The Singular Life of Rick Rubin

I just made an episode about Rick Rubin's ideas on creativity and how to do great work over and over again for a long period of time. To prepare for that episode, I actually re-listened to an episode that I made about the singular life story of Rick Rubin a few years ago. There were so many interesting ideas and stories in that episode that I re-listened to it twice. So I'm going to replay that episode for you now. Before I do, I want to remind you about the great sponsors and supporters of founders. The first one is Ramp. Ramp helps your business save both time and money, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. I run my business on Ramp and so do most of the other top founders and CEOs that I know. Make sure you go to ramp.com to learn how they can help make your business stronger and more efficient. The next company I want to tell you about is Vanta. Vanta helps your company automate compliance, manage risk, and build trust. 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There's no greater enigma than Rick Rubin working in record production today. His career began in hip-hop. He co-founded Def Jam Records with Russell Simmons in 1984. He produced Rap's first number one album and was widely credited for launching hip-hop as a viable commercial medium. Refusing to play it safe, Rubin jumped ship from rap to metal, leaving Def Jam to found another record label, Def American, where he signed and produced groundbreaking acts like Slayer. After his work on the hugely successful Red Hot Chili Peppers acclaimed album Blood Sugar Sex Magic, Rubin was only seven years into his career and already a living legend. Though he worked with legends like Mick Jagger, ACDC, and Tom Petty in the early 1990s, it was his recordings with Johnny Cash that still stand out as his most astonishing and studied collaboration. By the turn of the century, Rubin had invented, reinvented, or redefined so many musical genres that there was no way to categorize his style. Rolling Stones called him the most successful producer of any genre. But the praise and album sales didn't shake Rubin's focus as he dedicated himself to artist after artist. Grammy nominations and awards poured in, including winning Producer of the Year, but Rick Rubin workaholic and recluse found himself too busy to attend. That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Rick Rubin in the studio and is written by Jake Brown. This book wasn't even on my radar. A few weeks ago, I did a podcast on Jay-Z. It's episode number 238. And in that podcast, I talked about Jay-Z studying and working with Rick Rubin. And he said something that I thought was interesting. He's like, Rick ain't normal. He is strange by strange standards. Rick's 20 years into his career and dude has not changed. He's got his own vibe. You got to love him for that. And so after that episode came out, a listener contacted me and they're like, hey, you should check out Lex Friedman's podcast. He just released with Rick Rubin. And I started watching it and I absolutely loved it. And I realized as I was taking notes listening to that episode, I was like, I need to find a biography of Rick Rubin immediately. So I'm working off of Rick Rubin's biography, the one I just read from you or read a part to you from. I took notes on Lex Friedman's podcast. I'm going to link all this below in the show notes, below the link to the book if you want to buy the book. But I used Lex Friedman's podcast. I took notes on that. Peter Atiyah's podcast, which I'll link to. And then I watched a three-part, excuse me, four-part documentary on Rick Rubin's studio in Malibu. It's on Showtime. It's called Shangri-La. And then I also spent several hours listening to Rick's own podcast. I didn't even know he had a podcast. It's actually really, really good. It's called Broken Record. And listening to him speak for so many hours actually enhanced my understanding and reading of his biography because Rick, just like a ton of the other founders that you and I have said in the podcast, they identify a handful of core beliefs that's really important to their philosophy on work and life, and they repeat them over and over again. So I want to jump right into the book, and one of his core beliefs is in the beauty of simplicity. In fact, it's repeated so much. I had this idea of Da Vinci, if Leonardo Da Vinci was able to speak to Rick Rubin and say and repeat his one of his most famous quotes, which is simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. I think Rick would have smiled and nodded his head. And so we go to the first chapter. It's called production by reduction. This is one of my favorite ideas of Rick Rubin's. So it says when Rick enters the studio, his goal is to record music in, quote, its most basic and purest form. No extra bells and whistles. All wheat, no chaff. And that's what he says. When I started producing, minimalism was my thing. My first record actually says, instead of produced by Rick Rubin, it says reduced by Rick Rubin. And he was producing that album when he was around 18 years old. Def Jam, the company he founds, which is probably the most iconic hip hop label of all time, was actually founded by Rick Rubin in his dorm room at NYU. So we're going to get to a lot of the early history because it's just fascinating. It's the exact equivalent of like the Silicon Valley starting your company out of your garage. He just happened to do it in the dorm room. Going back to Rick Rubin's quote, it's still a natural part of me not to have a lot of extra stuff involved that doesn't add to the production and try to get to the essence of what the music is. You want to feel like you have a relationship with the artist when you're done listening to their record. And then Rick describes how he works. And when I read