Best Of: The Tao of Rick Rubin

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34:40If I were to watch you listening to something new, maybe it's an artist you're going to be working with, maybe it's just something that has been recommended to you by three friends, but you want to listen, you want to be there with it. What would I see happen? Are you in a dark room? Are you wearing headphones? Are your eyes open or closed? What is the practice of listening when the listening really matters to you look like? My eyes are closed. I'm in a space with complete silence that could be a room in my home with speakers. It could be in the car. It could be in the recording studio. Those I say would be probably the main places where that would happen.

35:30And I would sit quietly. If I was listening with the idea of, I really want to know where I am with this, I would be careful about when I listen to it. So if for any reason I felt any level of anxiety, any level of stress, if I was wrestling with some sort of a problem mentally, if I was in a terrible mood, I would not listen. I might listen to other things, but if I'm listening with the idea of really being with something, the state that I'm in plays a role in that. If I'm sick, I probably wouldn't do it. I think those are the descriptive elements of what it would look like. I would be sitting with my eyes closed.

36:23I might be laying down with my eyes closed. Depends on whatever's comfortable, really. And I would close my eyes and I would play it and just be with it. And I would start with the idea of I'm turning off. You mentioned the phrase from the book earlier about listening is suspending disbelief. Now, if I'm suspending disbelief, I'm not judging it. The aspect of myself, that's the judgment aspect, is turned off.

36:59I just want to be with the music and see what's happening in my body when it's playing. Feel it. Try not to think. Anything I can do not to think about it would be good. I might have a thought along the way. It's like, oh, this reminds me is something else, that's not so helpful. I'm hoping that doesn't happen. Or if it does happen, it would be like being in a meditation where in my practice, I'm focused on my mantra and a thought pops up. Happens all the time. In meditation practice, we let the thought pop up. we don't avoid it or engage with it we think of it almost like a bubble like a bubble floats up and we just let it float away and we go back to our mantra so in the case of listening to music the music would function as the mantra and if a thought popped up i would try using the practice what I learned through the practice of meditation of letting the thoughts just not engage, not push them away, but not engage so that I can really be with whatever's happening.

38:16Tell me about what you call the vessel and the filter. The vessel is the part of us that holds everything that we've seen over the course of our lives. And the vessel contains things that we collect and things that get in there without us knowing. So we may have learned a lesson from a teacher or an adult when we were young, and that got stored in the vessel. And it may be accurate, and it may be not accurate. And what's in us, what's stuck in us, there are definitely the things that we've collected that we loved. Everything we love is in the vessel. But there's also a bunch of stuff that just got in there through living life.

39:02and the filter is when things are coming from the outside world how we interpret them and how we see them that's our filter so we can experience the same thing and have a very different reaction to the thing that we see i'll tell you a story this is interesting i'm thinking about this because i'm currently listening to quentin tarantino's new book, which I love. And he talks a lot about very violent movies. And I tend not to like violent movies. And it reminded me, I was living in Boston in the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. And I went to a movie theater in the Harvard yard.

39:48There was a midnight movie. A lot of kids were going and I thought, okay, I'll go. But I had no, I never liked horror movies or anything like that. And the movie started and in the very first scene, you see a person who's a zombie, but he's a person through the scope of a rifle. And then you see this person's head explode and it was horrible. It made me nauseous seeing this. And I'm in a theater full of other young people all pretty much all my age who jumped up and screamed like yay like like they were seeing what they came to see and then over the course of the movie this happened thousands of times and over the course of the movie my sensitization of it making me nauseous by the end of the movie it didn't make me nauseous anymore.

40:53Not because it wasn't disgusting, but the way humans are, I imagine is the way it is for people who go to war. You find a way to compensate or calibrate yourself to this is how it is now. And this is not that it's okay, but that somehow we adapt, we adapt to this new condition. And I remember thinking after seeing this movie, He's like, I don't feel like this is good. I don't want to be adapted to seeing people's heads blow up and feeling like it's okay to cheer. It's wild. It was just such a surreal moment. So my filter rejected that first atrocity, seeing that atrocity. Yet everyone else in the theater, through their filter, that was what action was.

