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A

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin is credited with being one of the most creative and prolific music producers of all time. The range of artists with whom he's worked with and discovered is absolutely staggering, ranging from artists such as LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Minor Threat, Fugazi, Beastie Boys, Jesus and Mary Chain, Jay Z, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Green Day, Tom Petty, System of a Down, Joe Strummer, Kanye West, Johnny Cash, Adele, and many, many more. Not surprisingly, therefore, Rick is considered somewhat of an enigma. That is, people want to know how it is that one individual is able to extract the best creative artistry from so many different people in so many different genres of music. Well, as today's discussion reveals, Rick's expertise in the creative process extends well beyond music. In fact, our conversation takes us into the realm of what the creative process is, specifically and generally across domains, including music, of course, but also writing, film, science, and essentially all domains in which new original thought, ideas, and production of anything becomes important. Our conversation ventures from abstract themes such as what is creativity? And where does it stem from? To the more concrete, everyday, tool based approaches to creativity, including those that Rick himself uses and that he's seen other people use, to great success. That took us down some incredible avenues, ranging from a discussion about the subconscious to how the subconscious interacts with our conscious mind, and how the subconscious and conscious mind interact with nature around us and within us. Indeed, our conversation got rather scientific at times, but all with an eye and an ear toward understanding the practical tools that any and all of us can use in order to access the creative process process. We also spent some time talking about Rick's new book, which is all about creativity and ways to access creativity. The title of the book is the creative a way of being by Rick Rubin. This is a book that I've now read three times from COVID to cover, and I'm now reading it a fourth time because it is so rich with wisdom and information that I'm applying in multiple domains of my life, not just my work, but my everyday life. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Rick has an incredible ability to translate his understanding of the creative process in a way that is meaningful for anybody. So if you're in music, if you're a musician, it will certainly be meaningful for you. But it is not about music. It is about the creative process. And so whether or not you consider yourself somebody creative or not, or whether or not you seek to be more creative, Rick's book and today's conversation sheds light on what I believe to be the fundamental features of what makes us human beings. That is, what allows us, unlike other animals, to look out on the landscape around us, to examine our inner landscape, and to come up with truly novel ideas that thrill us, entertain us, entertain other people, scare us, make us laugh, make us cry. All the things that make life rich are essentially contained in the creative process. And to be able to sit down and learn from the Rick Rubin how the creative process emerges in him and his observations about how it can best emerge in others is and was truly a gift. So I'm excited to share his knowledge with you today. One thing that you'll quickly come to notice about today's conversation is that Rick is incredibly generous with his knowledge about the creative process. In fact, he very graciously and spontaneously, I should add, offered to answer your questions about creativity. So if you have questions about the creative process for Rick, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. And in order to make those questions a bit easier for me to find, please put question for Rick Rubin in capitals. Then colonization or dash, whichever you choose, and then put your question there. I do ask that you keep the questions relatively short so that I can ask Rick as many of those questions as possible. We will record that conversation and we will post it as a clip on the Huberman Lab clips channel. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium and potassium, the so called electrolytes, and no sugar. Now salt, magnesium and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrolytes need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in electrolyte concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits in cognitive and physical performance. Element contains a science back to electrolyte ratio of 1000 milligrams. That's 1 gram of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough electrolytes. And while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if I've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element. That's lmnt.com Huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drinkelementlmnt.com huberman and now for my discussion with Rick Rubin. Great to have you here today, Rick.

B

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

A

So of all the topics in science, and in particular in neuroscience, I confess that creativity is the most difficult one to capture because you can find papers, scientific studies, that is on convergent thinking versus divergent thinking. And there are definitions to these, and they take on different forms, but in a strict definition form, it seems that creativity has something to do with either rearranging existing elements or coming up with new elements. But as I went into your book, which I've done twice, I've read it twice. And by the way, I feel so blessed and honored to have gotten an early copy from you, or a final copy early, that is. But having gone through it twice, I'm now convinced that there may not actually be an internal source of creativity that exists on its own. Right. And the example that you give that for me really is serving as an anchor. And tell me if I'm wrong here is this idea that ideas and creativity are a little bit like a cloud. If you look at it at one moment, you might think that it looks like one thing where it has a certain shape and texture, but then you look at it a moment later, it could be quite a bit different, and if you look at an hour later, it very well could be gone. And the reason I think that serves as such a powerful hook for me to think about creativity and why I think neuroscientists and scientists in general have never actually captured a way to even talk about creativity stems from somebody that you knew in person. But that, as you know, I greatly admire. I don't have many heroes, but I would put Joe Strummer among the short list of heroes that I have. And I remember once an interview with him fairly disjointed. He was sort of off in different tangents that I couldn't follow. But at one point, he just kind of blurted out that if you have an idea, you have to write it down, and you may end up throwing it away, but if you wait, it will be gone. And I remember that. And as a consequence, I have a whole system that I use to try and capture ideas. But what are your thoughts on what Joe said? This cloud idea that comes up in one form, in one area of the book, but then I think is thread throughout the book in different ways. How did that come to you, and how does it serve you in trying to, I don't want to say extract, but trying to access creativity.

B

I think the best way to think about it is like a dream. It's like if you think about your dreams, they don't necessarily make sense. When you wake up, you might remember part, but not the whole thing. Then if you start writing them down, they'll come back and they may not make sense to you. There'll be a series of abstract images, and maybe someday in the future, you'll be able to look back and understand what they mean, and maybe nothing. That's sort of how the art making process works, is like we're making things, and we're looking for a feeling in ourselves. And it could be a feeling of excitement or enthusiasm, a feeling of interest, a feeling of curiosity. I want to know more. Feeling of leaning forward, and we're following that energy in our body when we feel this. There's something here. There's something here. I want to know more. I want to know more. I want to know more. But I'll say it's not an intellectual process. It's a different thing. That's why it's hard even to talk about it, because it's so elusive.

A

Recently, I was listening to a podcast, bye. Our friend Lex Friedman. I think it was an episode with Balaji Srinivasan, where Balaji, who's an investor type guy, thinker type guy. This is like an eight hour episode. He says something at the beginning that I'd love your thoughts on. He said, look, we can train a rat to lever press every other time, or to expect reward on every even number press, or every odd number press, or even every fifth number press. But a human and a rat can't do that for like, prime number presses. You can't actually train that. And then you think about the reward systems and the way that we follow life from when we get up until we go to sleep. And what he said is, the fact that we can't do that means that we may not actually be in touch with the best schedules of doing things. Like, every time I'm thirsty, I take a sip. I assume that's the right way to do it, but it might not be optimal. Right, optimal for whatever purpose. When I was reading your book, I was thinking about, there's a set of things to follow, things to pay attention to. You talk about this, things to access that. None of the creative process comes from just within us. It can, but it's always being fed by things outside of it. And so what I started to do is, the second time I read through the book, was think about it through the lens of what Balaji was saying, was that there may not even be a language for this thing that we call accessing creativity. I mean, there's a process, but that language in the form of words, is a little bit like trying to use even numbers to try and access prime numbers. The math becomes so convoluted that we end up in a conversation like this, where I'm confident we can get to the kernels of it. Because what's remarkable about the book is that you do, you show and inform the process, but there may not be a English or any other language for saying, do this, then this, then this, then this, and you'll have something of creative value. Does that capture it?

