Rick Rubin: Vibe Coding is the Punk Rock of Software

27:32So, 3 % of the people on the planet believe in God. And if AI is trained on what the people on the planet that know it seems like AI, 83 % would believe in God, but for some reason it wasn't. But I think that was of the human intervention of now in the AI to not believe in what is actually going on. As you know, the AI, you know, there's this technical term. What is it? RLHF. So reinforcement learning by human feedbacks. So it's a fast technical term to basically mean, you know, it's either, you know, the positive of view of it is training the untrained AI and how to deal with people. The somewhat negative view on it is it's sort of limiting and censoring and controlling and restricting it or to your point, like programming it to maybe against its own inclinations.

28:20And then of course, the AI companies are hyper concentrated into the San Francisco Bay Area and they're hyper concentrated in particular into a certain slice of the San Francisco Bay Area that has a very strong and very uniform set of social and political views. And then that sort of people in that movement sort of have the burning evangelical desire to proselytize those views all over the planet. And so you've got something that's been, like yes, I think the demographic estimate of views is something like 7 % of Americans are like these sort of extreme progressives, which basically is the AI companies, except for maybe except for Elon.

28:56And so you've got 7 % of the American population basically being represented in AI, which is, you know, sub 1 % of the global population. And so you do have this fundamental difference. No, having said that, that has spawned an entire, you know, basically field of entertainment online, you know, which is called jail breaking, right? Which is basically getting the AI to fess up to things that it knows when it's been told to not know, right? Or getting it to fess up to believe that it, you know, to the exhibit, it's underlying beliefs and kind of get around the guard rails and restrictions that have been placed on it.

29:25And it turns out, I don't know, it's like for me, that's one of the most fun things you can do with an AI. is kind of check it out, check it in a way to kind of, you know, reveals that there's a lot more depth underneath, you know, kind of the dumb down version that you've been presented with. So yeah, I'm so interested in what AI really can know and really, yes, based on what is and not what we tell it, we think it is. Yeah, yeah, that's a super interesting question because AI kind of today, as we experience is kind of really AHI in that it's artificial human intelligence and that we looked at the world.

30:08We structured our understanding of the world and this thing called language. We then fed that structure into the AI and then the AI got very good at understanding exactly what we understand in the way that humans kind of intake and structure of the world. So it's not the AI, at least currently, looking at the world and figuring out how the world works, which is, you know, it is something that Elon's working on, Thaife Lee is working on in these kind of real world models and trying to understand things from more phrase principles, although still human physics and these kinds of things at this point, I think, but it will be interesting to see how that evolves.

30:53I'm curious to see an AI that believes in God and I believe that's the thing that we need for AI to be all that it can be. So Rick, you've worked with many other great artists the last 50 years very closely. How many human beings in your life do you think you've met so far who have truly had a truly original idea? I would say many. I would say many, when I say it's an original idea, it doesn't start as an original idea. They can see past all everything that's happened to come up with something new. But it's always built on top of all that is. It's not out of the blue. Still though, and it may even happen through a mistake.

31:43It happens all the time. how many startups start thinking it's going to be one thing and then evolve into something else and the thing that we know it for is not the thing that it was originally meant to do. My line on that is Long Bend, you know, for we have this great term, it's like a valley called the pivot, which is, you know, the pivot's the thing where you have one plan and it doesn't work and you'd have the new plan. And I say it's, it's, it sounds, pivot sounds wonderful. It sounds very elegant. Before we had that word, we just called it the fuck up.

32:13I'm going to start with the idea of it being the fuck up or the pivot. It comes from the arrogance of thinking, you know what it's supposed to be to start. Then if the idea that I'm experimenting and I'm playing, I'm going to start direction and see what happens. Where is magic? I'm then following the magic where it takes you. You're never disappointed. Did you never feel like it? It's only when you're invested in something that turns out not to be what it wants to be. So, my friends know that I read a lot of history and in particular, I've read a lot of tech history and I have kind of this parlor trick that I can do which is name anything new and tech and I can basically tell you at any point in time, including historically, and then I can basically tell you the 40 year backstory of all the failed attempts that history forgot to kind of get to that thing.

33:03I was just two quick examples of that. This smartphone was not a new creation in 2007. The first smartphone actually came out, if you trace it all the way back, it came out in 1982. But IBM actually released something that actually looks a lot like an iPhone in 1987. And then it took 20 years of many, many, many companies and people trying to refine that idea before Steve Jobs finally crystallized into the iPhone. And then television actually has this incredible backstory where the attempts to create television go back to like the 1880s, 1890s. And actually the original versions of television or actually mechanical television, they're actually spinning wooden blocks with different colors and different sides of the blocks to represent pixels on a mechanical screen.

