Rick Rubin: How to Access Your Creativity

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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.

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 Act: A Way of Being,

by Rick Rubin.

This is a book that I've now read

three times from cover 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 we 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 colon 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.

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to bring zero cost to consumer information

about science and science-related tools

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And now for my discussion with Rick Rubin.

Great to have you here today, Rick.

RICK RUBIN: Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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 it 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, 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 off in different tangents that I couldn't follow.

But at one point, he just 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 it's 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?

RICK RUBIN: 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 not.

And that's how the art making process works

is like we're making things, and we're looking

for 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--

a feeling of leaning forward.

And we're following that energy in our body, when

we feel there's something here.

There's something here.

I want to know more.

I want to know more.

I want to know more.

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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Recently, I was listening

to a podcast by our friend Lex Fridman.

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, 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.

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.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Like 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?

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

I think language is insufficient to drill down on creativity.

It's closer to magic than it is science.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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, we're discarding things, systematically.

We get, quote, unquote, set in our ways.

Do you think kids are, just by definition and by design,

more creative than adults?

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

Kids, 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 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 skill set

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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: There is this idea

that there are no new ideas.

I disagree, because every once in a while,

I'll see or hear something that at least seems

different enough.

RICK RUBIN: 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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: You mentioned 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 will 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, 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 out

a big enough chunk of my brain, and I still survived.

I would be a 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 course 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.

Like 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, 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 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 the 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?

RICK RUBIN: It's a feeling in my body.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Is it localized?

RICK RUBIN: No.

It's a feeling of--

I would say it's like a surge of energy.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Do you remember the first time

you experienced that?

RICK RUBIN: Probably hearing the Beatles, when

I was three or four years old.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Three or four years old?

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Is there something wrong with me

that the Beatles have never done it for me?

RICK RUBIN: 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 can not, and we're both right.

There's not--

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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 in music is a little bit

obscure and fragmentary, but 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.

RICK RUBIN: 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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

Nothing against them, it's just I'm always bothering you

for a story, but like Ramones.

I saw that, and I was like, wow, like jeans, aviators,

everyone had to change their last name

to Ramone, a lot of them hated each other.

There's so much drama in there, and three chords

and just-- but to me, it just was like, wow,

like kids from New York, that energy.

So I think different things for different people.

Right?

RICK RUBIN: Absolutely.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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.

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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I love that, because in science,

having trained graduate students, having been

a graduate student, I was very blessed

to have mentors, one of who is a real iconoclast.

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.

So they all had a morbid sense of humor,

so they're laughing about this, someplace, right now.

RICK RUBIN: I thought you were going to say they

all ate the poison mushrooms.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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 it'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 it can be badly wrong in science.

You can be wrong for the right reasons,

but you can also be wrong 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 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 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,

sagging 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 we're all doing it,

and that's when it clicked for me.

I was like, most people don't actually know what they like.

RICK RUBIN: No.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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--

a 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?

RICK RUBIN: 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 commercial endeavor than an artistic endeavor.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like tactical.

Yeah.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I was thinking, in your book,

you describe, again, when you're thinking

about the creative process as a cloud,

for me, again, it serves as such a powerful anchor.

And then I think about the biology, the neurobiology,

of like 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 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

that broadening vision is essential, in some way,

or broadening thinking.

RICK RUBIN: Well, it 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.

Comedian makes you laugh.

Usually, what they're saying, it's outrageous,

but you know that it's right.

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 it 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, once 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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely.

RICK RUBIN: 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, where nice 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 all of what we believe in science now

and decide to throw all of that away and start from scratch.

And we'd probably create a whole different one.

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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 locked-in syndrome,

et cetera.

And you asked him, what percentage of what's

contained in medical textbooks and training--

RICK RUBIN: Today

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Today.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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, 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.

Like 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.

RICK RUBIN: 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 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, but they're beliefs.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I remember--

of course, I listened to the Beastie Boys growing up.

Who didn't?

I was a child of the 90s, and they were in the--

Sabotage was an outgrowth of a skateboarding movie,

like Spike Jones and like the girl movies.

And those worlds, the Beastie Boys and skateboarding

were really closely interwoven for a while.

Some people know that.

Some people don't.

And Spike 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 joking around,

like Beastie Boys, like these guys doing hip hop,

but it was kind of like the hardcore scene,

in New York, punk rock scene, and it was 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?

RICK RUBIN: Weren't paying attention at all.

Never considered it.

There were no-- at that point in time,

when we were making Licensed to Ill,

hip hop music was a tiny underground thing.

And 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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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.

We 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.

RICK RUBIN: I don't think it's wrong or right.

It's just more information that you can use or not use and use

it in a useful way.

And you can make something and put it out,

and people could not like it.

And you're like, oh, they still don't get it.

I'm going to I got to go harder.

