How to Access Your Creativity | Rick Rubin

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin is credited with being one of the most creative and prolific music producers of all time. The range of artists with whom he's worked with and discovered is absolutely staggering, ranging from artists such as LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Minor Threat, Fugazi, Beastie Boys, Jeez is a Mary Chain, Jay Z, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Green Day, Tom Petty, System of a Down, Joe Strummer, Kanye West, Johnny Cash, Adele.

And many, many more.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Rick is considered somewhat of an enigma. That is, people want to know how it is that one individual is able to extract the best creative artistry from so many different people in so many different genres of music. Well, as today's discussion reveals, Rick's expertise in the creative process extends well beyond music. In fact, our conversation takes us into the realm of what the creative process is specifically and generally across domains, including music, of course, but also writing, film, science, and essentially all domains in which new original thought, ideas and production of anything becomes important. Our conversation ventures from abstract themes such as what is creativity and where does it stem from? To the more concrete, everyday tool based approaches to creativity, including those that Rick himself uses and that he's seen other people use to great success. That took us down some incredible avenues, ranging from a discussion about the subconscious to how the subconscious interacts with our conscious mind and how the subconscious and conscious mind interact with nature around us and within us. Indeed, our conversation got rather scientific at times, but all with an eye and an ear toward understanding the practical tools that any and all of us can use in order to access the creative process process. We also spent some time talking about Rick's new book, which is all about creativity and ways to access creativity. The title of the book is the.

Creative Act A Way of Being by Rick Rubin.

This is a book that I've now read three times from COVID to cover.

And I'm now reading it a fourth.

Time because it is so rich with wisdom and information that I'm applying in multiple domains of my life, not just.

My work, but my everyday life.

I cannot recommend it highly enough. Rick has an incredible ability to 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 to look out on the landscape around us, to examine our inner landscape and to come up with truly novel ideas that thrill us, entertain us, entertain other people, scare us, make us laugh, make us cry. All the things that make life rich are essentially contained in the creative process. And to be able to sit down and learn from the Rick Rubin how the creative process emerges in him and his observations about how it can best emerge in others is and was truly a gift. So I'm excited to share his knowledge with you today.

One thing that you'll quickly come to.

Notice about today's conversation is that Rick is incredibly generous with his knowledge about the creative process. In fact, he very graciously and spontaneously, I should add, offered to answer your questions about creativity. So if you have questions about the creative process for Rick, please put those in the comment section on YouTube and in order to make those questions a bit easier for me to find, please put Question for Rick Rubin in capitals, then 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. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Maui Nui, which I can confidently say is the most nutrient dense and delicious red meat available. Maui Nui spent nearly a decade building a USDA certified wild harvesting system to help balance invasive deer populations on the island of Maui. I've talked before on this podcast and we've had guests on this podcast that have emphasized the critical role of getting quality protein not just for muscle repair and protein synthesis, but also for repair of all tissues, including brain tissue on.

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Great to have you here today, Rick.

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

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. 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 or 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 sort of off in different tangents that I couldn't follow. But at one point he just kind of blurted out that if you have an idea, you have to write it down and you may end up throwing it away, but if you wait, it will be gone. And I remember that. And as a consequence, I have a whole system that I use to try and capture ideas. But what are your thoughts on what Joe said? This cloud idea that comes up in one form, in one area of the book, but then I think is thread throughout the book in different ways. How did that come to you and how does it serve you in trying to, I don't want to say extract, but trying to access creativity?

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. They'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 sort of how the art making process works, is like we're making things and we're looking for a feeling in ourselves. And it could be a feeling of excitement or enthusiasm, a feeling of interest, a feeling of curiosity. I want to know more. Feeling of leaning forward. And we're following that energy in our body when we feel this. There's something here, there's something here. I want to know more, I want to know more, I want to know more. But I'll say it's not an intellectual process, it's a different thing. That's why it's hard even to talk about it, because it's so elusive.

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

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

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

Yes, kids are. They're open and they have no baggage. They don't have any belief system. They don't know how things are supposed to work. They just see what is. And if we pay attention to what is, we learn. 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 3 years old or 5 years old and you try singing, you're not singing like anyone else. You're singing with your own. 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.

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

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.

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

It's a feeling in my body.

Is it localized?

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

Do you remember the first time you experienced that?

Probably, you know, hearing the Beatles when I was three or four years old.

Three or four years old?

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

Is there something wrong with me that the Beatles have never done it for me? No.

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

You know, there's not a. I'm glad we can still be friends. I was a little concerned. I was A little scared to ask you that question. I know my taste in music is a little bit obscure, but. And kind of fragmentary, but.

Okay, good.

I've always felt like, gosh, there must be something wrong with me. I like their songs, but there's no juice for me there.

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.

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

Absolutely.

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.

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. Wouldn't be so helpful for me to tell you what those were. It'd be better for us to wait till we were in a place where we could try things and see where it goes. So the first thing is I wouldn't rely on language to do it. It would be more of a making a suggestion of something that's actionable. We try it and then we have more data and either we're moving in a good direction or we're moving away from a. Or 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. You know, when you have two choices which you like better, and I think most creativity can be boiled down to that, that's very different than, I wonder how this is going to perform on certain social media platforms. That's different than what is it? When I'm tasting these two things, which is the one I want to finish eating, and if I were to say, I like this one better, but it needs a little salt and then put a little salt on, it's like, maybe I put too much salt. And you know, when you taste it, 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, 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. You know, it's like sometimes more choices is not better. So limiting your palette to something manageable forces you to solve problems in a different way. Now, in our digital age, music wise, you can make anything digitally. There's no, like, there was a time when if you didn't have a guitar in studio, you couldn't record guitar. Or if you didn't, if you couldn't hire an orchestra, there couldn't be orchestra on your recording. Now you can just call any of those things up. So there's infinite choices. And infinite choices don't necessarily lead to better, better compositions or better final, final works. Understanding how you feel in the face of other voices without second guessing yourself is probably the single most important thing to practice as an artist or skill set. To develop as an artist is to know how you feel and own your feelings. And the key to that is not I know so I know what's right for you. It doesn't work that way. It's just, I know for me, and the reason I chose to be an artist is to demonstrate this is how I see it. If I'm undermining my taste for some commercial idea or it defeats the whole purpose of doing this, that's not what this process is about. This process is I'm doing me and I'm showing you who I am. And you can like it or not, but either way, this is still how I see it.

I love that because in science, you know, having trained graduate students, having been a graduate student, I was very blessed to have mentors, one of who 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. They all had a morbid sense of humor. So they're laughing about this someplace right now.

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

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 you can be badly wrong in science. You can be wrong for the right reasons, but you can also be for the wrong reasons. But people that just had almost a compulsion to do it their way or to believe in what they were doing. And I'm hearing some of that, or I'm hearing that in what you're describing. I also think that there's something about the human empathic process or the emotional process where when we see somebody doing something and they seem to really not be paying attention to what anyone else is doing. I guess the crazy person on the street is one version of it where we go, they're just in their experience and it's just crazy. But when somebody seems to be enjoying themselves or the emotion seems to be real, I think There are a good fraction of people who feel a kind of gravitational pull. And they go, yeah, that. And the best example I have of this is I remember growing up in the skateboard thing. We were the first. We were the first to start doing the baggy, like, sagging the clothes thing. And we got teased endlessly. One year in school, then there was a bunch of hip hop that came out and guys were wearing sagging their jeans or their shorts. Next year we come back and the very same people who were making fun of us were all doing it. And that's when it clicked for me. I was like, most people don't actually know what they like. They like what they like because of the certainty of the people that they like. 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?