this paragraph, the thing that jumped out to me most was this is exactly like Steve Jobs and his hero Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, how they would talk about seeing the finished product first in their mind and then working backwards from that. Be like, okay, that's the finished state. Now I just have to go through the steps to get there. And I'm going to read a section of this famous interview. But let me read what Rick says about this here. He says, finding the potential and seeing how to realize it can be the best part. And then the actual work of having to get there is just going through the process. Once you hear it in your head, it's like being a carpenter, trying to build the thing when you already know what it is. So that's the key. You're trying to build the thing when you already know what it is. And so there's this famous meeting that happens when Steve Jobs still is in his 20s. Edwin Land, I think, is in his 70s at this point. Steve Jobs borrowed a lot of ideas from other people. Obviously, he had like this deep historical knowledge and he used that deep historical knowledge and influenced the work in building Apple and Pixar and everything else that he was involved in. But the one person he took the most ideas from was undoubtedly Edwin Land. And so let me read this excerpt from this meeting that they were having. It says, Dr. Land was saying, I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one. And Steve said, yes, that's exactly the way I saw the Macintosh. He said, if I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, They couldn't have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it. So I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say, now what do you think? And then this next sentence, I think, is the most important part. And it really, from spending an unbelievable amount of hours, probably close to 40 hours studying Rick Rubin in the last couple of days, I think this gets to his essence. Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but to discover them. Both of them said these products have always existed. It's just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed. It is a matter of discovery. So back to the book, this is where Rick describes like what exactly do you bring to, like you're a producer, but he's not a technical producer. and really when he describes the role that he plays with the bands and the artists and the rappers and the musicians that he works with I'm like oh he's the founder he's playing the role of the founder check this out listen to what he says and I think it'll make sense to you he says it's almost more like I join a band when I produce a record but I'm unlike all the other members of the band who each have their own personal agenda the bass player is concerned about the bass part everyone else is concerned about their own part I'm the only member of the band that doesn't care about any of those particulars. I just care that the whole thing is as good as it can be. My goal is to just get out of the way and let the people I'm working with be the best versions of themselves. And then Rick goes into the process of like, how do I choose who I'm going to work with? He's going to say something here that I found almost the identical thought when I read all of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. I think it's Founders episode 88 if you haven't listened to that yet but he says i like so little in the first place meaning so little music in the first place very few records come out that interest me at all very few bands do i ever see that interest me at all i don't like anything that's mediocre i like it when people take things to their limit and so that line where he's like there's just so there's very few records that are that are great that are really interesting uh so warren buffett was talking in the shareholders was talking about the fact that him and charlie munger have spent decade after decade of decade of intense focus in studying your business, just like Rick Rubin has spent decade after decade of intense focus on music, right? So Rick Rubin starts his career in 18. He's turning 60 next year, maybe this year, and he's still doing the same job. That's what made me. I'm interested in him in general, because there's so many people that I like, admire and respect also like and admire, respect him. So I was like, okay, it's clear. No brainer. I should study this guy. I can clearly learn from something from him, but I'm obsessed, absolutely obsessed with people that do things for an extremely long time how many people that you know have been working the same job or studying the same field dedicating their their the life to the same thing for 41 years that's also why warren buffett and charlie munger are so interesting to me the fact is they're you know 98 i think charlie's 98 now and i think warren's something like 93 or 92 and they're still working on the same thing they've been interested in since they were you know, in Warren's case, a teenager. And so Warren writes, our major contribution to the operations of our subsidiaries, meaning the businesses that he owns, is applause. It's not the indiscriminate applause of a Pollyanna. That's like an old school word I had to look up. It's just like an excessively cheerful or optimistic person. So he's like, we're not just applauding because we're just excited or we're optimistic. Rather, it's informed applause. That was a really interesting phrase he chose there. Rather, it is the informed applause based upon the two long careers that we have spent intensively observing business performance and managerial behavior. And so Warren's saying, before I get to his punchline, he's saying, listen, me and Charlie have dedicated our lives to this. We've seen a ton of different businesses. The vast majority