Like I got to 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're 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.

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, 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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

It's beautiful, because the word that keeps coming to mind

is it's almost like a compulsion.

Like there are other options of ways

to be and to behave and to function and work in life.

But if something is 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 as 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?

Or 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 have to assume that there, at some point,

it becomes not strategy development or creativity

but strategy implementation.

Like there needs to be the songs are

going to come in this order-- and I

don't know much about music.

My musician friends are always laughing.

RICK RUBIN: It's not so much about music.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right.

Well put, but the ordering of the sequence

of the melodies, et cetera.

So at what point does one decide, OK,

like 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?

RICK RUBIN: 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 you keep thinking that for a long time,

you can do that forever and 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.

To use whatever the next project is

going to be as 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

is a good one.

And you said your description of source is something within us.

I don't know 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 where the vehicle for source

to allow things to happen in the world.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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 set somewhere between those,

it's neither of one nor the other.

That ultimately what feeds into all of that

are imagination and the way, indeed,

that our brain is a physical entity.

The nature in 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.

RICK RUBIN: 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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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 that these nature pictures-- seemed

like there were more of these in the '80s,

like 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.

He's outrageous personality.

Chews Nicorette nonstop.

You guys would get along great, not because of the Nicorette,

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 tastes.

And he says that everything that the brain does

is an abstraction.

Like I could take a photograph of your face

and show it to you, and you'd 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.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK.

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 a 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 and add and manipulate.

And the best example I can come up with would be Rothko.

And I only we 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 birth,

and they can swap something in here.

That 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 Rothkos--

and I happened to--

is that he removed all the white and high contrast-y 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 a 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 every once in a while,

have you ever encountered something

where something fundamental keeps

showing up in different form?

Or there's something like almost like a rule or a principle,

does that ever come about?

Because in science, we think of this

as like this is reveals something about our limitation

to abstract the world.

I hope I made that clear.

RICK RUBIN: 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 where 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 three feet 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 sounds fascinating,

that a painting teacher recommended.

Where instead of painting--

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.

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?

And what do I--

how do I form it to get as close to whatever

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.

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 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 is coming in to tap me on the shoulder.

It's like remember me?

Here I am.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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.

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 Rogen do comedy at the Vulcan Club,

in 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, 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.

RICK RUBIN: And it felt good.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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, it's 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 the other experiences that now become,

in a subconscious way, 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.

RICK RUBIN: 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.

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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have 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 like who they are.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Occasionally, but almost every young teenager

or pre-teen and is like who am I?

You're defining personality.

So I always likened it to that.

But leaving out the critical period biology

stuff, what do you think it is about the music

that we hear at that time?

Are that much more emotionally tuned?

Have we not shut down our sensors quite as much?

Because the songs and the artists

don't matter, because they're very individual to me.

For other people, it will 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 what I'll just use nerdy language

and call like a semi-deprived filter.

Because if I'm only looking for the way

that a Stiff Little Fingers track made

me feel the first time I listened to it, 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

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 range.

And you've, obviously, worked in a huge number

of different genres of music.

Punk is one thing.

Hip hop is--

Neil Diamond too.

Right?

Eminem too, Slayer too, right?

And in some sense, as I list these off,

just think about how much in high school, maybe nowadays

less so, but even in college and as an adult,

societally, were asked to constrain ourselves

to one of these groups.

I didn't know it was OK to love Bob Dylan

and love punk rock as much as I do,

until I heard Tim Armstrong said he loved Bob Dylan.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And I was like--

and recently, he told me he loves the Grateful Dead,

and I was like, whoa.

But I remember when you had to pick.

RICK RUBIN: Both the Ramones and the Clash love the Beatles,

so we can--

ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK.

I got work to do.

RICK RUBIN: We'll do it together.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK.

RICK RUBIN: I have a feeling part of it

is, the reason it gets in at that age, is it's

a time when we're defining who we are,

and the music is part of the definition

of how we see ourselves.

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.

My that's my thought of why it continues to last.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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

and communication, it's not music,

but 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.

RICK RUBIN: 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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'll be doing psychoanalysis in real time

here.

In therapy, we'll all be lying down on couches.

RICK RUBIN: Whatever it is.

Whatever it is.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

We probably won't be on psychedelics,

but we might be levitating.

You never know.

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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 like, 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 in order to get more access to this--

I'm going to think of it now more as a receiver

inside of you.

Right?

Almost like tuning a radio, [IMITATING STATIC] and then

it comes in.

Like the beginning of like a Strummer Clash thing.

Right?

He love the radio.

Joe loved the radio, right?

[IMITATING STATIC] 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 to this.

RICK RUBIN: 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 five 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 five 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, let's say.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: So 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?

RICK RUBIN: 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 never-- 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, there'll be an idea of,

if nothing works, maybe we could try something like this.

