Rick Rubin on Art, Life and Vibe Coding

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, Rick Rubin on art, life, and vibe coding. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Thanks to today's sponsors, KPMG, Blitzy.com, and Superintelligent. And to get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief.

0:23Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today we have something quite a bit different. First of all, it's an interview. And second of all, it's not just an interview with anyone. Even if you don't think you know today's guest, you have absolutely heard or been impacted by his work in some way. His fingerprints are on some of the most iconic music of the last 40 years. Beastie Boys License to Ill, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magic, Tom Petty Wildflower's Slayer Rain and Blood, Jay-Z's 99 Problems, Justin Timberlake's Future Sex Love Sounds, Ed Sheeran's X, Adele's 21, System of a Down Toxicity, Johnny Cash, the entire American recording series, the first of which was included in my guest's living room.

1:04If Run DMC's Christmas Hollis is part of your annual holiday celebration, that's him too. Of course, I am talking about the legendary music producer, Rick Rubin. A few weeks ago, my friends from Anthropic reached out about a project they were collaborating on with Rick around, believe it or not, vibe coding. Now, you may have seen this meme of Rick with his eyes closed, headphones on, vibing in front of a computer because it became a visual representation for vibe coding. And it turns out that even though it was sort of absurd and a joke, it also made a weird sort of sense. You see, Ruben is famously the producer who doesn't play instruments.

1:39In the parlance of the moment, the internet might call him a vibe producer. And so on some level, it wasn't that surprising that the meme resonated with the man himself and he decided to run with it. Now, I'm sure some of you have read Rick's book, The Creative Act, A Way of Being. It's a meditation on creativity, art, and many of the themes in the book are extremely aligned with the ethos and honestly technicalities of vibe coding. But Rick took it further. Collaborating with Anthropic, he's just announced a project called The Way of Code. It's effectively a living internet book, pairing 81 meditations on creative technology with interactive code artifacts created in partnership with Anthropic and their AI assistant Claude.

2:18The book is inspired by Lao Tzu's Dao De Jing and digs deeper into themes that have shaped Rick's life and work. In our conversation, we talk about becoming the unofficial mascot for vibe coding and how he felt like it was pulling him in, the implications of vibe coding like the democratization of creativity. But we also just talk a lot about art and AI and, frankly, why Rick isn't scared of AI somehow usurping human creativity. As an obsessive music person, an AI observer, and a huge Rick fan, I was delighted to have this conversation.

3:12really good context. So it said, it would start with a silence, not an empty silence, but a full purposeful quiet setting the tone, a long pause, breathing space, letting anticipation build until the first note arrives like an instinctual whisper, simple yet profound, softly nudging the listener into openness and curiosity. I love it. Yeah. So this is going to be such an interesting conversation, but I want to start with kind of a funny thing. When did you learn you had become a meme at the time that I became the meme I got uh friends were sending me pictures of me relating to something called vibe coding which I didn't know what it was and this all happened very quickly and recently I would say this was maybe eight weeks ago 10 eight or 10 weeks ago yeah and what was your what was your journey into sort of understanding what vibe coding meant.

4:04I have no understanding of anything to do with, I can barely get my computer to turn on. I'm not technical in any way. I have no coding skills. I really have a hard time getting the equipment even to work at the most rudimentary level. So seeing my image associated with this new technology just seemed like just funny. It was funny. Yeah. And how fast, though, did it click that actually it was super coherent? Like it felt very resonant with a philosophy that you've had for some time. It's true. I'm the record producer who doesn't know anything about music. So the idea that there could be a coder who doesn't know anything about coding, and that's vibe coding, it makes sense.

4:52I came to understand it. But at first, I saw the image another interesting thing about that image from the meme at first i thought it was an ai image i thought oh someone made a picture of me um because i'd never seen that picture before and then i came to realize that it actually was a photograph of me in munich at a hi-fi convention and i was listening to those headphones and the mouse was the volume control for the headphones that's why my eyes were closed i was focusing on the music and that's where that came from and i never saw that image before. That's so funny. Then when I saw it associated with vibe coding and when I came to learn what vibe coding was, I understood and thought it was funny and ridiculous, but it was as if the hive mind selected me to be part of this story.

5:40And my first instinct was, this is unusual. And then I started thinking about it because more and more people were sending me links to images of me you know there was a cursor the 15 rules of vibe coding and my picture was at the top of it and all these things happening it's like so strange like i don't know what any of this is i don't know what any of this is but i'm the mascot in some way and a lot of the philosophy in the creative act the book about creativity is talking about we're always in collaboration with everything going on around us. And in this case, I felt like, okay, I'm being enlisted here for something.