B

Yes. I think language is insufficient to drill down on creativity. It's closer to magic than it is science.

A

So when kids come into the world, do you think that they have better access to this creative process than we do as adults? Because we start to impart rule plays and books like, will it get likes? Will people like it? But also all the things that are available to us that we're not paying attention to, like the texture of this table. Right. They. We're discarding things kind of systematically. We get, quote unquote, set in our ways. Do you think kids are more, are, just by definition and by design, more creative than adults?

B

Yes, kids are. They're open, and they have no baggage. They don't have any belief system. They don't know how things are supposed to work. They just see what is. And if we pay attention to what is, we learn much more than if we, most of us, select from an endless number of data points available to us to. Well, as a species, to make sure that we don't die and to procreate and to feed ourselves are probably the primary functions first. And then. And then we learn things about what's right and what's wrong, and we learn things about how to do certain things. Or we're inspired by someone who makes something we love and we want to do it the way they do it. And all of those things undermine the purity of the creative process. They can be tools to build your skillset to be able to do it yourself. Like, if you're a singer, you might imitate a singer you really like for a while to get good at it and then eventually come to find your own voice. It doesn't always start with your own voice, but if you're three years old or five years old and you try singing, you're not singing like anyone else. You're singing with your own voice. And when you make something, you're making it based on not knowing. And I think I had the advantage early in my career of starting making music without any experience, which was helpful because I didn't know what rules I was breaking. And so it wasn't intentional breaking of rules. I just did what seemed right to me, but I didn't realize that I was doing things that other people wouldn't do.

A

I mean, there is this idea that there are no new ideas. I sort of disagree, because every once in a while, I'll see or hear something that at least seems different enough.

B

I think it's a combination of a new combination of existing ideas presented in a new way. I think that's how it works. I don't know, but I will say it does seem like the things that are most interesting to me have a series of familiar elements joined together in a way that it's creating something that I've never seen before.

A

You mentioned that it's that when you are close to, or you see hints of creativity that is of real value, that it's a feeling. And I also believe that the body is a great source of information, which once people realize that the brain, of course, is in the skull, but the nervous system extends everywhere in the body, the whole mind body thing just falls away. Philosophers have argued about this forever, but it's a silly argument. It's also true that if, God forbid, I were to amputate all my limbs, have them amputated, I'd fundamentally still be me, right? The same is not true. If we took about big enough chunk of my brain and I still survived, I would be fundamentally different human being. I'd still have the same name and identity and Social Security number, but I would behave very differently. Who knows, maybe better. The signals from the body we know, or at least we assume, are pretty generic. Like, I can think of 50 different ways or 100 ways that we could talk about creativity today, and we could define it and redefine it and carve it up and serve it up like sushi in a bunch of different ways. But the body sends signals that most of us are. We have a kind of coarse understanding of. It's like, oh, my stomach hurts, or, my stomach feels good, or, I'm not sensing my stomach, or, oh, that feels good. It feels warm, it feels cold. Most of us aren't trained in understanding how to interpret those signals. So it's almost like you have a few vowels, a few syllables, and there isn't a lot more. Whereas when we talk about our thoughts and our experiences, depending on how hyper verbal somebody is and how much emphasis they put on different sounds, it's kind of near infinite. Not infinite, but near infinite. So, for you personally, when you know that you're on the end of a thread of creativity, maybe you're listening to an artist, or you're hearing something and you're, like, there, and your antennae start to deflect in a certain way. Right. Do you feel that in your body as a recognizable sensation, or is it a thought and a sensation?

B

It's a feeling in my body.

A

Is it localized?

B

No, it's a feeling of. I would say it's like a surge of energy.

A

Do you remember the first time you experienced that?

B

Probably hearing the Beatles. When I was three or four years old.

A

Three or four years old?

B

Yeah.

A

Wow. Is there something wrong with me that the Beatles have never done it for me?

B

No. Maybe you just weren't exposed at the right time in the right way. There's no right or wrong way. And everyone. I can love the Beatles and you cannot, and we're both right.

A

There's not a. I'm glad we can still be friends. I was a little concerned. I was a little scared to ask you that question. I know my taste of music is a little bit obscure, but. And kind of fragmentary, but. Okay, good. I've always felt like, gosh, there must be something wrong with me. I like their songs, but they don't. There's no juice for me there.

B

I think maybe we'll watch. There was an eight part series called the Beatles Anthology, which is out of print, but I can try to find it somewhere, and we can watch that together, and maybe that'll make the case for the Beatles.

A

Okay. Yeah. I mean, nothing against them, it's just. And I'm always bothering you for story, but, like, Ramones, I saw that and I was like, wow. Like jeans, aviators. Everyone had to change their last name to Ramona. A lot of them hated each other. There's so much drama in there and three chords. But to me, it just was like, wow. Like kids from New York, that energy. So I think different things for different people, right?

B

Absolutely.

A

So that brings me to a question of when something feels creatively right and you're sensing it and you're there, let's say, in the studio, or maybe even you're listening to something that somebody sent you. How do you translate that, given the absence of language? How do you translate that into a conversation with the artist? And again, this could be about writing or comedy or science or podcasting, for that matter. How do you say that, keep going that way when they might not even recognize that they did it? And I'm guessing a lot of times they don't have.