are mediocre, just like Rick Rubin saying. The vast majority of anything is going to be mediocre. And so if Rick Rubin is admiring what you're doing, just like if Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett are admiring what you're doing, that there's like an added importance on their opinion, right? And this is why. Charlie and I have seen so much of the ordinary in business that we can truly appreciate a virtuoso performance. And if you work back from what he's saying, is most businesses are poorly run, are run in an average manner. Most managers, most CEOs are either poor at their job or average. So it pays to pay attention to the people that are putting on virtuoso performances. They know something that others don't. And then two more things from this section that you and I have talked about over and over again. Love what you do or find something else. Estee Lauder once said, love your career or find another. That's the perfect way to describe it. So he says the bottom line for Ruben to take on any projects is I'm falling in love. When he feels like he's falling in love with the artist, with their work, he's like, okay, this is the person I want to work with. Think about the best products or services that you happen to use personally. They're undoubtedly can be traced back to somebody that gives a damn. They truly love what they do. And then he goes to, this is, I mean, I feel like the entire last, well, on the In-N-Out, the podcast I did on the founder of In-N-Out Burger. I think like he just had one, essentially one thing he just repeats over and over again. I'm not sacrificing quality for anything. Not sacrificing for a partner, not sacrificing it for employees, anybody. I'm going to pray at the altar of quality above all. Rick Rubin says the same thing. I believe in the quality of content over everything else. This is also something he repeats over and over again in all the interviews I watch with him. So we spend, me and the artist, spend a great deal of time working on material long before we ever think about going into the recording studio. This is so, so important. I would summarize it in the maxim that I repeat to you over and over again. The public praises people for what they practice in private. The public praises people for what they practice in private. So before you hear this album where they go into the studio and they record. And in many cases I would go through because the book goes through in order, like from the 80s, 90s, all the way up to 2000s. This book is still almost 15 years old. So it's missing out on his latest stuff. But it goes through his approach and every single project, not every single one, but some of his best are classic projects. Like what role did he play? What were his thoughts? All that stuff. It was very fascinating. So what I would do is as I would read the chapters, I'd also be listening to some of the albums. But that idea about how long, he's like, listen, you can't predict. Sometimes it takes a few months. Sometimes we're working on the same album for multiple years. And so in that documentary, Shangri-La, he's talking to L.O. Cool J. L.O. Cool J winds up being one of the first people he signs. He signs L.O. Cool J when L.O. Cool J was 16 years old. Rick Rubin was 20. That's how I get there. It's crazy how that happens, too. There's a lot of ideas for us in that section. but they're so they're talking now as older men this documentary just came in the last few years and he says something to LO asks like what what increases the chances of like writing a great song and he says just practice be diligent in the process of always looking if you need 10 songs you might need to write 50 or a thousand songs to find 10 good ones it's like fishing you can't say that you'll catch a fish today, but you show up and fish every day and your chances get better. And so that is another main theme, I think, of the philosophy of Rick Rubin is the fact that he's obsessed with simplicity. He wants only what is essential, right? But to get to whittle down, to get to that simplicity, he will encourage you to do more. He is by far a workaholic for sure. And so he's like, if I want to get the 10 most perfect songs, we might have to go through 50, a hundred, a thousand songs. And I think that's extremely important to keep in mind how much work is required. You cannot deceive yourself about what this game requires. That's a quote from Michael Jordan. But I think about like what Steve Jobs said. He's like, listen, when you're designing a product, it's keeping 5,000 things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways. And then I would combine that quote from Steve Jobs with another one of my favorite quotes of his. And he says, there's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between an idea and a finished product. And that's exactly what Rick Rubin is describing to us in this book. We spend a great deal of time working on material long before we ever think about going into a recording studio. I do the exact same thing. The reason I feel comfortable recommending founders to my friends and family and people I truly care about, the most important people in my life, is because I know how much effort and work goes into every single episode before I sit down to talk to you, without exception. which before every single episode, I have to read at the very minimum. I have to read an entire book. And in Rick Rubin's case, I told you, I've probably spent 40 hours deeply ingesting who he is as a person, how he thinks. And you have to filter through all that to maybe get, you know, maybe I could talk to you for an hour, maybe two hours. I don't even know how long it's going to last because I'm barely a few pages into this book. I haven't even got to the beginning of the copious amount of notes I took. But I just, I