Rick Rubin: What Jay-Z Did in 30 Minutes Left Me Speechless!

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Legendary music producer Rick Rubin discusses the spiritual and psychological essence of the creative process. He explores how embracing 'in

Key takeaways

• Jay-Z's creation of '99 Problems' relied on intuitive humming and rhythm rather than traditional lyric writing.
• Rubin advocates for the 'indefensible' act—pursuing ideas that cannot be justified by reason or market research.

Main topics

• The Indefensible Act
• Intuition vs. Reason

Notable quotes

Everything we make is our personal true expression.

Conclusion

A profound masterclass on reconnecting with one's innate creative driv

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Jay-Z wrote in a way that no one else wrote. All the other rappers that I worked with spent a lot of time writing lyrics, and I never saw Jay write lyrics. And when I played him the beat for 99 Problems, he said, okay, just keep playing it over and over again. And he sat in the back of the room. You could hear him mumbling or humming. After 20 or 30 minutes, he's like, okay, I got it. Ran into the other room and did the first verse. He did, let's say, three takes, and then he came in and he listened to them. He's like, oh yeah, I think the second one's good. It just happens in his mind. Speaker 2 (0:28) And then this big list of people that you've worked with, I mean, it's just this unbelievable list. Jay-Z, Kanye, Adele, Justin Timberlake, and Mick Jagger, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Why do you think these people call you? Speaker 3 (0:39) Because I've been making things for 40 years, and I started making music as a hobby. It ended up taking on a life of its own and becoming a business. And that list... They're not special. I would say they're ordinary people who made a decision. I think of Eminem as a good example. Eminem is someone who's always writing because he wants to be the best he could possibly be. And he's insanely obsessive about that. It Speaker 2 (1:00) appears that some people are just like inherently more creative than others. Speaker 3 (1:04) Well, creativity is beaten out of us over the course of our lives. We go to school. We're thought to follow rules. The rules are not there to help us. The rules are there to control us. We're not taught to be free creative thinkers. So I'm suggesting we break free and express ourselves freely. How? Well, all of the best things involve risk. It's only through the risk that the greatness is shown. And so something needs to die. That lifestyle in that moment, that career path, that relationship, that's what needs to die. Speaker 2 (1:34) Is there a step one in that direction for people that want to hit the reset button? Speaker 3 (1:38) Yeah. The first one I'll say is... Speaker 2 (1:41) Your early 30s, you had a depressive episode yourself. Speaker 3 (1:45) Yeah. It was really a tough time. I Speaker 2 (1:47) felt Speaker 3 (1:47) like the rug had been pulled out from under me. I started having panic attacks and couldn't sleep. I got really sick, and it felt like I was shot with a poison arrow. Speaker 2 (1:57) Take me into that part of your life. So, um... Speaker 2 (2:04) Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple... easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. I'm Speaker 1 (2:39) going Speaker 2 (2:39) to start, Rick, where my curiosity is. Yes. How do you sort of self-categorize or self-identify in terms of like your profession? Speaker 3 (2:46) I Speaker 2 (2:47) would Speaker 3 (2:48) say I'm involved in art and creativity. Speaker 2 (2:50) And what is your involvement in art and creativity? Speaker 3 (2:53) Might be as a coach. It might be as a collaborator. It might come up in a film project or it might come up in someone who has a startup who wants to talk about what are the things, creative solutions, any problem that we have or anything we want to get better at, there's usually a creative path. to improve, or at least to test, to see if there are other ways around. Often the accepted version of how to move forward is another limitation. Speaker 2 (3:31) I'm very curious about your principles as it relates to finding the solution, whether that's in business or whether it's in music. And I'm really interested in if there's any similarities in the process of finding a solution, because I'm an entrepreneur. I guess I'm a podcaster as well. I do investments all day, every day. I'm in the pursuit of a solution to a problem, a people problem, a creative problem. Do you have any high-level principles that are broadly applicable irrespective of the type of problem you're solving? Speaker 3 (3:59) I'll tell you an interesting one. A word I've been thinking about lately is indefensible. Indefensible