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.

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

Well, it 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's not unlike what a comedian does. You know, comedian makes you laugh. Usually what they're saying, it's outrageous, but, you know, that it's right, you know, just no one says it that way or no one has said it that way before, but it's always the truth in it that makes it funny. It's like that. It's the same. It's the same idea as recognizing something that seems really obvious once you see it, but seems like nobody else sees it or no one else points it out. And I feel like science is like that too, because how much of science when once the, you know, the, the light flashes over your head, it's like I got. Just seems like, well, I. We knew that forever. No one knew it. But do you know what I'm saying? It's like it's so obvious.

Absolutely.

It's so obvious. And I think another superpower of artists is this accepting we don't know anything. When we think we know things that also limits our world. We think we know it's only like this. This is all that's possible. We're mice in this little box. But in reality, who's to say that's the case? Who's to say any of the. We could take all of the what we believe in science now and decide to throw all of that away and start from scratch and we probably create a different. A whole different one.

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In a 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 today, Today.

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.

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. 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.

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

Well, I remember, you know, learning. 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, you know, Sabotage was, you know, sort of an outgrowth of a skateboarding movie like Spike Jonze and like the girl movies and those worlds. The Beast Boys and skateboarding were really closely interwoven for a while. Some people know this, some people don't. And Spike sort of formed the Bridge. And then Spike went off and started making more, bigger movies that more people watch. But let's just use them as an example. I heard you say once before that you guys were kind of joking around like BC Boys, these guys doing hip hop. But it was kind of like the hardcore scene in New York, punk rock scene. And it was sort of a joke. There were a lot of inside jokes. When you were working together, was there the thought that people might love it, might hate it, or you just weren't paying attention at all?

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

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

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

Yeah, it's beautiful. Because the word that keeps coming to mind is this. It's almost like a compulsion. There are other options of ways to be and to behave and to function and work in life. But if something's a compulsion, it yanks us away from those other opportunities just enough that we have to get back to it. You've talked before about, and you talk in the book, this notion of the source. And to me, again, I can't help but put my neuroscientist lens on this. I think of the source 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. Sort of 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 is how I'm going to get from point A to point B. And yet when I listen to an album or a song, I mean, I have to assume that at some point it becomes not strategy development or creativity, but strategy implementation. Like, there needs to be, like, the songs are gonna come in this order. And like, I don't know much about music. My musician friends are always, you know, I don't either.

It's not so much about music.

Right, well put. But the ordering of the sequence of the melodies, et cetera. So at what point does one decide, okay, like, now's the time to get into that more narrow focus of. 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?

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. You know, 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, never put out anything. So getting to the point where you're ready to sign off is a good feeling, and it allows you. One of the things I talk about in the book is because it is a difficult thing to do because it's fun to play and it's fun to. Maybe it's not the best it could be yet, you know, to use whatever the next project is going to be 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 a impetus to finish something and release it into the world's a good one. And you said your description of source is something within us. I don't know if I would accurate. If I would say that was accurate. It's definitely in us, too, but it's not only in us, and it's. I think of source as the organizing principle of everything. And it's how everything exists, how the trees grow and why there are mountains and anything that we can see in the outside world. And every discovery and every piece of art and every new design and every machine are all outgrowths of this source energy. Our part of it is the antenna that connects to it. And maybe we're the vehicle for source to allow things to happen in the world.

And thank you for that, because I did indeed misspeak. Because I recall very distinctly in the book you described how the physical world is constrained by the laws of physics and certain things. The imagination is unconstrained. And I think I have this right, that you said the work sits somewhere between those. It's neither of one nor the other, but that ultimately what feeds into all of that, our imagination and the way, indeed, that our brain is a physical entity. The nature 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.

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.

And we love when we are able to peer in at different scales. Spatial scales, time scales, too, but spatial scales, the delight that comes from that. These nature pictures seem like there were more of these in the 80s, 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. Choose 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 taste. And he says, everything that the brain does is an abstraction. I could take a photograph of your face and show it to you and say, yeah, that's me. Or let's say, for the moment, I call myself an abstract artist. Let's just play a game, because I've never been accused of being an artist. And I do three dots and a squiggly line, and I say, that's you. And you say, well, that doesn't look like me. And I say, but that's my abstraction of you. Okay, well, the brain essentially does that, or something in between that, because there's no actual photograph of you in my brain. It's just a bunch of neurons playing what we call an ensemble, like different keys on a piano. And we go, rick, I recognize you, Rick Rubin. And so everything is an abstraction. And it's only once we start tinkering with the parts. And this is the essence of science, to remove and add and manipulate. And the best example I can come up with would be Rothko. And I only come up with this example because I started off in vision science, and maybe this will make the most sense to everyone except the folks who've been blind since birth and they can swap something in here. If I show you a Rothko and I don't tell you it's a Rothko, you may or may not actually think it's that impressive. It depends on your taste in art. But what Rothko did, which was amazing, even if you don't like Rothkos, and I happen to, is that he removed art, all the white and high contrasty stuff. And when you do that, you alter color space, and so the colors look very different. Some people saw that dress a few years ago. Is it orange or is it gold or whatever. That was a little bit of the same phenomenon. I doubt, in fact, I'd be willing to bet my left arm that Rothko knew nothing about the neuroscience of color perception, but somehow got to this place where if there was no canvas showing and no high contrast and the paintings were large enough and on the appropriate wall, you saw them a certain way that tapped into something fundamental. And this is where I think art and science really converge, is that every once in a while we see something that feels amazing to enough people. And not just like the baggy pants phenomenon, not just because other people think it's cool, but there's something there. And again, this defies language. And I have to imagine that in your years of life and music and other creative endeavors that you've. That every once in a while, have you ever encountered something where, like, something fundamental keeps showing up in different form? Or there's something like a. Like, almost like a rule or a principle? Does it ever come about? Because in science, we think of this as, like, this reveals something about our limitation to abstract the world. I hope I made that clear.

Not exactly, but I have a thought. You talked earlier about the drop of oil, the photograph of the drop of oil and the photograph. Or we could use on the other side, like Hubble telescope images of these vast things. In high definition, what we see every day is as impressive as those things, but we're numb to them because we see them all the time. And if we were to look at drops of oil every day in a microscope a month from now, we would not find wonder in that image. So sometimes it's the novelty of not seeing it from that perspective before that's really thrilling. You could, 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 a paint. An experiment I just heard about the other day. That sounds fascinating that a painting teacher recommended where instead of painting, you know, having a model in the room and painting the model, that you have the model in the next room and you go into the next room without your equipment, you don't have your equipment, and you can study the model for as long as you want. And then you go into a different room where you can't see the model and paint the model instead of. And it changes your relationship. 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 how do I form it to get as close to whatever that the experience of that person was? Which the closest of getting to the experience of that person in the painting might not look like a photograph. You know, it might look more different than. More the same to really see what you see. If we think about the Picasso paintings that were inspired by African art, where the eyes are on different levels, they may give us more information than a photograph would give us. I'm thinking about the. When you were describing the sensation of when something takes your breath away. And we all have that. When we see a dramatic sunset. Anyone, you know, when there's a really dramatic sunset, or if there's a whale and if anyone's on the beach and there's a whale, everybody's really interested that there's a whale. Do you know what I'm saying? These feelings of wonder, we get to experience them depending on where we are. Or a dragonfly or a bird flies into your space. These things happen. And when they happen, 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, you know, flying freely, but they do happen. These things do happen, and they, like, break us out of our trance. When these things happen, it's like, oh, yeah, there are birds like this everywhere. I'm just not paying attention. This guy's coming in to, like, tap me on the shoulder, like, remember me. Here I am. You know.