really believe that with my entire soul. I think the best thing, the things that you and I most admire, they spent a great deal of time, way more time than we could ever believe working on it before we ever get to see it. And so I just turned the page and I ran over my own point. The note I left myself on this is Ruben's advice. Do more. Ruben feels the real work of making an album is in the songwriting, but that work can be drudgery. Writing is dull and unglamorous stuff. For most people, it's really pretty miserable. but if you write 30 songs there's a better chance that the that the 10 on your album will be right will be better than if you just write 10 so he's like less is more but you have to do more to get to less it's the way i would describe rick's philosophy and then he talks about something over and over again he's like listen you you need to have an open mind he's like we know next to nothing so the idea you can predict like you have an idea what a great product is but the idea is you can you're going to get it right the first time he's like you've got to experiment you've got to iterate. I would say this reminds me very much of, I've told you my favorite book that I've ever read for the podcast was James Dyson's autobiography. I read two of them. His second autobiography when he wrote as an old man is very interesting, but the one that he wrote right after having, struggling for 15 years and finally Dyson is on, you know, somewhat solid footing. But when he published that book between then and now, his business is like probably 300 times bigger. But that book is all about the struggle, the early days of that every single person is trying to do something difficult, whether you're starting a company, trying to be a musician, whatever it is, you know that story. You've lived that story. And in that book, he just constantly talks about it. He's like, listen, just experiment. He calls it the Edisonian, from Thomas Edison, the Edisonian principle of designing a product. And I think Steve Jobs would agree with that too. Or not Steve Jobs. I think Rick Rubin would agree with that too, because listen to what he's about to say. This is one of the things we talk about at the beginning of a project. Let's try every idea and see where it takes us. Don't prejudge it. Sometimes it still comes up where someone in the band makes a suggestion and part of me says, that's a bad idea. Let's not waste time on that. And then I stop myself and think, let's try it. Let's experiment and see what it sounds like. And very often it sounds good. So think about the lesson behind with that simple paragraph, right? It's like, you gotta try it. There's so many times in my own experience where somebody says something like, oh, that's gonna suck. and then we do it and it doesn't suck. So clearly the lesson is you've got to experiment. Just don't prejudge it, create a demo, create a prototype, put it out to some customers, whatever your process is, and then see what happens. This next sentence is really important. I double underlined it. Ruben's most valuable quality is his own confidence. The reason that's important is because you can transfer that feeling, that confidence that you have to other people. So every day, my form of practice is I go back and I reread past highlights from all the books. And I have over 20,000 highlights, right? And one I just happened to be reading yesterday which I had forgot because Steve Jobs when he was young one of one of his his best friends had joined like this religious cult in San Francisco Her name Elizabeth And part of the cult's rules were that you have to cut off everybody from your old life. Um, and Steve Jobs just shows up at the cult house and he just completely rejected that. He's like, nope, she's coming with me and there's nothing you can do about it. And so they wind up traveling to this apple farm and they talk about, uh, the fact that And Elizabeth was telling the story about Steve Jobs, and she said something that was really fascinating. And she said he had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. And she talks about the fact that he helped her believe in herself. She didn't have the confidence. Obviously, if you're a really strong personality, probably not going to be joining some kind of religious cult. But the fact that he had this abundance of confidence, it's like, oh, I should have that self-confidence too. and I think Rick is really known for that because I listened to a lot of the people that he produced records for and they said that they're like he brought out the best of me he made me believe in myself and in some cases it's really crazy because people were super successful like Johnny Cash said that Neil Diamond all these people that had remarkable careers and maybe they struggled for a few years and so their confidence was dented which is shocking that Johnny Cash one of the most legendary musicians to ever live towards the end of his life before he starts, I think he did the last three albums of his life, he did with Rick Rubin. He's like, oh, I didn't think I had it anymore. So let's go back to this. This goes back to Rubin's fanaticism with just stripping everything down to its essence. He loves minimalism, simplicity. A good test of a song's metal is stripping down to its basics. This is what he says. If a song is great on an acoustic guitar, you can make 100 different versions of that song, and it's going to still be great. Then he goes back to the importance of preparing before you show up, the importance of practice. He says, as detailed and lengthy as the pre-production process can be, Ruben's productions tend to be quite short on actual in-studio time. And that's what he says, I often make records faster than a lot of other people. It usually has to do with how prepared we are in advance. It's the