs and or go to the i'd like to listen to the studio

1:44:08Lex Fridman:go to the studio even i generally almost entirely agree with you i just think that there's these historic moments but you don't know which are going to be which but you're making the concert free it's just all of it to get plus pantera and acdc the other which actually is a legitimate thing you mentioned is as one of the greatest concerts of all time, is Beethoven's world premiere of Ninth Symphony. You know, I didn't really know the personal side of Beethoven until I saw this movie called Immortal Beloved. It's an excellent movie with Gary Oldman. Just a really, it's a masterful celebration of Beethoven in an interesting kind of way through the perspective of a love letter that he's written.

1:44:55Lex Fridman:But then I realized like this early, this is many, many, a couple of decades ago now, that he went deaf before he even started writing in the Ninth Symphony, which is widely considered to be one of the greatest compositions of all time, the greatest symphonies of all time. He went deaf, couldn't hear anything before he even started writing it. And so there's that famous story of him in that world premiere of having to be turned around because he can't hear people applauding, So he has to be turned around to see that people are actually clapping. I mean, there's this whole tragic element, plus the meaning of the symphony that ends in this beautiful ode to joy.

1:45:39Lex Fridman:The symphony itself is a kind of, it starts with the chaos and conflict and ends with this celebration of peace and brotherly unity and I guess a call for that, a reaching for that peace. And there's a tragic element to it, again, connected to history, which is it was post-Napoleonic wars and before the American Civil War. So like you're in this middle, this respite from war calling for peace, not knowing that truly horrific wars are coming. So you have the American Civil War and you have, of course, the two world wars coming. So this, all of it together. And the fact that he's conducting deaf and he wrote this whole thing deaf.

1:46:30Lex Fridman:I was reading a lot about his process and he just edits and edits and edits and edits. So the fact that he had to edit in his head is just insane.

1:46:40Rick Beato:I mean, Beethoven was sick all the time too. I mean, a lot of people were sick all the time. It was very common. what would motivate you to write music this beautiful music that you can never actually hear except for in your head right like why the amount of time it takes to write to write a 35 minute 40 minute piece all the parts you got to hear all the orchestration in your head, you're editing, you're doing all these things. Where do you get the motivation when you can't hear the actual finished work? And people would say, well, he hears in his head. But what kind of enjoyment is it? You want to hear the orchestra?

1:47:27Rick Beato:I mean, it's really profound that he was inspired to do this. There's a thing called the Heligestad Testament that he wrote. It was a letter to his brothers from 1802. I think they found it in his desk after Beethoven died. And he felt a sense of shame and humiliation because of his hearing loss. And he said that he was afflicted with this thing where him of all people, that someone standing next to him could hear a flute that he could not hear or a shepherd singing in the field. And he could not hear this. And of all the people, why him? Where hearing played such an important part. Another person that would have had to have had perfect pitch.

1:48:15Because you could never do this if you didn't have perfect pitch.

1:48:19Rick Beato:Which I think all these great composers, for the most part. Brahms didn't, from what I know. But all the rest of them, for sure, had perfect pitch. So they could hear these things in their head. And that's how they composed. I mean, you love sound and music.

1:48:36Lex Fridman:What do you think it was like gradually losing your hearing for Beethoven? It must have been terrible. I mean, just terrible.

1:48:49Rick Beato:I mean, I've heard things where he would have a stick in his mouth and put it on the soundboard of the piano and you could feel the vibrations in his skull and things like that. Yeah, desperately trying to. Yeah. I just.

1:49:03Lex Fridman:But also, what is that that he's able to write Like one of the greatest symphonies ever While deaf So there's something about that We mentioned darkness, but torment That he's going through And ultimately, Ode to Joy Like, not a cynical thing Right To call for the positive Yeah Yeah

1:49:30Rick Beato:That's, I think I have devoted many, many hours thinking about that. And plus, Napoleon broke his heart because he was a supporter of Napoleon, because Napoleon was supposed to represent the French Revolution, this hopeful future of no more kings, no more monarchs, no more authoritarian regimes.

1:49:52Lex Fridman:and Napoleon ended up becoming essentially king. Right. Becoming authoritarian. And Beethoven sort of famously was critical of that. Nevertheless, I think maintained a fascination with Napoleon throughout his life. But sort of a kind of more sophisticated, complex view of human nature and human civilization. So becoming more cynical, like seeing more clearly that the world disappoints you, The dreams get shattered. And through that, is able to still do this call for a hopeful future. All right. So, okay. So Beethoven, one of the greats for sure. Like basically everybody, I know how to play the first movement of Moonlight Sonata.

1:50:39Lex Fridman:But I always avoided the third movement because I was like, I'll never be good enough. Never. Never. Never say never. One of these days. Maybe, you know, it'd be great if Tom Waits writes me an email that says, I only talk to people that can play the third movement. Play the third movement. That'd be a dream come true. There you go. Like for this. That's motivation. That's my dragon or whatever you do. You have to have a prince and rescue the princess. My dragon is the third movement. The Moonlight Sonata. Okay. You often highlight the importance of Bach. In fact, so many of your guests.

1:51:15Rick Beato:Every famous songwriter is influenced by Bach. They are. the greatest composer of all time, the greatest musician of all time. Even Sting and Dominic Miller said they go to Bach even for like practice. Every day. People talk about Bach was not known other than in his places he lived. Eisenach, he was born in Leipzig. He spent many years. But Bach was known to great musicians. It was difficult to find manuscripts, But there was a premiere of the St. Matthew Passion that Mendelssohn had done in 17, in 1829. It was on March 11th, I believe. He had a manuscript because his father and mother collected manuscripts.