B

Yeah, sometimes they don't. It depends. When we're in the. I'll try to be in a setting where, as we're talking about it, we can engage with it in that moment. So it's not much good. Let's say I was producing your new record, and you played me something, and I had some thoughts about it. It wouldn't be so helpful for me to tell you what those were. It'd be better for us to wait till we were in a place where we could try things and see where it goes. So the first thing is, I wouldn't rely on language to do it. It would be more of a making a suggestion of something that's actionable. We try it, and then we have more data, and either we're moving in a good direction or moving away from it. We're moving towards it or away from it, and we never know. And so it's always an experiment. And maybe a simple way to talk about it would be like if I gave you two dishes of food and asked you to taste them and tell me which one you like better. It's pretty. Usually it's pretty straightforward, you know, when you have two choices which you like better. And I think most creativity can be boiled down to that. That's very different than. I wonder how this is going to perform on certain social media platforms. That's different than what is it? When I'm tasting these two things, which is the one I want to finish eating? And if I were to say, hmm, I like this one better, but it needs a little salt, and then put a little salt on, it's like, maybe I put too much salt, and you'll. And, you know, when you taste it, it's like it's. It's that simple. Being in tune enough with ourselves to really know how we feel in the face of knowing that other people might feel very differently, which is part of the challenge. It's like if everyone tells you a and you listen, and you're like, that's b. As an artist, it's important to be able to say to me, it's bhdem. And it's a disconnect because so much of, you know, when we go to school, it's to get us to follow the rules. And in art, it's different because the rules are there as a scaffolding to be chipped away as need be. Sometimes they're helpful, sometimes they're not. And sometimes we'll even impose our own rules to give something its shape so we can decide to make a. We're going to make a painting, but we're only going to use, green and red are the only colors we're allowed to use. We decide that in advance. And then how do we solve the problem knowing all we have is green and red? It can, because otherwise, if there's an infinite number of choices, anything can be anything. You know, it's like sometimes more choices is not better. So limiting your palette to something manageable forces you to solve problems in a different way. Now, in our digital age, music wise, you can make anything digitally. There's no, like, there was a time when if you didn't have a guitar in the studio, you couldn't record guitar. Or if you didn't, if you couldn't hire an orchestra, there couldn't be orchestra on your recording. Now you can just call any of those things up. So there's infinite choices. And infinite choices don't necessarily lead to better, better compositions or better final works. Understanding how you feel in the face of other voices without second guessing yourself is probably the single most important thing to practice as an artist or skill set. To develop as an artist is to know how you feel and own your feelings. And the key to that is not, I know, so I know what's right for you. It doesn't work that way. It's just, I know for me, and the reason I chose to be an artist is to demonstrate this is how I see it. If I'm undermining my taste for some commercial idea or it defeats the whole purpose of doing this, that's not what this process is about. This process is, I'm doing me, and I'm showing you who I am, and you can like it or not. But either way, this is still how I see it.

A

I love that. Because in science, you know, having trained graduate students. Having been a graduate student, I was very blessed to have mentors, one of who was a real iconic class. He's dead now, actually, all my advisors are dead. Suicide? Cancer. Cancer. The joke is, you don't want me to work for you. They all had a morbid sense of humor, so they're laughing about this someplace right now.

B

I thought you were going to say they all ate the poisoned mushrooms.

A

No, but the last one said to me, you're the common denominator, Andrew. And I thought, oh, my goodness. And he said, kind of just kidding, but not really. So that's a little bit eerie. But in any case, he always said his name was Ben. He always said, the one thing I can't teach is taste. And the one predictor I have of the people who will never develop it are the ones who are perfectionists, because they're filtering their perfectionists, that filter their perfection through the feedback of others. He was always looking for the person that was putting up a little bit of a middle finger to feedback. Not so much that they would get things wrong, because you can be badly wrong in science. You can be wrong for the right reasons, but you can also be for the wrong reasons. But people that just had almost a compulsion to do it their way or to believe in what they were doing, and I'm hearing some of that, or I'm hearing that in what you're describing. I also think that there's something about the human empathic process or the emotional process, where when we see somebody doing something and they seem to really not be paying attention to what anyone else is doing, I guess that the crazy person on the street is one version of it. Where we go, they're just in their experience, and it's just crazy. But when somebody seems to be enjoying themselves or the emotion seems to be real, I think there are a good fraction of people who feel a kind of gravitational pull, and they go, yeah, that. And the best example I have of this is I remember growing up in the skateboard thing, we were the first. We were the first to start doing the baggy, like, sagging the clothes thing. And we got teased endlessly one year in school. Then there was a bunch of hip hop that came out, and guys were wearing sagging their jeans or their shorts. Next year we come back, and the very same people who were making fun of us were all doing it. And that's when it clicked for me. I was like, most people don't actually know what they like. They like what they like because of the certainty of the people that they like. And so the question then is, in this landscape of creative stuff, what's real? What's not real? It's almost like whoever can create the most convincing story at least captures a good number of good fraction of audiences. But that's not what the creative artist needs to do. They need to actually depart from that. Do I have that right?

B

Well, they're just two different things. Like coming up with a story with the purpose of pleasing someone else is a skill set, but it's more of a, it's more of a commercial endeavor than an artistic endeavor.

A

It's like tactical. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was seeing it in your book. You describe, again, when you're thinking about the creative process is the cloud for me. Again, it serves as such a powerful anchor. And then I think about the biology, the neurobiology of strategy formation or strategy implementation. And then almost by sheer luck, or miraculously, I turn a few pages later into the book, and there's a description of how animals that are trying to accomplish something, eat, mate, find water, accomplish the requirements of living. It requires a narrow visual focus. This is something my lab is kind of obsessed with, and I've been obsessed with. And in that more narrow visual focus, we know that the playbook becomes more narrow. The rule set is more narrow. Now, at some point, in order to come up with a new creative idea, that means broadening vision is essential in some way, or broadening thinking, well, it.

B

Could either be a broadening or a narrowing, but it's changing the aperture from the standard. The reason we do this is to present something new that maybe you already knew but didn't know you knew it. And for that to be the case, you have to be looking at it. It's not unlike what a comedian does. You know, comedian makes you laugh. Usually what they're saying, it's outrageous, but you know that it's right. You know, just no one says it that way, or no one has said it that way before, but it's always the truth in it that makes it funny. It's like that. It's the same idea as recognizing something that seems really obvious once you see it, but seems like nobody else sees it or no one else points it out. And I feel like science is like that, too, because how much of science, when once the, you know, the light flashes over your head, it's like, I got it. It just seems like, well, we knew that forever. No one knew it, but do you know what I'm saying? It's like, it's so obvious. It's so obvious. And I think another superpower of artists is this accepting we don't know anything. When we think we know things that also limits our world. We think we know it's only like this. This is all that's possible. We're mice in this little box. But in reality, who's to say that's the case? Who's to say any of the we could take a all of the what we believe in science now and decide to throw all of that away and start from scratch. And we probably create a different, a whole different one.

A

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic greens. Athletic greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or usually twice a day is that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important. It's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met. And it tastes great. If you'd like to try athletic greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com huberman and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up athletic greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, etcetera. And they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D, three, k, two. Again, that's athleticgreens.com hubermanda to get the five free travel packs and the year's supply of vitamin D, three k, two in an offline conversation one time, you asked a good friend of mine who's been a guest on this podcast, Eddie Chang, who's chair of neurosurgery, and I would place him in the top 1% of neuroscientists. He's pulling speech out of people who are completely paralyzed with Lockton syndrome, et cetera. And you asked him what percentage of what's contained in medical textbooks and training today. Today.