6:24I don't really understand what it is, but it's coming at me from all sides. It felt like maybe I'm being asked to participate in some way. And I just thought about it and I thought, okay, I don't know anything. I don't even know what it is. Maybe I could write a book about this thing that I don't know what it is. Maybe that would be interesting. And it started really as a joke. It's like, that would be funny. Somebody writing a book about something they don't even know what it is. What would that book be like? And then I started thinking about the different philosophical and spiritual texts I've read over my life.

7:02And probably my favorite of all is called the Tao Te Ching, which is written by Lao Tzu. It's about 3 ,000 years old. I first came across it about 40 years ago. and I read it regularly. And the beauty of that book is that every time you read it, it feels like a new book. The reader brings as much to the information in the book as what the book is offering. The book is open and poetic enough to allow the reader to truly participate in the experience of what the book is saying. And I thought if there was a way to do a vibe coding book based on the DAO, that might be interesting. And again, I'm still thinking it's a joke at that point in time, but I'm going to pursue the joke.

7:55And I started pursuing it and I got many different translations, had many translations, got many more. I spoke to several different AIs about the idea and asked it to weigh in and get some ideas that way. and took all the information and started putting it together and came to realize pretty quickly, once it started coming together and having some shape, a rough outline of what it could be, even though it started as a joke, it's actually profound because the DAO itself is so profound that anyone who comes in contact with this 3 ,000-year-old information, it's going to have an effect on them. And then I thought, I imagine many people in the coding world might not know about this stuff, might not know about Lao Tzu, maybe never read the Tao.

8:44So to introduce the Tao to this audience, who will probably be the people who are building the future, could end up being a really important thing. But again, started as a joke, and it revealed itself to be what it wanted to be, which is dead serious, I would say. It's still funny. I mean, the subtitle of the project is The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding. It's the timeless art of something that was coined 10 weeks ago. You know, it's ridiculous, but that's part of the beauty of it. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. So one of the other things that you talk about, I think, quite a bit in Creative Act is the idea whose time has come and how a lot of great creation is, is you just happen to be at the intersection of this thing that's forcing itself into the world.

9:33And as someone who's watched very closely, about as closely as anyone over the last couple of years with AI, just by virtue of what I do, even within this field where so many new things are coming, there does feel to me to be something fundamentally different about vibe coding and the resonance of it. And I think that you actually are just, you're almost just scratching the surface of some of this with the book. I've spent a bunch of time with it now over the last few days. And it really does feel, it's not a difference in scale. It's a difference in kind, right? It is not just, it doesn't feel to me an expansion of who gets to write code to build computer programs.

10:14it really feels like an unlock in generative capacity of people, right? And it may be less the code itself and more what the code unlocks. That's the real value. But I think people feel this. I think that part of why you were enlisted is that people feel that it is bigger than just, hey, the coolest new technology thing that they announced something about at a Microsoft conference or something like that. Yeah, it does feel like this is something for everyone to participate in. And I imagine most people will not be coming at it from either philosophical or spiritual dimension. So the book invites a different frame of reference going into this process that I think could be really beneficial.

11:01Have you had a chance to spend much time with these tools themselves? I mean, obviously, you're living inside sort of this philosophy and trying to unpack the layers of it. But have you had a chance to kind of dig in and just try to create stuff with any of these tools that are out there? I have not. So it's interesting because I had wondered if that was the case. But so much, so I was actually going back and re-listening to, reconnecting with the creative act now in this new context, right? I'd listened to it and read it before, but came back to it again. And there are a number of parts of that that get recontextualized in the context of vibe coding that are really, really interesting.

11:40So one, I mean, the beginner's mind, I think, stands out really strongly. You're certainly living in that, you know, with this idea. But everyone is, right? This is, to your point of it being, you know, very, very new. This didn't exist, you know, six months ago, much less a year ago. I think this idea of collaboration that you mentioned, sort of all art being a collaboration. But I also think, and this is one of the things that's hard for people who are coming at this from a traditional coding background, the way that you manifest and generate this is much less, it's every bit as intentional, but it's much less deterministic.

12:16deterministic. You don't get to control it in the way that you get to control code. You have to nudge it. You have to sort of almost surrender a little bit to what it wants to do and just kind of push it along towards something that almost inevitably is a little bit different than what you thought it was going to be at the beginning. Yes, and hopefully better than you thought it was going to be. It's one of the things that I've come to see working in the studio for all these years is we'll start with some idea of what it can be. And then through the experimentation, it often turns into something completely different and often something much better.