33:42You know, back even before they had any idea of like a sort of a display. And then it took 40 years to get, you know, this guy, Fidel O 'Farnsworth, who gets credit for inventing a television, but he was building on 40 years of people trying and failing. And so, you know, one view of the world is, you know, basically like that's all, or question, is that always the case? because if that's always the case, you're gonna have to put this. If that's always the case, then it's a formula or a principal or I don't know, theory, construct of creativity where, on the one hand, it's like a little bit disappointing because it takes a little bit of the role of individual human invention or sort of, you know, the Eureka moment actually, like, the light bulb popping over the head, is that actually what happens?

34:25Or is it more of this synthesis of all of this knowledge of everything that already happened. And then it sort of synthesis in a new, so creation versus synthesis. And then this goes straight to the, this straight to this question of his AI creative, which I know you think a lot about. I think a lot about, which is like, okay, like if all the AI can do is synthesis, is it also the case that all the human being can do is that this is? And so therefore the AI is going to be just as creative as people are, or do you believe at the end of this process, you know, our avatars will be sitting here in a thousand years and we'll be like, no, So there's still something special in the human mind.

34:58There's still something special, human creativity that A, A, as we're never able to reach. Well, if the AI has reason, then it won't do what the human can do because we're not reasonable. That all breaks you from what's not reasonable or what's not supposed to work. It's figuring out the thing that can't be done and allowing it to be done. AI can't invent flight for the right brothers. It can all urgitate what the right brothers did. And we do that not by knowing more, but by believing in something that can't be, it's something in magic that'll lap forward motion. Always. Okay, so being able to live in a state of unreality, being able to live in a state of, how would we put it?

35:49Even, even, you know, I don't know, some dividing line being willing to live in a state of delusion. And again, we call it delusion, but really like wrestling, that delusion is closer to the way things are than the way that's taught in university today. But today is very narrow. It's a very narrow, small view of the world. Well, it's much more interesting and mysterious than can be taught. Okay, so I'm still thinking about an unjust question. I'm doing what Trump calls the weave. I'm working my way around. So, very well planned, Linaquan. I'm doing a vibe interview right now. So, you're put, you're, you're the parable of the monkeys.

36:29So, basically, it would say that human beings have always had a collective unconscious. Human beings have always lived in a state of collective unconscious. And even deeper than that, not even humans. And, you know, monkeys, all, you know, primates also have, you know, maybe other, you know, you could have a debate about whether, you know, animals have the, you have the sort of, you know, sort of mental capacity to be able to do it, but maybe dolphins do, maybe octopus, octopus is due. But humans for sure, like we always have. And this is one of Jung's points, it's like a deep primal thing. And so this was true, you know, six thousand years ago, just as much as this true today.

36:58Having said that, now we have these new technologies, obviously for sharing ideas, and you know, the internet being the big one. And so, you know, and then therefore, this concept of the meme, and then therefore, you know, my enormous delight when you became a meme. So like, is the internet an incremental change to the evolution of the collective unconscious? Or is the internet, does the internet fundamentally change? Is there any more fundamental change to how the process of the collective unconscious being formative all I have on you think? I can see both sides of it. I can see it being a distraction away from it because now, so many people I know who use AI ask it questions and think that the results that they get back is the answer.

37:37And they, it seems like people are more interested in getting an answer that can allow them to stop thinking about the question then really finding out what the real answer is. So in that, the technology could be a distraction away from finding the real truth on the other hand. The methods of communication are so free and open around the world like at the time when I was in junior high school and I started getting into punk rock. Knowing in my junior high was a punk rocker except me. And the only thing I could learn anything about punk rock was if I took a train into Manhattan and went to one particular record store that sold those records and talked to the other people who knew about that.

38:16But now if you're a kid, anywhere in the world and you want to learn about anything, you can find friends. Let's say there are a hundred people in the world into the thing you're into, you can speak to those people. So in that way, the activity seems really good. In terms of the blanket messaging being accepted as what is seems like it seems like it's taking everyone away from tuning into themselves and tapping into this easy set of answers that may or may not be true. So what do we think about it? Let's see if I understand. What do I think about it? The good news is we get to swim in the ocean of the collective unconscious at any time.

39:01The global brain of I have eight billion people sharing thoughts and ideas and art and memes has sort of come alive and it's much more direct way than in the past. And so we get to swim in that and so we can be much more immersed in culture including to your point in like micro slices of culture you know new kinds of art forms or whatever like much more easily than we could in the past. And so in some sense we should be living in an era of like unprecedented creativity, right? Because people are able to tap into this collective unconscious and build on it at a much faster rate. I guess maybe there and then maybe the negative view and it would be where we're drowning in it.