But that would only be for my own anxiety.

It wouldn't be for actual practical use.

But there's always a sense of anxiety, because I know,

whatever's going to happen is completely out of my control.

Something either interesting or not will appear,

and then we're going to follow that wherever it goes.

And until something appears for us to follow,

I have a lot of anxiety, even though it has never not come.

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 going to 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, OK,

we have a-- and that thread may lead us to anything.

It could lead us in a million different directions.

But something about having that glimmer, that we're not

looking at a blank page.

We're looking at, OK, 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, 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 OK.

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 remember the original question.

So that was the beginning of something completely different.

But do you remember what you asked?

I don't remember.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

Well, we were talking about disengaging,

and is your subconscious into it?

And then we're talking about, I love this.

So like what is your process of wading into this thing?

And you're revealing that now.

I think of anxiety as readiness.

I 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

like not feeling OK sitting still,

anxiety was designed to mobilize us and not always to run away.

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 is brilliant.

Graduate student Lindsey Salay, 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.

Like I'm not getting off the back.

I'm not leaving the--

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 at least comfortable

when we are forcing ourselves to stand still.

So it's a 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 woo.

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 is the ultimate reservoir

of energy.

But a lot of the music that I like from when I was younger

was because of the anger that was

thread into it or the sadness.

RICK RUBIN: If you think of your relationship to that music,

it's a relationship of love.

You didn't listen to that to get angry.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: No.

RICK RUBIN: You listened to it because you loved it.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And I felt loved by it,

because it matched where I was at the time.

RICK RUBIN: It was true to who you were and where you were.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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 dangling there,

and you're going to go after this.

Or you grab on to it, and you're like, OK,

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 of academia

and playing by those rules.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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.

How-- 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, et cetera.

How do you work with people who have it in them

but are getting in their own way?

Right?

And do you think that 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?

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

I don't think it's an essential piece in general, but certain

artists, 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 them jump around

on stage.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'm a fan of boxing, track and field

and boxing, the sports nobody really cares about,

now that UFC is so popular.

And track and field is--

it's a little bit like wrestling.

When you go, the people that are there

are 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,

and 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 was in camp with him who actually was

a sparring partner for him, and the lore has it--

they have very closed door sparring or clean ups.

But the lore is that he would do--

because nowadays, it's 12, three-minute rounds

with a minute 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 12 rounds.

For whatever reason, cut off at 12

really seemed to truncate the deaths.

There are other things too.

If the dad is apparently a cornerman--

we have someone else here at the podcast who

knows more about this than me.

RICK RUBIN: That's fascinating.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

The kid not wanting to disappoint the parent

correlated with death.

I'll get some of this wrong, and 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 hour 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.

So it sounds very similar.

Like what we see is often not what goes into it,

that people are intensely rigorous.

RICK RUBIN: 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 the person was actually working really hard,

outworking you.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Like from a psychological perspective,

that makes sense to me.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: So what I keep coming back to

is that I'm imagining in my mind you

have to ends of the continuum.

One that is about fairly narrow focus, training, training,

strategy implementation, cultivating craft, building

craft, and then the other side is 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.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: The man in the moon.

RICK RUBIN: Yep.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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 it 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 propasognosia,

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 Fridman.

RICK RUBIN: It's quite the list.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Quite the list, there you go, Lex.

Run for office, Lex.

Just kidding.

It's hard enough to get you to respond to my texts as it is.

So we have these filters, and so we're taking this cloud,

and we're deciding what things are.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And what I want to go 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 like trying to surgically go

into your process in a way that would disrupt it in any way.

But I trust you been doing this for a while,

and there's no threat of that.

RICK RUBIN: 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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: So that's a leap over to here, momentarily,

but then you get back.

RICK RUBIN: Maybe.

Maybe.

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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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.

RICK RUBIN: We'd never want to break any flow,

once it's happening.

Yeah.

Once something's happening, just sit back and watch.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And do you think there's resonance,

like the team of engineers and other people

know when "It," quote, unquote, is happening?

RICK RUBIN: 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 involvement might say, 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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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 shop.

RICK RUBIN: 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 short hand, 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 OK 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, did you see that guy running out of the house?

It's like, yeah, he was chasing his dog.

I saw that.

And you won't even realize that it was 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.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I completely agree.

We confabulate from birth until death.

There's this well-observed phenomenon

in people who have memory deficits.

So there's the sad example of this and then

there's the everyday typical not--

who knows-- sad or not sad example.

So 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, I was going to get a glass of water,

but they're walking away from the direction that

would make sense.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: You ask them who their name is--

RICK RUBIN: But do they believe?

They believe that's what happened.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: With 100% certainty, and this

actually relates to a lot of the now better

understood controversy around repressed memories.

You can, 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.