So I would say that the whale example and what you're describing is. It's revealing to us how, in a delightful way, how deficient our perceptual filters normally are. Yes, it's a little bit like the Rothko is revealing how I've Never thought about it this way until this moment is revealing to us. How color normally looks is actually, first of all, not the only way it looks. Those colors, we think, are one way, but all color. This gets into the biology of color. Vision is all about contrast. What something is next to dictates what it looks like. And that's the origin of that dress meme, or whatever you call it. I still can't figure out exactly what a meme is. Someone will eventually tell me. In the same way, when you see a whale, and it's delightful, I think it's revealing to us the extent to which those whales are. The ocean is vast. There's a whole universe there, and we are blind to it all the time. And I think the misperception, or the misconception, excuse me, is that we're delighted because we see the whale. We might be just as delighted because we're getting hit with the contrast of how little we recognize all the time. And in that way, it reminds me a little bit about comedy where. And I've been watching more comedy lately, and sometimes it's the shock, sometimes it's the absolute truth that's revealed. And then other times, what I've noticed, and I saw Rogan do comedy at the Vulcan Club in Austin, which he does every once in a while, and it was small club, and he was leading out this story during his routine or bit, I think, right this bit, he's leading, and everyone knew where it was going. We all knew. And then when he finally told us, it was exactly where we thought it was going, and it was hilarious, and it felt good and it felt amazing. And I thought in that moment, I was like, wait a second. How did he pull that off? That was masterful. Because normally 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 all the other experiences that now become in a subconscious way. Kind of like, ha. It's almost like laughing at this perceptual deficit that we have. It's almost like laughing at how little we actually know, which is what you've said.

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

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. I mean, you don't find too many 40 year olds, some who are wondering who they are occasionally, but almost every young teenager preteen. And so like who am I? You're defining personality. So I always likened it to that. But leaving out the. The sort of critical period biology stuff, what do you think it is about the music that we hear at that time? Are we that much more emotionally tuned? Have we not shut down our sensors quite as much? The songs and the artists don't matter because they're very individual to me. For other people it'll be the Beatles or something. Now I just really wish the Beatles did it for me too. But do you think that's important? Because I could see how it's really terrific. I could also see how it sets up one of these. What? I'll just use nerdy language called 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 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 missing all this stuff that people I love and respect, really love. So I've never worried about it because there's kind of a infinite treasure trove of other things that I do love, but I do Sometimes wonder whether or not my life experience is diminished because I'm not allowing kind of range. And you've obviously worked in a huge number of different genres of music. Punk is one thing. Hip hop is another thing. I mean, Neil Diamond 2, right. Eminem 2, Slayer 2, right. And in some senses, I list these off. I mean, just think about how much in high school, maybe nowadays less so. But even in college and as an adult, societally, we're sort of asked to constrain ourselves to one of these groups. I didn't know it was okay to love Bob Dylan and love punk rock as much as I do until I heard Tim Armstrong said he loved Bob Dylan. And I was like. And recently he told me he loves the Grateful Dead. And I was like, whoa. But I remember when you had to.

Pick both the Ramones and the Clash loved the Beatles. So we can.

Okay, I've got work to do.

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

And.

It always has that impression in us that this is ours. That's my thought of why it continues to last.

How do you wipe the slate clean then? So, for instance, if you're going to go in and work with somebody new. And again, as people are hearing this, I hope that they're transplanting this to whatever it is that they do. Because in the realm of science and podcasting communication, it's not music, 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.

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.

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

Whatever it is, whatever it is.

Yeah, we probably won't be on psychedelics, but we might be levitating.

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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. 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, underlined, took, note, starred 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 want to think of it now more as. As a receiver inside of you, right? Almost like tuning a radio. And then it comes in like the beginning of, like, a Strummer Clash thing, right? You love the radio, Joe. Love the radio, right? And then it comes in clear, and there it is. How do you clear the static? What are some of the operational steps that you think might be more generalizable to regardless of where somebody in, you know, Africa's listening to this?

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

I believe so. I believe so. And I think, in general, to stew over a problem is not the way to solve a problem. Problem. Think to hold the problems lightly. And. And if. And when I say a problem, you know, when we're. 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 never. I may have, in some cases, a potential backup plan if, you know, 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 like, if nothing works, maybe we could try something like this. But that would only be for my own anxiety. That would, 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. You know, it has come every time. But there's something about it. Because I also feel like there might be expectation on me that I'm going to make it happen. And I know that's not happening. That's not how it works. It's. I show up ready for it to happen and am open to whatever we have to do to find that first thread. And once we find the thread, then it's like, okay, we have a. And that thread may lead us to anything, you know, could lead us to in a million different directions, but something about having that glimmer that it's not a blank. We're not looking at a blank page, you know, we're looking at, okay, we have a. We have the beginnings of, I would say a map, but it's a map that we don't know where it takes us. And it's just the beginning. It's just like, it's just a start. You know, you are here. If you have a map and it says you are here, even if you can't see the directions, knowing where we are feels okay. And once we get. And usually again, usually in the first day, first couple of days it happens, but up until then, it's really an anxiety producing situation. And then I can't remember the original question. It's like that was the beginning of something completely different. But do you remember what you asked? I don't remember.

Yeah, well, we were talking about disengaging and is your subconscious into it? And then we were talking about.

I.

Love this, what is your process of wading into this thing? And you're revealing that now. I mean, I think of anxiety as readiness. I mean, 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 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 okay, sitting still, anxiety was designed to mobilize us and not Always to run away. This is one of the. I could, you know, rarely do I talk about the work in my own laboratory. But one of the things that frankly, I didn't discover, but it was done in my laboratory, but this brilliant graduate student, Lindsey Saleh, 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, you know, these heroes, you know, 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 least comfortable when we are forcing ourselves to stand still. So it's an activating energy. And that brings up a word that I have written in my notebook as an extraction of a lot of themes from within the book that you and I have talked about before, which is, and here I'm going to sound very west coast 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 liked from when I was younger was because of the anger that was thread into it or the sadness.

If you think of your relationship to that music, it's a relationship of love. You didn't listen to that to get angry. No, you listened to it because you loved it.

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

Yes, it was true to who you were and where you were.

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

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

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 a. It's a little bit like wrestling when you go, the people that 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 camps. 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, it cut off at 12. Really seemed to truncate the death. 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.

But that's fascinating.

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

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? From a psychological perspective, that makes sense to me.

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

It's quite the list.