B

If you went to medical school today and you learned what was in the textbook, what percentage of that information is accurate and what percentage is not? And he said, maybe half.

A

Right. And you asked, and what is the consequence of that? And he said, incalculable. And I completely agree. And I asked him a second time and he still came up with the same answer. So that's a good sign. Reliability from experiment to the next is good. Yeah. I think that there is this idea that we really know things in science. I mean, you see, we've observed amazing discoveries from chance. We've observed amazing discoveries from incredible bouts of hard work. In both cases, people were spending a lot of time in the lab. No one walked into the lab, saw something one day, and had a Nobel Prize winning discovery or fundamental discovery. They were all hanging out in lab a lot. Just some of them came up with something that they didn't expect. Others were drilling toward an answer.

B

And in all those cases, when the breakthroughs happen, I'm guessing, I don't know this, that considering we assume this information, then this discovery is true based on everything that came before it. But if everything that came before it is wrong, then the discoveries are probably built on a. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like the context. Everything that happens takes into account that the context that it's sitting in, it fits in that context. Maybe that context isn't right. Who knows? We don't know. So I'm saying we're too close to most things in thinking when we think we know things where there are a lot of assumptions that go into it and that any new discoveries are essentially built on top of these beliefs, you know, but they're beliefs.

A

Well, I remember, you know, learn. Of course, I listened to the BC boys growing up who didn't. I was a child of the nineties and they were in the, you know, sabotage was, you know, sort of an outgrowth of a skateboarding movie, like Spike Jones and like the girl movies and those worlds, the Beast Boys and skateboarding were really closely interwoven for a while. Some people know this, some people don't. And Spike sort of formed the bridge, and then Spike went off and started making more bigger movies that more people watch. But let's just use them as an example. I heard you say once before that you guys were kind of joking around, like BC boys, like these guys doing hip hop. But it was kind of like the hardcore scene in New York and punk rock scene, and it was sort of a joke. There were a lot of inside jokes when you were working together. Was there the thought that people might love it, might hate it, or you just weren't paying attention at all.

B

Weren't paying attention at all. Never considered it. There were no. At that point in time when we were making licensed ill, hip hop music was a tiny underground thing, and there was no one making hip hop at that time, thought it would ever mean anything. It was not a realistic thought. So we were making it really for our crazy friends, and that's it.

A

So do you think nowadays, the fact that one can create something and, quote, unquote, release it quickly, I can put something out onto Twitter or Instagram now. I could do it in 10 seconds from now, and I will get immediate feedback, which is external feedback, of course, but then I can iterate on the basis of that feedback. Do you think that's problematic for the larger opportunity for creativity? In other words, if we were to go back 20 years or even 15 years, when the opportunity to create was certainly still there, but you really didn't know how it was going to land until you quote unquote, released it, it seems to me there was more opportunity to stay in that magical rainforest. That is the creativity itself.

B

I don't think it's wrong or right. It's just more information that you can use or not use, use it in a useful way, and, you know, you can make something and put it out and people could not like it, and you're like, oop, they still don't get it. I gotta go harder, you know, like, I gotta go harder in that direction. Not. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like not to react away from information. It can be helpful. It can be helpful when there could be different stories that happen at the same time where you making something and you have an idea of what it is, and then other people engage with it and they have a different idea of what it is, and they like it for a different reason than you did or dislike it for a reason different than the reason you like it. We can't control any of those things. You know, the only part of it that we can control is how we relate to the thing that we make. And any external information that undermines the clarity of that connection is probably bad for the art, is my guess. And again, I'm only saying this from my experience. I try to make things. All I've ever tried to make was something I like or something that I felt like was missing as a fan that I wanted, and nobody was making it, so I'll make it, you know, but it wasn't. It was always in the service of, I love this thing, I want something like this. No one else is making one. I have to make one.

A

Yeah, it's beautiful. Because the word that keeps coming to mind is this. It's almost like a compulsion. Like there. There are other options of ways to be and to behave and to function and work in life, but if something's a compulsion, it yanks us away from those other opportunities just enough that we have to get back to it. You've talked before about, and you talk in the book, this notion of the source. And to me, again, I can't help but put my neuroscientist lens on this. I think of the source has not one brain area, but some function within the brain where we are in touch with our bodily signals, like what feels right, what doesn't, like tasting the two foods. I love that example. And that it's a playbook that is far more vast than the short term adaptive playbook like this how I'm going to get from point a to point b. And yet when I listen to an album or a song, I mean, I have to assume that at some point it becomes not strategy development or creativity, but strategy implementation. Like, there needs to be. Like, songs are going to come in this order. And like, I don't know much about music. My musician friends are always, you know, I don't either.

B

It's not so much about music.

A

Right. Well put. But the ordering of the sequence of the melodies, et cetera. So at what point does one decide, okay, now's the time to get into that more narrow focus of effort? Like, we've got it, let's run with this. Because there is a component of the creative process that involves packaging and finishing. And is that part less satisfying to you, or is it just all part of the same larger arc?

B

It's all part of the same. It's nice. There's a good feeling. There's usually a good feeling when something is done. On the one hand, it's a commitment, because up until the time that you say it's done, you can keep experimenting and changing it. If you think, well, maybe tomorrow I can make it better, then it's not finished. And keep thinking that for a long time, you can do that forever. Never, never put out anything. So getting to the point where you're ready to sign off is a good feeling, and it allows you. One of the things I talk about in the book is because it is a difficult thing to do, because it's fun to play and it's fun to. Maybe it's not the best it could be yet, you know, to use whatever the next project is going to be. Motivation to finish the one you're working on now. Like, I'm working on this. I'm spending all of my time on this thing. It's really good. I believe it can be better. But there's this other thing that I really want to make, and if I keep tinkering with this one, I'll never get to make the other one. So using other projects as an impetus to finish something and release it into the world's a good one. And you said your description of source as something within us. I don't know if I would accurate. If I would say that was accurate. It's definitely in us, too. But it's not only in us, and it's. I think of source as the organizing principle of everything, and it's how everything exists, how the trees grow, and why there are mountains and anything that we can see in the outside world. And every discovery and every piece of art and every new design and every machine are all outgrowths of this source energy. Our part of it is the antenna that connects to it. And maybe we're the vehicle for source to allow things to happen in the world.