pre-production time that really makes all the difference. Sometimes it's a couple of weeks, sometimes it's a few months, sometimes it's a year or two to get ready to go into the studio and cut the whole album in a week. My preference is always to get as much done before you go in to the studio as possible. More advice for artists I think we can apply to whatever work that we're doing. You combine really high expectations with the belief that your life depends on this work. Ruben continues to rally his collaborators asking them to set their expectations of themselves really high. If we're going to do this let's aim for greatness. You have to believe what you are doing is the most important thing in the world. And so not only in this book, but also in a bunch of the conversations I heard him have, he talks about his role. He thinks almost like the role is like a coach or something like a teacher. And so there's a little bit about that. And he says, listen, a key part of my job is simply listening. A lot of artists really like having someone to bounce things off of because it's hard to truly know. This is very similar to what when I covered Charlie Munger's fantastic biography, Damn Right is the name of the book. It's episode 221. He said something in that book that I thought was really fantastic. He talks about the role he played with Warren Buffett. And he says, listen, everybody engaged in complicated work needs colleagues. Just the discipline of having to put your thoughts in order with somebody else is a very useful thing. So what the process Charlie's describing is the exact same process that Rick Rubin is describing that he has. Charlie has it with Warren Buffett and some of their business partners. Rick Rubin has it with the musicians that he's producing for. And then he continues describing his process of how he works. I'm going to read you a couple highlights from these two pages. The way I would summarize the section for my own thoughts was that your work is a reflection of you. And so he says, although he's a very private person, Rubin doesn't shy away from making his professional life very personal. I'm doing things that touch me personally and that I feel and I am moved by. Ruben is very clear on what his strengths and limitations are. I don't know how to work a board. I don't turn knobs. I have no technical ability whatsoever. My primary asset is I know when I like something or not. It always comes down to taste. I'm there for any key creative decision. He summed up the drive behind his life's work very simply. I'm just trying to make my favorite music. And so think about that line. I'm just trying to make my favorite music. On one of these podcasts I was listening to, he was asked, do you have any advice for young people? And he says, the only advice I have is to not listen to anyone and do what you love and make your favorite things. Be the audience. Be the audience. Make the thing for you, the audience. You can't make something great with someone else in mind. So then we're going to get into his early life. So he had three main loves that he discovered really early. His love of music, his love of magic, and his love of professional wrestling. So he's got to pick one, right? He obviously chose music. But his love of magic and his love of professional wrestling, he uses those influences in his work. He did it from a very young age. He still continues to use it to this day. And so it says Rubin spent his formative years in the hard rock glory days of the 1970s. I loved ACDC, he said. The group's minimalist approach would show up years later in his sonic approach to recording rock records and even in the way he constructed hip-hop albums. And this is what he says. There's so little adornment. So going back to that main theme. simplify his push for minimalism just i want the essence of the song and nothing more in fact he talks about something that's very interesting let me find my note on it real quick this is really one of the clearest ways he described on like why he constantly simplifies like why i'm not a producer i'm a reducer is the way to think it i'm not a producer i'm a reducer that's a really fascinating thought if you if you sit there and think about it for a while this is the reason he simplifies he says often when you're in the studio there'll be an idea that we need to add layers to make the song seem bigger. But what we discovered is sometimes the more things you add, the smaller it gets. And a lot of that is counterintuitive. You need to discover it in practice. And so back to his early life, it says Rubin immersed himself in the world of rock and roll. He had the requisite long hair, the leather jacket, and a position as a lead guitarist in a punk band. One part of the lifestyle, though, he avoided entirely was alcohol and drugs. And on the Peter Tia interview, they talked about that for several minutes about like why so many people including that rick worked with like they died of drug and alcohol overdoses and so there is a there is a discipline and it seems weird because you look at the guy maybe hear him speak he seems kind of calm and mellow but he has extreme levels of discipline and part of that discipline is just avoiding things like not trying to be brilliant but avoiding obviously obvious dumb things obviously things that that are not good for your life. No one thinks, hey, heroin's good for my life. Hey, excessive cocaine habit is good for my life. Drinking all the time is good for my life. And so it says one of the part of that lifestyle he avoided entirely was alcohol and drugs. Ruben had a discipline and focus rare for someone his age. And he just explains it very simply like everything else. I just didn't want to give up any of my time. I was deeply into something, meaning music. So his love of music kept Ruben from