Quite the list. There you go, Lex. Run for office. Lex. Just kidding. It's hard enough to get you to respond to my text as it is. So we have these filters and so we're taking this cloud and we're deciding what things are and what I want to drill into your process a little bit more deeply when you approach a project. So everyone meets each other, shakes hand. 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? Where are you in that continuum? And forgive me if I'm trying to surgically go into your process in a way that would disrupt it in any way. But I trust you've been doing this for a while and there's no threat.

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

So that's a leap over to here momentarily.

But then 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, 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.

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.

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

And do you think there's resonance? Like the team of engineers and other people know when it is happening, if everyone's paying attention?

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

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 down.

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

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. People who. Alcoholics who drink enough develop something called Korsakoff syndrome, where a certain brain area gets messed up. And you'll ask them a question like, oh, what are you doing here? And they will come up with incredible stories, sometimes interesting stories that have no bearing on reality. You ask them who their name is, but do they believe that's what happened with 100% certainty. And this actually relates to a lot of the now better understood controversy around repressed memories, especially from young people. You can pull memories from them that 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.

That's good to know.

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 these selective filtering and storytelling. And we are. I think it was Salman Rushdie who said, we are the storytelling species. He probably.

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

Yeah, I think we are story. I would say that the big five, if I had to pick up sort of 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. They're not, as far as I know, 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? I mean, maybe they're in there like a Rogan 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. But we decide whale song is beautiful. We decide cactus are just plants, 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.

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 instances in life where I saw what I thought was a homeless vagrant inside a building at an academics 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. 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. Okay. 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'd 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.

Wow, that's wild.

And I wrote that down. I put it over my desk.

Wow.

And I still tattooed it on my forehead if I didn't already have it, well, committed to memory. But I think I know that's true. Nature we can look at, and it's.

But 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.

Yes.

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 in knowing that, because if you think you know what's going on, chances are you're being deceived. Not because somebody's 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 that we. 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. 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's fake and the world is real. Wrestling's real and the world's fake.

You talk about in the book. We're definitely going 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 for you poke at its authenticity. And when I first heard that, I thought, this is kind of hokey, right? It's just words. And then I realized how foolish I was being, because she's really onto 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. I mean, 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. 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 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 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's 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? 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. Like, it's like the yin yang, you know, it's like 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.

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 and Torrence of 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 micro saccades and you're comparing what you're seeing to what's right next to it, pixel by pixel, pixel by pixel. If 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, 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 Coco Beware the guy that had a macaw. I was obsessed with tropical birds. And he would come in and he'd put his tropical bird on the thing. And then. Who's George the Animal Steel? The guy that would eat the ring. Okay, so.

And I believe he was a professor. Seriously? Seriously. In real life.

Amazing.

He was a professor, but he played Georgie Animal Steel as a wrestler.

And I loved the movie. The Wrestler. The Wrestler.

Darren Aronofsky movie.

It was Mickey Rourke. 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 seen there. That was really eerie. Still kind of haunts me a little bit. There's something about the east coast in kind of fall, all the places that people normally go just for the summer that we don't have out here on 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 kind of 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 change their bodies change, the rule book changes fundamentally.

Our understanding of the world changes in that moment.

Oh, yeah. I mean, the moment that a child understands really what sex is and kind of 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 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 kind of blurry. This is captured pretty well in that movie Stand By Me, where they're hanging around the campfire at night and the kids says, who do you think would win in a fight between Superman and Mighty Mouse? And the other kid says, you idiot, Mighty Mouse is a cartoon. Of course Superman would win. And to me, that's being 11 and a half 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.

That sounds like a really healthy place to be to me. Like that not letting it crystallize. I think that's the, there's where the downfall happens. Whatever it is, whatever it is.

Yeah, we probably won't be on psychedelics, but we might be levitating, you 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. 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 worker 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 note, starred. 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 want to think of it now more as a receiver inside of you. Right. Almost like tuning a radio. And then it comes in like the beginning of, like a Strummer Clash thing, right? You love the radio, Joe? Love the radio, right? And then it comes in clear, and there it is. How do you clear the static? What are some of the operational steps that you think might be more generalizable, regardless of where some. Somebody in Africa is listening to this?

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

I believe so. I believe so. And I think in general, to stew over problem is not the way to solve problem. Think to hold the problems lightly. And. And if. And when I say a problem, you know, when we're. 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 never. I may have, in some cases, a potential backup plan if, you know, 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 like, 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 I know, even though it has never not come, you know, it has come every time, but there's something about it. Because I also feel like there might be expectation on me that I'm going to make it happen. And I know that's not happening. That's not how it works. It's. I show up ready for it to happen and am open to whatever we have to do to find that first thread. And once we find the thread, then it's like, okay, we have a. And that thread may lead us to anything, you know, could lead us to in a million different directions. But something about having that glimmer that it's not a blank. We're not looking at a blank page, you know, we're looking at, okay, we have a. We have the beginnings of, I would say a map, but it's a map that we don't know where it takes us. And it's just the beginning. It's just like, it's just a start. You know, you are here. If you have a map and it says you are here, even if you can't see the directions, knowing where we are feels okay. And once we get. And usually again, usually in the first day, first couple of days it happens, but up until then it's really an anxiety producing situation. And then I can't remember the original question. That was the beginning of something completely different. But do you remember what you asked? I don't remember.

Yeah, well, we were talking about disengaging and is your subconscious into it? And then we were talking about, I love this. What is your process of wading into this thing? And you're revealing that now. I mean, I think of anxiety as readiness. I mean, think about the characteristic features of anxiety. It tends to be a bit of a constriction of the visual field into more of a narrow vision. But that's appropriate because you want to shed what's going on elsewhere. And then even when people talk about the shakes or this not feeling okay, sitting still, anxiety was designed to mobilize us and not always to run away. This is one of the rarely do I talk about the work in my own laboratory. But one of the things that frankly, I didn't discover, but it was done in my laboratory, but this brilliant graduate student, Lindsey Soleil, who's now at Caltech, was that we can often observe animals or humans in very high states of anxiety as they move forward toward a goal. And we always think of moving forward as like this calm thing, you know, these heroes, you know, 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 least comfortable when we are forcing ourselves to stand still. So it's an activating energy. And that brings up a word that I have written in my notebook as an extraction of a lot of themes from within the book that you and I have talked about before, which is, and here I'm going to sound very west coast 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, it was because of the anger that was thread into it or the sadness.

If you think of your relationship to that music, it's a relationship of love.

Absolutely.

You didn't listen to that to get angry.

No.

You listened to it because you loved it.

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

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

I know that collaboration, there's a wonderful chapter on collaboration, but it's collaboration, as you mentioned before, with the universe, not with others. But in terms of the. Especially the kind of work that you've done and do, when it comes to working with artists, I do wonder. And here I'm not looking for any gossip or stories. I've never been interested in gossip. I love stories, but I'm not interested in gossip. But once you see that thread kind of dangling there and you guys are going to go after this, or you grab onto it and you're like, okay, now you have a little bit of a map and an orientation within that map. I often wonder. Scientists are complicated people. People think they're very boring, but they're actually very complicated because they're often living in one limited rule set of the prefrontal cortex. That's how you get good at getting degrees, is by understanding the rules of academia and playing by those rules. People tinker with the rules. You get your Richard Axels, who are very playful in how they go about it, but they are systematic. He's known for rigor. Rigor, rigor. Right. When I think of creative artists and musical artists, I think of a bit more zany or loose or you watch the documentary about the Ramones and you're like, wow, there's all this chaos. 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 that kind of the internal chaos that a lot of artists seem to have, do you think that sometimes is actually an essential piece of the creativity picture that you can't disentangle it?