is a funny word because it's a really pejorative word. It's a strong pejorative. If something is indefensible, it's not just bad. Indefensible is really extreme. Speaker 3 (4:24) I'm thinking that in making art, indefensible is actually a good thing. Maybe not only a good thing, maybe a necessary thing. That you take things to the extreme that are indefensible. I can't tell you why. I can't tell you why because it's beyond reason. Speaker 3 (4:49) So I'm in that camp of reason is a tiny sliver of how decisions get made. And I would be much more in the camp of intuition or maybe some sort of guidance from the universe, openness to being guided by. Speaker 3 (5:16) something more, something, the creative force of the universe. You could call it God. I call it God. You're not required to. Speaker 2 (5:26) What art that you've been involved in creating would you define in the moment as being indefensible? Speaker 3 (5:33) A little over a year ago, there was a meme about vibe coding. Speaker 1 (5:38) The Speaker 3 (5:39) way it started was, if something new happened, a guy named Andreev Karpefi coined the term vibe coding. I didn't know what it was. That same day that he coined the term and tweeted about it, someone put a picture of me wearing headphones with my eyes closed, hand on a mouse. And that image became associated with vibe coding. Had nothing to do with me. I saw it. I didn't know what it meant. But then over the next few days, friends started sending me hundreds of this image associated with vibe coding in all different ways. And I thought, hmm. Now, The old me, pre-creative act me, would have laughed and moved on with my life. And one of the things that I learned through working on the creative act, one of the things that talks about a lot is we're given information all the time around us. There are all these opportunities or invitations. Speaker 3 (6:41) being made all the time. In the past, if someone told me about a movie that sounded like I didn't want to see it, that doesn't sound like it's for me, I would ignore it. But if two or three people say, you might want to see this movie, even if it's not interesting to me, it's almost like the universe, too much energy behind this. So this was an example of a lot of energy coming towards me relating to vibe coding. I don't know what it is. And I thought, okay. How do I participate? If I want to participate in this thing that's going on, then experiment, creative experiment. And I thought, okay, I'm going to write a joke tweet related to vibe coding. I thought about it and came up with tools will come, tools will go, only the vibe coder remains. And typically the tweets get... 10,000, 20,000 views. I look the next day and this joke tweet has a million and a half views. It's like, something's going on. It was an indefensible act. There was no reason for me to do it, but I'm feeling this energy coming at me from all of these different directions. I participate. I, I answered the invitation comes back. There's interest. It's like, Hmm. What would be the next step? And the next step is, well, I still don't really know what vibe coding is. Maybe I'll write a book about vibe coding. I put aside all of my real work, my professional work, to dedicate myself to this book on vibe coding. And again, I couldn't explain it. I couldn't tell you why. I can't say it was a good idea. None of those things. I was following a calling. feeling like I was being invited to participate in this thing. And this is the way that I could answer the call. Speaker 2 (8:36) So I did. In so many parts of our life, we might get that invitation to participate in something that is none of our business. Yes. All the time. Speaker 1 (8:45) Yeah. Speaker 2 (8:45) And we, and we usually say no, because it's not what's on our business card. It's not what we've done in the past. And we are, you know, the more successful we become, the more narrow we become in many respects. Speaker 2 (8:56) I'm thinking about this idea of like how one resists their label so they can capitalize on all the callings or, you know, so they don't miss important calls. Any label Speaker 3 (9:04) that you put on yourself or that's put on you makes you smaller. No labels apply. No labels apply. We are beyond labels. Speaker 2 (9:15) It's tempting though, isn't it? Because labels are nice shortcuts at cocktail parties. There are also no shortcuts. Speaker 3 (9:23) And I hope you don't spend too much time in cocktail parties. Speaker 2 (9:25) No, I don't. Don't worry. I'm guessing what goes on there. Okay, so that's interesting, this idea of sometimes following the indefensible. Well, if you feel a call, even if it doesn't make sense, if Speaker 3 (9:39) you, for an artist to write a song. and you really feel like this is really, this is some, this