12:52But if we're too deterministic to start with, it ends up being a limitation. We're painting in a very small square. If we think we know what it is in advance, we're making a tiny little thing. Whereas if we allow what wants to be to come out, while we're making what we're making, all of a sudden we realize, hmm. And you hear the story with so many startups where a company starts as one thing and then it sort of morphs into the thing that we know it for. It happens all the time. The idea that these mistakes or reframing or reorientations change the picture. We thought we were making one thing, but we're really making something totally different.

13:35And the beauty of the vibe coding is It takes less steps to get to see what that first iteration is than if you had to manually write all that code. And I imagine the more code you write, the more attached you are to it doing what you want it to do. Whereas if you're suggesting you want it something like this and you get something like that but different, maybe you'll be more open to seeing when it's better. So we've experienced a little bit of this even inside my startup where no one talks about their feature ideas anymore or their product ideas. They just vibe code them. And what will often happen is it's sort of valuable on a couple different levels.

14:19One is it's much easier to explain what you're trying to show, don't tell, right? But more than that, what often happens is that in the process of trying to birth this thing into the world to see and visualize it, one of us will realize that actually the thing that we cared about wasn't the thing that we went in trying to explain. We would have spent all of these words, you know, dozens or hundreds or thousands of words trying to articulate a thing. And the reason that we would have tried so hard to articulate a thing is it actually wasn't even the thing that we were trying to get to. But by virtue of sort of being able to just put it out very, you know, nascently into the world, you know, we kind of uncover the thing that we are trying to go for.

14:57And I think it's a very different process. And again, it sort of involves a lot more collaboration with forces unseen in some ways. Absolutely. And that's honestly how all creation really works. I think the other version of kind of muscling your way through to get what you want, that's not the way the great artists work. You know, that's the way maybe craftspeople might work that way. But the real revolutionary artists know that more goes into it than what you think it's supposed to be. and that the forces align for something bigger and better to come through if you allow it to happen. Have you spent or had you spent much time thinking about AI and creation broadly before you sort of wandered into or you were enlisted into the vibe coding world?

15:50The only thing that I thought about was the reason I'm interested in the artists that I like is because I'm interested in their points of view. about two years ago, someone played me a song that was Jay-Z rapping. And it wasn't Jay-Z, it was an AI Jay-Z. And it was now vibe coded that two years ago, but it was an AI generated song based on Jay-Z's other work. So it was written as if Jay-Z wrote it from the computer's point of view using his voice and I listened to it and I realized I don't listen to Jay-Z to hear the sound of his voice or to hear the way he's thought about things in the past. I listened to Jay-Z to know what is he thinking about in this moment?

16:41What does he care enough about today to commit it to writing, to give us a song? And that's his point of view. And AI doesn't have a point of view. It can cobble together a historic reference of things you've thought about in the past. But that's not your point of view. And our point of view changes over time just based on our experiences in life. So I always thought of AI as an interesting tool, but it couldn't replace what the artist does because the artist is the point of view. AI is not point of view. Now, I spent a lot of time in my younger life listening to vinyl records looking for samples of things to use.

17:32So we would do, it was called Crate Digging. You'd get all these records that you might have never listened to before and hunt around and see if there are any moments that were interesting that could be the basis to build something around. So it wasn't even copying someone else's song. It was just looking for an interesting moment in a performance that could be looped to create something bigger. A starting point. And it seems like instead of spending all time looking at old records, you could have AI just generating music all the time. And you could have that on in the background playing all day.

18:13And whenever you hear something that catches your ear, you could create a snippet. That's different than asking it to make what you want it to make, but you could let it DJ all the time. And if you happen to run into a moment that's interesting to you, you could capture that. And then the human can do the thing that the human does with art. That's how I perceive the potential use for AI going back for the last two years. Yeah, it's interesting. So music has always been sort of my most important way of engaging with the world artistically. It's the genre that I've forever danced around, so close to being a music manager numerous times in my career, giving up tech and just sort of joining music.

18:56It's the thing that connects with me most resonantly. and music has always been, since I started paying attention to AI, the biggest reason that I wasn't concerned in the way that I think some are about AI replacing human creativity for a couple of reasons. And one of them will be maybe particularly funny to you. So first, again, I was re-listening to the book and, you know, in the make it up chapter, you say a truism that's so true. It's one of those things that needs to be repeated all the time, which is no one knows what it makes a piece great. And for every song that becomes a thing that's hugely emotionally resonant and culturally impactful, there's 10 ,000 other songs that use the same chords and the same words and the same themes and just they're not.