41:46That's what excitement was. That was an adrenalizing experience. And I can't say mine's right and theirs wrong. And that different experience is our filter on the world. Because we were all watching the same movie, but how it affected us was different. I'm interested to hear that story of your youth because it conflicts with a suspicion I had about you. So I was looking over all the work you've produced or all the work that I could find that you produced to prepare for this. And one thing I noticed was that early in your career, you know, the first 10, 15, 20 years of production, the work you were attracted to or seemed to be working on was really quite aggressive.

42:28It was more aggressive forms of rap and hip hop and metal. It was a lot of production of Andrew Dice Clay's stand-up albums. And there are a lot of issues with Andrew Dice Clay, but one thing I think everybody can agree on is he's got a very aggressive form of comedy. and that seems a lot less true for your recent productions and your book is very notably gentle and your demeanor is very notably gentle so I was going to ask if you felt that your filter your taste your your temperament had changed in that way but it sounds like there was something there at the beginning too in terms of what you did and didn't like so tell me what I'm seeing there in the shift of what you've worked on?

43:07I think it's just more a question of what's going on in the culture and age. Those two things are playing a role in it. I like outlaw elements. I like things that seem like they go too far. I've always liked that. I still like that. I like being shocked. I like the extremes. But maybe now I might like the extreme in a very quiet way instead of in a very loud way but i think that might just be a function of age i still am capable of finding the aggression in a piece of music and helping support that and maybe when i was younger i don't know if i would have been as good at the more delicate side of things um i don't know but I think that the my taste is the same I just probably spend more time in a mellower world but then again I've been meditating since I was 14 like I always seek peace in my life I like to be by myself I like to be in quiet spaces I've always lived a bit of a monk-like life even when you know producing very aggressive music what's a work you find moving or interesting for the extremeness of its quiet the first one that comes up there's a song we did with the chili peppers that was so delicate and quiet and beautiful but one of the techniques that has appeared in the studio is if we're looking for a very, very quiet, delicate performance, making the headphones that the musicians are hearing very loud, so loud that if they play at normal level, it's deafening.

45:08And it forces everyone to play so delicately, like almost as if you just touch a guitar string and it's really loud, it creates a whole different feeling. You can make a louder guitar sound quiet based on turning a fader down, or you can make a quiet guitar sound loud based on turning a fader up. But when someone's playing very, very delicately and you mic it well and you can hear it loud but you can feel the touch being so careful. It creates an energy that's really beautiful to hear. So you look back early in your career and you're a producer of a really remarkable series of hip-hop recordings.

45:56You co-founded Def Jam Recordings one of the early hip-hop record labels. And then there's this period when you begin to expand and among other things you begin working with Johnny Cash on these really now legendary recordings, the American recordings. But at that point, his career had really stalled. So when you walked into that studio, when you began talking to him, what did you see there? What did you think was there that you were trying to bring out? Well, we'll start with, I worked on hip hop music, then I worked on other kinds of music. I worked on heavy metal, rock music. I don't think I'd done anything within the country genre but i'm doing the same thing in all the cases and it has very little to do with what kind of music it is it has more to do with just how it feels and after having success doing hip-hop and hard rock and heavy metal i realized most of the artists i worked with were young almost all of them almost all of them it was their first project maybe their second project so I had this thought because I've only worked with young artists what would it be like to work with a grown-up artist I wonder if whatever this is that we're doing would work with a grown-up artist and I thought about who's the grown-up artist who has the potential to be great or who has been great over the course of their life but maybe isn't doing their best work now and that was a key to it because it wasn't finding someone who was doing the best work of their lives and working with them on more of that.

47:36It really was a, who's someone who's proven that they could do it, but who hasn't been doing it for a long time. And the first person I thought of was Johnny Cash. And it had nothing to do with him being a country artist, had nothing to do, it had to do with him being, in my mind, an iconic figure and someone whose best work, I think everyone would say, including him, was long behind him. So it was more of an experiment. And as you walked into that room, though, what did you see in him? I mean, beyond that his best work had been behind him, when you met him and you tried to open yourself to what he was and what he could be, what was it you noticed?