is really meaningful to me, I think no one's going to like it, but I really feel it. I can't defend it. That's the best thing you can do. If you make something where you think this is for everyone or they're going to love it. Speaker 3 (10:04) It's like, it's too easy. The most interesting things are challenging. It's challenging to you. It's challenging to the people who see it. The things that are revolutionary, most of the things that I've fallen in love with over my life, creatively, art, when I first see it often or first hear it, I might not like it at first because it's too much or I don't have any context for it. The true revolutionary works we don't have context for. Speaker 2 (10:36) It appears to me, Rick, that sometimes things that are more of the same do bigger numbers. So I'm thinking about... Maybe for a period of time. I was thinking about two artists. One of them is... Speaker 2 (10:50) Drake, who listened, makes great music, makes hits. Everybody loves them. They come out, we dance in the clubs to them, et cetera. Then I was thinking about, I think a record that you worked on with Kanye, Yeezus. I remember where I was when I first heard that. As a huge Kanye fan, I thought, here we go, we're going to get more college dropout, here we go. And I put it on and I was like, what the fuck is this? But then I loved it. And in my little group of six. How long did it take? A while? A while. Speaker 1 (11:14) It Speaker 2 (11:14) took a while. I mean, it... You know, with Drake's stuff, I tend to like it on first listen. But with that Yeezus album, I had to really like persevere. And then I thought it was genius because it was a new paradigm. You worked on that album. Speaker 3 (11:31) And that's a good example of like, it was a sort of an anti-hip hop album. And that was done intentionally. And it definitely, we went as far as we could into an indefensible realm. Speaker 2 (11:50) But what about the numbers? What about the sales? What about the record label? Speaker 1 (11:54) Is Speaker 3 (11:54) it an important album to you now? Speaker 2 (11:56) Yeah. Speaker 3 (11:57) Okay. Did its job. Speaker 2 (12:01) Those near-term incentives, though. Listen, we need, Drake, we need you to make another. We Speaker 3 (12:05) never consider near-term incentive ever at any point in time. Speaker 1 (12:08) Never once. Never a consideration. It doesn't exist. We're making things forever. We're making Speaker 3 (12:20) things that are truly personal to us. And if it's truly personal to us, if someone doesn't get it, that's, they just don't get it yet. Or maybe they'll never get it. And it's fine because I know this is my diary entry. Can someone else read your diary entry and tell you it's wrong? It's not good enough. Or it's not true. It's not how you see the world. Everything we make is a diary entry. Everything we make is our personal. Speaker 3 (12:54) true expression. The reason we're saying it is to show you see it like that. We see it like this, or I see it like this. This is how I see it. And with that information, you can see it's like, ah, I never considered that before. There's more. The world is bigger than I thought. It's not just more the same. It's not just more numbers. And it's also the more numbers game is a shorter term game. I remember I made an album with Linkin Park, who at the time. were probably one of the biggest bands in the world. And they'd made three albums that were, I would say, stylistically very similar. They were rap rock. And they were, there was this, there was a rap rock movement, Korn, I guess Rage Against the Machine was first, Korn, Limp Bizkit, all these bands. And Linkin Park was probably the last of that wave of music. And they were... wildly successful doing that music. And when we started working together, there was a choice. We could continue and do the next in that same style, which the audience would love, and it would be easy to do. Or we could be true to where the band was in this moment of time, 10 years after they started about, probably eight, 10 years after they started, and be free to find the new sound, the next sound. And when we did that, probably half of the audience didn't like it and half of the audience loved it and new people came along and they set themselves up. to have a much longer career of making the things that they wanted to make. Whereas they were already on the tail end of a genre that had they made another one, maybe it would have been, it probably would have been, you know, as successful as what they had done. But long-term, the genre was dying. Again, none of this was thought about at the time. Another example I think of is Radiohead's Kid A. I remember when Kid A came out, I didn't like it at all. I loved the Benz and OK Computer. They were my favorite band. And then they