the need to distract or entertain himself with drugs. Before music, his deep focus was on magic. From the time I was nine years old, I loved magic. Even though I was a little kid, I'd take the train from Long Island into Manhattan and I'd hang out in magic shops. I still think about magic all the time. Ruben's fascination with and love for magic and music was something that delighted his endlessly supportive parents. So this is good. His mom and dad just they were he had dreams, not dreams. His idea is like, you can't make money in music like that was just gonna be a hobby. So he's like, originally, he's like, I'll go to NYU. Then I'll go to law school. And the idea is like, I'll just have a day job and then I'll make music as a hobby. And the day job just allows me to fund my hobby. And no matter what, like the fact that he told his parents he's going to be attorney, he switches off. He's like, I'm going to be this music producer. I'm going to go to California. I'm going to do all these things. And his parents are like, OK, that sounds good to me. So it says his parents were endlessly supportive, who showed the same devotion to their son as he did to his passions. Ruben's mother would drive him to concerts in New York City, wait outside the venue until the show was over. no matter how late the hour, and then drive her son home for a few precious hours of sleep before waking him up for school the next day. And then his quote for his senior year, they say his graduation quote was pretty prophetic. And it gives you an idea of who this person is. I want to play loud. I want to be heard. And I want all to know I'm not one of the herd. And so now we get into the founding of his first company. At the beginning of every section, and there's like these quotes, this advice from Rick Rubin, this is the first one. The key to it is doing what you believe in, as opposed to what you think is going to work. There were never any plans to make anything happen. I just did what I liked and believed in it. And luckily, it all worked out. And so the birth of him making music and him eventually founding Def Jam is because he just saw a gap in the market. It wasn't anything more complicated than that. Rubin began his career as a DJ, throwing parties in his NYU dorm room. The move from DJ to producer resulted from a dearth of good material for him to play. I didn't know anything about the record business, but I recognized that hip hop records that were coming out that I would buy as a fan and the music that I would hear when I go to the club were two different things. What I set out to do as a fan, he repeats it, was to make records that sounded like what I liked about going to a hip hop club. So his point is, this is very, it's like, think about the top-down nature of most industries, top-down nature of the music industry at this time. It's like, no, this is what we're making. But that comes from like executives or other cases, like this is what we're pushing out. Where what's taking place in these underground hip-hop and metal clubs that he's going to, and this is the early 80s, that is the bottom up. Because as the DJ, you play something, you get immediate feedback from the audience. the record executives are separated from what the actual customer wants, right? It's like, no, we're pushing this down the channel. Where Ruben's like, why don't we just make records that we like, and we know we like them because when they get played, they're closer and people go crazy. Again, that's like a simple idea that you can build a very valuable company around. I remember hearing Elon Musk give this interview one time. There's a documentary that Elon watched, and I happened to watch it too. It's like, Who Killed the Electric Car, I think it's called. And GM had done an electric car. and they made maybe like, I don't know, like a thousand, two thousand, some small number like that. But that electric car had like a cult following so much that when GM closed the program, they repossessed the cars. You couldn't own them. If I'm not mistaken, they were leasing. I could be mistaken on the details, but the punchline, I remember correctly. And so the people were so distraught that GM forcibly removed their cars from them that when they went to like be impounded and essentially GM destroyed the cars, they held a candlelight vigil. And so Elon said that, and I heard him in an interview one time, he goes, when's the last time somebody held a candlelight vigil for a product? That one simple sentence, like clearly there's a demand here. If I can build an electric car and make it affordable, like people will respond. When is the last time you heard of people having a candlelight vigil for a product? So I just love, I'm completely obsessed with these like these just basic observations. Like, oh, that's pretty simple. I can actually build a very valuable company, a very, very valuable life just off that. And Rick's like, well, this is weird. I'm buying hip hop albums, right? And they sound one way. But when I go to the club, people are going crazy for hip hop albums that sound completely different. Why don't we just make more of those? And so he says, I just saw this void and I started making those records just because I was a fan and wanted them to exist. So this is where he starts Def Jam. He's like, all right. So he does a song. It's called It's Yours. It's one of the first things he produced. And again, because he's a fan, he knows what he likes, and he clearly knows because he's going to the clubs what other people like. He's like, okay, I'm going to make this record. I'm going to make an album just because no one else is doing this, so I have to do it. His goal here is like, I'm just going to break even, right? I just want to cover my cost so I can keep making records. Watch what happens next. This is