Stacking Biohacks In Tune with Body and Mind Rick Rubin #585

Bulletproof Radio.

A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that singing mice are using two different brain systems when they do something called a duet. There's a strange kind of mouse that lives in Central American cloud forests, and they're musical mice and they sing songs to each other. And a new study reveals how their brains orchestrate those rapid fire duets. And they show the brains of the mice actually split up the musical work. So one brain system controls the content of the song, but another part, called the orofacial motor cortex, or omc, orchestrates the split second timing needed for them to work with each other. These mice are known as Alston's singing mice. And they're super quirky, and they're kind of like the famous singers with extreme green room demands. And they're kind of divas, according to the researchers, who had to get extra big terrariums and exercise equipment and special diets, just like you'd expect from any big music star. And the mice are really loud, really vocal in the lab, and they really just study them with EEG to figure out what's going on inside those brains. When they cooled the OMC of these mice, I'm not sure how they did that. Hopefully with an ice pack, it slowed the nerve cells activity and the songs got longer, which suggests that the brain region normally controls that song timing. And when they used the drug to silence the omc, they couldn't sing in call and response with each other. So there's some weird stuff going on around the way those mice and probably people work when we're singing in a functional unit like that. And as you might have guessed, we're going to be talking something about music, something about high end music, but not with a musician per se, but with none other than legendary music producer Rick Rubin, who is, in probably more ways than he knows, responsible for some of the work that I've done. It was the first time I met Rick several years ago, must have been 20, 2013. I mentioned I was working on the bulletproof diet. And Rick just at the first, first time we were sat down for lunch, he said, hold on, let me make a phone call. And he called someone. And that is why you guys read about it on the New York Times list. Because I was gonna self publish because I didn't know what I was doing. And all it took was like one poke from Rick in the right direction to get me to go, maybe I should publish this as a quote Real book. So, Rick, I don't know if I've ever formally thanked you for that, but you, you set the wheels in motion in a really cool way. But when I look back, I realize that pretty much 80% of the music that I've listened to while I'm writing my books is music that you've directly touched. We're talking about Rage against the Machine. I mean, Johnny Cash and you've worked with Metallica, Kanye, pretty much all the people that you know, you've worked with. But for people listening, if you aren't familiar with Rick's work, it's just kind of ridiculous. Go to Spotify, look up Rick Rubin playlist, and you just realize the music that probably makes the biggest memories of your life was touched by Rick, who has this Zen like manner, these big blue eyes that just look at you and this big beard. And he's probably the opposite of what you might think a music producer is. So I'm super honored to be not just interviewing Rick, but to be doing it at Shangri La Recording Studios, which is why I sound so amazingly good. Because I'm probably on a 50 billion dollar microphone sitting at a place full of history right next door to Bob Dylan's tour bus. It's one of the most epic things I could possibly imagine me doing right now. So, Rick, with that introduction, thank you for being on Bulletproof Radio.

Thanks for having me.

This may be a tough question for you. What was your singular, most favorite experience producing music? The one that just stands out as like, most memorable? I want to know why.

Yeah, I don't. I don't think it's possible to answer the question. I'll say that the thing that's most exciting about the process is when something goes from not very good to very good in this moment where very little has changed. So it feels like magic is happening. And when that happens, that's a really exciting experience. And you can be working on something for a long time and it's kind of trudging along in this boring, uninteresting way. And then for some reason, it shifts into being remarkable. And sometimes you can't even tell the difference of what's different between when it's remarkable and when it was uninteresting five minutes earlier. But it happens anytime those moments of transformation happen and we get very excited and then there's this feeling of, so let's say it's a band performing and they're performing together and that starts that feeling of, oh my God, it's really good. Then there Then it's like, scary because, oh, are they gonna make it to the end of the song? Is it gonna be able to maintain this?

Okay.

You know, it's like. Because we don't even know why it's happening. It's like this. It's so. All of this work is so out of our control. So we're. We're really at the mercy of the forces of the universe to control the. And we just have to be patient and be open and allow it to happen, invite it to happen. And sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, but when it does, it's really exciting.