made this album, Kid A. And it was totally different. And it really alienated me. And today, that might be my favorite Radiohead album. It Speaker 2 (15:19) feels like a risk. Speaker 3 (15:21) Yes, but that's all of the best things involve risk. Speaker 2 (15:25) Because I'm sure you've also got examples where someone followed that thesis of listening to what they wanted to make or doing it for themselves and not thinking too much about the audience and it didn't work. Of course. And they could have just made, you know, a hit and paid off their mortgage and... Speaker 3 (15:38) Yeah, it's not so interesting. I know, it's not so interesting to me. I think that's, it's a different game. That's the, you know, that's the investment commerce game. and I'm in the art game. It's just a different thing. There's nothing wrong with that other Speaker 2 (15:52) game. It's just not my game. Which one leads to more success over the long term? Defined by, let's say, if we define success in this context by the subjective opinion of people that that was good and money. All Speaker 3 (16:06) I can say is that I've been making things for 40 years. I have never done it the way you're suggesting. I've always taken the risk. I've always made my favorite thing. I've always supported the artists in making their favorite thing. Speaker 3 (16:22) Luckily, a lot of revolutionary things have happened from that. And I would say things that probably inspired other artists to be more free and more true and more honest and take bigger risks to make something more interesting, made the world more interesting place. Why do you think these people call you? Speaker 3 (16:47) I think it's probably different for different artists. Speaker 2 (16:49) Why did Jay-Z call you? Speaker 3 (16:51) The time that I first met Jay was when he was making the Black Album, and he wanted to... He was planning on retiring, and this was going to be his one song, his final album, the Black Album, was Jay-Z's last album. Turned out not to be, but that was the plan. And he asked his 10 favorite producers to each make one track with him. And ours was called 99 Problems. And it was a really fun experience to make. Speaker 2 (17:20) I mean, what an iconic record that is. What was your contribution to that record? Everybody knows that record. Everybody. Speaker 3 (17:26) Yeah. We created the track and we played it for Jay and he liked it. And then he wrote the words and rapped on top Speaker 2 (17:32) of it. So you produced the music? Made Speaker 3 (17:35) the Speaker 2 (17:35) music. Made the music. I read that you gave him direction in terms of the lyrics as well. Well, my friend Chris Rock had the idea Speaker 3 (17:42) of, um... Ice-T had a song called 99 Problems that was the opposite. It was... I have 99 problems and a bitch ain't one. And then it's a story about the girls. And Chris said, you know, 99 problems would be a great hook and it doesn't have to be about the girls. And then I suggested to Jay, make it about the problems. And then that's what it was. Speaker 2 (18:10) And business people, startups, they seek your advice as well? Entrepreneurs? All Speaker 3 (18:14) the time. Speaker 2 (18:15) And what are they seeking? Speaker 3 (18:16) Let's talk about 99 problems a little more because it's an interesting story. Jay-Z was signed to Def Jam Records. Def Jam Records was the label that I founded. And I was no longer at Def Jam when we made 99 Problems. And I remember giving it to the people at Def Jam and the person who was the president of Def Jam at the time listened to it. And he's like, oh, this is great. It'll never be a single, but it'll be a great album track. I remember thinking, okay. And again, I don't know. I couldn't say. Speaker 3 (18:45) The president of the label that I founded was saying this could never be a single because it doesn't sound like everything else on the radio. That was the old way of thinking. That was the normal way of thinking of like, you make things to go on the radio that sound like everything else on the radio. But if you do that, who cares? It's just more of the same. So 99 Problems didn't sound like anything on the radio. So when it eventually got on the radio, it had a big impact. So another band I work with is called System of a Down. Speaker 2 (19:18) Yeah, I remember. Speaker 3 (19:18) And I remember bringing their record to Kevin Weatherly at K-Rock, which is the rock station, alternative rock station in California. And if they play it, all of the other alternative rock stations in the country play it. They were like the leading station. And this was a California band that was starting to get popular in the clubs. Maybe 200 people would come, but in a club, the club would sell out. Good sign. And I brought, I think the song was called Sugar. And I