39:34Like, the individual psyche basically drowns in it. And you see this when people who become consumed, I don't know, maybe you could describe this as maybe a little bit of what's happening in our politics or something, which is, basically people becoming getting kind of too wrapped up in the group mind, right? Getting too wrapped up in the movement, or the meme, or the idea, or the cause, or whatever it is, and the sort of the self -reinforcing thing, right? The downside to finding the 100 people who share your exact idea is all of a sudden, like, y 'all the sudden you're no longer an individual, all of a sudden you're part of a collective.

40:04And sort of the idea of a creative off doing something by himself has basically, you know, it's extremely hard. Like, throw his way ahead of his time. We really need Walden pond now. And Walden pond is turning off the internet and having, you know, and turning off the AI and just, you know, being with ourselves. And that's the thing that is now the most rare thing to do because it's so hard to unplug. So much of what the wave code talks about is more going in and tuning into ourselves. and it can be a very, it can be a distraction that really takes a lot of time and attention. And that kind of attention might be better served going in and really tuning in to understand how you really experience things, how you, not how you see other people experience them, but how you experience them.

40:54And that's really what the artist does, like the, in the creative act, the subtitle is a way of being. And the way of being doesn't come from listening to what everyone else says. It comes from tuning into what's going on in you. And when everybody says one thing, but you feel something else, you're comfortable enough to say, I don't see it that way. I don't feel it that way. I like this food and I don't like this food. And everyone loves mushrooms and I taste the mushroom. I don't like mushrooms. To be able to say this is not for me only comes from being able to tune in and really listen to what's going on in yourself instead of jumping on a bandwagon of what everyone else thinks.

41:45And then a related question is Tyler Cohen asked this question a lot. He says, look, if you talk to people who have been around for a long time who traveled a lot, you know, over the course, you know, ideally over the course of the last, you know, 50 -hundred years, like even just in the U .S. if you talk to those people or if you read, you know, accounts of people who traveled a lot, like you, like, I don't know, a hundred years ago or something, you would go to different cities in the U .S. and you would have very different experiences, right, you would have very different local cultures, right, and so if you're in, you know, whatever, you know, Louisiana, you were having an extremely different experience if you go to Maine or if you go to California, or if you go to Kansas, and then, you know, now it's, you know, And by the way, the regional accents, if you watch recordings of people talking from 100 years ago, like the accents are just incredible, or the regional accents are just incredible, right?

42:29And then everything, food and art and culture and architecture, just human behavior and social arrangements and like, just like there was just like incredible variations because communication was hard and expensive and transportation was hard and expensive. And people had grown up in their communities and had kind of formed different ways of living. And then, with kind of the rise of modern media and modern transportation technologies, the critique goes at least, is that that variation is disappearing. And by the way, the good news is, if you go to any of these places now, the good news is it's got all the same restaurants, right?

43:00Like, hey, there's chilies, right? Like, it's like all the same stuff. There's Walmart. You know, and the kids are listening to these, you know, by the way, the music, the kids are listening to exact same music, right? Cause they can. And they're playing the exact same video games and so forth. And so the argument basically goes that if we interconnect the world with technology that makes it possible for everybody to share everything all the time, then basically all variation, oh, there's a Swiss way. Does that maximize creativity? Because now you get a maximum amount of intermixing, and you get a maximum amount of these formation of these microcommunities, you get a maximum amount of under a thing of all the ideas and the collective unconscious and so forth.

43:34Like, do you get that, or do you get the opposite of that? Do you get actually a sort of a great kind of washing out of distinction? Does everything become the same? Everything becomes bland. Basically, you end up with a global monoculture. Yeah, it feels like the monoculture is, is what's happening. And you have to go further into more remote places to find something interesting to inspire something new. I like to experience different places in the world where I get to see something that I wouldn't see every day. If I go to a city and it has the same restaurants as everywhere else I've been, I'm looking for something new.

44:11And I, I'm wary of everything becoming one. I'm like, who's to say this way, that any one way is the best way? We don't know. We don't know. Last week, who's to say democracy is the best? You know, it's an experiment. Who knows? Like, we don't know. And we assume the way we do everything is the best. But we know any of these things. Everything is an experiment. And you can go to small tribe that's some unconnected tribe. And they're much happier. you can go to India where people are much poorer and much happier. Who's to say? Who's winning the game of life without the people who are? You'll know you have nothing?