1:52:03Rick Beato:And he got a manuscript of this piece. And I think he was 20 years old. And they had a performance of it in Berlin. and Beethoven, Mozart. They studied the well-tempered clavier, the two books of the well-tempered clavier. But Bach wrote profoundly beautiful music and some of the most complex contrapuntal music that I don't think anyone has ever done like that. Extremely bright guy. Had 20 kids, 10 of them, only 10 survived till adulthood. Lost both his parents when he was nine within nine months of each other, went to live with an older brother. Extremely productive. Yes.

1:52:46Lex Fridman:Yeah. I think from all the music teachers I've ever had, I understood the importance of studying Bach.

1:52:56Rick Beato:He didn't write Master of Puppets, but he wrote some great, powerful music.

1:53:01Lex Fridman:Well put. I tried to educate the aforementioned music teachers of the brilliance of the Master of the Puppets. Sometimes a good riff is greater than any musical composition. I agree.

1:53:18Rick Beato:I go back and I play Master of Puppets every time I'm trying out a new amplifier. That's my go-to.

1:53:26Lex Fridman:That's your go-to. So the stereotypical guitar store, when you come in, you're playing Master of Puppets.

1:53:34Rick Beato:I'll play Master of Puppets. I have to play some heavy riff, and so usually it will default to some metallica or something like that or i'll play alice and chains or i do usually like a lot of times i'll go and i'll do drop d something or play tool i usually would do something do do some drop tuning thing and it's always got to be some some type of metal that i'll test to see if that if the bottom end's tight on the amp and stuff

1:53:59Lex Fridman:so yes all right we have to talk about this a little bit you made a bunch of videos about it there's a moment in time, it still goes on, but there's a moment where really people are freaking out about the use of AI in music. So there's these, I would say, incredible apps like Suna, UDO, 11 Labs Music is also great. They can generate basically text to song, full song from a text prompt. And a lot of people start freaking out just based on how good it is. So you start to immediately imagine how this is going to transform music and you're going to replace musicians and all that kind of stuff. It is legitimately nerve-wracking because these are early versions, so you don't know where it goes.

1:54:48Lex Fridman:But in your intuition now, you've been thinking about this, you made a bunch of videos, now being able to reflect, okay, everybody chill, calm down.

1:54:56Rick Beato:So if you write a prompt in Suno and it spits out a song, which I've done, I've made a bunch of videos in this. I made up a fake artist, Eli Mercer, in this video. Then I did a thing for CBS News. I made up this fake artist, Sadie Winters, and came up with this song, Walking Away. Well, the program came up with it.

1:55:15Lex Fridman:There is some creativity in a process. So in this particular thing, the process is you generate an image. I did it in ChatGPT, the image.

1:55:23Rick Beato:Then I went to Claude, and I wrote the lyrics, because Claude's way better at lyrics than Suno is. Asuna is bad at lyrics, at least right now. So I created the lyrics in Claude, and then I imported the lyrics into Asuna. And I had great results with the songs that it came up with. I always have to qualify that. But I started thinking about this. People freak out about this. Oh, this is bad. This is bad. And then I was like, no, who are going to be the ones that are going to benefit from AI? Well, the people that are already great songwriters. Because you have to be able to recognize when it spits out something good versus when it spits out something that's not that good.

1:56:02Rick Beato:And every other song, I've probably created 130 song ideas out of which there's three good ones.

1:56:11Lex Fridman:And there's a thing that's happening where people's ear very quickly is becoming attuned to AI slop. Yes. And that's actually quite fascinating. like for example um one of the things there's this viral clip going around of an ai base like a soul jazz remix of songs like 50 cent many men and i think it is super impressive and it's a different pipeline actually it's a tricky pipeline how to pull that off and i think a lot of the creativity in that even that kind of remixing is in the pipeline that of how you actually do that because there's actually a lot of manual stuff in that pipeline. But I think ironically, it's very cool at first, but when you listen to it for a while, you understand that this is AI slop.

1:57:00Lex Fridman:Yes. For a soul remix, it actually lacks soul. But it made me think of like when I listen to soul or blues, I think I really want in that case to know, I don't want to AI BB King. I want the real BB King. And if I know if any AI is involved in the BB King process, I'm tuning out. Yes. And I don't think I'm being curmudgingly old dude in that. I think we humans want authenticity.

1:57:36Rick Beato:So when AI, when I first started making these AI videos, it started back in 2023. I made my first one.

1:57:46And I would take my phone, come up in the kitchen, I'd play a song.

1:57:51Rick Beato:And my youngest and Dylan, my youngest Layla, and I have three kids, and my oldest Dylan. As soon as I played, why are you listening to AI? And I was like, oh my God, instantly. I was like, how do you know? Oh, it has this ringing sound in the thing. So it took me probably about four or five days to figure out, okay, what are they hearing that I'm not hearing? So I did it. I separated all the parts. And what they're hearing was the artifacts that are in the vocal reverb that sent that were that made incomplete. It just couldn't do the ambiences correctly. Right. Because it's trained on a lot of these AI programs are trained on very low bit rate MP3s.