brought it to Kevin Weatherly and I played it for him. And he said, not only will we not play this record, we will never play this band on our station because it sounded insane. It didn't sound like anything else on the station. One year later, number one song on the station, most requested. And two weeks ago, I saw System of a Down sell out 80,000 seats in a stadium in Paris. They sold it out two nights in a row. I can't tell you how or why this works. I can't tell you that there's anything to follow. But I will say... We made the things that we loved. We never questioned if anyone else was going to like it. We never questioned what the audience was going to think. We never questioned where does it fit in the market? None of those normal conversations. We made our favorite thing. We took it to an indefensible level as far as we could go. And luckily, it worked out. Speaker 2 (20:48) Is there a way to get clearer on what you love? This sounds like a strange question, but... Meditate. Meditate. I Speaker 3 (20:54) learned to meditate when I was 14. And I think having a TM as a grounding element in my life... Speaker 2 (21:06) TM. Speaker 3 (21:06) A transcendental meditation. That was the first type of meditation I learned when I was 14. Speaker 3 (21:13) It changed me. I know this because I stopped meditating when I went to college. And then when I moved to California, right after college, I started meditating again. Somewhere I knew it was a big decision. And somewhere I knew there would be a right moment to start. And it took several months before I actually sat for the first meditation after not doing it for several years. And in that first meditation, I realized, oh, this is very familiar to me. This is a big part of who I am, even though I haven't done it in five years. It's a big part of how I see the world. The fact that I got to do that from a young age. Speaker 2 (21:57) To understand who you are with it, I'm going to ask you who you would be without it. I don't know. Speaker 3 (22:03) I'm curious. I'm happy that I don't know because I like having the practice. But whether I continue a practice or not, I've done enough of it over the course of my life that I'm there. When I meditate more, it gets deeper. But even if I don't meditate, it's like Maharishi, teacher of transcendental meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, says every time you meditate, it's like making a deposit in the bank. So it builds up. And again, that was rhetoric before, but in my experience, I got to see, oh, it's not rhetoric. Like I actually had this experience. Speaker 3 (22:47) And it changed the way I saw the world. And I'll say, you see beyond the surface. You can see the depth underneath. And for me, the things on the surface are not so interesting. I'm interested in the depth, the depth behind it. Speaker 2 (23:09) So my first question would be, what is transcendental meditation? Speaker 3 (23:12) It's a mantra practice that's done silently. You do it sitting with your eyes closed. You learn it from a TM teacher. I can't teach it to you. We close our eyes. And then the mantra is a sound vibration that gets given to you. I was given mine when I was 14. I have never uttered it out loud since that time. I've never shared it with anyone. And that's part of the training. It's like a private sound. Speaker 3 (23:45) And you engage with this sound in the way that you're taught. 20 minutes. At least once a day, typically twice a day. I would do it right when I woke up in the morning and then again before dinner. Those would be the two windows. When I lived in California and I was working in different recording studios, I meditated with Tom Petty and Johnny Cash and different artists before sessions. That would be part of our practice, Red Hot Chili Peppers. We would sit and meditate together before sessions. So I've had this experience for a while in my life and it's a... It's probably the most profound thing I can mention. We'll get to others, but that's one that's a learnable, practicable action that really changed who Speaker 2 (24:32) I am. How did you know it was... How did you know it was working? What is the measure that this practice is worth that investment in time, in your view? Speaker 3 (24:43) The only proof that I had was getting away from it and coming back to it. I recognized it in that first meditation back, how deep and connected I was to this thing. Speaker 2 (24:58) And I'm guessing this unlocks, you said, a deeper level, a deeper level of creativity and ideas. Everything. Everything. Speaker 3 (25:06) Deeper understanding. Speaker 2 (25:08) People often hear that meditation in various forms is beneficial. Very successful people sit here all the time and say it's so central to why I've been able to do what I've done. And then there'll