wild. It's just incredible. This is another example of one opportunity leading to the next opportunity and leads to the next opportunity. You can't skip steps. You've got to get that first opportunity. Then once you get to it, think about it like climbing stairs. maybe climbing mountain. Like once you get to that next peak, you, you look around the corner or look over and you're like, Oh, there's something else farther away. I couldn't see at the very bottom of the mountain, but now I can, then I can reach that. So it says Ruben approached the production of the song from a fan's point of view. Ruben borrowed $5,000 from his parents to press the single imprinting Def Jam records on it. And he says, I was planning on putting it out myself strictly for the purpose of breaking even, making back my costs. That was always my plan. As it turned out this record was a hit. It sold 100,000 copies in the New York area. That was a very big deal. That is insane. And then he does something, he did something smart too on the sleeve. So when you're buying a physical record, right? It's literally a record on the sleeve that the record comes in, he put Def Jam recording and put his address. The address for Def Jam was his dorm room. And that's going to open up the next opportunity. The single sleeve listed Ruben's New York address and that launched an onslaught of demos being mailed to him, which helped fuel the fires of Def Jam. So I'm going to get to why that was so important. First, he's realizing, hey, this business is screwy. Despite the song's success, Ruben never made a dime on the record. So this is all coming full circle because in that podcast I did on Jay-Z, Jay-Z talks about it. He says, listen, man, I studied. The reason I came in the game independent, I own my own record label, which is extremely rare when Jay-Z did that in 96, because he studied the founding of Def Jam and he learned from it. He read that book, I think it's called Hitman, Hitmen or Hitman. And it talks about all the people that were making the music and putting the music out and doing all the work. None of those guys got paid. It was all the record executives and the CEOs that came through. You know, this is a tale as old as time. This is where we are in the story. So essentially like we're living through right now what Jay-Z is going to learn from 10 years later. So it says, enter Russell Simmons. So this is going to be Rick Rubin's co-founder. This is also going to be the guy, Russell Simmons, that Jay-Z talked about. He's like, he was an informal mentor for me. I go to meet with him when we're getting signed to Def Jam. I'm sitting across the table from him. He's like, I don't want to be your artist. I want to be you. I want to be the hip-hop mogul. There was no such thing as a hip-hop mogul until Russell Simmons appeared. He was the very first hip-hop mogul. So it says, enter Russell Simmons on the recommendation of some other record owner. so some other record owner record label owner is the one that's going to introduce rick rubin and russell simmons and the reason that rick wanted to meet with him because that guy said of simmons no one promotes rap records better rubin felt that while most of the rap records at the time weren't any good see that that thing same thing pops up a lot of stuff's out there's mediocre so i'm thinking hey most of the rap records aren't very good the ones that were good always had russell simmons name on them so he's the manager of the best rap acts around in rubin's opinion at the time. That partnership would revolutionize hip-hop began with a simple meeting. They meet at a party, and Russell's talking about, hey, that album you just produced, the one you sold 100,000 copies, I love it. He said it was his favorite record, and he was excited to meet me, and he couldn't believe that I was white. There was nobody white doing anything in hip-hop. And here was his favorite hip-hop record made by a white guy. I was really excited to meet him. He was already a mogul of rap music, even though there was no business. It was just a small underground scene. The two became fast friends. We did everything together. We would be together in the studio every night. Ruben and Simmons shared a love of hip hop, a vision of where they felt it should head both musically and commercially. And one other thing, both had hit records under their belts, but no profit to show for it. And so they both arrive at the conclusion like this is dumb. These people aren't paying us. So let's just do it ourselves. And so it says Def Jam was set up to overcome business obstacles. Instead of going to somebody and asking them to, this is Ruben talking, instead of going to somebody and asking them to do things that needed to get done and not getting them done, it's just easier if we take on the responsibility. It wasn't going to get done unless we did it. So Ruben needed an artist to launch Def Jam, the hip-hop version of Def Jam, right? The one he's doing with Russell Simmons. And the reason I said it's the importance of stacking one opportunity on another is if he'd never had that hit single and if he never put his address on it, he would have never met LL Cool J. So that's one opportunity he had to get to before he got to his next opportunity. This is the next opportunity. Ruben had just the right artist to launch the new formalized partnership, a young rapper whose demo was one of the hundreds that had been sent to his dorm room. LL Cool J, who is 16 years old at this time, and Ruben's giving us context of just, he's in the very early days of what is now a gigantic industry. The hip hop industry is massive. He says there were no stars in rap music. It was really just a work of passion. Everyone who was doing it was doing it because they loved it. Not because anyone thought it was a career. We just