1:58:34Rick Beato:Right. So they feed all this stuff in there. So they're getting really inferior information on the in the training process. Whereas now, when they make these deals with the major labels, they'll get the multi tracks and they'll get high quality wave files to train from. Right. And whoever opts in, they get the solo vocal tracks. You know, if Ed Sheeran wants to do it or Drake or whoever wants to give their voice to it, let it do its thing and then get their royalties from it. I'm not saying that any any of them are doing. I'm just giving an example. But. Every time that I would do it, I could be down the hall and I would play something on my phone just to see if they're like, why are you listening to AI?

1:59:12Rick Beato:They can instantly tell. Then eventually it started getting better. And then it'd be like, is this AI? I'd be in the car with Layla coming back from Taekwondo practice. And she's like, is this AI? Why does it sound like AI? It sounds like it could be AI. And I'd be like, yeah, it's AI. She's like, oh, it's getting better. And then I did this song for, it was an NPR interview. I created a song with a fake artist and the song was called neon ghosts. And I played it for Layla in the car. She's like, can you separate the tracks? I said, yeah, I have them separated back home. Okay. I want to go down to here.

1:59:48Rick Beato:So we go down to the studio and, and I play it for her and she listens to the soloed vocal. She said, wow, this is really realistic. This is very hard to tell, even with a soloed vocal.

2:00:00Lex Fridman:I think the room for creativity right now for humans is lyrics. It seems like the lyrics that are being generated, they lack soul somehow. I don't know the words correctly. I mean, they can be incredibly sophisticated, but there's something, the edge is not there. Some kind of edge that we want in our lyrics. like some kind of surprise, but not cringe or not cliche, something truly novel in the lyrics. But if that's the case, it's kind of sad that that's where the creativity is to come from, but not from the music. Because then if we can create very realistic music that sounds really damn good, where's the role of the musician?

2:00:53Lex Fridman:there.

2:00:53Rick Beato:I think the role of the musician is that in actually, if they use AI to assist them in coming up with ideas, like as a creation tool, then the musician, like some of the stuff is just not high quality, sonically high quality. So the musician goes in and redoes stuff and changes things and adds parts. And then they actually do music production and maybe they re-sing the parts and they change the stuff. And then it's just basically like an idea generator. And I think that that's a great use of AI is for that.

2:01:27Lex Fridman:But see, if you do that, does it make you sad that you don't necessarily need to learn instruments? So basically you can, I mean, you can think of it as a different kind of instrument, but you can write lyrics, you can hum the melody, you can just hum parts. Yeah. you know and then and then do a b kind of thing this kind of rhythm this kind of and stitch them together and never actually have your fingers on a guitar or or fingers on a drumstick that's why

2:01:59Rick Beato:i'm not going to use ai lex is for that reason because to me it's just boring and i when i use it it's like but i i used it for about a month or so just because i was making videos and i was to see how it's advancing every every three or four months i'll i'll i'll sit down and i'll see whatever new versions they have and i'll write some songs write some songs i'll prompt some songs and see what they come up with and see if they're improving on the things but ultimately i don't find it interesting to to use i hear you you're a bit old school i'm so am i yeah i'm trying

2:02:37Lex Fridman:to think about the future and i think it's still even in the future also going to be boring i think there's something fundamentally boring about it and i've been trying to figure it out so for example i use it a lot for more and more and more for programming so for building stuff and there it's not about the final output is not the code the output is what the code creates and there it's extremely useful not it doesn't matter if it's boring or not it's useful but when the final output is the thing that ai creates which it would be in music then there's something about us that just like we know we there is something boring about it yes we want to celebrate and see the thing that's hard to create and if ai can just text the song generate a top 10 hit we will quickly lose value for that i think and so we'll want raw like raw whatever whatever shape that raw takes i want to say raw talent but that raw talent of any kind and perhaps it would make me a little bit sad but that's also awesome perhaps the new kind of raw talent that civilization is asking for is how to make uh great tiktoks maybe that's what raw talent looks like it makes me a little bit sad because i'm a huge fan of long form uh but that that also creating tiktoks and is is also talent it's a it is a talent absolutely um when i see anything

2:04:15Rick Beato:that's ai generated i instantly recognize any video i'm like boring boring boring and my kids do the same thing they just have no interest in engaging with it as soon as they recognize it and They can spot it a mile away and they're just like boring, boring, boring, boring, boring. And then they kind of just, then they, they don't even want to engage with the social media platforms, which is, which is a danger, which I think they need to crack down on the AI slop. YouTube's done a pretty good job on it, but it's hard to, it's hard to stay on this. It's getting, it gets flooded with so much of this stuff.

2:04:50Rick Beato:it's so easy to create and put up there and to just be in the um in the whack-a-mole thing where you're just trying to get rid of it all is fundamentally like it's fundamentally boring

2:05:03Lex Fridman:i think boring is really good boring and it's and it's annoying to have to uh flip through the ai slot yeah but i think actually as a civilization it's just inspiring for authenticity because you want to be real and being raw which i you know one of the things i like about podcasts is people just shooting shit and just being themselves in in the long form versus overproduced i think ai is making people realize that ai is good at being overproduced right so there'll be more let's get that covered yeah even artists because you're saying like yeah they'll use it as tools part of me things like not really like i think i think i think they'll quickly this kind of process of generating a bunch of different options uh and choosing the one you like the most i think is a really frustrating process for artists and it i i think it i think ai will will definitely be used extremely effectively as a very uh fine grained tool um in the image domain it's editing image but not like macro editing, but very specific kind of editing that Photoshop is increasingly integrated in.