be people, you know, that think, well, I sit in there for 10 minutes. My brain is very, very busy. I've tried it once. It didn't really work. And then they move on. And then I study some of the great creatives in the world, the great visionaries, people that I thought could see round corners in an atypical way, like Steve Jobs. And there's always a practice, a meditation practice, well, so often at the very heart. of, of their brilliance. So I've, I don't currently have a meditation practice. My wonderful fiance does. She does it every morning for 20 minutes. She's a breathwork practitioner. So, I mean, it's her whole world. And tell me what she says about it. She says it unlocks a deeper level of, um, calm. And I don't mean calm as in like stress. I mean, a deeper level of like groundedness. And she says she feels more connected. Speaker 2 (26:06) Now in her context, I think that's more of like a spiritual thing. She feels more connected to the universe and others. Speaker 3 (26:12) As far as the creative experience goes, a spiritual connection is a big part of that. It's just the nature of how it works. It's not an intellectual process. It's a spiritual process. Speaker 2 (26:26) What is the mechanism? that is causing these results that you see? From a biological perspective? Speaker 3 (26:33) I couldn't answer that in the way that you would hope, but I will say I think it allows you to let go of all of the ordinary concerns. Speaker 3 (26:48) I also have a question, which is if you live with a person who says this practice is so impactful on her life, I'm questioning why you at least haven't tried it with her for a month to see how it would have been for Speaker 2 (27:03) you. No, it's a good question. I have no good answer for it. Speaker 3 (27:08) Yeah, because what it has to do with it, you're not looking for cues from the outside. You're looking for cues on the inside. What lights you up? What are you excited to play for your friend? Not what are you excited to play for your friend? Like, what do you think this will do? Speaker 3 (27:26) You play it for your friend like, wow, can you believe something like this exists in the world? How cool is that? Speaker 2 (27:32) The distinction that I'm trying to make is often if you read business books or entrepreneurship books, when they're talking about innovation, when they're talking about the great companies like Amazon, or I heard Sebastian, who's the CEO of Klarna say the other day, who's a tech founder, they spend a lot of time thinking about the customer, the customer's problem, and they work backwards, they call it, to the answer. So they'll zoom in on Rick's world and say, Rick has these problems, he's da-da-da-da, and they'll work backwards from there to a answer. That's how Amazon say they built the platform. Speaker 1 (28:03) And Speaker 2 (28:03) one of the quotes that's quite famous with Jeff Bezos is, he bets on things that he knows won't change. He says, no one in 10 years is going to come up to me and say, I wish my package would take longer. So you can double down on that as solving a customer problem. Does that sit in contrast to what you're saying, or is it the same thing, or is it a different type of work? Speaker 3 (28:22) Well, I'll start by saying if you look at the history of Amazon, it lost money for probably 20 years. It was considered one of the worst investments until it wasn't. They kept doubling down on what they believed in. It wasn't working. The audience showed it didn't work. The model showed it didn't work. But they stuck to what they believed. And it changed the world. So it's the same thing. It's doubling down on what you believe in Speaker 1 (28:53) when Speaker 3 (28:54) all of the metrics are showing you it's not working. That's the story of Amazon. Speaker 2 (29:01) Do you think people have different levels of their ability to, you know, if we take practices like meditation aside, it just seems that through history, some people are better at cultivating that or listening to that internal voice than others. Obviously, I sit here and interview these, like some of these great founders, and it appears that some people are just like inherently more creative than others. Some people are in the analytical part of their brain and they need one plus one to be equal to all the time. I'm wondering if, you know, there's other ways, if you think there is an inherent difference in creativity. Speaker 3 (29:32) I think that creativity is beaten out of us over the course of our lives. I think we go to school, we're told to repeat back what we're told. We're told to sit in a chair all day. where our spirits are broken by institutions. We're not taught to be free creative thinkers. We're taught to follow rules. The rules are not there to help us. The rules are there to