RICK RUBIN: That's good to know.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: 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--

RICK RUBIN: Wow.

I was going to say we're storytelling machines,

but that's great.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

We are story--

I would say that the big five, if I

had to pick up a brain function, is we are very limited filters.

The mantis shrimp sees 67 shades of red for every one

that we see.

So they have access to things we don't have access to.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: They're not, as far

as I releasing, albums of the Red Hot Chili Peppers caliber,

but who knows.

Maybe down there they are.

I did see something, by the way as a relevant tangent recently,

and I don't know if it's--

look, even if it's crazy, it's super cool.

If you take a device that amplifies

the electrical signals coming from cactus,

and you just translate that into a simple rule of conversion

to two or three pitches of sound,

the music that comes out of it is beautiful, nothing short

of beautiful.

And when I saw that, the teenager in me thought,

you know when we hear whale song,

we think it's so beautiful.

Like what if they're just like cursing at each other

the whole time?

Right?

Maybe they're in there like a Rogen episode,

when he invites all his comedian friends in there.

Who knows?

Maybe it's a psychoanalytic conversation

about their childhood traumas.

I don't know.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: But we decide, whale song is beautiful.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: We decide cactus are just plants.

RICK RUBIN: And it's beautiful to us,

and we're right, that it is beautiful to us.

But it doesn't mean we know anything about it.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's right.

Yeah.

So we have these filters, perceptual filters.

We only can see and hear, smell and taste what we can,

and then the brain likes to work in symbols.

We tend to like to match that person whose shoes are

messed up must be homeless.

I've had a couple of instances in life

where I saw what I thought was a homeless vagrant

inside a building at an academic institution.

It turned out, it was the most accomplished person

in the field.

That's always cool.

Yes, that happened at Berkeley.

Then, the other thing that we do is we tend to put symbol--

so we said perception, symbol representations, and then

our memories are entirely confabulated,

based on already deficient symbol and perceptual

representation.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And so I never liked the statement

that we don't know how the brain works.

I think we do know how the brain works,

but that it works through very limited filters.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: So knowing that and accepting it,

and it seems to me that this idea of looking to nature,

looking outside us, is so critical.

And in fact, I hope you won't mind me sharing this,

but a few years back, I had sent you something by text.

And I was kind of in disbelief about something

I had seen in the media.

I was like, they got it all wrong.

And I knew the person involved, and it was not

a good situation for them.

And I was like, they got it all wrong, and you wrote back.

You said, it's all lies.

Back to nature, the only truth.

RICK RUBIN: Wow.

That's wild.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And I wrote that down.

I put it over my desk.

RICK RUBIN: Wow.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And I still--

I'd tattoo it on my forehead, if I didn't already have

it well-committed to memory.

But I know that's true.

Right?

Nature we can look at and it's--

RICK RUBIN: When I say it's all lies,

you just talked about our ability

to how limited our facility to see and understand what we see.

Yes?

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yes.

RICK RUBIN: So based on that, that leads us to we

can't know much.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Our resolution is so low on everything

that we're really just like we're grasping at straws.

We have no idea.

We have no idea, and there's great power and knowing that.

Because if you think you know what's going on, chances are,

you're being deceived.

Not because somebody is deceiving you,

but because they're telling you what

they see, and they don't know.

It's all-- do you know what I'm saying?

It's all made up.

Everything we know is made up.

Maybe, maybe it's true.

This brings us to pro wrestling.

It's the reason that pro wrestling

is closer to reality than anything else we can watch

or any other content.

It's we know it's made up.

We know that it's a performance.

It's storytelling, and that's how everything

is, except we think wrestling is fake, and the world is real.

Wrestling's real, and the world's fake.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: You talk about in the book--

we're definitely going in this direction.

In the book, you talk about this notion of entertaining

the idea of the opposite being true.

And there are not only emerging but established fields

of psychology that are making great ground, I think,

into the human psyche, Byron Katie's work and others.

Where you take a statement, and you start

playing with that statement.

You poke at its authenticity.

And when I first heard that, I thought, this is hokey.

Right?

It's just words.

And then I realized how foolish I

was being, because she's really on to something.

And there are others too, of course, but in science,

that's exactly what you do.

You don't really ask questions in science.

You are forced to raise hypotheses and try

and say true or false.

Now, there are limitations to that approach, certainly.

Pure observational studies have been

incredible in terms of what they've revealed

to us, especially in medicine.

A patient that has a bullet hole through a certain area

of the brain, you don't go in and say, oh, I

hypothesize that person will have a deficit in seeing faces.

No.

The person wandered into the clinic, and they go,

this person sees faces but can't make sense of them.

And then you reverse--

you forensically arrive at an understanding.

So but in general, we go about things in this way,

and considering that the opposite might be true, well,

that's a little bit, I suppose, of like seeing the whale

at the surface of the water.