48:24And then how did you guide him there, if that's how you would describe what you did? I felt a very deep, soulful human being. He seemed like someone who had essentially given up on themselves. He was a huge star on Sun Records, along with Elvis Presley. Then in the 70s, he was the biggest artist on Columbia Records. And then over time got dropped by that label. He was playing at dinner theaters. And I don't think he thought of himself seriously as a current recording artist. I think he saw himself as someone who's passed their prime and now was getting to sing the old songs in front of the audience.

49:19who's interested. And we met at a dinner theater in Orange County. I watched his show and I thought he sang great. And I thought it was a great experience other than the sadness of seeing this iconic figure singing, you know, in a room of maybe 150 or 200 people who were eating dinner as he's singing. I was curious to know what would a great new Johnny Cash album sound like. And I had no idea what that was. And usually with the artists I work with, I have no idea going in what it's going to be. And I met him backstage and I liked him very much. And we didn't speak very much. We sat together for a while, but I would say he's quiet and shy.

50:03I'm quiet and shy. And we just were in each other's presence for a while, said a few words to each other. But I would say there was some sense of connection. And he may have said, so I understand you want to record me. And I said, yes. And he said, well, why would you want to do that? Or what would you do different than anyone else has done? And I said, I really don't know. I'd be curious to see what happens if we got together and you just sang me songs on acoustic guitar and played songs for me that you like over the course of your life to give me an idea of who you are. Like, so I understand your taste.

50:49And then once we do that, we'll figure out what to try to do. And he agreed to do it, but he didn't agree to do it enthusiastically. It was more of a, why does this person, it's funny you say, he didn't know who I was. he's like why is this guy want to work with me doesn't make sense so he thought if i cared enough to want to do it he would see where it went but with zero expectations and then we did that and he would start coming to my house and um we would he would sit on the couch and he'd play me songs on his guitar and they were i learned so much from him because he had this wealth of history of music.

51:36He knew so many songs. He didn't know many modern songs, but he knew songs from the past and he knew songs from his childhood or from before he was born that I'd never heard before. And he would sing me these beautiful songs. And I recorded the songs, not with the idea of anyone ever hearing them. I recorded them more as a reference, the same way that we make notes in the studio. It's like, I'll record these songs so that we have a reference of all the songs that you play me. And then if there's a question between which songs to do, we could listen back and decide if, you know, it comes down to choosing between two songs, we could listen to the original time that you played them for me and decide what to do.

52:20So it was purely to document the experience for us. And we did this over time over and over again. And then it got to where we had, okay, here's a handful of songs that we think it's time to record. And then we booked studio time and went in with different musicians. And we did this several times with different musicians, great musicians. And over time, it became clear to me that none of the experiments we did were better than what happened on the couch. And that actually the solo acoustic performance on the couch was the most interesting thing that happened. Even though when it was happening, I had no idea that it would ever be a record.

53:05I just thought we're looking for songs. This was just part of the process to find the songs. And then I remember calling them and saying, I feel like these are like listening back. This is the most interesting stuff. what do you think he's like well it makes me nervous but i've always wanted to do like a late and alone kind of album but i never had the confidence to do it but listening to these if you think these are better than when the band's playing i'm willing to try what you want to do and that was how it happened and then and then we did a show at the viper room which is a club owned by johnny depp and johnny depp brought johnny cash out on stage and it was beautiful and I don't know if it holds 100 people, 120 people, tiny club.

53:50And the house was packed with musicians and people who just loved Johnny Cash. And this was sort of a loud, rowdy club. If you've ever been to this club, it's kind of a loud, it has a bar and they usually have loud music. And it was kind of a loud rock and roll club. and from the moment Johnny Cash stepped on stage, you could hear a pin drop in the room. It was dead silent in the room and Johnny started playing the first song and I could tell he was uncomfortable and afraid and he told me he's uncomfortable and afraid. Every show, every show with his band has been over the course of his life terrified, would sometimes throw up before shows, even after doing it for 50 years.

54:45And here was the first time he was ever doing it solo. Came out solo. There once was a man and he couldn't cry.

