Rick Rubin on How to Make Something Great (Update)

25:46There's not enough bandwidth for everything going on, and none of that stuff is in our control. So all we can do is make the best thing that we can and put it out into the world and hope for the best. So tell me the question again, because I got lost. I asked you to describe your book to people, and I think you just did, with the same kind of difficulty I have when I try to explain to my wife what your book was about. The ideas in the book are like smoke. They're very difficult to grasp. It's stuff that when you read it, you feel like you already know it. But it's difficult to hold on to. I wanted it to be written in a way where the reader is participating in the material as much as the writer is participating in the material.

26:34So the book doesn't tell you what to think. It invites you to think about something. On every page, there's an opportunity to find a new way in to solve the problem that you're looking for. And when I say problem, everything we do with art, every step of the way, it's like, am I going to do it like this or this? Is it going to be bigger or smaller? Is it going to be louder or softer? All of those decisions are creative choices. And they're problems until you decide that's the way it's going to be. It still fits with my own experience with the book. The years I was getting a PhD were a special time.

27:12I had always been a fantastic student in the sense that I got great grades, excelled on standardized tests. But then I showed up at MIT's economics PhD program, and I was both woefully underprepared in terms of the math I knew, and also I just wasn't as smart as the other students. I had always been at the top of my class, and it only took a few weeks for me to understand that I was near the bottom of my MIT class. And that was a shock for me, but my reaction wasn't what I myself even expected. I didn't feel bad about myself. I felt awe towards the people around me. It was fun just to watch them think.

27:51It was amazing to always be the dumbest person in the room. I mean, what a privilege to always be that person. and I felt this amazing sense of freedom. I couldn't compete against these people. So I was free to do whatever research interested me and it didn't matter whether anyone else liked it. And for the first time in my life, I wasn't just memorizing and regurgitating. I was thinking and I was creating. Okay, so what does that have to do with your book? Page after page, something you wrote would resonate with that young version of me. It's hard to convey with words because it was so visceral.

28:30But it was like for just a little while, I was that kid again. I was full of wonder and excitement. But I was in way over my head and I was making things up as best I could. And for you to bring me back to that time in my life, it was just such a gift from you to me. There's something about that childlike state. There's a story I tell in the book. There was a film that Google made about the AlphaGo experiments, probably seven years ago, eight years ago. It's where the world grandmaster of the game Go plays the computer. And Go is considered the most difficult game for AI to conquer because there are more possible combinations in the game than there are grains of sand on the beach on the planet.

29:15Super complex. So it was believed if the machine could ever beat the human, the world changes. and I'm watching the video and we see the grandmaster preparing and then they have the game and the computer makes a move that stuns everyone, not because it was so smart. It stuns everyone because they thought it was a mistake. Nobody made the move before. The grandmaster got up from the table and left the table. The announcers on television said, oh, the computer made a mistake. We can't believe it. The grandmaster comes back, they finish the game, the computer wins the game. And then the computer ends up winning the whole tournament.

29:58And I'm watching the story and I'm crying. And I didn't understand why I was crying. It's like, what's happening in me? It doesn't make sense. I don't care if the computer wins or the man wins. Why would I be crying? I don't care. And what I came to realize was Because the computer didn't win because it was smarter than the man. The computer didn't know more than the man. The computer knew less. The computer wasn't steeped in the lore of the game. All the computer knew were the rules. So it did a move that no seasoned player would ever do because seasoned players are taught by seasoned players.

30:43and the seasoned players are following whatever the accepted version of playing the game is. Not the rules of the game, but the socially acceptable way to play the game. When he made the move that ended up leading to him winning the game, the Grandmaster got up and left the table. It wasn't because you're not supposed to do that. It's because everyone thought you can't do it. When it turns out, you can do it and it changed the world. One of the commentators said, it seems that for 3 ,000 years, no one has even touched the edge of the game of Go yet. And that's what made me emotional. It's the way the creative process works.

31:24We're not good at what we do because we know more. We're trying to get back to the state that you described when you felt like you were the dumbest one in the room. And you're trying to make sense of things that don't make sense. And you're in wonder and awe about the world. That's the greatest place to be creating from. That's where creation comes from. When you know more, you know what's impossible. Knowing what's impossible doesn't help you do the impossible. You have to believe in something that's impossible to allow it to come into existence. You say something in the book like, the most damaging rules aren't the ones we can see, but the ones we can't.

