ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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. RICK RUBIN: 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 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 we're moving away from--
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. Usually, it's pretty
straightforward, 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,
I like this one better, but it needs a little salt, and
then put a little salt on it. It's like, maybe I
put too much salt, and you know when you taste it. It's like 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, A, A, A, A, 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 B. And it's a disconnect,
because so much of, 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. It's like, sometimes more
choices is not better. So limiting your palate
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-- there
was a time when, if you didn't have a
guitar in the studio, you couldn't record guitar. Or 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 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 a skill set to develop as
an artist is to I 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, 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. [MUSIC PLAYING]