It's like, well, the opposite of my experience,

which is all above water, for the most part,

is maybe not the complete experience of life.

You start seeing the inverse all the time.

So I want to--

RICK RUBIN: Consider the inverse all the time,

and it really relates to the way that you described how we see

colors is based on contrast.

So maybe blue is only blue in relation to yellow.

So if blue is our choice, if we're not considering yellow,

blue doesn't exist.

Do you know what I'm saying?

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely.

RICK RUBIN: It's like, we talk about night.

It's only night, because there's day.

If there was no day, there is no night.

In all of our cases, it's like the yin yang.

There's the light and the shadow always.

There's always another side for everything,

and we focus on one aspect.

But if we look at the other aspect, chances are,

we'll learn something too.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: The nervous system

is not just able to do this.

It's the way it does everything.

Two experiments I'll just briefly describe.

My scientific great grandparents,

David Hubel, Torsten Wiesel, showed

that, if you force a person to look at something

for a long period of time without moving their eyes--

there's a way that you can do this-- the image disappears.

Because normally, your eyes are making little microsecods,

and you're comparing what you're seeing

to what's right next to it.

Pixel by pixel, pixel by pixel, pixel by pixel.

RICK RUBIN: Wow.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: We don't even have

to use the example of pressing on the arm.

We're sitting in chairs right now,

and until I said you know what's going on

at the level of sensation on the backs of your thighs,

you were unaware of it.

Because if you experience a pressure or a smell in a room,

you ever walk in the smell is either good or not good,

pretty soon, the smell disappears.

The neurons are still firing like sledgehammers on a bell,

but we become blind and deaf to it.

Because the nervous system likes to habituate

the value of that signal when it's there often,

and it's only the stuff that comes through

signal the noise that kind of jolts us

into attention and awareness.

And I want to return to attention awareness, which are

prominent themes in the book.

And I think, in an important way, not just,

oh, attention awareness is important,

but you also give insight into how to pay better attention,

how to pay awareness with the understanding

that people are going to go about it differently,

but I do want to ask you about wrestling.

Because when I was growing up, I lived South of the Cow Palace,

and there was some wrestling going on there.

I think back then it was WWF.

There was a short stint in my childhood

where I paid attention to, in particular,

was it Koko B. Ware, the guy that had a Macaw?

I was obsessed with tropical birds, and he would come in,

and he put his tropical bird on the thing.

And then George "The Animal" Steele,

the guy that would eat the ring.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK.

So and--

RICK RUBIN: I believe he was a professor.

Seriously.

Seriously.

Seriously.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Was he really?

RICK RUBIN: In real life.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing.

RICK RUBIN: He was a professor, but he played Georgia

"The Animal" Steele as a wrestler.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And I loved the movie

The Wrestler, The Wrestler.

RICK RUBIN: Darren Aronofsky movie.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: It was Mickey Rourke.

RICK RUBIN: With Mickey Rourke.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

One of the reasons I liked it is I once visited Asbury Park.

Isn't that where that was filmed?

There's a vacant-- he goes to visit his daughter.

There's a vacant amusement park or abandoned amusement park

scene there that was really eerie,

still kind of haunts me a little bit.

There's something about the East Coast in fall.

All the places that people normally

go just for the summer, that we don't have out here

in the West coast, people in the East Coast

are just tougher than we are.

It still haunts me.

Great movie.

But I remember watching wrestling,

and it was at that age, I think I was probably about 12, 13,

maybe 11, 12, 13, where you're entering puberty,

and puberty is a fundamental landmark of development.

It's the most rapid period of aging.

It's also when we start to change our rule set.

Like certain people and certain kinds of interactions

take on profoundly different meaning.

Right?

It's not just a reproductive competence time, and when kids,

their bodies change.

The rulebook changes fundamentally.

RICK RUBIN: Our understanding of the world changes

in that moment.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

The moment that a child understands really what sex is

and how they got there and that a lot of the stuff that we

see in the world is kind of passively, or not so passively,

being sent through that filter, it's like it's something.

It changes the rule book of perception.

I view this age, from about 11 to 13,

at least for me was a unique transition point.

Where the gap between what I perceived as reality

and fiction was blurry.

This is captured pretty well in that movie "Stand By Me,"

where they're hanging around the campfire at night.

And the kid says, who do you think

would win in a fight between Superman and Mighty Mouse?

And the other kid says, like you idiot,

Mighty Mouse is a cartoon.

Of course Superman would win.

And like to me, that's being 11 and 1/2 or 12 years old.

Where your understanding of reality as you know

it is changing, but it's not completely

crystallized into an adult form reality.

RICK RUBIN: That sounds like a really healthy place

to be, to me, like that.