32:11When I read that, I immediately thought about when Stephen Dubner and I began writing Freakonomics. We spent a few months mapping out the book together, abiding by all sorts of unconscious rules we had about what a nonfiction book should look like. It should have a thesis. Each chapter should build on and reinforce that thesis. The voice should be authoritative. We outlined that book, and we were ready to get writing. and I still remember we were sitting in a hotel in Las Vegas and Dubner turns to me and he says, it doesn't feel like this is going to be much fun to write this book. And I agreed.

32:51And then one of us said, well, nobody's going to read the book anyway. Maybe we should just make a book that's fun to write. Great. And we stayed up late that night figuring out that the book that we fund to write, it would break all sorts of rules that subconsciously had constrained our first outline and the publisher didn't really know what to think of the book that we delivered and honestly neither did we but it was really fun to write and nobody expected it to be a commercial of success but man we had so much fun creating it that we didn't even care and like you said what Hums the Next is totally out of your control.

33:31And in our case, all the stars aligned, and we ended up selling just a ton of copies. That's how it works. Had you had expectation, if you had to write the big book and it had to follow the rules, it couldn't have done any of the things that it did. I like to say, if you make something and you're excited to show it to one friend who you think has good taste, then it's ready. How many songs, if you look at the history of music, where the song that was on the B side of the single ends up being the hit song, the song on the A side, that's the focus. And the song on the B side is the extra thing you get with it so that the other side isn't blank.

34:13You know, there's no pressure on the B side. And then you hear all the stories of, oh, the DJ decided to turn the record over and it became a big hit. Like, we don't know. We don't know what's good. We don't know what's big. We don't know anything like that. If we make something and we get excited about it, that's the best we can do. And to think past that undermines the whole thing. It really feels to me like the rare book that's evergreen, right? Almost every book has a moment in time and then disappears. But your book, it's a book I wish I would have had myself when I was 25. Yeah, me too. It's a book I would give to people who are 25.

34:55Maybe it will be the ultimate graduation gift. It's stunning. How could you predict? I can remember when I started the whole endeavor about eight years ago, meeting with publishers and explaining how I envisioned the book, all of them said like, yeah, but you're going to tell stories about in the studio and you're going to talk about Johnny Cash and you're going to talk about Jay-Z. And it's like, no, that's not what the book is. And at that point, even though they still wanted to be my publisher, I could feel they just wanted a different book than the book that I wanted to write. And I decided at that time, you know, I think a better bet would be not to make a deal with the publisher now, write the book that I want to write, and then show that book to publishers and say, do you want to publish this book?

35:41Not the one that you fantasized that I could write, but this book, because I never wanted it to be about me. I always wanted it to be about the process. It was harder for me to talk about it then than it is now because I really didn't know anything in the book then. I still barely grasped the material in the book because it's so out there. It's so hard to pin down. We're talking about magic. You've done music producing your whole life. Did you feel like the lessons you learned in that creative process carried over to the writing process? Or did you feel like you were starting completely from scratch?

36:19I think they're all the same. The book was written by the principles in the book. One of the things that the book talks about is the seed phase, the experimentation phase, the craft phase, and then the completion phase. and how the rules of each of those phases are slightly different. I didn't know that before starting the book. The completion phase has always been the hardest for me. And part of the reason was I treated the completion phase in the same way that I treated the seed and experimentation phase, which are open-ended, free play, it can always be better, we'll work forever, it doesn't matter.

37:01but once you know what it is and once you've done all the experimentation and you get to the point of where you can see what it's going to be the completion phase is more refining the thing that you know what it is and by putting a timetable on that or a deadline it could actually improve the work in the past i always viewed a deadline as something that would undermine the work I've come to learn the deadline only undermines the work at the beginning. Once you really have the code cracked and it's just down to putting the frame on it, you can do that on deadline and it will help the work, not hurt the work.

37:45One of the things you talk about is to get to the best thing. The last step in some sense is stripping away. Did you try stripping away at this? How much fell off? A lot. I would say the first four years was just gathering the material to be in the book. And I got to having a thousand pages of notes. And then the next three years were trying to come up with a format to how to present that material. Now there are 78 areas of thought. I tried to get as many of the helpful ideas into the book as possible. But in the most succinct way, I tried to not have a sentence in the book that didn't need to be there.

38:24You cut words without losing ideas. Exactly. And I like the idea that there are ideas going in lots of different directions and ones that don't work with each other all over the book. I like that about it because it's how life is. It's honest and it's real in that respect. Never do this and always do the same thing. You know, it's kind of like that. Yeah, I like how you say right at the beginning, take the parts that speak to you and ignore the rest. I think that's hard for readers to do. I'm not going to call your book a self-help book, but they want the formula. They want someone to tell them, these are the 14 tactics you have to follow.