A

And thank you for that, because I did indeed misspeak, because I recall very distinctly in the book you described how the physical world is constrained by the laws of physics and certain things. The imagination is unconstrained. And I think I have this right that you said, the work sits somewhere between those. It's neither of one nor the other, but that ultimately, what feeds into all of that, our imagination and the way, indeed, that our brain is a physical entity, the nature and the outside world provides at least what appears to be near infinite, if not infinite, options. And I love the example of the color palette, that if we restrict me to whatever sorts of paints or medium I have, then it's restricted. But in nature, there's an infinite number of shades and tones and combinations.

B

And even on one, if you pick up a rock and look at the color of the rock and tried to find a paint to match that rock, it would never match. There's too much. There are too many variations in nature within a single color rock for us to get close. There's too much information. We scratch the surface. We're only scratching the surface.

A

And we love when we are able to peer in at different scales, spatial scales, time scales, too, but spatial scales, the delight that comes from that these nature pictures seem like there were more of these in the eighties where you'd see a drop of oil shot at very high resolution. There's beauty in a drop of oil, and then you'd see the earth and the galaxy. There's beauty in that, too, these extremes. And of course, our daily perception is mostly through the filter of these kinds of interactions, walls and sometimes outdoors. There's a brilliant neuroscientist, and not surprisingly, he has a Nobel. His name is Richard Axel. He's at Columbia University. His outrageous personality. Choose Nicorette nonstop. You guys would get along great, not because of the nicarette, but because his perspective on things is very abstract for a guy who's solved. He won the Nobel for solving a great problem within how we smell, perception of odors and taste. And he says, everything that the brain does is an abstraction. Like, I could take a photograph of your face and show it to you and say, yeah, that's me. Or let's say for the moment, I call myself an abstract artist. Let's just play a game, because I've never been accused of being an artist. And I do three dots and a squiggly line, and I say, that's you. And you say, well, that doesn't look like me. And I say, but that's my abstraction of you. Okay, well, the brain essentially does that because. Or something in between that, because there's no actual photograph of you in my brain. It's just a bunch of neurons playing what we call an ensemble, like different keys on a piano. And we go, Rick, I recognize you. Rick Rubin. And so everything is an abstraction. And it's only once we start tinkering with the parts. And this is the essence of science, to remove an ad and manipulate. And the best example I can come up with would be Rothko. And I only come up with this example because I started off in vision science. And maybe this will make the most sense to everyone except the folks who've been blind since birthday. And they can swap something in here. If I show you a Rothko, and I don't tell you it's a Rothko, you may or may not actually think it's that impressive. It depends on your taste in art. But what Rothko did, which was amazing, even if you don't like Rothko's, and I happen to, is that he removed all the white and high contrasty stuff. And when you do that, you alter color space, and so the colors look very different. Some people saw that dress a few years ago. Is it orange or is it gold or whatever? That was a little bit of the same phenomenon. I doubt, in fact, I'd be willing to bet my left arm that rothko knew nothing about the neuroscience of color perception, but somehow got to this place where if there was no canvas showing and no high contrast, and the paintings were large enough and on the appropriate wall, you saw them a certain way that tapped into something fundamental. And this is where I think art and science really converge, is that every once in a while, we see something that feels amazing to enough people, and not just like the baggy pants phenomenon, not just because other people think it's cool, but there's something there. And again, this defies language. And I have to imagine that in your years of life and music and other creative endeavors, that you've. That every once in a while, have you ever encountered something where, like, something fundamental keeps showing up in different form? Or there's something like a. Like a. Almost like a rule or a principle. Does it ever come about? Because in science, we think of this as like, this reveals something about our limitation to abstract the world. I hope I made that clear.

B

Not exactly, but I have a thought. You talked earlier about the drop of oil, the photograph of the drop of oil and the photograph, or we could use on the other side, like Hubble telescope images of these vast things in high definition. What we see every day is as impressive as those things, but we're numb to them because we see them all the time. And if we were to look at drops of oil every day in a microscope a month from now, we would not find wonder in that image. So sometimes it's the novelty of not seeing it from that perspective before that's really thrilling. And I could imagine, and this probably relates to the Rothko idea, that you could see something from a particular angle and have this magical experience, and then walk 3ft to the side and see it from a different way, and it just evaporates. It only works. It only triggers this thing in us when we look at it just the right way. There was an experiment I just heard about, heard about the other day that. That sounds fascinating, that a painting teacher recommended, where instead of painting, you know, having a model in the room and painting the model, that you have the model in the next room, and you go into the next room without your equipment, you don't have your equipment, and you can study the model for as long as you want. And then you go into a different room where you can't see the model and paint the model instead of. And it changes your relationship where it's not. We're not just painting the lines, we're painting what is interesting enough about what I saw. What are the data points that stuck in my mind? And when I string those together, what do I get? What do I. How do I form it to get as close to whatever that the experience of that person was, which the closest of getting to the experience of that person in the painting might not look like a photograph. You know, it might look more different then more the same to really see what you see. If we think about the Picasso paintings that were inspired by african art, where the eyes are on different levels, they may give us more information than a photograph would give us. I'm thinking about the. When you were describing the sensation of when something takes your breath away. And we all have that when we see a dramatic sunset. Anyone, you know, when there's a really dramatic sunset or if there's a whale, and if anyone's on the beach and there's a whale, everybody's really interested that there's a whale. Do you know what I'm saying? These feelings of wonder, we get to experience them depending on where we are, or a dragonfly or a bird flies into your space, these things happen. And when they happen, it's like we're confronted with the mystery of the world when we change the perspective. Normally, we don't think of whales in our backyard or birds in our house flying freely, but they do happen. These things do happen, and they, like, break us out of our trance. When these things happen, it's like, oh, yeah, there are birds like this everywhere. I'm just not paying attention. This guy's coming in to tap me on the shoulder, like, remember me? Here I am.