Not letting it crystallize, I think there's

where the downfall happens.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: So I have a question specifically

about wrestling, but it's really about process.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I want to know whether or not

you watch wrestling because it allows you to access the energy

state in your body and mind and that mode of thinking in which

reality, as one conceives it, is somewhat blurry.

Or is it for a number of other reasons, which is fine.

Is that the energy you're trying to export and bring

to the creative process elsewhere, to life?

Is it that anything is possible, or that we're

dealing with archetypes?

Because it doesn't matter if it's Koko B. Ware or Randy

"Macho Man" Savage, or George "The Animal" Steele

and the lovely Elizabeth.

I guess I did watch a little bit of wrestling.

They are archetypes, much like the Greek myths

or the Bible or--

no disrespect to the Bible or to Greek myths or to wrestling,

for that matter.

Archetypes are a powerful filter for humans,

but we know that they're a very limited filter too,

because people aren't built like square wave functions.

We have curves and contours and complexity.

So what is the deal with your relationship to wrestling?

RICK RUBIN: I think it maintains that playfulness.

Anything is possible.

We expect the unexpected all the time in wrestling.

And it's a way to have a feeling of the energy

of a sport with no competition.

Everyone is working together to put on the best show they can.

So it's more like a ballet than it is like a sporting event,

and there's great skill involved.

It's one of the few things that I can watch and really

feel relaxed.

It relaxes me.

I don't feel like I have to think about it.

I can just relax and enjoy it.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: This brings up a topic

that is very near and dear to my heart, which

is this notion of dopamine schedules.

I never want to reduce everything to dopamine,

but dopamine is the universal currency of delight, pleasure,

motivation seeking.

There are other chemicals involved too,

but there's a beautiful experiment and a couple

of examples that I'll use as a foundation

to more questions about wrestling

and why it's powerful.

And why other people may want to use wrestling

or some other endeavor as a way to access creative energy

and source.

Earlier, we talked about you can train an animal

to press a lever three times and then get reward,

and it will learn three is the magic number for reward,

and then it can switch.

It takes a little bit of training,

and then they can switch.

But they can't do prime numbers.

They can't do high abstraction schedules.

Humans either.

We're not very good at figuring out the rule set

for optimal foraging.

We do it well enough to persist as a species, at least for now,

but it's very likely that we are not tapping into that system

as well as we could, and how would we

know, if we don't know?

It's one of those you who don't know what you don't knows.

There's a beautiful experiment that

explored when dopamine is released

in the context of watching sport or watching comedy,

believe it or not.

And with the comedy stuff, it was every time

there was a surprise, it was kind

of that jarring like ha-ha, and they'd measure

people's dopamine output.

They were also brain imaging.

In a game of basketball, it's a beautiful opportunity

experimentally.

Because every time one team gets the ball

or is shooting free throws or something,

they're going down court, and it's either

going to end up in the basket, or it's not.

Might end up on the free throw line, but it's end up or not.

So what they found is that the schedule of anticipation

was every time there was a switch of which team got it.

So you're waiting, waiting, and then it's, ah.

You're waiting, waiting.

Yes.

Waiting, waiting, three-pointer.

Ah, awesome, and if something happened

where it looked like they were going

to make the three-pointer, but then somebody basically swatted

the ball away, and then went for a half court shot,

like you don't expect that very often, bigger dopamine release.

So that's kind of how the dopamine thing works.

When you describe wrestling, I wonder,

because you don't know the script,

it's not one team gets it, then the other team gets it.

You don't know who's going to win.

Anything could happen is what you said.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: The availability

of that dopamine surge or drip, which is a powerful thing,

is completely--

it's completely out of your reach in terms of anticipation.

You don't know when it's going to come,

but it must arrive often enough that you return to it

11 hours a week of watching.

In many ways, the way I'm starting

to conceptualize the creative process is a little bit

the same.

You don't know where those nuggets of gold

and those loose threads are, but you have enough experience--

and in this case, I am referring to you specifically--

to know that they are in there.

The people walking in this room have a certain level

of ability and talent to create that the map will form itself,

as we are going through the voyage.

And those nuggets of--

here I'm calling them dopamine-- but they

are out there, and that knowledge

is enough to get you to come back again

and again to trust the process.

So I actually think the way you described wrestling as it's

the energy of the sport.

It's not whether or not it's this move or that move

or who wins or who loses.

It's the energy, and I'm guessing

it's the energy that it creates in you as an observer.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

It's the energy creates in me, and the reality

that it's honest in what it is, in a world

where seemingly nothing is honest at what it is.

And again, not because people are lying all the time.

We have little data, we make up a story to explain it,

and then we say that's what happened.

And we have trusted sources who do exactly what I just

described and who pass this down as gospel of what we teach.

And maybe it's true, and maybe it's not.

With wrestling, we know, maybe it's true, maybe it's not.