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 an essential piece of the creativity picture that you can't disentangle it?

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. Much more serious about what they're doing than what it looks like from. If you see them on stage, there's much more to it, and there's much more focus on craft going on and digging deep than would necessarily be obvious. Seeing him jump around on stage.

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 a. It's a little bit like wrestling when you go. The people that they're there because they really love it. We'll talk about wrestling in a little bit. Professional Wrestling. But Floyd Mayweather is obviously a colorful character and one of the best records in boxing of all time. And a few years back I got into watching his stuff 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 is in camp with him who actually was a sparring partner for him. And the lore has it they have very closed door sparring or camps. But the lore is that he would do. Because nowadays it's 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 deaths were occurring when it was more than 12 rounds. For whatever reason, it cut off at 12, really seemed to truncate the death. 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. But yeah, the kid not wanting to disappoint the parent correlated with death. I'll get some of this wrong and then they can come after me. But in any case, this guy who was in Floyd's camp said that he would do 30 to 60 minutes of sparring, bringing in fresh sparring partners with no rest, that he would run three or four times per 24 hour cycle, despite all the critical need for sleep, that his training was unbelievably intense to the point where he would just 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. What we see is often not what goes into it. That people are intensely rigorous.

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? From a psychological perspective, that makes sense to me.

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

It's quite the list.

Quite the list. There you go, Lex. Run for office, Lex. Just kidding. It's hard enough to get you to respond to my text as it is. So we have these filters, and so we're taking this cloud and we're deciding what things are and what. I want to drill into your process a little bit more deeply when you approach a project. So everyone meets each other, shakes hands. Here are the engineers. We're going to sit down. Everyone knows what they're doing because you work with professionals. And you start going, are you trying to be with the cloud or in the implementation? Where are you in that continuum? And forgive me if I'm trying to surgically go into your process in a way that would disrupt it in any way. But I trust you've been doing this for a while and there's no threat.

I'm not at. I'm. 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.

So that's a leap over to here momentarily.

But then maybe, maybe if I. 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, oh, I hope this is. I hope we're really doing this, because I don't know if we can 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.

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.

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

And do you think there's resonance? Like the. The team of engineers and other people know when it is happening?

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

I had 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.

I wrote it down. The brain tells us stories. So you talked about. I walk in certain data points. You recognize me, but it's a real. Like looking at a cloud. Shorthand. We go through our lives doing this all day with everything we see. And the shorthand. In the case of me, you know, me, the shorthand turns out to be right. It checks out. If it's something we don't know and something we're not familiar with, something happens. We experience something on the street, something happens, and it doesn't make sense. Something out of the ordinary happens. First thing is, this doesn't make sense. Then what we do is, again, subconscious, unconsciously. I don't know if it's unconscious or subconsciously. Without thinking, we create a story that explains what just happened. A hypothetical that makes it okay that what just happened happened. And, oh, maybe he's running because his dog ran away and he's chasing his dog. Maybe that's why he's running. And as soon as we have that thought of what it might be, we relax. Because now it's not just a guy running. And this is weird, but it's a guy running always, 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 bugs? Yeah, he was chasing his dog. I saw that. And you won't even realize that it was the maybe hypothetical story that was the first, 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.

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. People who alcoholics who drink enough, develop something called Korsakoff syndrome, where a certain brain area gets messed up. And you'll ask them a question like, oh, what are you doing here? And they will come up with incredible stories, sometimes interesting stories that have no bearing on reality. You ask them who their name is.

But do they believe?

They believe that's what happened with 100% certainty. And this actually relates to a lot of the now better understood people who. Alcoholics who drink enough, develop something called Korsakoff syndrome, where a certain brain area gets messed up and you'll ask them a question like, oh, what are you doing here? And they will come up with incredible stories, sometimes interesting stories that have no bearing on reality. You ask them who their name is.

But do they believe that's what happened.

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

That's good to know.

Yeah, very, very complicated area of the law, as you can imagine, because we tend to want to trust, 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.

That's good to know.

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 these selective filtering and storytelling, and we are. I think it was Salman Rushdie who said, we are the storytelling species. He prepped them for understandable reasons. But in terms of.

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

Yeah, I think we are story. I would say that the big five, if I had to pick up sort of 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. They're not. As far as 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 these selective filtering and storytelling, and we are. I think it was Salman Rushdie who said, we are the storytelling species. He probably know 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 symbol.

Wow. I was gonna say we're storytelling machines, but that's great.

Yeah, I think we are story. I would say that the big fobble 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 or. Right. I mean, maybe they're in there like a. Like a Rogan 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.

I've.

If I had to pick up sort of 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. They're not, as far as I know, but we decide whale song is beautiful.

Yes.

We decide cactus are just plants 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.

That's right. Yeah. So we have these filters, perceptual filters. We only can see and hear, smell and taste what we can. No releasing albums of the Red Hot Chili Peppers caliber. But who knows? Maybe. 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 instances in life where I saw what I thought was a homeless vagrant inside a building at an academics institution. It turned out it was the most accomplished person in the field. That's always cool. Yes. 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 symbol. 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 or rule of conversion to two or three pitches of sound. The music that comes out of it is beautiful.

Yes.

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. Okay. So knowing that and accepting it. And it seems to me that this idea of looking to nature, looking outside, 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? I mean, maybe they're in there like a Rogan 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. Yes. 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'd 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, but we decide whale song is beautiful.

Yes.

You said it's all lies back to nature. The only truth we decide cactus are.

Just plants and it's beautiful to us. And we're right that it is beautiful. Wow. That's wild.

And I wrote that down. I put it over my desk.

Wow.

And I still tattoo it on my forehead if I didn't already have it, well committed to memory. But I think I know that's true. Nature we can look at and it.

To us, but it doesn't mean we know anything about it.

That's right. Yeah. So we have these filters, perceptual filters. We only can see and hear, smell and taste what we can.

But 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.

Yes.

So based on that and then the.

Brain likes to work in symbols. We tend to like to match that person whose shoes are messed up.

That leads us to. We can't know much. Do you know what I'm saying?

Our resolution must be homeless. I've had a couple instances in life where I saw what I thought was a homeless vagrant inside a building at an academics institution. It turned out it was. Was the most accomplished person in the field. That's always cool. Yes.

That 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 in knowing that. Because if you think you know what's.

Going on happened at Berkeley, then the other thing that we do is we tend to.

Chances are you're being deceived. Not because somebody's deceiving you put symbol.

So we said perception, symbol representations. And then.

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 that we. Everything we know is made up. Maybe. Maybe it's true. This brings us to pro wrestling.

Our memories are entirely confabulated based on already deficient symbol and perceptual representation.

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.

Restless 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. Okay. So knowing that and accepting it and it seems to me that wrestling's fake.

And the world is real. Wrestling's real and the world's fake.