54:59He hadn't cried for years and for years. After, by about the third song, he got in the groove and just was feeling comfortable. And the love after every song, even the first where he was uncomfortable, The love in the audience was so profound and the cheers were so strong that I think the acceptance of the people in the room gave him the confidence to continue the show. And it was a beautiful, beautiful moment. And I think after that show, he was convinced for himself that maybe this is okay to put this out as a record. Delia, oh, Delia, Delia all my life. If I hadn't shut for a while Just because we went into the studio with great musicians, we went into the studio with members of the Chili Peppers, amazing musicians.

55:58If that's not better than Johnny by himself, why would we put out the one that's not the best one that we have, even if it's not what we thought it was going to be? That story reminded me, actually, of a way you very indirectly influenced the music I've listened to over the past couple of years because I listened to an interview you did with Andre 3000, who I revere. And you asked him what he was listening to. And he said he was listening to Steve Reich, who I knew nothing about, but is one of the great minimalist composers of the, I mean, he's still working today, but of the 20th century. And he said that he was listening to him, that Andre 3000 said he was listening to him because he'd been more interested in music recently that created space in which he could think.

56:51And I immediately thought, well, anybody he's listening to and describing that way I want to listen to. And it has kind of sent me on a whole different musical journey. And I've gone to see Steve Reich music live. And I really, really adore his work. But I'm curious about that idea of music that creates space in which you think and how you approach that. It's interesting because Steve Reich is a great example of extreme music. And when you're 15 years old, maybe the extreme music that speaks to you is Slayer. And when you're 40 years old, the extreme music that speaks to you is Steve Reich. It's a great way of putting that.

57:34Yeah. Explain what's extreme about him. It's very repetitive. In a way, you could say it's non-musical. It seems to be more almost algorithmic, even though it's not. It's like hearing a cycle over and over and over again, sometimes overlapping with another of a similar cycle, sometimes changing in very small ways, and they can be very long pieces. And often the instrumentation is interesting. might be a group of players playing just percussion instruments or the instrumentation seems to often be as interesting as the composition itself. Well, one thing that always strikes me about his music is that he's able to make human beings sound like machines.

58:24Like when I think of Pulses, which is one of his great works.

58:35I always describe it to people that it's like being inside an air conditioner in a really good way. Yeah. But it has this remarkable quality of, I've now seen it live, so I really know that it's done by instrumentation. But it is the most machine-sounding music I've ever heard, much more so than most electronic music. And that transmutation of people into, as you put it, something that feels mechanical, algorithmic, but still beautiful. It's a really quite remarkable production. His music is very beautiful. What's beautiful about it is when we think of classical music, classical music is written and performed in a very structured way.

59:24Whereas jazz music might be rooted in the same elements. It might use the same language of classical at times, but it's often played in a more free improvisational way. There's very little improvisation in classical music. It doesn't really work in classical music to have improvisation. And I'm going to send you an album that I love because I've never heard anything like it before, where it feels rooted in classical music, but it's as loose and improvisational as jazz. It sparks something in my mind. It's from the album Music for Wobbling, Music vs. Gravity, F.S. Blum and Nils Fromm. This is the first track.

1:00:20Amen.

1:00:53This podcast features Ezra Klein and Rick Rubin. Thank you.

1:01:36So tell me what moves you or captures you in that. Well, it breaks my understanding of genre. So there's clearly, you hear the sophistication of the playing, where it's classically trained music, by a classically trained player and whenever i hear classically trained music by a classically trained player it stays on one course and this starts like that and then it feels more like a jazz improvisation and i've never heard classical music looking for the next idea allowing the next thing to unfold, allowing the improvisation to happen. And then all of a sudden something happens that seems electronic.

1:02:27There's an electronic intervention, which is completely unexpected in this acoustic classical framing that takes it to a whole other place. And the whole album, it's soothing to me and creates a question in my mind. I always want to know what's going to happen next. It forces me to pay attention because it breaks all of the conventions that I've grown to understand to be the way it always works. So this is different than all the other ones like it. It's thrilling to me. So it reminds me of something in your book about the relationship between imperfection and perfection. Because one thing I hear when I listen to that.

1:03:12So I love Neil Fromm's music. And one thing about a lot of it is it is gentle and perfect and the sounds are very rich and he manipulates pianos in a remarkable way. And on that particular song, he and the other artist, there's distinct imperfection. There's something they're doing there with the instruments that is making them sound off, that is making them sound jarring that is almost like it is miss striking in the chord that forces a lot of attention but but i'm curious how you how you hear that because in a way i feel like that song is built not to be soothing it's soothing based on the instrumentation and then those mistakes or those seeming mistakes force you to pay attention they re-engage you again sometimes it's the mistake that re-engages you.