We lean towards it not being true,

but what's really interesting about wrestling,

and maybe one of the most fun things about it,

is that, sometimes, real life works its way into the story.

Like two wrestlers get married.

Now--

ANDREW HUBERMAN: In real life.

RICK RUBIN: Well, we don't know.

It's like you never know.

It's like in the storyline, they're

getting married or getting divorced,

or best friends turn on each other.

And it could be part of the story,

and it could really be happening, because they do.

Right?

Someone gets someone breaks their leg.

So they're out, because their leg is broken.

Did they break their leg?

We don't know.

They're out.

Do you know what I'm saying?

We're told they broke their leg.

So there's always this like I wonder what's true?

I wonder where the line is.

We know that it's scripted and/or predetermined.

That's how they say, it's predetermined.

But we don't know where reality is and isn't, and in some ways,

that's our real experience of the world,

is this we don't really know where reality is and isn't.

We have an idea, maybe.

I think in some ways, wrestling's

more honest or legitimate, because we start with the idea

that it's fixed.

When we go to a boxing match, we don't go to a boxing match

thinking it's fixed.

Yet, it might be, and historically, it's happened.

Or there was just something in baseball where--

was it baseball?

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't follow baseball.

I should know.

RICK RUBIN: It was just a big sports--

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Oh.

RICK RUBIN: One of the teams that--

ANDREW HUBERMAN: The plays, basically.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Was it the call signals of the--

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Of the catcher?

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

You're not supposed to deprogram the--

or deconstruct the call signals of the other team,

and I guess maybe a team got caught doing that.

RICK RUBIN: Yes, and the team that won

whatever the World Series was.

So it's like, with wrestling, that wouldn't be a scandal.

Do you know what I'm saying?

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Almost anything goes.

RICK RUBIN: Anything goes, and that's

what the world is really like.

So in some ways, it's comforting,

and there's still this mystery of like, wow, I

wonder if that's true or not, because we never really know.

If someone gets hurt, did they really break their back,

or are they just going on vacation?

We don't know.

We'll never know.

It's fascinating.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: It is fascinating,

and I feel like there are certain people who show up

in a way that is surprising in not just one direction

but in all directions.

Like it's one thing for a celebrity

to come out and make a statement.

That can be interesting or not interesting,

depending on the celebrity and the statement and the delivery.

And I'm probably going to get this wrong,

because I'm terrible at pop culture things, most of them

anyway.

But as I recall, Lady Gaga showed up

to some event wearing an outfit made of meat,

and I can't tell you for the life of me

whether or not that was a statement

against meat or for meat.

Maybe, it was a statement for the carnivore diet.

Maybe, it was a statement for veganism.

I don't know.

RICK RUBIN: Or maybe neither.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Or maybe neither,

but it was definitely a statement

in that it broke with the norm.

And it said to me, OK, she creates different rules

for herself or breaks boundaries that other people had.

I never heard of anyone doing that before.

It doesn't mean they hadn't, but I never heard of anyone

doing it before.

But we do tend to associate outside the current playbook

with, quote, unquote, creativity,

unless it crosses a line, in which case, it

becomes something else.

It becomes almost theater for sake of theater.

But what you're telling me is that, within the realm

of wrestling, theater is the goal, at some level,

and everybody knows it who goes into those arenas, who

watches it.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Everybody.

RICK RUBIN: Yes.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And everyone agrees

to kind of suspend outside reality

and say this is reality.

RICK RUBIN: Yes, and they boo for the bad guys and cheer

for the good guys, knowing that backstage

they're probably friends.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Except for the kids

that are 11, who think it's really real.

RICK RUBIN: I don't know.

I don't even know if they know.

I'm not sure.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: The only other person

I know who has vocalized their love of professional wrestling

to the extent that you have is Lars Frederiksen, the rhythm

guitar player for Rancid who loves wrestling.

But his statement-- and forgive me, Lars,

if I'm getting this wrong--

is that, because he grew up in an area of the South Bay,

where there were no teams.

Like now, there's the San Jose Earthquakes,

but there was no football team in San Jose.

He's from Campbell.

But there were no like good teams, no sports teams,

but they had wrestling, and he had it where?

On the television set.

And so if you didn't have a-- like

I didn't grow up with any organized sports thing.

The 49ers were up the road, but for me, it was skateboarding,

and I love it for the same reason.

You actually never really know what's going to happen.

There is no rulebook.

The rulebook is made up, but they are very--

it's a unique sport, in that--

surfing's a bit like this too--

in that, they are absolutely maniacal about making

things look a certain way.

It's not about just doing it.

It's about doing it and making it look good.

RICK RUBIN: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Smooth, catching it

with the front foot, and the trends change.

RICK RUBIN: Styles.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Style.