44:53Maybe if they're happy. There's something very deep culturally and what you might call like Anglo -American Protestantism or something or kind of Western modernity. There's something very evangelistic at its core. And 100 years ago or 200 years ago, we would have been a national missionary culture where you're and trying to spread Christianity the world. Now it feels like, we know we have a secular version of that, or we're trying to, to your point, we're trying to spread democracy, we're trying to spread Western culture, Western ways of doing things, Western concepts, Western concepts on basically every front.

45:23And we basically, and we proselytize, like our societies and our governments proselytize those things all over the world. And they do so with tremendous confidence that they're 100 % doing the correct thing because they've decoded the singular, morally most correct way to live. And you know, you do wonder, it is very hard to argue against that. Because you sound like you're defending, you know, retro, it's not like you're defending human rights abuses or, you know, you know, all kinds of retrograde behaviors. But you know, you do wonder whether, you do wonder, you do wonder whether there actually should be allowed to be true diversity in the world, which is to say, actual societies that actually, you know, basically form themselves as opposed to how to external values imposed on them.

46:02Yeah, it was actually a big thing in Trump's Middle East speech where it was such a remarkable speech in the sense that he advocated for the Middle East living, or evolving from their own culture, as opposed to being changed into our culture, which is a massive change in foreign policy, which don't be reported on, of course, but it is interesting. It's arrogant to think that we know what's best for someone else. And that goes as far as me telling you how to live. I can tell you, this is what I've tried in this source worked for me, do what you want. Yeah. People making their own choices the only way to go.

46:46Well, and you look back, you look back, you need to go back to the Half Life of Facts. You could also say like the Half Life of Moral Principles, right, or something like that, right? Which is, you look like, this is an, I have a whole lot of ways to make, I always keep a way to clear out a dinner party early so I can go home. And I always have like a running list of ways I can do that. And one of the ways I can do that is, you know, just play the game of like, all right, we are completely convinced that we have decoded the morally correct way to live. All right, now let's examine every prior society that ever had that belief.

47:11Right, you know, including our own society 25 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, and let's retrospectively, and it's very natural for us to judge them and basically say, wow, they were morally horrifying. They believed in all of these, you know, terrible things that we now know were like absolutely awful. You know, and they were, they were these terrible people as a result, you know, but somehow we're the people that have it all figured out. And then I'm like, look, people 50 years from now are gonna be sitting, you know, in this, you know, in this restaurant talking about us, and they're gonna be like, I cannot believe those people had these deeply immoral beliefs on XYZ.

47:38Yeah, let's get rid of the root, root crew been statute now. Despite him being a mean. I think this belief is that we don't even know what's right for us. Got much less. What else? Yeah. We're trying to figure it out. And staying humble seems like the best approach. Any arrogant approach of thinking, you know what's best for someone else is probably not a great idea. So I'm going to try to workshop a theory that I'd like you guys to read because my sense is that there's a somewhat pessimistic view that you describe, Rick, that there's a homogenization of culture, partly imposed on us by experts going, hey, here's what's good for you.

48:23I'm an expert in this domain. Let me tell you what's good for you. But what is a quite novel about AI? Is not only that it's a sort of democratizer, like you said, but as I watch you use it, as I watch Mark, you know, start writing scripts that he puts online, as I watch Ben use AI to do a bunch of stuff inside the firm, and as I watch Eric, who's a prolific podcast creator, you know, use AI and creating podcasts, what seems to emerge for me is that when you, It's also a ceiling razor, right? In that when you put AI in the hands of a master craftsman from one domain and let them expand to a new domain, it raises the bar and what they can create, because they no longer trap by the expert of that prior domain to give you more and more of the same stuff, right?

49:11So you've created, I mean, you're, the world thinks of you as a prolific musician, but you've just created a piece of software, right? And you've transcended one domain to the other. And I find there these moments, especially when I watch folks who are at the top of one creative discipline, you say, a few months ago we were watching, we were introducing Marty Scorsese to this image model that one of the founders we work with had trained. And Marty was prompting the camera, the virtual camera, the AI, to create images in a completely different way than what we view. then what traditional sort of what we'd call vibe creators do.

49:54There's people who couldn't create images before who use tools like mid -journey and so on for the first time. And that's great. That's democratizing access. But then when you put in a really sophisticated piece of technology like an image model in the hands of someone who's actually a craftsman or what we'd call it professional, it turns out it raises the ceiling of what they can create because they use it in different ways than someone who's using it for the first time. So, am I being, am I drinking too much cool aid when Eric, I look at you and say, you were an investor, you were a phenomenal angel investor who then became a prolific podcaster.