You started Def Jam when you were a young man in college and you had an ear, an eye, an intuition, a feel, some way of picking out, oh, I don't know, the Beastie Boys and Run DMC and, and these very early transformative artists. So you didn't rely on a body of experience. Oh, I've done this for 20 years. I became a master at doing this by putting in the hard work. Were you just always naturally. Did you have a spark? Did you always sense things this way? Or did you get stronger over time because it feels like you've touched so many things consistently for 40 years?

Yeah, it just seems like a natural. I really love music and I really love good music. And the best way to describe what I do is I'm really just a fan. I'm a super fan of music and I'm true to that fandom. So when I hear something, if it makes me lean forward and gets me excited, I know that that's good.

I've seen you do that. I think one time when we were chatting or something, I mentioned some older song that just did something for me and I watched you, like, your eyes change. You sort of like zoomed in on it, if there's. If that's the right word for it, to sort of see if it had the thing for you. And it did. And it was just a song I liked. Right. But it was almost like a. I would describe it as watching a predator look at something. Not in a bad way, but just like if you see a big cat suddenly gets interested, like the ears come up and like all the senses come out and, and look and go, is that something that I want to eat? And you're like, okay, no, that's not something. But it was very tangible. I could feel that, this intensity that just came on. And it was probably a three second thing. You were born with that.

Yes. But I think you were born with it too, because it's a sensitivity. It's something that I know that we share from discussions we've had before. And those are the same things that make us uncomfortable when we walk into certain places, make you start sneezing, difficulties with traveling, all of the. It's just a over, over sensitization that I just apply to music. But it really. It complicates my life.

Yeah, being a highly sensitive person is a complicating factor, but it comes with a gift because there's times, and I do not claim any musical skills, despite my April Fool's rap video. But there's times when I look at something, I go, that's it. That's why mitochondria do this. And I don't know how I know it, but I know it. And then I do the work and you write about it and you realize, okay, you can put these ingredients together and have this effect in a way that wasn't done before.

It's interesting too, how often the science follows. Like, in music, we don't set the intention of what we want to make. We just know we want it to be good. And we're open to the process, but we don't decide it. We don't decide in advance, oh, we're going to make a song that's a political song in it. We want it to do these things. It's not like that. Or I want to write a love song that's going to mean this to this person. It's not like that. It's all more of just an open, almost like automatic writing process where we're trying to tap into our subconscious and let the ideas come through where we might not even know what it means. And then after it appears and after we realize we like it, then we might analyze it and try to understand what is it that we like? How does this work? But we don't start with the. The science and then build it. It's more like we're. We're. We have this magical moment that's more rooted in emotion. And then after that happens, we. We then try to see if we can figure out why it is okay. And we don't always. We can't always tell, you know, we just know we like it. We don't always know why. Sometimes. Sometimes, like, oh, it does this, it does this, it does this. We like those things. That makes sense. And sometimes no idea.

It seems like in music and art, it's okay to not know why something works. But when we get into the world of biohacking or medicine, if there's no reason for it to work. Therefore it doesn't work. Hold on. It did work, but we couldn't explain it. How do you think music and art escaped that breaking down into its constituent elements thing so that you can say, that's a great song, couldn't tell you why and people all know it's great. Do you have a theory?

No, but I would say that theory. I would apply that theory to everything. And in. In my life, I don't need to know. I don't need to understand the science of why some. Why a biohack works or doesn't work. And if there's something going on with me and there are 10 different possible ways of dealing with it, I'll try all 10 and I won't know which of them worked and which of them didn't. But I don't care. I just want it to work.

You got the results right?

Yeah. That's all that. All that I'm interested in is what works for me.

It's a liberating perspective. And I didn't used to have it because I was trained as an engineer. And I'm going to try this one thing and then this other thing and you realize same thing. If you're trying to compose a song one instrument at a time without the other ones playing, it probably would not sound very good. So the same thing. If you're. The goal is to do something, you might as well just do it all the way. And you and I have talked about a lot of different biohacks and I know I want to talk with you about some of the things that you've done in biohacking that probably most people don't know about that are particularly top of mind for you as a person who's in tune with the world around you. See what I did there? In tune.

But.

The things that you find either are particularly grounding and really helpful for you, or the things that help you have more of that intuitive spark that you use, the one I described. You sort of perk up and look around and just suck in whatever information is there to see if it hits your filters right.

Sa.