19:38And there's this infinitude of tiny little decisions that artists make that make it what it is. And I think I feel similarly to you that AI is just going to create this massive canvas of new sort of things to pull from. I also think the other sort of thing that felt strongly was I was listening yesterday was the intention that if the art is about the sort of the intention that gets pressed into it, not about the delivery mechanism, AI is almost incidental. If an artist uses AI or if they use a guitar, if they use a turntable, if the intention is the thing that makes it art, AI is just another vehicle for uncovering it.

20:13It's another tool. It truly is another tool. And you can't say it's a good tool or a bad tool. It's either the tool that helps you get where you're going or it doesn't help you get where you're going. And either way, it's certainly worth examining any new tool. If you start thinking the tool is the end, that the tool is the art, it's not. It never is. But it's another tool. And it could be a really powerful tool and a really useful tool. But like most tools, the more powerful they are, if they allow the artist to settle. like if you don't have to work as hard to get the result maybe the bar gets lowered and maybe that's not a good thing but that has more to do with the artist than it does to do with the technology it's pushing through any boundaries to get to where you're where you want to get and when i say where you want to get you often don't know in advance what that is you learn it along the way You learn it on the journey.

21:19You find out where those magic moments are. So there's a concept in AI called the Turing test. It's a longstanding historical concept. And it was basically this idea that AI would pass the Turing test when a human could have a conversation with an AI and not realize it was an AI. It's sort of the simplest definition of it. and I've actually had sort of a in my head for a long time believe it or not a musical version of this sort of a creative turing test and in my head it's called the system of a down test and um so system of a down was my sort of like my revelatory band when I was a teenager it's the band I tried to copy with all my bands down to like the stutter snares and these like tiny little elements that I tried to reference and the reason that I think of it as the system of a down test is that if you, especially you listen to that first album, the variety of weird decisions made on every single song that no one else would make is that you're just, I just can't imagine an AI ever putting those combination of elements together.

22:22And so it's not, the system of a down test for me is not can an AI make a thing that sounds like system of a down. It's do AIs ever get to the point where these random off kilter, seemingly wrong even decisions that humans make are a thing that it does. And my guess is that it doesn't. And that's always going to be the province of the artist. Yeah, the revolutionary work breaks the rules of convention. AI is built based on the rules of convention. It's a regurgitation machine. So you've been around at a lot of moments of explosion, the birth of new things. Does this feel like one of those moments to you?

23:04It does. And I'll say not so much in my world, but I feel it around me and I feel it around me coming from all sides and with a, at a fevered pitch that I don't think I can remember ever seeing before. As you've been pulled in more with vibe coding, has that frequency gone up and do you find yourself wanting to lean into it in different ways? I mean, is this book in some ways an act of you letting it take whatever next steps of the journey it's going to take you on. Yeah, it'll go wherever it wants to go. I love the idea of a 3 ,000-year-old philosophical work applying to the most cutting-edge technology of the moment, and it just seamlessly hand-in-glove fits.

23:52That feels good to me. It makes the vibe coding feel more real to me, that the rules that apply to all things that work through nature over time, it applies, vibe coding applies to those same principles, makes me think it may have a future. Today's episode is brought to you by Super Intelligent and more specifically, Super's Agent Readiness Audits. If you've been listening for a while, you have probably heard me talk about this, but basically the idea of the Agent Readiness Audit is that this is a system that we've created to help you benchmark and map opportunities in your organizations where agents could specifically help you solve your problems, create new opportunities in a way that, again, is completely customized to you.

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27:45But the nature of the book, I'm guessing, will be most foreign to that audience. And I feel like that's where the power in it lies. This is, man, I don't even know if I want to ask this question because it's too reductive. I was going to ask something to the effect of if there's like, you know, a single lesson or a connection point that you saw, that if you just had, you know, a minute with Elon Musk in an elevator, you would hope sort of that he could embrace. Is there anything that stood out or is it more just sort of the connection, the through line, like you put it, between sort of, you know, ancient philosophy and this thing that is very of the moment?

28:19I think these timeless rules apply to this thing of the moment in a way that we know we don't know how it works when we're making art. I believe we don't know how it works as it relates to anything in the world. And vibe coding feels like a good partner in this, not knowing how it works, let's go on this adventure. This is a tool to help me go further faster. You know, one of the things that I was also thinking about in the context of this conversation was, it's interesting to me how many of the terms that we use in and around AI or vibe coding are musical terms. So when we talk about agents, we talk about orchestration, right?