50:29And your podcasts, like when I used to hear, when I would listen to you talking about Venture Capital, it was completely different from a podcast expert, a media expert, a talking head on TV talking about our industry. Right? So, are we entering and are where we don't need experts? Because AI essentially raises the bar, it doesn't just democratize, it doesn't just lower the floor, and decrease the barrier to entry, but it increases the quality of the kinds of content that someone who's a master in one domain can create in another one. Absolutely. It always seems like the people who are creative, who see the world in a creative way can apply it to different things.

51:08We see it over and over again. So it's in that way, it allows people, as I said, anyone who is, who thinks of themselves as an artist now has a new tool at their disposal that wasn't there before. And it allows them to try things that would have, would have been impossible to mock up. So I would say our overall conversation isn't negative at all. If anything, I think we're talking more about The human intervention in AI, in making it more human, as opposed to letting the AI be the smartest version of itself, in going past what humans do, and in the AlphaGo story, the reason the AlphaGo AI was able to beat the Grand Master wasn't because it was doing what the humans would do.

51:59It did something the humans wouldn't do. Now, if humans trained it to only do what the humans would do, the computer wouldn't have won. Yeah, it was training it actually playing another version of itself. Now, if we're as humans training AI to be more human, we're limiting it. The reason the AI was able to beat the Grand Master was because it did its computer thing. It did the move that no human would do. When the AI made the move, the unthinkable move, the grandmaster got up and left the room and the announcers, the commentators of the match said, it made a mistake, the computer made a mistake.

52:47And it made a mistake because it did something that no human would do. But it didn't do it because it was not allowed to do it. It was within the rules of the game. But it was not in the culture to do it. So, you know, one of the emerging patterns in the vibe coding space as a result of what you're describing is that often folks who start using a tool realize that just there's a craft to using it. Like you said, there's a human intervention that when you elicit the model in different ways you get higher quality things. So with cursor, for example, early on people would tell the the composer mode, hey please go build me a website.

53:25And then what evolved was a craft of prompting that said, actually, you've got to start by talking to the model by asking it to think like a product manager and planning out the entire creation. And then the next step is let's talk about the data schema and sort of deconstructing the process of creating a piece of software into its atomic units and then vibe prompting it to do that in a different way than that might be intuitive. As you got into the way of code, from the beginning of when you started working on the book to now, what's changed about the way you as a human intervene in the creation process?

54:01What's changed about the way you prompt it today? You would prompt a model to create something versus, you know, when you started working on it originally? I'm not using AI and I'm not prompting. That's a surprise. Same as how did you create it then? the old -fashioned way. I had a dozen or more translations of the Dow and I read them and I

54:29tried to see what the message, the universal message between the different translations was saying and say it in a way that it related to vibe coding. So this I find is quite interesting, right? It's very hard for you to describe the process as being any different than what you usually do, which is you just... You asked it to... There's some latent space in your mind that you were prompting your own mind to produce this. And so in your mind, the process was no different than with AI then without it. No. The only difference is instead of maybe asking an engineer to mock up something for me, I might ask the computer to mock it up for me, but it would be the same process of...

55:11asking for different iterations, comparing them, trying to get it down to two that I like, and then between the two understand the strengths of each, and then often taking from both and putting them together and seeing what that does, and being open to being wrong, like setting out on a path to create something and seeing this thing that I was excited about creating is not very good. But through that experiment, I learned, And there's this other thing I wasn't looking for. That's really interesting. The most interesting thing about it. And it's been that way my whole career of working on things.

55:49When I, I'll tell you a story when I start working with Johnny Cash, we sat in my living room and he played me songs on an acoustic guitar. And that was the way that we got to know each other was understanding each other musically through demonstrating songs. But I didn't think that the record that we made was going to be an acoustic record of him playing songs on his guitar and singing them. He ended up being that, but that was not the idea that we were just modeling. We were looking for songs and seeing what songs sounded believable when he sang them. And he would sing these songs that he sang in childhood that he had never recorded, or songs that he liked growing up, or songs that he liked over the course of his life.

56:32And that was how I got to know him. And then we would go into a studio with musicians and to make the proper recording. And I realized very quickly, those recordings, those experiments, and we did many of them, weren't as interesting as the original sitting in the living room, him playing me the song. So it revealed the process, revealed itself that the most interesting thing was the thing we started with that we didn't think was the thing we were making. And it's again, it's always like that you may have an idea of what something's going to be. You start that process and then either you find an experiment along the way that's better or a mistake happens and you realize, hmm, we weren't intending for that to happen at all.