1:04:05Sometimes it's the change in direction. There are musical direction changes that are not always expected because I don't know. I'm not sure that these pieces were composed or if they're improvised. I'm imagining they're improvised, but I don't know. That's another thing that I love about it is hearing it. I'm not sure how this was made. And I know that you could listen to this piece and learn this piece and play it back with the mistakes and that's how that piece would go and that you know someone like john cage would have the mistakes in if there were mistakes those would be part of the piece and it would be written out with those clunks in there again i don't know how it was made but i love it i love it and it makes me want to listen more it makes me want to know what's gonna and i'm i'm always i never fall into the pattern of it.

1:04:57It never gets old. It's always new. I think it's a really lovely bridge to another section and very important section to me of your book, which is alongside the openness, you have quite a bit on developing taste, developing discernment, developing judgment. You talk about what it takes to, quote, level up your taste. One of the opportunities for developing taste right now, but also one of the difficulties with it is the unbelievable abundance of what you can absorb, right? You can at any moment really have access to a lot of the best art humanity has ever produced in a way that definitely was not true for me when I was sitting in my room and I was 14.

1:05:41On the other hand, there is this unbelievable flattening, this overwhelming, this everything is the same, everything is just another line on a screen, everything is just another entry in the playlist. So yeah, what does it mean to develop taste? What is, if you wanted to spend six months a year leveling up your taste, how do you go about that? I would seek out whatever's considered the greatest works in history in whatever area you're in, and maybe maybe beyond whatever area you're in. I listened to a beautiful podcast called Poetry Unbound, where I hear beautiful poetry every week. I love that podcast.

1:06:27If you're a filmmaker, studying painting is not a bad idea. If you're a musician, studying filmmaking or films is not a bad idea. I mean, so many great, great songs were written about great movies over the course of our lives. I probably watch more old movies. There's a, um, the two places that I find the movies I watch are the Criterion Collection app, which is fantastic, and Mubi, M-U-B-I, that are mostly arthouse movies, the most beautiful movies in the world. The inspiration can come from any direction. seeing great works of architecture traveling to see them not just looking at pictures of paintings on your laptop but going to the museum and getting up close and seeing how the paint was applied seeing the thickness of the paint on the canvas so many things don't translate i would say if you see a sunset and it takes your breath away and if you take a photograph of it the photograph doesn't have that same quality.

1:07:36And that's true with looking at art online. We can get a sense of it, but you don't really see Guernica when you look at a photograph, you know, a small image of this giant, magnificent painting. go outside of your normal taste in music and maybe do a deep dive into the historically greatest country albums ever made or country songs ever made or the historically greatest jazz recordings if you're if you've never really listened to jazz and listen enough and when i we talked earlier about it's hard to stay with something if you don't like it. But if you know that something's in the canon of stood the test of time for the last 50 years, this is considered the best in this genre.

1:08:35It's a genre I don't understand, but I'm interested in, in folk music, going deep into folk music. I've gone through phases where I listen to one kind of music for a really long time and then I move on to a new phase at the moment I'm interested in um I don't know if you would call it Moroccan or maybe it's Arabic music but uh traditional Arabic spiritual music I heard it on the on a radio several years ago there was a radio station in a in a country that I was in and I heard this incredible music that was unlike anything I've ever heard before because because it sounded like folk music, but it was from a different place.

1:09:22It was in a language I didn't understand, and it was from a different place. And it was so beautiful. And since then, I've been searching for more of that. There's also, interesting, a great app called Radio-wo-wo-wo-wo. And Radio-wo-wo-wo-wo. Is that O's or woes? O's. Letter O's. Radio. Radio. It's the word radio, but with a lot of O's. Radio. And that shows a map of the world, a globe. And you can pick any country in the world, and you could pick any decade. So you can say Spain 1940s, and you'll hear what was playing on the radio in Spain in the 1940s. Or Russia in the 1970s. It's wild. It's like being in a time machine where you're showing up to these places and turning on a car radio.