You talk about in the book. We're definitely going 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. This idea of looking to nature, looking outside us, is so critical. And in fact, I hope you won't mind me sharing this, Byron, Katie's work and others where you take a statement and you start playing with that statement for you poke at its authenticity. And when I first heard that, I thought, this is kind of hokey, right? It's just words. And then I realized how foolish I was being, because she's really onto something. And there are others too, of course, but in science, that's exactly what you do. But a few years back, I had sent you something by text, and I was kind of in disbelief about something I'd 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 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. I mean, 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, you said, it's all lies. Back to nature. The only truth. Oh, I hypothesize that person will have a deficit in seeing faces. No, the person wandered into the clinic and they go, this person cannot sees faces, but can't make sense of them.

And then you, wow, that's wild.

And I wrote that down, I put it over my desk. You forensically arrive at an understanding. But in general, we. And I still. I'd tattoo it on my forehead if I didn't already have it, well, committed to memory. But I think I know that's true, right? Nature we can look at and we go about things in this way. And considering that the opposite might be true, well, that's a little bit, I suppose, of 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.

But when I say it's all lies. You just talked about our ability to.

How limited our facilities, the complete experience of life. You start seeing the inverse all the time.

So I want to 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's 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? 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. Like, it's like the yin yang, you know, it's like 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.

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 and Torrence of 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 micro saccades and you're comparing what you're seeing to what's right next to it, pixel by pixel, pixel by pixel. If 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 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 Coco Beware, the guy that had a macaw. I was obsessed with tropical birds. And he would come in and he'd put his tropical bird on the thing. And then. Who's George? The Animal Steel. The guy that would eat the ring. Okay.

I believe he was a professor. Seriously? Seriously. In real life.

Amazing.

He was a professor, but he played Georgie Animal Steel as a wrestler.

And I loved the movie the Wrestler. The Wrestler.

Darren Aronofsky movie.

It was Mickey Rourke. 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 kind of fall. All the places that people normally go just for the summer that we don't have out here on 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 kind of 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 change their bodies change, the rule book changes fundamentally.

Our understanding of the world changes in that moment. Oh, yeah.

I mean, the moment that a child understands really what sex is and kind of 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 something. It changes the rulebook 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 kind of blurry. This is captured pretty well in that movie Stand By Me, where they're hanging around the campfire at night and the kids says, who do you think would win in a fight between Superman and Mighty Mouse? And the other kid says, you idiot, Mighty Mouse is a cartoon. Of course Superman would win. And to me, that's being 11 and a half 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.

That sounds like a really healthy part place to be to me like that, not letting it crystallize. I think that's the. There's where the downfall happens.

So I have questions specifically about wrestling, but it's really about process. 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 kind of 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 Coco Beware or Randy Macho Man Savage or George the Animal Steel 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?

I think it maintains that kind of playfulness. Anything is possible. We expect the unexpected all the time in wrestling. And it's a way to have kind of 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.

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 don't know what you don't know. 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 haha. And they'd measure people dopamine, 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 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 ended up 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. Oh, 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. Okay, 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 say said. The availability of that dopamine surge or drip, which is a powerful thing, is 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. 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 describe 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.

Yes, it's the energy it 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 in real life. Well, we don't know it's like that. 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 write, 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. You know, I want. I wonder where the line is. We know that it's scripted 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, think, hey, it's fixed yet. It might be. And historically it's happened, you know, or there was just something in baseball. Where was it? Baseball.

I don't follow baseball. I should know.

There was just a big sports.

Oh, one of the teams that the plays, basically.

Yes.

Was it the call signals of the. Of the catcher?

Yes.

Yeah, they were. 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.

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? It's like.

Because almost anything goes.

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. 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.

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.

Or maybe neither.

Or maybe neither. But it was definitely a statement in that it broke with the norm and it said to me, okay, she creates different rules for herself or so breaks boundaries that other people had. I never heard of anyone doing that before, which 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 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? Yes, everybody.

Yes.

And everyone agrees to kind of suspend outside reality and say, this is reality.

Yes. And they boo for the bad guys and cheer for the good guys, knowing that backstage they're probably friends.

Except for the kids that are 11 who think it's really real.

I don't know. I don't even know if they know. I'm not sure.

The only other person I know who has vocalized their love of professional wrestling to the extent that you have, is Lars Frederickson, 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. Now there's the San Jose Earthquakes, but there was no football team in San Jose. He's from Campbell. But there were no 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. 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 is 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. Look good. Smooth, catching it with the front foot. And the trends change.

Style, style. It's a style.

Style. And style is this nebulous thing of. 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 49, or 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 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? Is there style to wrestling?

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. 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.

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.

And. 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. It's very alive and there's a lot of. Something interesting and unexpected is always happening.

Well, in a much more calm form. I'll share with you something. I 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. Very strategy implementation oriented. When I was a little, 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 like agnostic front show or like chaos, the chaos of a punk rock show for me was kind of this reset. It was like release all this thing and I got energy from it. First time I saw Transplants play and it was like, 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 kind of 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. Like 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. 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 like 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. When I think about my love of punk rock music, for instance, or I think about the ocean, I think of it in that way that we actually have a need to source from things that have both a combination of structure and no structure.

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 and in Hawaii that I walk on every morning when I'm there. And if you walk on the same beach every day, you kind of get a sense of what it's like. And I remember I was in Hawaii, walked on the beach every day for a year, however long it was. And then I left for six months and I came back. And the next time I walked on the beach, it was an entirely different beach. Entirely different. And. 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 was. 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. To our connection with the Earth when we're experiencing that, versus going to a place that has very little change. And you can kind of count on it being the way it's always been, that both of those are interesting things to be able to draw upon depending on what we want to open in our psyche.

I have an almost unhealthy fascination with New York in the mid-80s and 90s.

You didn't live there, though.

No, but since I was a kid. I went there when I was a little kid and I was fascinated by it. There's also a very interesting migration of east coast to west coast creatives, including yourself, that played an important part of my life, just seeing things and hearing things that were meaningful to me. But for instance, I love the movie. I haven't seen the documentary, but the one about Jean Michel Basquiat. Basquiat. Because of the characters that are in it and the huge number of people in that, like Parker Posey, Dennis Hopper and Christopher Wall, and on and on. Those images of New York at that time are so exciting and what was happening. I wish I could transplant myself to that. If I had a time machine, that's where I'd land first. I hear a lot of people say New York isn't what it used to be. San Francisco isn't what it used to be. Whatever LA is. There does seem to be something that feels a little bit disruptive to people about cities changing. But the idea that natural landscapes change is actually. We even accept, like, hey, fires sweep through places and assuming they weren't started by humans, we accept that that change and the reordering of landscapes is normal and healthy. And I always tell myself, yeah, the kids growing up in New York or San Francisco or Chicago, now, they only know it that way. So to them, it's as cool or as uncool as it's ever going to be. They either want to get out or they're loving every piece of it. And this happened for all the people that came before us. So my question is a very basic one. Do you miss the New York that you came up in? Are you somebody who is attached to the past?

I'm not attached at all. I'm not attached to anything in the past. I don't look back at all.

You don't think about, like, oh, in my dorm room at NYU Beastie Boys. This like I miss. No, your optics are forward. Present and forward only.

Present and forward.