2:06:17Lex Fridman:I mentioned to you offline, the whole iZotope RX group of software that does a lot of the denoising, all the de-removing the wind, they integrate machine learning extremely effectively for working with audio in different kinds of ways. There's a bunch of different other programs that do that. maybe for like b-roll footage and a same thing on the audio if you just need a little audio to create a feeling of a scene yeah it might be used there in that kind of way but truly original

2:06:52Rick Beato:stuff i've saved videos where i'm doing speaking over music for example in an interview somebody's playing and and we have two dialogue two people speaking in labs but it's but there's so much bleed coming from the person playing that you can't hear what we're saying. And then we'll split out the voice for that section. The two voices separate them and then take the music and separate that stuff. And so it's really helpful for things like that.

2:07:18Lex Fridman:And now once again, quick 30 second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfreeman.com slash sponsors. We got Uplive Desk for my favorite office desks, BetterHelp for mental health, Element for electrolytes, Fin for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, back to my conversation with Rick Beato. So you have this video of Breaking Down Sabrina Carpenter's song, Man Child, and you use that as an example of building up people's intuition about the the music business and how the music production for these popular songs is being done these days who's doing the songwriting how is it being done and all that kind of i was wondering if you could speak to that

2:08:17Rick Beato:in that particular song jack antonoff who was one of the writers amy allen sabrina carpenter said in some awards thing that there's an old guy on youtube that says that sabrina had very little to do with the song and so he said in this clip you being the old guy me being the old guy that well sabrina really was the she's amazing and she's the one that wrote everything and the song is like so my response is like well why are you guys even included on the songwriting then

2:08:47Lex Fridman:so one of the things you highlight is a lot of people are are included on the list of

2:08:53Rick Beato:uh songwriters yeah 10 people 11 people i mean you know like why are the song why is song of the year have songs that are interpolation meaning that they have melodies from other songs in their interpolation they used to call it stealing and then um you have songs that are used samples for the whole thing like the doji song that's out right now and i said look she took a gautier song and basically took off his melody and she created her own melody over it. It's like, well, I mean, it saves time for, you don't have to actually create a track. You just can sing over someone else's song that was already successful.

2:09:32Lex Fridman:Yeah, you pointing that out, the song Anxiety, broke my brain. I mean, it's so absurd. Yeah, this feels unfair. It feels, it's a good song, but it was also a good song before, and it was before that, it was also a good song. Right.

2:09:48Rick Beato:2011 or the Louis Bonfant 1967. So why is that considered to be in the top songs of the year? It's like, come on, you can't find another song that's not based on that? That's ridiculous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Doji has some really good songs on a record. Yeah, but why are these the ones that are coming to the top?

2:10:12Lex Fridman:This is interesting. That might be just a criticism of the machinery of the business that drives them. It's not necessarily... A lot of these folks are really good musicians. First of all, I think a lot of them are also good. The actual songs that make it to the top are good. I'm a big fan of Bruno Mars. He's a great songwriter. and he's a great musician all around. You know, this is a Michael Jackson and reincarnated. Super, super talented guy. Incredible, right? Yes. Um, you mentioned Billie Eilish and her brother, right? A lot of the songs. So good. Yeah. Super talented. I mean, Taylor Swift is unlike anything.

2:10:53Lex Fridman:I mean, that's a historic figure in music, but she's a fundamentally, at least originally a singer songwriter. Yes. So that's a, I mean that, I mean, I'm sorry, but that, that is a, like of the kind, of music that Rick Beato gives props to. She carries the flame forward.

2:11:15Rick Beato:She works on her own songs, absolutely. But she never has more than two co-writers on things.

2:11:20Lex Fridman:You want to take a quick bath and break? Yeah. Okay. I have to ask you about this complexity that you're facing on a basically daily basis. I think it's a challenge a lot of YouTube folks experience, but you're just so viscerally experiencing it because a lot of what you do in your channel is celebrate music broadly. And so as part of that process, you have to sometimes show clips of music. And I think all of that falls under fair use quite obviously. And so you get all these YouTube copyright claims. And for folks who don't know, if you get three of those, each one of those can be a strike on the channel and can take down your channel.

2:12:02Lex Fridman:And you get some insane amount. You said you got like, I think I had a similar thing on the Rick Rubin episode. Like, I think you said 13. Yeah. 13. So what, can you just speak to this whole thing? You've been in a constant battle. WMG, UMG, all the... All the three-letter name

2:12:23Rick Beato:record labels, right?

2:12:24Lex Fridman:The music business people.

2:12:26Rick Beato:So what's the story there? Well, this has been going on since the beginning of my channel, and I've made videos periodically. When I first started, it was just instant blocks. So you never knew back in, I started, it'll be 10 years in June. So when I play music in a video, YouTubers were not playing music in videos because they didn't, because the content ID things and the takedowns and stuff. So I would play music and I would just see what happens. And then you get a content ID claim or you realize that people were quote unquote blockers. And I came up with that term that they would block your video, take down your video.