control us. I'm suggesting we break free and be free and express ourselves freely. And that's our purpose here on the planet is to express ourselves freely. That's why we're here. Speaker 2 (30:13) What you're saying links to something we were talking about earlier, which is at a very young age, we're taught that the things we make are a means to a particular end. And that end is promotions, pay rises, capital, success, job titles. In the creative process, are you saying that it's never productive to talk about how we'll measure success and to try and optimize for that measurement? Speaker 3 (30:36) In the creative process, I tend not to think about those things. Speaker 3 (30:45) want to use data. I think it's much more about this internal feeling and then the feeling we have when you play it for someone, when you share it with someone, whether it lights someone up. You can tell when someone really resonates with something. sometimes the numbers don't show, the numbers can't reflect that. You know, you can have two things that are kind of on equal footing commercially, yet one of them lights you up, and the other one is, well, this gets the job done. They're different. Speaker 3 (31:26) And long-term, chances are, the one that lights you up is going to have more value to you and you'll be more willing to support that thing over time. Speaker 2 (31:38) In your book here, The Creative Act, A Way of Being, you talk about the things that block creativity. Thoughts and habits not conducive to the work. Believing you're not good enough. Speaker 3 (31:52) That's a big one. Someone at some point in time, you were singing and someone's like, ah, you can't sing when you're a kid. And that gets lodged in you. Singing is not something I can ever do. Or you're a terrible cook. Or you're not smart enough. So often, the gifts that we have are stifled and smothered. We're all creative. We may not choose to embark on a creative, make creative choices, but that's, it's on us. We can, we just have bad information. We have, we were told we're not good enough and we believe it. And it's Speaker 2 (32:34) not true. When people say that, oh, you know, Rick is a creative and Stephen is, they say Stephen is not a creative. What are they actually saying? What is that like in our culture to be a creative? How are like we misunderstanding the definition? See what I'm saying? Because we do, we go creative. They do a little bit of art and music stuff, creative, not creative, Excel documents, creative. What are we actually saying there? Speaker 3 (32:58) I think it's a way to, um. Speaker 3 (33:02) try to simplify the world. The world is complicated and I think all of us can do anything. I'm not saying all of us could do everything to the best of our ability better than anyone else. That's a big part of it is the idea of competition. Like if I want to play baseball, I know that I could get better at baseball. That doesn't mean I think I could get good enough to play on the Mets, but I know I could get better and I know I could train anything that I'm interested in and get much better at it. And as soon as we're not capable of playing for the Mets, we think it's not for us and we shut that off. We're not doing a service to ourselves. We're not becoming our best selves or really living up to our full potential as humans. Speaker 2 (33:51) It feels like a natural human instinct to compare in order to understand the value of anything. I feel like we do it when we go to restaurants. There's three steaks. The expensive one's probably a bit bougie. The cheap one's probably not good. I'll go for the middle one. Seems like a way that humans take shortcuts. But we do it with ourselves as well. So I know that the thing I've made is good as if I look over at your thing and mine is ranked better or mine is prettier or richer. Are you saying... for us to get out of the business of comparison. Yes, Speaker 3 (34:21) because I'm saying it's always apples and oranges. If you were to ask who's better, Michael Jackson or Prince, I would say Michael Jackson's much better at being Michael Jackson. And Prince is probably better at being Prince. But you can't compare what the two of them do. They do two different things. Before you mentioned Kanye West and Drake, there's no competition there. They do two totally different things. What you get from each of them is totally different. I wouldn't want from Drake what I get from Kanye, and I certainly wouldn't want from Kanye what I get from Drake. It's pointless. Is either more creative? That's for you to decide. That's for you to decide. The whole idea of competition between artists, it's such a weird thing. Again, it's back to who has a better diary entry. It's Speaker 2 (35:15) ridiculous. Feeling you don't have the energy it takes. These are all