1:10:22That's what it feels like to me. It's truly transported to another dimension listening to this. I find it very inspiring. And it's fun just to hunt around the world and to pick decades and move. What's it like in the 90s? And then what was it like in the 1930s? And maybe even chart the progress through the different decades in the different places. It's so cool. and how different two countries next to each other, let's say Italy and France, how radically different the music on the radio in those two places were, even though you could drive right over the line and be right there. It's that close.

1:11:00It's a radical, fun trip and opens your mind to possibilities. Really, it makes me excited about music again when I play with that. You write about leveling up your taste, quote, this applies to every choice we make, not just with art, but with the friends we choose, the conversations we have, even the thoughts we reflect on. All of these aspects affect our ability to distinguish the good from the very good, very good from great. Give me some examples of what you mean by that. Yeah, that's heavy. At different points in your life, we have relationships with people or friendships with people that make sense at that point in our lives and we're seeing the world in somewhat of a similar way and over time we might find they grow in a way that we don't or we grow in a way that they don't and and also sometimes the opposite is true too i will say sometimes having people around you who have very different ideas is really helpful and more true to what it's like being in the world.

1:12:11And I'm suggesting pay attention to your network of friends, the things that you read, everything that you take in, what you watch. Are you being true to yourself today? Are you being true to who you were when that relationship started or when that interest started. I'll tell you honestly, at the time that the formation of hip-hop, the early days of hip-hop, I listened pretty exclusively to hip-hop music for a long time. I grew out of my hip-hop phase, and now I listen to hip-hop when either someone recommends something great or I come across something just out in the world that excites me and engages me and gets me back interested.

1:13:02for a period of time, but I don't listen to hip hop music all the time. But I spent a lot of my life listening to hip hop music. I don't listen to new heavy metal. You know, I listened to that at a certain point in my life. And I continue to allow whatever's interesting to me in that moment. And whatever's interesting to me in the moment usually has other things with it. It may impact what I'm reading. It may impact the people I'm talking to. I try my best to stay true to who I am in the world today and doing my best to support who that is. And when I change, those things change. And I may go very deeply into something for a while and then grow out of it and then move on to something new.

1:13:56And as a creative person, having those different chapters in my life, they all bring something. All of that is in the vessel. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like, while I don't listen to the same aggressive music I used to listen to, I have a whole vocabulary of aggressive music in me that's never going to go away.

1:14:24Thank you.

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1:15:11One thing you talk about in that section on taste, and I found this really beautiful, is you have this emphasis on nature as a place to develop a deeper appreciation of beauty. and you write quote of all the great works that we can experience nature is the most absolute and enduring say more well it seems to me that all man-made art is a reflection back to our first energetic feelings of what's stimulating to us so our mother's face when we're an infant. Our mother's face is the first thing that we recognize. And that's the first thing that we're connected to. And then it might be a family. It might be the home that we grow up in.

1:16:04It consistently broadens out over time. And nature is the one where, you know, the first time you see the ocean, paying attention to the stars at night. If you live in a place that's flat, the first time you get to see mountains. If you live in a mountain range, the first time you get to see plains. All of these things that, from our experience, seem like this is how it always is. I grew up in a small beach community. It was flat. And the world that I grew up in, it was a small town. The ocean was on one side of the little island, six blocks away. The bay was on the other side of the little island.

1:16:50There was a boardwalk. When I would go to Manhattan, it was mind-blowing to me, the difference between what Manhattan was like and what the place that I lived in was like and what the place that I was born in was like. And experiencing those changes, the thing that ultimately led to me feeling less comfortable staying in New York after imagining this is the place I'm going to live my whole life. It was my dream to live in New York. had to do with nature. I found that spending my life looking up at the sky and seeing a small sliver of sky between two buildings wasn't satisfying to me after, I don't know, seven, 10 years, however many years it was.

1:17:37And I felt like I need to see the horizon. I need to see the horizon every day. I can't just look between buildings. It doesn't feel right to me. I need the horizon. One thing I've noticed is that when artists seem blocked, novelists, painters, and musicians in particular, it's a very common move to decamp to somewhere more natural for a period of time, to do their work out of a hut in rural Vermont. Can you tell me about an example where you saw that move to nature have a profound effect on the direction of someone's work? I'll say what's interesting about that is that I think the magic in those things is the move more than the move to nature.