2:13:04Rick Beato:And I realized at first it was like anything Guns N' Roses, which is still the case, Guns N' Roses, ACDC. I mean, many bands, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin. and then and then something happened there there was a guy on the skateboard on tiktok that had the ocean spray thing and and he was listening to dreams by fleetwood mac yeah and that blew up and became a number one song again and the labels then realized i mean i had made many videos about about why this is wrong and it should be fair use and everything well because of that the laborers like oh maybe we should rethink this and then they just started demonetizing videos demonetize means they get all the money they get all the money in a one hour video if they if you use 20 seconds of a clip they get all the money okay so i hired a lawyer finally after the rick rubin video because i thought it was ridiculous i go over to to to tuscany i interview rick at his house and and uh i had hired a lawyer to fight this who i'm gonna have on my channel i don't want to say who it is but he's another youtuber and uh he had approached me a couple years ago

2:14:23Lex Fridman:and and it's not cheap to do uh you're gonna do like a public interview with him i'm gonna do an

2:14:29Rick Beato:interview with him yes i talked to him today about it i can't wait yeah that'd be great so he said you should fight these because every single one of them is fair use and he went through my my entire cattle. I have 2100 videos and he's fought 4 ,000 content ID claims and won every single one of them. 4 ,000. That's a lot. I mean, when I do top 20 guitar solos, there's 20 content ID claims, you know, it's, and it's either, it can be either from the sound recording. If I use that, or if I just play it, it can be from the publisher.

2:15:09Lex Fridman:That's amazing. Yeah. So is there, I mean, that's, it's still, you're still a lawyer, still work. Does that, is there a hopeful thing you can say about the future of.

2:15:23Rick Beato:Yeah. Fight these content ID claims. If it's fair use, if you're not just playing the song and listening to it. And cause a lot of stuff that are reaction videos or whatever that are not where they play the whole song. I mean, I'm using these things and I'm talking a lot of the times it's in interviews or it's in interviews. I'm breaking down a solo and there's a.

2:15:41Lex Fridman:Yeah. See, that's an obvious one, but even reaction videos, right?

2:15:45Rick Beato:Yeah. Even reaction videos. Yes, absolutely.

2:15:47Lex Fridman:Those are more borderline. Yeah. But I don't know. I love those videos. Absolutely. Like when a person is just sitting there and listening to it and they're like, you know, like a voice teacher is listening to a vocal performance.

2:16:02Rick Beato:Yeah, but those are breakdowns.

2:16:04Lex Fridman:Yeah, those are breakdowns.

2:16:05Rick Beato:I think that the content ID stuff that was happening with these major labels, they would hire third parties that would go out, use AI and go and anytime they detect anything, they always go to the biggest channels first to get the most views and make sense and stuff. And they would claim everything that they could. And historically, YouTubers never would fight back. They were like, oh, this is easy money. YouTubers never fight back and at these things because they're afraid to have their channels taken down. Yep.

2:16:36Lex Fridman:So Rick Biotto said, hold my beer. There you go. So, I mean, I mean, it's important.

2:16:40Rick Beato:It took me years though, Lex. I didn't, I've been doing this. So I, so I've been doing it for one year now and I'm nine years, I'm 10 years into my channel. So it took me that long.

2:16:50Lex Fridman:I mean, hopefully it, uh, there's a ripple effect also. It's not just your situation. Hopefully you don't have to deal with this for much longer. Right. How does Spotify change music? Sometimes we highlight the fact that the change in nature of music and that the scarcity is not there. But it also allows it. It's like every kind of music is available. And it's so fast. And it's so easy. It's easy to explore. It's a commodity. It's like turning on a water faucet. Do you think there's some good to it? I mean, there's a lot of good to that, right? have you did you go through that whole process i still remember where i had to basically throw away the albums i never did that when if you if you upload them into your computer yeah so there's that two-step process one there's like the hard albums cds and then and then you upload them into your computer yep and you save them and then you

2:17:55Lex Fridman:how do you put it? Allegedly a friend of yours pirates some extra songs and puts them on the computer. But you have your stash on the computer. You're like, this is my finally selected stash of greatness. Sometimes organized by album, sometimes not. And the big moment for me that was really difficult to do, really difficult to do, is throw away that stash. and switch to Spotify, switch to streaming, and basically rebuild the stash of playlists and all this kind of stuff. And it was heartbreaking because so much love and effort went into that, both the CD, the stashing of the CD and the stashing of the MP3s and the computer.

2:18:42Lex Fridman:And then in Spotify, it just seems just effortless. But it helped me discover all kinds of artists I never would have discovered otherwise. And Pandora, I use a lot. Pandora is more prioritizing on the discovery part versus the organization part. And that was really wonderful.

2:19:03Rick Beato:So one of the things I'll start with the positive that I like about Spotify is that they show play counts. Whether they're real or not, that's another question. But they show how many plays songs have. And that's how the charts are based.

2:19:17Lex Fridman:Does that give you a signal that something is listened to a billion times? Does that mean something to you?

2:19:23Rick Beato:Yeah, it means that it's a popular song. Well, that's a massive hit. That's very few songs that have a billion plays. Now, the downside of Spotify is the way that they pay their artists. Now they've lumped in podcasts that are getting a cut of the streaming with the music. um and you know the search and discovery i mean there's there's a there's benefits of algorithms and there's negative things of algorithms algorithms happen to kind of a lot many times pigeonhole people into listening to the same genre of music all the time and not expanding their you know um the discovery of of of new music where that you might hear on the radio back in the day where program directors would play things that they liked, right?

2:20:17Rick Beato:And you might hear something, ooh, what is that? Oh, that's a new Soundgarden record. Whoa, I like that. I'm going to go check that out. Something you might not have heard or something odd.