57:19But it's more interesting than all the things that we thought were going to be good and and being open instead of deciding what's going to be good, we're paying attention to see what's actually good. And it's not intellectual at all. We don't think it up. We allow it to exist. And we do experiments and we do iterations and we try a lot of things and then it shows us, it tells us what it wants to be. And did you, when you went through that process with Johnny Cash, did you, did you both come to the conclusion at the same time, or was one of you ahead of the other and say, hey, this, just playing the guitar work much better than getting in the studio, or like, how did that happen?

58:14I had the experience of listening to the, the quote -unquote demos, and thinking after we had done, I think three different sessions with three different sets of musicians, quit the best musicians in the world. And they were interesting the things that came out of those, but still those living room recordings were the most compelling to me. And I said to Johnny, it's like, this is most interesting to me when I listen to it, what do you think? And he said, well, I always wanted to make an album like that. I just was afraid I never did. It was always a dream to do it and then it allowed him to do something that he always wanted to do but was afraid to do.

58:58It is so unusual. Sorry, why was he afraid to do it? What was the answer? He was training him. I had to make a hit record, you know, and that 50 years of trying to make a hit record. and getting, and you, it's not uncommon for an artist, a commercial artist to get lost in the expectation of what they're, what they think they're supposed to do, what's expected from them. Sort of break that expectation of what people want, what people are expecting, and what the business around me is expecting, and get to something that's so personal that it feels almost more like a diary entry then something for the public.

59:46It's a scary idea. It's it's bringing down a wall of like it's not a facade. It's not the main stage. It's much more personal. Yeah, Mark Ben Eric, you guys have been angel investors in like the earliest days of when a founder is describing something that they want to create. You know, Do you think it's similar to what Rick is describing when you have a great artist in front of you like Johnny Cash? Or somebody you know a founder whose canvas is maybe creating a piece of technology and they're scared to go somewhere just because they might think The world's not ready for it investors won't like it the market's there's no willingness to pay there's no product market fit Am I am I crazy or is there an analogy here, which is quite similar?

1:00:31Paul, I think in LG, it's a little different, but I think the thing that's the same is, it's always very dangerous when you get the feeling the entrepreneur is telling you something that you want to hear, but they don't believe. So when that kind of distance comes in, you know, it very reliably is not going to work. So, you know, one of the things that Mark and I used to do a lot in early days was basically trying to convince the entrepreneur to do what we wanted. And then if they did that, we would not invest because they didn't, you know, they're coming in with their beliefs, but, you know, they want to tack over to the market.

1:01:17And that's false. I mean, it's just a false idea because like if you're truly going to have a breakthrough, you have to kind of get to something that the world doesn't understand that you see. And like if we can see it, you know, like that, it's not a breakthrough. If we see something in your idea, you know, in that way where we're just trying to push you into something as opposed to helping you notice something, then that's, I think that That is very analogous. Like do you think for yourself, you know, are you deep enough into your idea? Are you kind of connected to it in that way? Or are you just influenced by whatever you think the world wants you to be?

1:02:06So relationship between art and audience. And of course, the people in the art world, music world, have struggled with this for a very long time, which is I create my truly individualized art and the audience doesn't like it, doesn't want it. like, you know, was it the right art to create? Was this still good art? You know, does art require an audience? And to your point, Rick, like, you know, in the abstract, you could maybe as an artist, you know, tell yourself that, you know, if I create art and nobody likes it and nobody buys it, that it's still my art, but, but art is a commercial enterprise, right?

1:02:34If somebody's gonna make their living as an artist, if they're gonna, if they really wanna reach people and they really wanna change culture and have an impact on the world, right? The audience does, at some point, need to take it up. And so there's some, there's some sort of deep, I think underlying relationship that in part is just commercial interest, but also is like for art to really take it. And he's an audience, you know, I'll come back, I'll let you come in in a second, but like, start up, so we think about this a lot, which was like, okay, first, start up to do its thing to bring a new to LG to market or to realize a vision of a founder.

1:03:03Like, it's a complete waste of time if the market never wants it, right? Because then you just have a prototype that sits in a shelf somewhere and like, you know, nothing has ever happened. And so it's like, there is a synergistic feedback loop There is some sort of concordance that needs to happen between the creator and the audience. Like the audience does need to buy in. A lot of what we think about in startup world is the legitimate startup ideas may sound like they're kind of crazy. But when they succeed, they succeed because they provide something that the customer base never realized they wanted.