things that are not conducive to the work. Yeah, I have that one sometimes. Speaker 3 (35:27) feeling like I'm not up to it too much. I flew here yesterday from London. I'm tired. I'm a little jet-lagged. I'm going to show up and talk to you. Maybe it won't be good. Maybe it's Speaker 1 (35:40) better to just lay down, relax, and recover. But I'm here. I show up. Speaker 2 (35:47) You've referred to yourself as a lazy workaholic. Speaker 3 (35:52) It's true. Speaker 2 (35:53) What is a lazy workaholic? Speaker 3 (35:55) Often, most days, I would rather not do any of the things that I'm scheduled to do. And I schedule the things and I show up and Speaker 2 (36:05) I do what needs to get done. Do you ever settle with creative work? The deadline for the record label is approaching. The work is not yet done. We'll finish here and we'll send it. Speaker 3 (36:17) I tend not to do that. I tend not to work on deadlines until we're past the point. The first time we would ever establish a deadline is when we already know. We've cracked the code. We know what this is going to be. We can see it. It may not be completely finished, but we have a good idea of what it is and how it's going to work, and it's maybe 90 % done. Then we might set a deadline for that last 10 % of finishing it. And that last 10 % probably won't make or break the project. Speaker 2 (36:49) Part of what you accept when you pursue... Speaker 2 (36:53) the creative process you've described where it's really about like, do I like it? Do we like it? Is you will create things that are at some points just absolute legendary and unlike anything else that exists. They are not the same. But part of the risk you take is you'll make things that other people just don't like. Yeah. Speaker 3 (37:10) That's all Speaker 2 (37:10) there Speaker 3 (37:10) is in this process is you have an idea, you build it. You may learn along the way that the idea was maybe not the best idea and it turns left and you make, I'm starting out to make. this blue statue, and it turns out to be this red painting. You don't know that going in, but you discover it through the process, and it could take a long time. Other times, you'll think, I'm going to make this blue thing. You make it in five minutes. There it is, done. And we can't, you can't calculate that. You can't anticipate what's going to happen. But if I wasn't doing this experiment here, I would never get to the better thing. It happens all the time. And then sometimes you build it and it doesn't work for 20 years and then it becomes Amazon. Speaker 2 (38:01) I've thought a lot recently about how time horizons change the work that you do. And that's kind of also what I'm hearing there, because in that example you gave of this blue statue thing, if you were under a time horizon, you wouldn't have the space for that exploration you've described. And actually, in all of our lives, we, I think, apply time horizons. We say, this part of my career is going to be five years. And in those five years, I want to achieve these things. How do you think about setting personal time horizons, but also like creative time horizons? Speaker 3 (38:29) One of the things I talk about in the book is that there are different phases of creativity. The first phase is the seed phase. Then is the experimentation phase. Then is the crafting phase. And then is the finishing, completion, editorial phase. And you can't set a timeline. early in that process. In the seed phase, you have to try a lot of things and it's going to take as long as it takes. And in the experimental phase, which is where you're taking the seeds and seeing what they want to be, that takes time. And then in the crafting phase, the third phase, it still takes time because now you have the seed, you see what it wants to be, you've given it time to gestate, you see how it grows. And now in the crafting phase, third phase, you start trimming it and making it the way you see it. Speaker 3 (39:20) All of that has to happen before there's any idea of a timeline. Because until that time, you don't really know what you're making. It's a dream. But once you've gone through these three phases and you have this thing in front of you, it may not be finished, but you see what it is. You see it and it's good. You're excited about it. When I say it's good, I mean it's good to me. That's it. That's where it ends. It's good to me. I like it enough that I'm willing to show it to you. If I like it enough that I'm willing to Speaker 2 (39:55) show it to you, I like it enough to show it to everybody. People will hear this as creative advice. I was hearing it as life advice. I was hearing the seed phase of my life, the experimentation phase of my life, the crafting phase. It's the same. It's all the same. And that's why the creative act Speaker 3