A

So I would say that the whale example and what you're describing is it's revealing to us how, in a delightful way, how deficient our perceptual filters normally are. Yes, it's a little bit like the rothko is revealing how. I've never thought about it this way until this moment is revealing to us how color normally looks is actually, first of all, not the only way it looks. Those colors, we think, are one way, but all of color, this gets into the biology of color. Vision is all about contrast. What something is next to dictates what it looks like. And that's the origin of that dress meme, or whatever you call it. I still can't figure out exactly what a meme is. Someone will eventually tell me in the same way, when you see a whale, and it's delightful, I think it's revealing to us the extent to which those whales are. The ocean is vast. There's a whole universe there, and we are blind to it all the time. And I think the misperception or the misconception, excuse me, is that we're delighted because we see the whale. We might be just as delighted because we're getting hit with the contrast of how little we recognize all the time. And in that way, it reminds me a little bit about comedy where, and I've been watching more comedy lately, and sometimes it's the shock. Sometimes it's the absolute truth that's revealed. And then other times, what I've noticed, and I saw Rogan do comedy at the Vulcan Club in the Austin, which he does every once in a while. And it was small club, and he was leading out this story during his routine, or bit, I think. Right, this bit he's leading. And everyone knew where it was going. We all knew. And then when he finally told us, it was exactly where we thought it was going, and it was hilarious, and it felt good and it felt amazing. And I thought in that moment, I was like, wait a second. How did he pull that off? That was masterful, because normally this thing, like, you create one story, there's like a scripting out almost like a courtroom lawyer, and then they kind of pull the curtain and it's something different. And if you look at the science, the neuroscience and brain imaging of laughter and humor, which I've looked into, to be honest, and no disrespect to the people in that field, it's pretty lame. It's lame because it's always the jarring nature of a surprise. But what he led us to was something that, oh, no, he's actually going there. Oh, wait, he's really going there. And it was this anticipation with a beautiful delivery at the end. And so I'm convinced that based on what we're talking about here, that there's something about when we see something, we think it's about that, but that the delight that we feel could be about all the other experiences that now become, in a subconscious way, kind of like, ha. It's almost like laughing at this perceptual deficit that we have. It's almost like laughing at how little we actually know, which is what you've said.

B

Yeah, it could be that. It also could be the sense of community, of when you think it's going to go a particular way and it goes that way. It's like reinforcement of you. You know? It's like, yeah, he's saying it, but in a way, we're saying it together. I'm listening. He's saying it. But we're in this together, and that's a good feeling.

A

To think about that for a second. I was trying to think about why certain music still can evoke such powerful emotions in me. And there does seem to be something special about the music we listen to when we are teenagers. From about 14 until about 25. It seems to get routed into our nervous system in some way. Maybe because that phase of our life is really one of identity crisis. You don't find too many 40 year olds, some who are wondering who they are occasionally, but almost every young teenager, preteen and sort of like, who am I? You're defining personality, so I always likened it to that. But leaving out the. The sort of critical period biology stuff, what do you think it is about the music that we hear at that time? Are we that much more emotionally tuned? Have we not shut down our sensors quite as much? Is there? The songs and the artists don't matter because they're very individual to me. For other people, it'll be the Beatles or something. Now I just really wish the Beatles did it for me, too. But do you think that's important? Because I could see how it's really terrific. I could also see how it sets up. One of these would all just use nerdy language and call the, like a semi deprived filter. Because if I'm only looking for the way that, like, a stiff little fingers track made me feel the first time I listened to when I was 15, the feeling is worthwhile. But if I'm looking for that, I'm missing all the other stuff. I'm missing the Beatles. I'm missing Fleetwood Mac, which never did it for me either. I'm like. I'm missing all this stuff that people I love and respect really love. So I've never worried about it, because there's kind of an infinite treasure trove of other things that I do love. But I do sometimes wonder whether or not my life experience is diminished because I'm not allowing kind of range. And you've obviously worked in a huge number of different genres of music. Punk is one thing. Hip hop isn't. I mean, Neil diamond too, right? Eminem.

B

Two.

A

Slayer. Two. Right. And in some sense, as I list these off, I mean, just think about how much in high school maybe nowadays, less so. But even in college, and as an adult, we societally were sort of asked to constrain ourselves to one of these groups. I didn't know it was okay to love Bob Dylan and love punk rock as much as I do. Until I heard Tim Armstrong said he loved Bob Dylan. And I was like. And recently he told me he loves the Grateful Dead. And I was like, whoa. But to. I remember when you had to pick.

B

Both the Ramones and the clash loved the Beatles, so we couldn't.

A

Okay, I've got work to do.

B

We'll do it together. I have a feeling part of it is the reason it gets in at that age is it's at a time when we're defining who we are, and the music is part of the definition of how we see ourselves. So it's the like, the music that we hear before that might be the music that's on the radio, or our parents music, or our older brother or sister's music. And then when you're 14 or 15 and you start choosing what you're listening to, it's like, now it's finally mine. And my parents might not like it, and my older brothers and sisters may or may not like it, but this one is mine. And it always has that impression in us that this is ours. That's my thought of why it continues to last.

A

How do you wipe the slate clean then? So, for instance, if you're going to go in and work with somebody new, and again, as people are hearing this, I hope that they're transplanting this to whatever it is that they do. Because in the realm of science and podcasting communication, it's not music. There's a contour and a way. Hopefully, this podcast will look nothing like it does in five years. That's my hope, is it will still have the core features of the beauty and utility of biology coming through. But I hope it doesn't look anything like episode two.

B

And I think it'll evolve as you evolve. It's just the truer it is to what interests you. And if you're not interested in biology in the same way in five years, I would hope it's not the same.

A

I'll be doing psychoanalysis in real time here. We'll all be lying down on couches, whatever it is.

B

Whatever it is.

A

Yeah, we probably won't be on psychedelics, but we might be levitating. So how do you. Let's talk a little bit, if you would, because I know I'm very interested in your process. I'll spare you the daily routine question. It's very cliche, but you and I are both lovers of sunlight, of horizons, and not as a trivial source, as an amazing gift of energy. Right. And there aren't words for it, really, aside from your daily routines. When it comes to somebody you're going from project to project, and you know you're going to be doing work with somebody, could be your own work. And we'll talk about the writing of this book and its structure, which is very unique. I've never encountered a book with this kind of structure before, and it's the most facile read ever. And yet every single page I underlined, took notes, starred, and as you notice, it's very worn. Very, very worn already, and only more so over time. Do you have a process for removing the functions of the day and what you were doing last week and what's going on? And in order to get more access to this, I'm going to think of it now more as a receiver inside of you, almost like tuning a radio. And then it comes in, like, the beginning of, like, a strummer clash. You love the radio. Joe loved the radio, right? And then it comes in clear, and there it is. How do you clear the static? What are some of the operational steps that you think might be more generalizable, regardless of where somebody in Africa is listening?

B

I would say when I engage in a particular project, whatever it is, I dedicate all of myself for that period of time, whatever it is, whether it be 20 minutes or whether it be 5 hours, whatever it is, total focus and no outside distraction whatsoever. And when I leave that process, I do my best not to think about it. When I'm away from it, I don't bring any materials with me. I don't leave the studio with works in progress and spend time listening to them during the day or looking for ideas. I stay as far away from it when I'm not directly engaging in it as possible. And in the best of situations, I have something else to totally engage myself in in between. So instead of working on project A for 5 hours and then leaving and doing nothing, I'm hoping to engage in a project B or B, C and D with all of myself before going back to project A again, which might be the next day.

A

Let's say this relates to an amazing chapter and series of writings in your book that I'm not going to describe because I want people to find it for themselves. About disengaging. About disengaging from the process. One question I had as I read that chapter, and as you're saying this now, is even though you're disengaged, do you believe that your subconscious is working it through that?