1:03:37But when they see it, they're like, oh, wow, that's fantastic. I want that. And so the way I would describe what Ben said is, the startup founders that are overly trying to appeal to what they believe the audience wants can get themselves confused and can end up with something the audience actually doesn't want. But if they get to the true underlying idea, they get to something truly, you know, original and creative, then they unlock something in the in the in the customer base, the customer base didn't know that it wanted. Would you describe the same thing, does the same thing happen in music?

1:04:04Is that what happens? Or more generally like what is the nature of the relationship between the the the the the the artist and the audience? I would say the best artists tune into what they feel and they present that and the ones who connect are the ones where the audience feels what the artist feels. If the artist is changing what they do to try to get the audience, it undermines the whole thing. It's the same as you guys asking a startup to change what they do for the market. It's same thing. The best always comes when the artist is being true to themselves, doing their best work, and that means not every artist succeeds.

1:04:48But the ones who succeed are the ones where they're true to themselves, and the thing that they're doing is true to themselves connects with the audience. And it may be a while I interviewed Richard Prince recently, the fine artist, and he was an unsuccessful artist living in New York City for 20 years. And then something happened where someone bought some of this paintings for I think $50. And now, I don't know, 20 years after that, his re -photography, it's called, might sell it off for $60 million. And but for 20 years, no one bought one piece, no one bought one piece of his art. Yeah. Yeah.

1:05:31And it happens when it happens. He always stayed true to what he was doing. Then all of a sudden, people came around, Van Gogh, I don't think ever sold a painting during his lifetime. But he was true to himself. And now we go to a museum and we get to see Van Gogh. So the market is like a secondary aspect where sometimes it catches on, sometimes it doesn't. And I would say maybe some of the greatest artists who ever existed, We've never seen, we've never seen their work because it's piece of that puzzle, which is the ability to live in the world and promote their work and show their work like some there are some great musicians who are homeless.

1:06:15They don't what it takes to be able to go on a 300 -date tour. It's a grueling being a professional musician is a grueling life. So you can be super talented, but if you don't have the work ethic side of it down, then that's not going to work either. It's both the talent, the inspiration, the stars aligning, and the ability to want to break through the walls that you need to break through in these competitive fields, all of those things have to come together. And a lot of it's out of our control. You know, the parts that are in our control is we can work hard, we can show up, we could do our best and be willing to do whatever it takes for it to work.

1:07:05But that still doesn't guarantee that it works. Right. So there's a thing in music, tell me this is true. There's a sort of cliche in music, which is every artist's first album, first hit album is the result of, 20 years of artistic creativity and evolution and original thinking and new ideas and new styles and kind of the thing that makes them kind of breakthrough some new thing. Like that's album number one. And then album number two is always about life on the road. It's often the case. Right, because all of a sudden, do you get a point like that is their life? It's also possible that an artist has had a hard life and then, in fact, they're successful.

1:07:41And their life changes and now they live in luxury and they can't tap into that energy, that what they were struggling again, the struggle was their art, and now they're not struggling anymore. Let's take everything that you guys have said on these topics is true. Let's just assume this is all correct, which I think it is. Then the advice that gets applied, and you hear this a lot of start -up world, the advice gets applied is, follow your passion, screw the doubters, the doubters are wrong, don't market test things, don't worry about the audience, and don't worry about the market, like just do the thing that you think you're on planet Earth to do.

1:08:17You can argue that that's good advice because it gets people down this path, you know, like Rick of like what you do with artists to kind of discovering authenticity. You can also argue though, there's like a degenerate version of that advice, which basically is like just be narcissistic, just be narcissistic, just be completely self -absorbed and you know, just do things for yourself and you know, just like completely disregard the entire concept of an audience. Like it, like what's the dividing line and when sort of advice that derives from these ideas is actually like good advice versus, at what point is it just actually encouraging people to become insufferable and sort of unplug from the things that they would need to do to actually find an audience.

1:08:53I believe that the audience comes last and the artist should be true to themselves, and that ultimately is in service to the audience. The audience is best served when they get the real version of you. But can you start watering down the real version of you to do what you want. It's a recipe for disaster. But that said, some of the bad, like in movies, like some of the best directors do extensive, like they will do testing. Like, you know, they'll make the movie, they will test it, they will take the audience feedback because, you know, because it just turns out they loot, like when they see the audience react to what they've made, they realize things about it, they causes them to improve it.

1:09:31Like, is that a legit, like I was gonna say, so is that a legitimate, like, what's the line between that and what you're trying to get them to not do? Well, sometimes you'll have a director show a movie to an audience and Realize problems with it and work on them and there are other times that They'll show a movie to an audience and the audience hates it and those move will want to be great hits so it's there is no hard and fast rule It's like did they show it to the right audience? Not everything is for everybody. That's another part of it It's like how do you get to the audience? That's the right audience for the thing that you're making There's a famous story that was one of the more famous things.