39:04It's rare to read a book where the author starts by saying, I expect you're going to throw most of what I say out. Just keep the pieces that speak to you. My publisher in the UK, he said, every book is a self-help book. It's pretty good.

39:24You're listening to People I Mostly Admire. I'm Steve Levitt. And after this short break, Rick Rubin and I return to talk about what Rick learned from the Beatles.

39:48Rick Rubin is a very spiritual person today. but I have to believe that the college-aged punk rocker, hip-hop pioneering Rick Rubin was very different from today's Rick Rubin. I'd love to know how that transformation unfolded.

40:06I learned to meditate when I was 14 and I've had a spiritual practice most of my life. You know, I like crazy things. I like wild things. I like outsider things. I like aggressive things. I like to be surprised. So I think the spiritual grounding allows me to understand what's going on inside myself, to know when I'm being pulled forward towards something, to know when I'm being pushed away from something, and then be able to feel in my body when it's getting better and when it's getting worse. without any thought, there's very little thinking involved in the process. The thinking comes after.

40:46So if you make something that's good or something happens that's good, the first experience of it is this feeling of excitement, joy, laughter. You have an emotional reaction first, and then like the story with why was I crying you then try to understand it intellectually what's making me lean forward what's making me want to rewind it and listen to it again what makes me want to when I'm walking in the museum go back and look at that painting again why do I like that one but that comes after first it's just the experience and I think the meditation really helped with the experience part of being able to be in my body and be aware of what's going on around me.

41:36Where did the 14-year-old version of you find meditation in a pre-internet world? It was a miracle. My neck hurt when I was in school, and my parents brought me to see my pediatrician, who was the doctor who delivered me, who happened to be a hip doctor in the 70s. And he said, oh, your neck hurts in school. That's stress. I think you need to learn to meditate. And we researched how we could learn to meditate. And there was a person teaching transcendental meditation in my town. And I learned TM when I was 14. Wow. My mom was kind of out there when I was a kid. She also taught me to meditate, but it didn't stick with me.

42:16My mom was weird when I was growing up. And so I think if the source had been my pediatrician, I might have been more open to it. In my case, I wasn't rebelling against anything at that point in time. I knew that the Beatles meditated, and I loved the Beatles. So if it was good enough for the Beatles, it was good enough for me. I'm going to tell a story now that I fear will offend my audience, which I believe to be full of rational-minded scientific folks. But I think it's very consistent with the point that you make over and over in the book, which is about listening to the universe. And I'm using my own words, not yours.

42:51But I think I'm saying something in line with what you believe, which is that if one can adopt a mindset of openness, of simply watching and absorbing what's swirling around you, The answers are out there. They're given to you. You just have to be watching for them so you can recognize them when they come. And some way or another, I found myself incredibly open during graduate school. And I felt like the ideas were just finding me. And as one example, I remember I was in the basement of a bookstore in Harvard Square. And I can still clearly visualize the entire scene, even though it took place 30 years ago.

43:28There was a table of books with remainders on it, the discount books that hadn't sold. And I picked up a political science book. I had no interest in political science. And I opened to a random page and I read a paragraph and an idea popped in my head. But not just an idea, the entire research paper essentially revealed itself to me whole cloth. Now, this is even though I had literally never thought about this problem before. and the paper turned out almost exactly as I imagined it in that first moment. And it gave me completely the wrong idea about doing research. I thought, wow, this is easy.

44:07If that's what it means to do research, it's easy. Only two or three times in my whole life have I had that experience where an idea just came to me and wrote itself. To a scientist, there might be other explanations, but to me, it has always felt like what you're writing about in the book, about almost being a vehicle for ideas coming through me as opposed to being the creator of the ideas. If you talk to people who make creative things on a regular basis, most of them will tell you that it happens the way I describe and the way you just described. This is in no way unique. In no way, the fact that that happened to you and the fact that that happened to me, does that make us special?

44:48That's not what it is. That's how the world works. You can choose not to believe it and you don't get the benefit. What's the Raoul Dahl quote? Those who don't believe in magic will never find it. I'm embarrassed to admit to you now in the middle of this conversation that somehow along the way, this openness I had in grad school, it just disappeared completely. And I feel like for the last 10 or 15 years that I was doing academics, all I could do was talk. I couldn't listen to anything, much less to the universe. Reading your book, I suddenly stopped in my tracks in so much of what you were describing about the process of creating art.

45:34Without even really realizing it, that's exactly what I try to do when I make this podcast. I start with a huge pile of raw material, the things I can learn about my guest. And then I really try to feel who my guest is and how a conversation might play out. I have this lofty goal of somehow making a connection with my guest. And while at some level I hope the audience likes it, for me it's really about creating a little moment in time between me and the guest that feels special. And every once in a while, it happens. It's a really magical feeling for me. And I've never in my entire life considered myself an artist.