B

I believe so. I believe so. And I think, in general, to stew over a problem is not the way to solve a problem, I think to hold the problems lightly. And when I say a problem, when we're starting a project, there's usually this feeling of, there's a question mark at the beginning of every project. I'm always anxious when I start a new project, because I have no idea what's going to happen. I never know. I may have, in some cases, a potential backup plan if nothing works, but I really try not even to have that. I prefer not to have that. I prefer to go in, maybe to calm myself down enough to be able to show up. Therell be an idea of, like, if nothing works, maybe we could try something like this. But that would only be for my own anxiety, that wouldnt be for actual practical use. But theres always a sense of anxiety, because I know whatevers going to happen is completely out of my control. Something's gonna, something either interesting or not will appear, and then we're gonna follow that wherever it goes. And until something appears for us to follow, I have a lot of anxiety, even though I know, even though it has never not come, you know, it has come every time, but there's something about it, because I also feel like there might be expectation on me that I'm gonna make it happen, and I know that's not happening, that's not how it works. I show up ready for it to happen, and am open to whatever we have to do to find that first thread. And once we find the thread, then it's like, okay, we have a, and that thread may lead us to anything, you know, could lead us to in a million different directions, but something about having that glimmer that it's not a blank, we're not looking at a blank page, you know, we're looking at, okay, we have a, we have the beginnings of, I would say a map, but it's a map that we don't know where it takes us. And it's just the beginning, it's just like, it's just a start. You know, you are here if you have a map and it says you are here, even if you can't see the directions. Knowing where we are feels okay. And once we get, and usually again, usually in the first day, first couple of days, it happens, but up until then, it's really an anxiety producing situation, and then I can't, I can't remember the original question. So that was the beginning of something completely different. But I. Do you remember what you asked? I don't remember.

A

Yeah, well, we were talking about disengaging, and as your subconscious into it and you were. And then we were talking about, you know, so I love this sort of like, what are. What is your process of wading into this thing? And you're revealing that now. I mean, I. I think of anxiety as readiness. Think about the characteristic features of anxiety. It tends to be a bit of a constriction of the visual field into more of a narrow vision, but that's appropriate because you want to shed what's going on elsewhere. And then even when people talk about the shakes or this not feeling okay, sitting still, anxiety was designed to mobilize us and not always to run away. This is one of the rarely do I talk about the work in my own laboratory. But one of the things that, frankly, I didn't discover, but it was done in my laboratory. But this brilliant graduate student, Lindsey Soleil, who's now at Caltech, was that we can often observe animals or humans in very high states of anxiety as they move forward toward a goal. And we always think of moving forward as like this calm thing, these heroes, Rosa Parks telling people, like, f you, I'm nothing, getting off the back, I'm not leaving, giving up my seat on the bus or Muhammad Ali. I bet you they were experiencing tremendous anxiety, but it was in the forward tilt. And so I think anxiety is least comfortable when we are forcing ourselves to stand still. So it's an activating energy. And that brings up a word that I have written in my notebook as an extraction of a lot of themes from within the book that you and I have talked about before, which is, and here I'm going to sound very west coast.

B

Woo.

A

But I mean it as seriously as it can be stated that I feel like everything is energetic. We can do things from a place of anger, we can do things from a place of joy. We can do things from a place of delight. I like to think maturing into the idea that joy and delight and love as the kind of the ultimate reservoir of energy. But a lot of the music that I liked from when I was younger was because of the anger that was thread into it or the sadness.

B

If you think of your relationship to that music, it's a relationship of love. You didn't listen to that to get angry.

A

No.

B

You listened to it because you loved it.

A

And I felt loved by it because it matched where I was at at the time.

B

It was true to who you were and where you were.

A

I know that collaboration, there's a wonderful chapter on collaboration, but it's collaboration, as you mentioned before, with the universe, not with others, but in terms of the, especially the kind of work that you've done and do when it comes to working with artists, I do wonder, and here I'm not looking for any gossip or stories. I've never been interested in gossip. I love stories, but I'm not interested in gossip. But once you see that thread kind of dangling there and you're going to go after this, or you grab onto it and you're like, okay, now you have a little bit of a map and an orientation within that map. I often wonder. Scientists are complicated people. People think they're very boring, but they're actually very complicated because they're often living in one limited rule set of the prefrontal cortex. That's how you get good at getting degrees, is by understanding the rules, academia, and playing by those rules. People tinker with the rules. You get your Richard Axels, who are very playful in how they go about it, but they are systematic. He's known for rigor. Rigor, rigor, right. When I think of creative artists and musical artists, I think of a bit more zany or loose or you watch the documentary about the Ramones and you're like, wow, there's all this chaos. Because so many of the brilliant artists, musical artists that are out there seem to have some chaos inside them, or their lives aren't always structured, oftentimes. And science, too, by the way, there are substance abuse issues and personal life issues. How, since you don't have 100% control, they need to play the instruments, sing, etcetera. How do you work with people who have it in them but are getting in their own way? Right. And do you think that that kind of the internal chaos that a lot of artists seem to have, do you think that sometimes is actually an essential piece of the creativity picture, that you can't disentangle it?

B

Yeah, I don't think it's an essential piece in general, but certain artists, that's their. That's how they do it, I would say. I rarely get to see the chaotic part of artists. For whatever reason, they rarely show it to me. And most of them, like most comedians I know, are much more serious about what they're doing than what it looks like from. If you see them on stage, there's much more to it, and there's much more focus on craft going on and digging deep than would necessarily be obvious seeing him jump around on stage.

A

I'm a fan of boxing, track and field, in boxing, the sports nobody really cares about, now that UFC is so popular and track and field is a little bit like wrestling. When you go, the people that they're there because they really love it. We'll talk about wrestling in a little bit, professional wrestling. But Floyd Mayweather is obviously a colorful character and one of the best records in boxing of all time. And a few years back, I got into watching his stuff. What one sees is the cars and the money. They literally call themselves the money team and the spending, and there's all the outrageous stuff. But I know someone who is in camp with him who actually was a sparring partner for him. And the lore has it, they have very closed door sparring or camps, but the lore is that he would do, because nowadays it's twelve three minute rounds with him, and in between used to be 15, but now neuroscientists stepped in and it turns out a lot of the deaths were occurring when it was more than twelve rounds.

B

Wow.

A

For whatever reason, it cut off at twelve. Really seemed to truncate the deaths. There are other things, too. If the dad is apparently a corner man, we have someone else here at the podcast who knows more about this.

B

Than me, but fascinating.