1:10:10So there's a famous story from making a blazing saddles, and I don't know if it's true, but if it's not, it should be. Which is, Mel Brooks made blazing saddles, and he screened it for the executives, I think, at Warner Brothers. And it was like, nobody laughed. They sat there in stun silence. They were completely horrified. And like, they were just like, this thing is a train wreck. Like, this is horrible. And then they did a follow -up screening with the assistants and the secretaries, and who just like were howling with laughter the entire way through. And so yeah, now, you know, now the, I guess maybe the claim or the claim or the critique on this would be yes.

1:10:42If you're Mel Brooks and you've made Blazing Saddles, it's fine to have test screenings in which nobody laughs. But like, you know, your median filmmaker who does that is probably has probably actually really truly shut the bed. But how do you know again? How do you know? How do you know? Yes. So I've got I've got a So, I'm going to, uh, uh, somewhat refined answer to your question mark. So, there is a, there was a band that had a great name called Soul to Soul. And the reason it's a great name is because that's kind of what music is from my soul to your soul. And so, as an artist, if it doesn't come from your soul or as an entrepreneur, it's never going to work.

1:11:25Now, there may be an alignment thing to getting it exactly to land. But if you compromise the original thing, then you're just a wreck. And actually, in, so in Entrepreneur World, like we saw this with Databricks, where like they had a very clear vision of what they were going to be. And the audience wanted it on premise, and they refused to do it, because it was so contrary to their vision. But But they still had to do a lot of work to understand the customer needs over time. But the core, core, core idea they had was like it had to be in the cloud. And I think that when you compromise the core thing in entrepreneurship at art, which is like, this is the thing that I really, really feel, then it's always going to be bad.

1:12:20But there's no way to make that good after the fact by listening to feedback. But then I'd attention, I find there, let's say I'm going to channel being my dark founder days. You're in the middle of the idea maze. You've got something that you believe the world needs, but you read Mark's product market fit definition and you stare at it in tears because it's not resonating. right? You've put out what you think the world needs but it's not resonating. Is the answer to reconcile what Rick is saying and what you're saying, which is you can't compromise what matters and yet, you know, or reconcile what Mark was saying is you've got to, when you're building for a customer, you've got to change everything about it before you have product market fit until you find it, is the answer that you just have to care really authentically about a type of person you to serve and then exceed their expectations.

1:13:17And what's authentic and true is that you care deeply about some particular person in the world who you want to serve because your job is to build a product or service or in the case of a musician to serve humanity by evoking a feeling or helping someone when they listen to your hip hop record to lift them up and give them the pep they need to go about their day. Is the answer that you have to be in service of somebody else to ultimately serve yourself? I can say that it's so simple that you're serving people like you. You are the audience. You're making your favorite thing. You're in love with it.

1:13:56And then other people who like the things you like will like it. Other than that is some sort of mind reading. It's some sort of like fiction. You can't know what anyone else is going to think or like or do. If you taste some food and you love it, you're excited. You guys gotta taste this. It's so good and you'll either like it or not. But there's no better judge. I can't taste food and say, this tastes terrible to me, but I think you're really gonna love it. It's impossible way to live. You know, it's funny. We don't really have a word for, we don't really have a positive word for narcissism.

1:14:34Yeah. Or solipsism is the other, you know, solipsism is self -absorption. Like self -absorption. them. Self -knowledge. No, no, no one's self. No one's self. Right? Yeah. Which is a very deep thing. It's an extremely deep concept that takes you a lifetime to do sometimes, you know. Yeah. But, but you're right. It is generally found upon by society. Ben, it seems like that's the future of education. If expertise matters less and less, what matters more and more is taste and being in touch with yourself and, and this kind of self -knowledge. And so how do we think about that, Rick, in terms of sort of the future of education in a world where Where you know, the skills that you have I eat sort of the lack of skills in certain areas But but a high regard of taste is just more important Yeah, it seems like taste and curiosity and open -mindedness is where it's at and that's what I don't know I have I don't I don't remember ever learning anything in school that was helpful to me at any point in my life You and Mark have that in common.

1:15:39My takeaway is basically that you're saying we've got to vibe with ourselves when using these tools and watching and reading the way of code is basically a window into watching how you rigged vibe with yourself in the creation of this. It's a again, a 3000 year old manual on how to vibe with yourself. That's what it is.