2:20:28Lex Fridman:Like one thing I really love doing on Spotify is you can have radio. Yeah. Meaning like you have a few, it's similar to Pandora. Like you can, okay, this is going to reveal a little too much about myself, but usually when I go work out, I'll listen to something like Rage Against the Machine radio. I'm sorry. What else would you listen to? I need motivation. Classical music? I don't know. But yeah, it's pretty good because it recommends a bunch of other stuff. I wouldn't even know some of it I know obviously but akin to the similar to the Rage Against the Machine type thing it recommends a bunch of artists holy shit that's awesome so I don't know that discovery works really well some of it is a technology thing but that experience is fundamentally more vibrant than I had previously with my stash I would just keep a stash and I would listen to the same record over and over and over and over but yeah there's what's lost is the the i'm sure you love you love this but listening through the led zeppelin records just driving in a car and listening to the whole thing all the way through

2:21:41Rick Beato:yeah that's lost so i have my old itunes libraries from 2005 that i listed that i that i have saved the cds that i uploaded into my computer yeah anytime i do that i play songs on my um when i'm doing an interview i always play wave files i put them in and it's funny that when i interview a mixer i interviewed this mixing engineer andy wallace and people comment wow that the song sounded amazing here well not only are they great mixes that he did but i'm using wave files in there and people notice there and these are wave files from from, you know, original encoding, not remastered things that Spotify keeps doing and adding a bunch more top end and things like that.

2:22:32Rick Beato:These are actually the original WAV files from off the CD that I ripped 20 years ago.

2:22:42Lex Fridman:What's your current, and people are really curious about that, so what's your current stack? What are the tools you use? What's your DAW? What's the audio interface? What are the mics? So I use Pro Tools.

2:22:52Rick Beato:Pro Tools. For the most part, but I also use Logic and Ableton. I've got all those. So you're mostly on a Mac? I'm only on a Mac. Only on a Mac. Only on a Mac. I'm only the opposite. Although we have multiple PCs because my kids use PCs.

2:23:08Lex Fridman:Yeah, just to rebel.

2:23:10Rick Beato:They do it for gaming. They like to game.

2:23:12Lex Fridman:That's true. But in terms of editing, I hate how good Mac is. So good. At just integrating. The hardware and the software just work well together, both on the Mac.

2:23:23Rick Beato:If I didn't have a Mac, honestly, I wouldn't be talking to you right now because I got a G3. That's the only good thing that a major label did for me is when my band was on UMG and they bought me a G3 and an SM7 and Pro Tools Digio won the first prosumer Pro Tools thing. And I learned how to use Pro Tools and that allowed me to learn how to edit video and become a record producer. so i gotta give it give it to max for that so pro tools i mean that's still the standard that's

2:23:58Lex Fridman:kind of the industry standard yeah i gotta ask you because i know i've never used pro tools i've used again i'm a caveman i've used uh reaper i've used studio one that's recently i've used that and for the most time i've used ableton live i feel like i'm using one percent of the power of the tool like ableton live makes me feel like i'm literally just pressing the record button ableton's amazing it really is it is yeah but i feel like that i mean it's designed for people they're doing like all kinds of meaty stuff and like looping and do the the what is it the push buttons with the with the beats and the is this i mean i saw them i saw them really out of touch but it's just the power is incredible also it's i think it's not just for recording it's also for live performances yes so this is why studio one has been a little bit nicer for me because it's simpler made for uh recording more so any daw that you get used to lex that's just using using it

2:25:06Rick Beato:yeah and and yeah you have to become a master at the things if you want to be a recording engineer producer, you become an expert. A lot of the, you know, Phineas and Billie Eilish, I think that they use Logic. That's their DAW that they like to use. And Logic, you know, a lot of pros use Logic. You know, I fire up Logic every couple of days and I use it for things. I have it on my laptop here and I have Pro Tools and Logic on my laptop. I use both. I use Pro Tools mostly though. But Pro Tools, that's where you feel like at home. I'm an expert in Pro Tools.

2:25:38Lex Fridman:Are you using any emulation, any amp sims, or it's all real amps?

2:25:45Rick Beato:No, I use amp sims. On my laptop here, when I travel and things like that, I use Neural DSP, which I just did a video at their headquarters in Helsinki. And the CEO, Doug Castro, is a friend of mine. I actually talked to him today, as a matter of fact. And I have a Kemper amp sim, you know, modeler. I have an Axe FX. I've got a Helix. I pretty much have all these things. But for me, I have 100 amps in my studio. And I have mics set up all the time on cabinets and stuff. I have 100 amplifiers, real amplifiers. Real? Yeah. Wait, sorry, 100? I have 100, yeah. About 100, maybe 95.

2:26:30Lex Fridman:How does one go get to that level?

2:26:34Rick Beato:Collecting and being, I'll be 64 in April, so.

2:26:38Lex Fridman:So you just don't let go.

2:26:39Rick Beato:I don't let go, no.

2:26:41Lex Fridman:Why would you get to 100? Like, is it tone difference?

2:26:45Rick Beato:So everything does one thing really well. And so it'd be like, okay, so I have this Marshall GCM 800 that's modded that does this one thing. It's got great mids and it's good for this kind of a tune. So I will pull that out. Then it's like, no, I need more of like a scooped metal sound that's more like Metallica or Dream Theater or something. So I'm going to pull out my Mesa Boogie. Or I need something that's chimey that's more like Brian May or like the Edge. I'm going to pull out my Vox AC30. So everything. And that's why I have so many amps because they all do. Every amp I have does one thing really well.