A

Yeah. The kid not wanting to disappoint the parent correlated with death. I'll get some of this wrong and then they can come after me. But in any case, this guy who was in Floyd's camp said that he would do 30 to 60 minutes of sparring, bringing in fresh sparring partners with no rest, that he would run three or four times per 24 hours cycle, despite all the critical need for sleep, that his training was unbelievably intense, to the point where he would just chew out, chew up and destroy all training partners. And yet the perception that we see is, it's playful for him. For him. So it sounds very similar, like what we see is often not what goes into it, that people are intensely rigorous.

B

Yeah. And I think, in a way, from a psychological perspective, if you knew you were fighting someone who wasn't taking it seriously, that would give you some confidence, and that would not be a good thing if you're, if the person was actually working really hard, outworking you. Do you know what I'm saying? From a psychological perspective, that makes sense to me, William.

A

So what I keep coming back to is that I'm imagining in my mind two ends of the continuum. One that is about fairly narrow, focused training, training strategy implementation, cultivating craft, building craft, and then the other side is this. The cloud. It's very nebulous, right? And there's this word that I learned from a colleague of mine when I was down at the salk institute when my lab was there, because he studies this. There's this phenomenon that I don't want to mispronounce because then it sounds like something else. But the correct pronunciation is pareidolia. And pareidolia is our tendency to look at an amorphous shape, like a cloud or a tree and think that it looks like something else, an ice cream cone, the man in the moon. And that, again, reveals the extent to which the brain wants to place symbolic filters on things. And we need this, right? Because I see you walk in the door, and, Rick, I recognize you. In fact, we have a brain area called the fusiform face gyrus that literally is a face recognition area. And you could be at any orientation, or I could just see your eyes and know that it's you. There's a phenomenon called proprisagnosia, where people can see faces. They can describe everything in the face, but they don't know, for instance, that it's JFK or Madonna or Lex Friedman.

B

It's quite the list.

A

Quite the list. There you go, Lex. Run for office, Lex. Just kidding. It's hard enough to get you to respond to my text as it is. So we have these filters, and so we're taking this cloud and we're deciding what things are.

B

Yes.

A

And what I want to drill into your process a little bit more deeply when you approach a project. So everyone meets each other, shakes hands. Here are the engineers. We're going to sit down. Everyone knows what they're doing because you work with professionals and you start going, are you trying to be with the cloud or in the implementation? Like, where are you in that continuum? And forgive me if I'm trying to surgically go into your process in a way that would disrupt it in any way, but I trust you've been doing this for a while and there's no.

B

Threat I'm in the cloud with the exception of, I'm aware of what could go wrong on a technical side. And I might, like, if something good is happening, I might look over and make sure that we're rolling.

A

So that's a leap over to here momentarily. But then maybe.

B

If I feel like if I was in the moment, I would be in the cloud, and if something good starts happening, it would trigger something in me, like, uh oh, I hope this is. I hope we're really doing this, because I don't know if we could ever do this again. That would be a thought of when the first time the real world would come into the picture would be something good is happening. Let's not lose it.

A

And when that happens, do you never been in a studio besides a podcast studio? Do you say, hey, guys, that sounded good. More of that, or do you, wait, you let them continue because obviously you don't want to break their flow.

B

We'd never want to break any flow once it's happening. Yeah, once something's happening, just kind of sit back and watch.

A

And do you think there's resonance, like the team of engineers and other people know when it, quote unquote, is happening?

B

If everyone's paying attention, yes. When everyone's paying attention, it's usually pretty obvious. Sometimes the thread will be something different than expected, and maybe not everybody would pick up on it. And that might be a particular. That might be particular based on my taste or an artist's taste, or someone involved might say, that was. Let's listen back to that. I think that was better than we thought. That can happen. You said several things, and it was like you said enough for there to be several conversations.

A

I tend to do that. Sorry. Especially with you. I don't get to see you nearly as often as I would like, and so when I do, I confess that I'm a little bit of a kid in a candy store.

B

I wrote down the brain tells us stories. So you talked about. I walk in certain data points. You recognize me, but it's a real like looking at a cloud. Shorthand. We go through our lives doing this all day with everything we see. And the shorthand, in the case of me, you know me, the shorthand turns out to be right. It checks out. If it's something we don't know and something we're not familiar with, something happens. We experience something on the street, something happens, and it doesn't make sense. Something out of the ordinary happens. The first thing is, this doesn't make sense. Then what we do is, again, subconscious, unconsciously. I don't know if it's unconscious or subconsciously. Without thinking, we create a story that explains what just happened, a hypothetical that makes it okay that what just happened happened. And, oh, maybe he's running because his dog ran away and he's chasing his dog. Maybe that's why he's running. And as soon as we have that thought of what it might be, we relax, because now it's not just a guy running. And this is weird, but it's a guy running. Oh, he's probably running after his dog. And now we register that story that we just made up without even knowing we were making it up as what happened? And then later in the day, if someone says, yeah, do you see that guy running out of box? Yeah, he was chasing his dog. I saw that. And you won't even realize that it was the maybe hypothetical story that was the first possible explanation that allowed you to continue walking. Do you know what I'm saying? That's our whole lives, our whole lives are reacting to things, making up a story of what we think may have happened without realizing that's what we're doing, and then living the rest of our lives as if that thing that we made up really happened and we never know.

A

I completely agree. We confabulate from birth until death. There's this well observed phenomenon in people who have memory deficits. There's the sad example of this, and then there's the everyday typical, who knows? Sad or not sad example. For instance, if somebody has a slight memory deficit or someone has Alzheimer's dementia, they'll find themselves in the hallway at night and say, what are you doing here? And they'll say, oh, you know, I was going to get a glass of water. But they're walking away from the direction that would make sense. People who, alcoholics who drink enough develop something called Korsakoff syndrome, where a certain brain area gets messed up. And you'll ask them a question like, oh, what are you doing here? And they will come up with incredible stories, sometimes interesting stories that have no bearing on reality. You ask them who their name is.

B

But do they believe?

A

They believe that's what happens with 100% certainty. And this actually relates to a lot of the now better understood controversy around repressed memories, especially from young people. You can pull memories from them of things that never happened. This has been demonstrated over and over again. So courtrooms know to be very cautious now about this whole notion of repressed memories.

B

That's good to know.

A

Yeah. Very, very complicated area of the law, as you can imagine, because we tend to want to trust victims for understandable reasons. But in terms of accuracy of details, two people have very different accounts of the same experiences. And this has been shown over and over again that you can do well in the laboratory. It's pretty interesting. So, again, because of this selective filtering and storytelling, and we are. I think it was Salman Rushdie who said, we are the storytelling species. He probably, wow.

B

I was going to say we're storytelling machines, but that's great.