RICK RUBIN: It's a style.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Style, and that style

is this like nebulous thing of like in fashion or in sports.

Right.

Whereas with a football, there's some amazing catches.

There's even like the catch, which I happen to know

is a 49er-- the catch during the Super Bowl.

But in general, it's like the goal is get in the end zone,

win the game.

And I'm sure football players are

like cringing as I say this, but it

doesn't matter if you run ugly, if you run fastest.

In skateboarding, that would never fly.

In fact, you'd basically be ridiculed out of the sport.

In wrestling, is it the same?

Are there style to wrestling?

RICK RUBIN: It's all performance.

It's all the charisma of the people involved.

There's the physical ability, the ability

to talk and tell a story, and how charismatic

the performers are.

Whether you want to watch them, whether you want to see them

win, whether you want to see them lose,

and whether you're interested in cheering or booing for them.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I was going to say it reminds me of opera,

but operas get released over and over again.

You know the story and how it ends

when you walk in, if you've listened to it before.

So wrestling does seem to be unique in that way.

It's real time iteration, at least

from the perspective of the--

RICK RUBIN: And it's real time iteration

based on because people get hurt all the time.

They're doing really crazy physical stuff.

So if someone gets hurt, the story has to change.

Because in real life, they can't show up next week

and do what was planned in the script.

So it's very alive, and there's a lot of--

something interesting and unexpected is always happening.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well, in a much more calm form,

I'll share with you something, I'd just

like your perspective on it.

For years, I used a tool in order to try and access ideas,

since I was a little kid actually,

because I have a little bit of OCD,

a little bit of a Tourette's.

When I get tired, I'll do that.

I'm very strategy implementation oriented.

I had that when I was a little kid,

I needed all my stuffed animals arranged in a certain way.

LEGOs had to be--

a little neurotic or a lot.

And then science is very much about you have to do things

with a lot of precision.

And I discovered that the ultimate reset for me

when I was in graduate school or a postdoc

if I couldn't make it to a really good agnostic front

show, or like chaos.

The chaos of a punk rock show for me was this reset.

It was to release all this thing.

And I got energy from it.

First time I saw Transplants play, it's was,

whoa, because you don't know what's going to happen.

And it was scary.

And I loved it.

The other thing that I used over time

to reset this ability to think in a structured way

without it feeling like it was overcoming me,

maybe even access the same thing in some ways

that you're accessing with wrestling

was I like to stare at aquaria.

I like to go to aquariums or I'd build aquariums.

And I would just sit there because you never

know which way the fish are going to go.

You think it's going that way, but then all of a sudden

they'll turn and go the other way.

It's completely unpredictable.

And I love aquaria because of the tranquility

and had them in my lab for a long time.

I just adore aquariums because of the non-linearity of it.

It's not A, B, C. It's A, Z, Z, Q.

And I think this is what some people try and access

through psychedelics, but that didn't seem to me like a very

good way to do it on a regular basis,

whereas with aquaria, the tanks are there.

So in your book, you talk about something

that I also share a love for, which

is how the ocean and aspects of nature like clouds and ocean,

they have a predictability to them.

We know where they are and where to find them.

Fortunately, the sun rises and sets every day, at least

for now.

And we can count on them with 100% reliability.

And yet, they are from the perspective

of what physicists would say, they're very chaotic.

You can't look at a wave and know exactly how

the foam is going to roll out.

You know it's going to roll in and roll out.

We have the tides, but when I hear about wrestling,

I think about my love of aquaria.

And I think about my love of punk rock music, for instance,

or I think about the ocean.

I think in that way that we actually have a need to source

from things that have both a combination of structure

and no structure.

RICK RUBIN: I think it's interesting

that there are some places that don't change

and some places that change a lot.

And I can remember thinking about this.

I was walking-- there's a beach that I walk on

in Hawaii, that I walk on every morning when I'm there.

And if you walk on the same beach every day,

you get a sense of what it's like.

And I remember I was in Hawaii.

I walked on the beach every day for a year

or however long it was.

And then I left for six months, then I came back.

And the next time I walked on the beach,

it was an entirely different beach, entirely different.

And I remember thinking in that moment

like this is an unusual place because I pictured

the house that I didn't even grow up in,

the house I lived in maybe for the first seven

years of my life.

And I think about what the backyard looked like.

And I think about a particular old tree that was there.

And I don't know this for sure, but my sense

is, if I were to go back to where I grew up,

and go to that place, and look in that yard,

it would probably look pretty similar.

Yet, here was this beach that I was

walking on in Hawaii that in the course of six months

completely changed its face.

And just how interesting both of those things are.

And that depending on the project

we're working on, to be able to go to a place

that we know has the potential to change a lot

and what that would do to our connection with the Earth

when we're experiencing that versus going to a place that

has very little change.

And you can count on it being the way it's always been.