2:27:29Rick Beato:If it doesn't do it well, I get rid of it. and i'm down to 100 down to 100 this is only 100 yeah uh but i can get by with probably 75

2:27:40Lex Fridman:come on but then you're really running the risk of not having just the right but you're using emulation so that's that's great i mean on that but there's the other side of it which is the guitar i told you offline i think having multiple guitars is cheating but whatever nobody agrees with me on this i only have like one i do have some side pieces um but one main the greatest strat yeah american strat i said i would never do this but i was in a guitar store i lived next to a guitar store in cambridge and one day i would always stop by i don't know why i just just look at the guitars like i don't really know why exactly just to be in the aura of these great instruments.

2:28:26Lex Fridman:And they brought in this American Strat that had these different shades of, it was like a silver. And I just, I've never had this feeling. They talk about love at first sight. I just fell in love with the guitar. Can you just speak to the kind of guitars you have and you love? I pretty much have mainly old school guitars, right?

2:28:54Rick Beato:So I have Gibsons, I have Fenders, I have PRS guitars, and then I have two Gibson acoustics. I have a 1957 Country and Western that I've had for probably 30 some odd years. It's a great guitar. And I have a J45 Gibson, and I have a Martin D28. So I only have three nice acoustics and I have a Guild 12 string and I have a Guild Nashville tuned guitars. The low strings are up the octave. So the E, A and D and G are up the octave. That's Nashville tuning. Six string though. Like basically what David Gilmore plays Uncomfortably Numb in my video, he plays a Nashville tune, but with one variation, the low E is up two octaves.

2:29:42Rick Beato:so um he he demonstrates actually the and this is how he wrote comfortably numb the chorus part of it was with this particular guitar that he's playing in the video what can you say about like

2:29:56Lex Fridman:the different uh feels that the guitars the acoustics have like what how do you know which

2:30:03Rick Beato:one to pull out it depends on the kind of part that i'm playing if i want something with really tight mid-range with not that doesn't have a lot of low low bass this particular old gibson that i have the 57 i will pull that out it's got very balanced strings and uh you know mid-range doesn't have a lot it doesn't have a booming bottom end booming low e string or anything or a string so it depends on what what kind of sound i'm looking for if i'm more about sound versus feel Yeah. All my guitars play equally well. Okay. I have them all set up to where they play well. I have a signature Gibson guitar that I've had for five years now.

2:30:46Rick Beato:When you say Gibson, Gibson Les Paul? Gibson, it's a double cut Les Paul special. Yeah. With P90 pickups. I don't know what double cut means, but it sounds impressive. It's two cut. Oh. Yeah. As opposed to a Les Paul that has one cut. So it's a Les Paul special that has two. i have it over there my signature guitar that's the all right nice yeah when you play this you're going to be like oh my god this is butter now again i said it's cheating i don't and what amp do you play through do you play through an amp sim or do you have what do you have like a this is going to be yeah yeah i use bias effects i'm sorry lex i i use amp sims too so i just got the new john mayor neural dsp plug-in today that i have not tried out he did a modeling of all his amplifiers that the neural dsp did and um it sounds great john played it sounds just like his amps

2:31:39Lex Fridman:yeah john is incredible john's great i've been fortunate enough to have dinner with him two times and uh i thought of being an incredible musician he's also conversational yes i've known john

2:31:52Rick Beato:since he lived in Atlanta, but when he got signed, and I knew John from way back then, probably in the early 2000s.

2:31:59Lex Fridman:I think he doesn't get enough credit. He's one of the greatest living guitarists in the world.

2:32:05Rick Beato:He's a fantastic guitar player.

2:32:06Lex Fridman:Absolutely. And a celebrator, if that's a word, of great guitar playing. Absolutely. By way of advice, you started your YouTube channel in your mid-50s and found incredible success. You've had essentially multiple careers. Is there some wisdom you can extract from that? So my theory is that

2:32:35Rick Beato:somebody's got to be successful, so why can't it be you? That was, that was,

2:32:42Rick Beato:that was my, when I started my channel, I mean, I didn't start it to, it started by accident with the Dylan video and really so many people reached out to me. I started it six months after that viral video. So many people wrote to me, can you teach me this? Pro musicians, well-known ones who you'd know, can you teach me this? I can't teach you what Dylan did, but I can teach you relative pitch, develop your ear that way. But then I had conservatories writing to me about this stuff from all over the world. How did you teach Dylan this? because we made about four different videos and they got more and more sophisticated.

2:33:22Rick Beato:And so I thought, okay, I'll make some YouTube videos and explain this stuff. This is, that's really why I started. So I didn't have to keep, I couldn't answer the emails. There's so many of them. So I just started making videos on how to train your ear and music theory. And that's really how I started my channel. And my wife was like, what are you doing? I said, I'm making YouTube videos. Why? So I don't have to keep telling people how I did this stuff. And then all of a sudden, you know, I had 4 ,000 subscribers the first month, another 4 ,000, then hit 100 ,000 after a year. And then six months later, 200 ,000.

2:33:55Rick Beato:Then three months later, 300 ,000.