1:18:24The idea of changing your life for a period of time, going to a new environment, experiencing a different way of living, has to impact your work. It has to unlock something. There are new things to notice. There are new feelings to be had. And it could be if you're a city dweller, going to nature can unlock you. And if you live in nature, going to a city can unlock you. I think the idea of going somewhere to make something, it takes you out of your daily life. It takes you out of the responsibilities of your life. When you go to a remote place to focus on work, all there is is that work. And it can help an artist really get in tune with themselves.

1:19:17I can tell you one from personal experience where it ended up not negatively impacting the work, but causing a bit of an explosion. When Trent Reznor had finished, I think he had finished the Downward Spiral album. And we talked about maybe working together. And he was very much in it. and I suggested that he rent a house in Big Sur and go live in Big Sur and see what happens there because it's a different kind of a place and for him at that time in his mental state it it did the opposite of what was hoped and he felt uh again I've not really talked to him about this because he kind of vanished after this for a while, but he went inside of himself and then started, I believe, drinking and kind of went stir crazy.

1:20:20And it didn't lead to the result, the hoped results in that case. So it really does have to do with the person and the timing. And there's not a one remedy for all. It's like we all do have to find our own way and find our own path. And I suggest often in the book is try to open yourself to another way than the way that you think is the way. And see, just experiment. If you're used to working dark, work light. If you're used to working loud, work soft. If you're used to working high, work low. Whatever it is, see what happens on the other end of the seesaw. and even if all it yields is you getting better at being on the side you're always on, that's fine.

1:21:12You'll know more. You'll get a new perspective. I think this speaks very deeply to your perception of the artist as a contextual creature, as a translating person. I grew up in Southern California in Irvine and then I went as a political journalist to Washington, D.C., and I lived there for 14 years. And then I moved to the Bay Area about four-ish years ago. And my work changed much more in that move than I expected it to. I knew California. I went to college at UC Santa Cruz. I just thought it was a place I liked. And, you know, I lived in urban environments this whole time, right? I didn't live out in, you know, rural California or out in Big Sur.

1:21:58And the amount of difference in what I think about and how I see things and what feels resonant to me was really big, even though I would not think of Washington, D.C. and Bay Area, California as dramatically different places. But they're different enough that the signal I was pulling in became very different. And then what I began putting out and I'm not, you know, a lot of it I would not classify as art. It's reporting and analysis and other things, but it really became quite different. It's been a quite profound lesson to me. Tell me more about the differences both in your work and the places.

1:22:38Was it difference in the community or was it different in the place? Tell me everything. both both so for me it began we actually took a before we made this move we took a 10-week book leave in half moon bay not actually that far from from big sir and i thought that was going to be a very quiet period in this little hut near the beach and i was really struck by how expansive it was with so much less to do because spatially i wasn't near a lot to do and i didn't know anybody in Half Moon Bay, and it's a bit of a hike to get into the city, into SF. The quiet, and I didn't have kids at this point, so it's a little bit different.

1:23:24The quiet was, I had almost never felt bigger when I expected to feel very small. So that was one pretty transformational period. And that led to the actual move, which we didn't live in Half Moon Bay. We lived in Oakland and then in San Francisco. And I mean, among other things to talk about the political side of my work, maybe the problems of California are different than the problems of national politics. You're dealing here with a state run by Democrats. You have to focus in on what is not going well in democratic governance. You've netted out a lot of Republican influence. And so where that is the cause for me, in my view, of a lot of problems at the national level.

1:24:09That's really not the cause of the main problems at the California level. So you have to begin thinking about a different set of dynamics and players and problems. And my work has profoundly shifted off of that. And then what people think about and take seriously in the Bay Area is just different. I mean, I do think there is now and has been for a long time. People call it the California ideology or California consciousness or but but there is a tilted axis of more interest in things like meditation and psychedelics and technology and this sort of weird locus of things that affect consciousness that is just much more constantly present here than it is in a place like D.C.