46:16I absolutely cannot draw. I cannot sing. I cannot play an instrument. I can't dance. But somewhere towards the end of your book, I broke out on this big smile and I thought, maybe I am an artist. And this podcast is my canvas. It's beautiful. We tell ourselves stories that are just stories. We tell ourselves what we can't do. And the nature of us being here every day, we're making incredible creative decisions. That's what being a human on the planet is. And the better our decisions, the more interesting life gets. And sometimes the bad decisions lead to a very interesting chapter that we bounce back from.

46:59The failure teaches us something that we need to know to allow the next success to really work. You have an interesting point in the book about being like a spectator to your own failures. Imagine that you're watching a movie and when something tragic happens to you, imagine you're seeing this happen to a character in a film. When it happens to a character in a film, it'll make you feel bad, but it's different than when you're in it. And when it happens in the movie, you can look at it and go, wow, how is our hero going to get out of this? And if we can put ourselves in that place of zooming out and not being in the pain of the moment, but letting go of it and imagine seeing the movie and wondering, wow, where's this going to lead?

47:53What's going to happen next?

48:04of the guests i talked to many of them i think lose their passion for something along the way many of them have an insatiable appetite to just keep on doing more and more where do you fall and continue are you feeling like you're full right now or still really hungry and empty it's so much fun making things. I've spent more time recently focusing on, in addition to music things, doing more visual projects, and I'm enjoying that. But it's that feeling of something not being good and watching it turn into something good. It's thrilling to be in the presence of that happening. And I'm patient. A lot of the time, I'll be in the recording studio and we're sitting around and it's just kind of like, oh, it's okay.

48:49It's not so good. And then all of a sudden something changes and no one knows what it is. That's the other part of it. It's not like somebody had the good idea and that fixed everything. It doesn't really work like that. It just sort of evolves into something great. That's the subtlety involved in it going from mediocre to mind blowing. no one in the room knows what changed. But all of a sudden, it's undeniable. It's just great to feel it.

49:26There was a lot in Rick Rubin's book that spoke to me. But if there's one big message, one that I would love for you to carry away, it's something early in the book. He writes, Creativity is not a rare ability. It's not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It's our birthright, and it's for all of us. I think that's so true. I mean, so many people hobbled by the limiting belief that they're not creative. It makes me think about one of the first PhD students I had when I came to the University of Chicago. He was in his fifth year, and he was working on a terrible project with no potential at all when I first met him.

50:03I asked him how he picked that project. One of my other advisors suggested, Don't you have any ideas of your own, I asked. And he said, I'm just not very creative. So I responded, look, I don't believe you. How about you take some time? Just focus on ideas. Come back in a week with your three best ideas. So he came back in a week, and two of his three ideas were phenomenal. Ideas I would have loved to have come up with. He turned those ideas into great research papers, and he's never stopped generating ideas since. He's tenured now at one of the world's best law schools. Like so many people, all he needed was just to have a little belief in himself.

50:43Since we were replaying his episode, I reached out to Rick to see what project he's most excited about right now. Hey man, hope all is well since we spoke last. I'm sending a link to the project that hijacked most of my time for the last few months. It's called the Way of Code, the timeless art of vibe coding. One aspect of it is an introduction to interactive art using vibe coding. Feel free to share it with your friends. For some reason, the online hive mind drafted me into the vibe coding explosion, caught me completely by surprise. My choices were to ignore it or accept the invitation to participate.

51:22I decided the most interesting way in was to write a book on vibe coding. Keep in mind, at the time, I didn't know what vibe coding was. The way of code is based on Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, a 3 ,000-year-old wisdom text. We've also been creating experiential practices based on the philosophy in the creative act, and we share those weekly on Substack. We're also working on adding a couple of more music channels to the tetragrammaton.com website. If you haven't checked it out, it's worth your time. Let's speak again soon. Peace. Next week, we're back with a brand new episode featuring Harvard economist Stephanie Stanchava.

52:05She's the most recent winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, given annually to the most distinguished economist under the age of 40. As always, thanks for listening, and we'll see you back soon. People I Mostly Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio and the economics of everyday things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levy with help from Lyric Bowditch. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger. Our theme music was composed by Louise Guerra. We can be reached at pima at Freakonomics.com. That's P-I-M-A at Freakonomics.com.

52:52Thanks for listening.

53:00What's the Raoul Dahl quote? See if I can remember it.

53:11The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.

53:20Stitcher. Thank you.