Is there a process to that or it just happens to be where you default to?

I don't know. I'm not sure. But that's how I do it.

Nostalgia is not in Rick Rubin's brain.

No.

Oh, lucky you, man. No, I say that with genuine admiration. So you can hear a song that maybe you had a role in producing or not something from the past and you're accessing a state, presumably, but you're not pining for or wishing how it was.

Never.

I'm no psychologist, but I'm going to venture to say that I think that's a very unique quality. I think a lot of people wish for or wish that things did not happen the way they did, that there's a lot of living in the past. There's a lot of this notion of people future trip. I don't actually think that's the default state of the brain. I think a lot of people live in emotional anchors to the past, good and bad.

I have none.

And watching wrestling is one way that you cleanse the palate.

That's true.

When you go to a meal and they pass around, don't really do this anymore, but pass around a little bit of sorbet to cleanse the palate. Turns out there's a. A biological reason for that. There's a kind of neutralization of the taste receptors between savory and sweet, et cetera. So if wrestling is your palate neutralization.

I know that if I watch wrestling before I go to sleep, it's going to be a good night's sleep.

Do you dream about wrestling?

No, never. But it's just relaxing. It's just relaxing.

Do you anticipate, when you watch it, like, here comes the dopamine hit?

Sometimes. Sometimes when it happens, he's going up to the side. Yeah, sometimes it's exciting.

But do you enjoy?

Even then, it's like the stakes are low. It's like I don't really care what happens, which feels good, you know, that I'm just being entertained.

Do they actually get hurt sometimes? You said they do a lot.

Often they're doing. I mean, they're basically stuntmen. So imagine stuntmen getting hurt doing a crazy stunt. Happens all the time.

Well, in the movie the Wrestler, I remember he got staples stapled into him and I thought, that's pretty intense. I once went and saw, I guess they called it Mexican wrestling. I don't know if they call it that anymore. Where the guys dip their hand. Yeah, they dip their hands in glass. This was in Sacramento. And I went saw and I honestly didn't have a stomach for it. I really didn't. I couldn't believe it was legal. It might not have been legal.

Yeah. But I thought there's crazy stuff in wrestling sometimes. Wow.

So before sleep, is that typically when you watch wrestling?

Yes.

Do you think it's useful for people to have some activity that allows them to kind of clear their mind and create peace before heading off to sleep?

I think so. And I think yoga nidras would be a good. It's like yoga nidra pro wrestling. Any of the. Any of those type things.

Yeah. Not watching the Dahmer thing. I won't watch the.

That. I don't watch any horror. Anything or. I don't like violent things.

Yeah, I know it exists. I know horrible things happen in the world, but I certainly don't want to do that before sleep. I think these liminal states before and emerging from sleep are very powerful. When you wake up in the morning, are your thoughts immediately structured or do you enjoy the kind of clearing of the clouds?

It's a slow process for me to wake up, and I like that. I like not engaging too much too soon. I also another. I usually fall asleep listening to a lecture or something speaking, because if I don't, I can get caught in my own thoughts. And listening to something is enough of a focus point that it stops me from talking to myself.

I do the same. My grandfather listened to the radio, to sports on the radio, and he would fall asleep. Oftentimes he was a smoker with a cigarette in his mouth. His wife's responsibility was to stay up later than he did and make sure he didn't burn everything down. And then when you wake up, you said it's a slow process. Is it an hour or two before you feel like you're.

I would say probably an hour. I usually wake up and try to get in the sun as soon as I possibly can and hope to spend. Hope to spend about an hour. And then I'll usually go for a walk on the beach for another hour or 90 minutes, depending.

Are you with family members and other people at that time?

I'm usually focused by myself.

Phone.

I'll be listening to something. I don't look at the phone, but I listen. I listen to again, a lecture or podcast or audiobook. I like audiobooks a lot.

Yeah, I do, too. If an idea comes to mind, do you write it down?

I may. It depends. I like To. I usually would do a note in my phone. I don't usually carry pen and paper with me when I. When I'm walking.

Yeah, I do the same. I do a long Sunday hike or jog. And I will audio script into my phone. People sometimes give me funny looks because I'm talking to myself.

That's a nice way to do it, though. I'd like to learn more of the audio methods of doing it instead of the typing methods. Right now I type and I don't think it's the best way.

The voice memos function in the iPhone and other phones is really good. And they're now companies like Rev.com that will turn those into word doc scripts that are fairly well corrected, fairly inexpensive. No, they're not a sponsor of the podcast. I just happen to use it. It's great. I actually learned that trick from Richard Axel, the Nicorette chewing wild man, Nobel Prize winner. He writes manuscripts by walking around his office, pacing and talking into his phone.

I always think of the Woody Allen movie where the Alan Alda character is talking about, yeah, he's speaking comedy ideas into the phone. It's really pretentious.

I liked that movie about Harvey Milk that Sean Penn played Harvey Milk. Cause Al took place before I was alive, mostly in the Bay Area. But there's these beautiful scenes of him, as I recall, sitting there at his kitchen table talking into a tape recorder at night, talking about how he predicted that he would be possibly assassinated, et cetera. And this goes back to the Strummer thing about writing things down. I think that a lot of people, including myself, feel a little bit of egotistical guilt around who am I to think that my ideas could be worthwhile or something. But I think over time I've come to realize that the ideas about experiments or questions I have about health, they. They don't always, but oftentimes can lead to real, you know, seeds that grow into it.

But it's something that's interesting to you. It's, it's. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. You know, like most of my notes are not for anyone else's.

Right.

You know, for anyone else's use. Like, I. I hear about something that's interesting to me and I think about, okay, I want to learn more about this, whatever it is. And then sometimes those things work their way into things that I'm doing, because the universe seems to work in that way. But I rarely am learning something with the idea of using it. I learn things with the idea of, this is what I want to know this is what's interesting to me. And then often those things that are interesting to me can find their way into other projects just because they do.

Yeah, it's almost like coal or kindling. But the moment that you think of it that way, it sounds so extractive. Right. So you take this walk and you're writing down the occasional idea perhaps, and then what is the next sort of the way that here are less than do this then this than that I'm interested in. Where does your mind shift to? Does it become more structured as the day goes on? Does your thinking become more structured around projects and plans?

I try to deal with things that need dealing with after that and in preparation for going to work. And then when I go to work, it's more like free. This free thing where I'm again hoping something good comes, welcoming something good, paying attention and maybe trying to will it to happen, but never but knowing I don't have the ability to make it happen. I can just be present for it and be ready if it does arrive.

Some of the more surprising and I found really interesting and useful features of the book were about dancing with structure and lack of structure. So when I think of structure, I think of deadlines. So when you are in the process of creating something, obviously deadlines are relevant. Time of day, there's only so many hours in the day where one can stay in the groove or in this readiness to receive. Have you ever found yourself in that mode where you're kind of grinding like, ah, here we are, like, okay, I'm not coming home for dinner and I get the next. We're going to push, like put on the coffee pot kind of thing.