1:25:01Relationships are different. I think there's much more gender experimentation out here than there was in D.C. That's actually a much bigger part of what is changing here than I had realized before I came. So just all of it is different enough that what I began thinking about and taking seriously and giving my attention to and being aware of was really different and has been, you know, very invigorating. Sounds great. I think if you look at the history of cults, many more cults have started in California than have started in DC. Well, that's if you don't assume the whole constitution, constitutional culture is a cult.

1:25:36Oh yeah, that's true. But that's just one. It seems like that's one. There's all kinds of interesting ones in California. You talked about living in a quiet place and how profound that is. And that also brings up the idea of boredom. You talked about when you lived in DC, there was a lot to do. all the time. And when you were in Half Moon Bay, there was less to do. So I don't know if you didn't use the word bored, but that is a part of it is this feeling of, well, what am I going to do now? Like, what am I supposed to do now? I know that in DC, this would be what I would do. And that feeling of, I see artists have this when they come off the road.

1:26:18If an artist has been on the road for a really long time, it can even happen honestly to me if I've been in studio for a long time. when I finish a project I get home um and during the day when I would normally be engaged in this creative function in the studio I have a real sense of what am I supposed to be doing now like what do I do you know what do I do I'm this is what I do all day every day and now I'm not doing it what do I do and that is one of the great things that comes up when you go to a new location all of the normal rhythms of the day get upset and it becomes truly about one thing i want to pick up on what you said about boredom because it reminds me of something i found striking in the book you write quote the artist actively works to experience life slowly why i think when we're when we're moving slow we're stopping to experience each part i know if I go to the beach for my morning walk and I go myself, I walk at the pace that I walk, get my heart rate up, stay consistent, listen to my podcast or audio book and pay attention to the things around me.

1:27:35I might stop and capture an image or make a note if something occurs to me. But if I were to do that same walk with my son, that will not be the cadence of the walk. my son will stop anywhere there is anything interesting to him and he'll stop for a long time he'll find a shell a stone a piece of wood whatever it is he'll stop and just engage fully and i'm living on schedule trying to get my steps in and he's living in the world really as an artist, as a creative being, engaging in the world, stopping for what catches his attention. He's got no other agenda other than whatever's right in front of him that's holding his interest.

1:28:32So if we can get back to that childlike, the schedule doesn't matter, what I'm trying to accomplish doesn't matter. I'm here in this moment, present with what's going on, and I'm going to give attention to whatever it is that calls me. That's the practice. I want to pick up on one other thing you said about time that struck me, which is that, quote, discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom. It's a harmonious relationship with time. A harmonious relationship with time. I really like that line, but tell me what it means. An example would be, I don't have time to meditate because it's going to take me 20 minutes or 30 minutes, two times a day.

1:29:23That's an hour that I'm taking away from my work, from my play, from whatever it is that I'm doing, so I don't have time. And what you come to learn when you do meditate is that even though you've used 30 minutes two times a day, not engaged in the thing that you're hoping to accomplish, that you end up having more time doesn't make sense. You're trying to save time by not meditating, yet when you meditate, you have more time. It's one of the things with time that's interesting. It also goes to the idea of shortcuts. We live in a society of looking for shortcuts. It's the same. It's like there are no shortcuts.

1:30:12The shortcut you're missing, the synopsis isn't the article. The headline isn't the story. we miss all of the nuance and all of the depth when we're just living on the surface with the bare amount of information thinking we know what's going on and that's where the discipline comes in the discipline is the commitment the discipline is the thing that allows us to get to where we want to go and we think a discipline is uh something that gets in the way and it's the exact opposite it allows our dreams to come true i think that is a lovely place to end okay so let me do a twist on what is often our final question which is what are three albums that have changed you that you would recommend to the audience love forever changes Arthur Lee in Love, beautiful album, the White Album by The Beatles, and I'll say the Ramones first album.

1:31:22Rick Rubin, thank you very much. Thank you.

1:31:33The Ezra Client Show is produced by Emma Fogawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Roche Karma, and Kristen Lynn. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, mixing by Sonia Herrero, original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. Special thanks to John Karamonica, Dan Charnas, Jack Hamilton, Felix Grimm, Carol Saburo, and Christina Samulewski.

1:32:08Thank you.