2:33:58Lex Fridman:So I think there's one thing that should be said that in modern culture for young people, a lot of them will see YouTube and TikTok and Instagram. And they kind of want to be famous. They want to get the clicks and the views and so on. and that's the thing they chase and optimize. I think the thing that you're leaving unstated, perhaps, is that you spend many years pursuing the mastery of a craft. And there's a lot of value to getting good at something. Absolutely. Offline. You can actually reveal your journey online, but the thing you're chasing is not fame. fame it's getting good at something and i think actually what happens is even if the thing you get good at is not the thing that you become famous for if that's the thing you're uh that ends up happening it's still like getting good at one thing kind of somehow relates to getting good at another thing somehow they'll lead you to get better at getting better at the next thing at the next thing and the next thing but if you're just chasing fame and trying to figure out how do I do the viral thing or so on.

2:35:13Lex Fridman:It just seems to, you might actually get there, but it'd be unfulfilling and not long lasting.

2:35:20Rick Beato:My theory of my channel has always been make videos on things I'm interested in. And at first I thought, oh, nobody's going to watch an old white haired guy on YouTube. Yeah. That was kind of my thing. Well, that was not correct.

2:35:38Rick Beato:and then it's like we'll just make videos on stuff I'm interested in just so happens that other people are interested in the same things I'm interested in and keep learning and I when I produce bands I never let them take my picture ever I never let them record me in the studio there's virtually no pictures of any band I ever produced so from 1999 to 2015 when I December 2015 when that dylan video came out no one took my picture there were no pictures of me on the internet you're fully behind the camera kind of guy yes like no no no pictures no no pictures with people hey can we take a picture said no no pictures with people and now you're like you're

2:36:19Lex Fridman:the talent you're the face no i mean but again the thing you're leaving unstated there is is like you You spent a lot of years teaching music, really exploring music, trying a music career, trying to create, trying to produce, trying to be a musician, and all these. Not just trying, getting extremely good at it. I think in modern culture, there's a sense you want to skip that part. I want to be famous. I wonder, you know, this and that is a thing that's not going to be in most cases effective as a primary thing to chase. So I have an undergrad in classical bass.

2:37:08Rick Beato:I have a master's from New England Conservatory in jazz guitar. Then I taught college for I taught jazz studies for five years from 87 to 92. Then I got a publishing deal, my first publishing deal in 1992 with Polygram Publishing. and then I became a producer when I was 37 having no idea how to engineer I taught myself engineering and then YouTube I taught myself how to edit videos and then you taught yourself how to interview and I taught myself an interview I'd never done an interview before and that was like

2:37:37Lex Fridman:an interviewer what you haven't just done that you've taught yourself not how to do just YouTube but YouTube shorts yes different totally different thing totally different skill and then not just youtube but like how to be like it there's a because you're both a youtuber and and like a musician who posts stuff on youtube youtuber means like you're thinking about stuff like

2:38:02Rick Beato:thumbnails and which i make my own thumbnails i've always made my own thumbnails by the way

2:38:08Lex Fridman:before i forget i think i i speak for the entirety of the internet thanking you for how you introduce videos and how you close them because you this is a big part of youtube where people have a 30 minute introduction to to a five minute video you just go straight in that's really wonderful that's i mean and on all fronts i mean i suppose that has to do with the production skill that you have of understanding cutting cutting the fat song yep yeah cutting cutting the fluff cutting the bullshit i'll just get straight to the core of the thing i've heard you talk about maintaining friendships for a long time.

2:38:45Lex Fridman:You said never waste a friendship. Can you elaborate on that?

2:38:48Rick Beato:Yeah. That's one of my things is that I really value the time I've spent with people, friendships and keeping in touch with people. I talk to each one of my siblings multiple times a week. I talk to my sisters probably every night, my two sisters. I have friends from college. I get friends from growing up i have friends from you know both colleges i went to i have friends from all different eras in my life that i keep in touch with and visit whenever i can and and you must have

2:39:20Lex Fridman:met some incredible humans and incredibly weird and interesting humans throughout your life so it's worth it the effort to to connect and reconnect i mean it's that pretty much everything

2:39:33Rick Beato:in life. Nothing means anything more than the friendships that you make in your family.

2:39:39Lex Fridman:Yeah, what's the point of this whole thing? That's right. What's the role of music in the human experience?

2:39:47Rick Beato:Well, hopefully to enlighten people and to create the soundtrack of their life. It is, right?

2:39:54Lex Fridman:Yeah. Music does something. Sometimes when I'm alone, I'll listen to a song and there's nothing quite like a song that makes me truly feel, like feel alive in whatever that is, sadness or hope or excitement

2:40:17or when I'm working out,

2:40:19Lex Fridman:listening to Rage Against the Machine, like protest. Or as I was listening to the Metallica, I was re-listening to the set that they played in Moscow, just hyped. Like truly hyped. I was like pacing, listening to it. And there's nothing like that. I've never found anything. And I don't know what that is in the human psyche that's that. But I'm so glad we found it. We humans created instruments. They can vibrate strings and together create harmonies and melodies. And ones that reverberate through generations. And they carry that. it's one of the greatest things that humans ever did creating music and all of that led up to you some guy being listened to by millions of people on the internet this is all a simulation rick and i've been a fan of yours for a long time like i told you this is crazy to meet you uh same lex thank you for everything you do for the world for celebrating music, for helping us discover and rediscover some of the incredible musicians and songs that have been created over the centuries.

2:41:37Lex Fridman:Thank you for being who you are, and thank you for talking today. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rick Beato. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from Friedrich Nietzsche, as I often do. Without music, life would be a mistake. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

2:42:24Thank you.