A lot, A lot in the. Over the course of my life, a lot. Not as much now. And one of the things that I discovered through working on the book was the phases of work. We're not required to treat the different phases of work in the same way. Whereas before I did, before everything was in this state of play. Everything had a wide open time schedule. It happens when it happens. And if it takes two years or three years, it doesn't matter. It's not about that. It's only about this thing has to be great. And what I came to realize in working on the book is that there are different phases. And the first phase is this seed collecting phase, which is kind of an ongoing part of life in general. I do that. I do that always. Whether I'm. Whether I'm working on something or not. I'm always in the seed Collecting phase. And there's no deadline or just anything that interests me that I think I want to learn more about or has potential to be something, anything. I hear something, think I'd like to read more about that. Or I wonder if there's a movie about that. Is there a movie about that? If not, maybe there's a movie to be made. You know, like, again, I want. This is something I want in my life. Let's see if it exists. If it doesn't exist, then maybe that's something interesting to pursue. But I know that the desire is there because I have it. So in the seed phase, there's no deadlines. It's just a wide open part. And then the next phase is called the experimentation phase, where we start experimenting to see what the seeds want to do. You're involved, but you're more of a. You're not really dictating the action. You're setting the stage for something to happen, but it's not about you yet. So it'd be like the equivalent of you'd plant the seed, you would water it, you would make sure it was in the sun, and you'd wait. So you're involved, but you can't make it grow, you know, and then when it sprouts and it grows and. Or if it turns into a plant, then you can look at the plants like, okay, how does this plant? What's the potential of this plant? And then. And then that the third phase is the crafting phase, where it's like, okay, I have this plant, maybe I'm going to trim it, or maybe I'm going to combine it with these other plants to make something else with it. Now it's like material that you have. And then finally is the completion or finishing phase, which is the final edit, getting to the version of it, the version of it that's the one that you can share with the world if that's something you're going to do. And I've come to realize that by the time you're going into the completion phase, you can have a deadline and it won't hurt the project. In fact, it might help the project. And I didn't know that before. So I've worked on projects that have gone longer than they necessarily needed to and maybe not in the best interest of the project. Because I didn't know that. I didn't understand that, the timing of that, because I. Because I am so aware of the necessity in the experimental phase to not have a deadline that I assume that that held through the whole project and it's not a clear Phase one finishes and then you start phase two. Phase two finishes and then you start phase three. You move back and forth between them. I'm collecting seeds all the time. I'm always in phase one. And then probably to some degree there's always some version of experimentation going on. Maybe not now, but if something's on a list of things I want to look at, hopefully I'll get to the list and give them some experimentation and see what they can turn into. And then if they do turn into something, then they get to the crafting phase where it's more, okay, now I have this thing. What do I know about this kind of thing? What can I match this with? What can I use this for? How can I be involved as a craftsman and by the end of the crafting phase or deep into the crafting phase, you can start seeing the end. You know, you can start seeing an end and then you can even dictate an end. But I recommend if you do just dictate it for you, not for anyone else. Because if something comes up where you learn, if you set a deadline, a public deadline, and then a new discovery happens along the way and you realize, oh, this could actually be much better than I thought. But I need more time. It's harder to do that if you set the deadline. So I would say have an internal deadline to get to finish it. That said, if an unusual situation comes up and it's better for everything not to meet that deadline, it's one of those rules that you set the rule to break it if it's what's best for the project. But that was a new thing for me and it helped me a lot.

When did you realize that?

In collecting the material for the book and thinking about it. When I realized that it was phases. I didn't know any of this when I started writing the book. I didn't know any, hardly any of the things in the book. They're more. Most of it would be reverse engineering something that I had experience, a successful experience using these methods without knowing they were methods. Just following my instincts got me to something good. And then I would look back at why did I want to do that and is there a principle at play that could be of use outside of this case? And how do I explain that? And that's what the book is. These reverse engineered principles that have led to good decision making and trying to make things.

The chapter on self doubt was really interesting to me.

Tell me what it says, because I can't Remember?

Well, I'll read the first sentence of it, which is that self doubt lives in all of us and while we may wish it was gone, it is there to serve us. And it goes on to describe how to dance with self doubt in not so many words. I think there's a saying that is actually from the landscape of psychology which is generally discussed in a kind of pathological context, which is if nothing matters, anything goes. This is usually the phrase used to describe people who feel as if like there's no use in living, so just go crazy often to self destruct. But there's a light version of this, I realize, where in some sense the creative process seems to have something to do with. If you're not paying attention to what outcomes are like who likes it, who doesn't like it, and you're just doing it for you. You make the rule play. I want to delight myself. Well then anything goes. And you have an infinite rule set there to extract from, at least initially. So as one gets better at their craft, you can imagine self doubt goes down. I think that's the perception of a lot of people. You get better at what you're doing. You can land more free throws as a basketball player, you can hit more home runs as a baseball player, you can produce more platinum albums as an artist. Self confidence goes up, self doubt goes down. But I think you and I both know a number of people who are successful enough to know that oftentimes there's a mirror image to that where people feel pressure because they did it once, now they got to do it again.

Yes. Or that you think you're so good at it that it, it comes easily and you don't have to apply yourself.

Arrogance.

Yeah. So self doubt is a. It's like a. It's a check on yourself. It can either be really helpful or it can undermine you. So it's something we all have and if we let it undermine us, then we don't make anything and that's not good. But when used as a balancing tool in our lives, it serves a great function where we really do. It's okay to have all the confidence in the world and still second guess. Is this the best it can be? You can doubt. I think the phrases in the book, you can doubt your way to a great work, to a masterpiece. Sometimes that questioning allows you to push further than just accepting. I made it so it's good.

Yeah.

I've encountered more people that seem to be driven by self doubt and the need to constantly perform and perform again. Then I Have real arrogance. Just. That's been my experience. Fortunately, I've met some arrogant people in my life, and of course, we never. As a psychiatrist who I admire a lot, and bioengineer who was a guest on this podcast, Carl Deisseroth, said, we never really know how other people feel. I mean, most of the time, we don't even know how we feel. Again, language is a very deprived format for explaining feelings. So we think somebody feels one way, but we can observe, and it could be another, but we observe their behavior. So in the sense of returning to the work, just always returning to process. It sounds like your routine is fairly scripted at least now. But the things that you are getting in touch with, wrestling sleep and dreaming the ocean, there's a predictability of them because you can access them in a predictable way, but they seem to have a lot of unpredictability in them. The ocean is completely unpredictable.

I also listen to a lot of music that I don't know. So I listen to a lot of classical music and less so, but some jazz and a lot of old music that I never heard before. And I like being surprised by music. And sometimes it really catches me off guard, like I shazam a lot, you know, when I hear something I like.

Have you ever encountered music that really works well live, but just does not work in a recording or that is that much better live, but the recording is sort of meh. You don't have to name names.

Yeah, I don't think so. I feel like maybe there's some artists who are great live who've never captured it well on record. Example would probably be the Grateful Dead's a good example of a band where I feel like their albums are not their strong point. But if you hear live recordings, they're really interesting and really different from each other. And that's kind of part of what makes the Grateful Dead interesting, is their unpredictability.

I confess, I had a sister who listened to the Grateful Dead, and I got taken to a few shows when I was younger. And they would do that. What is it called? Space. It was like these drum solos that would go on for hours and hours. This is like the antithesis of punk rock shows, where songs are like 90 to 120 seconds. And I remember thinking, like, what is this? What is this? But people I know who love the Grateful Dead love that uncertainty.