tried to do something we liked. How many times has he repeated that? We're not even one quarter of the way in the book. And he said, I just did something I loved. Just try to focus like I'm the first listener. I'm the first customer. We just try to do something we like. There was no expectations whatsoever. The only hope was that we would sell enough records to make enough money to make another record. So the partnership between Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons is only going to last for a few years. But while they were together, they actually they were well matched because it's really important to find a partner that has the skills you lack. So Rubin is going to be in the studio with the artist making the records. And then Simmons is going to be the one promoting them. And he was really good. Both of them were really gifted at their respective strengths. So it says, Ruben would then pass the baton to Simmons, whose promotional expertise pushed the fresh new sound of the music onto the airwaves of local hip-hop stations and into the city's hip-hop clubs. Simmons had a talent in old-school hustling. So they wound up selling so many of these singles that CBS Records gets their attention. And they offer a development deal with a $600,000 advance, which is more money than they could even imagine at the time. And so it says time would prove this deal to be merely a foot in the door that they would kick open a year later. But for 20 year old Rick Rubin, it was a major milestone. I sent a Xerox of the check to my parents. That's when this stopped being a hobby. And so then Russell Simmons has a really smart marketing push. He's like, let's make a movie about the story of the early years of Def Jam because we're just a few years into the story. That movie he winds up getting made is Crush Groove. and it was a movie but it was really content marketing for Def Jam and their artists. You can actually find the entire Crush Groove movie is on YouTube right now. I was actually watching it last night and Rick Rubin plays Rick Rubin in the movie. It's fantastic. Crush Groove was a marketing vehicle Russell Simmons dreamed up to introduce their label and artist roster. So it introduced the world to people like Fat Boys, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, and Run DMC. And the reason I'm bringing this to your attention is that the next sentence that I double underlined that I think is extremely important for all founders or anybody trying to get attention to their work, right? Russell really cared about finding new ways to expose their music to a bigger audience. It's very creative. And the person I think did this the best out of anybody in recent memory to me is Michael Bloomberg. And I didn't know that before I read his autobiography. It's Founders 228. If you haven't listened to it, the main reason to listen to that podcast, other than the story is insane. The fact that he owns that company, It still a private company makes billions of dollars a year right now Michael Bloomberg had a lot of creative ways to get his product in front of potential customers And that skill is the foundation what allowed his business to grow into a large, extremely profitable business. But it's just so clever, the way he thought about these things and what he actually put into work, very similar to this. Like the idea is like, who's going to think, hey, I'm starting a record label. I've sold a little about singles clubs like my music the radio likes my music i have you know four or five acts signed to my record label all of them are going to be super famous in their own day but they're not famous yet and it's like hey let's make a movie this is 1988 maybe 80 somewhere around there 86 like mid to late 80s how the hell did you even figure out that idea like that's remarkable and so on the back of some of the success of their music that they put out they wind up finding a Warner Brothers studio agrees to fund the $3 million film budget. So it says Warner Brothers agreed to finance the $3 million film budget. The picture is Green Light led CBS, who they had signed their deal with, to change the terms of their original development deal. These are the people that just gave them 600 grand, right? Now they changed that like, wow, you guys are getting real popular. They changed the original development deal with Def Jam, signing Def Jam to a $2 million distribution deal in what Russell Simmons described as the greatest opportunity in the whole world. And again, this is happening in 85. So they signed that deal in 85. So think about that. Within one year, they go from $600,000, this is amazing, can't believe this is happening, to signing for $2 million and having a major motion picture studio agree to finance $3 million of what is essentially content marketing in the form of a movie. And it winds up being a smart investment by Warner Brothers, by the way, because they spent $3 million on the movie and the movie winds up making $11 million at the box office. one of the biggest hits that Rick Rubin's going to have in this point of his career like a mainstream hit Beastie Boys winds up being the first hip-hop album ever to go to number one which he produced but he does he has the idea to do this crossover song between Run DMC and Aerosmith and Run DMC is kind of well known at the time Aerosmith is like orders of magnitude more famous and this would have never happened if Rick Rubin didn't have an excessive, excessive amount of self-confidence. This is something that is talked about over and over again by the people he works with, that he believes so much that he makes you believe. Very similar to that Steve Jobs quote I just read to you earlier. And so I'm going to get into this. It says, Rubin's desire to work with Rum D&C dated back to the early 80s when Rubin, upon hearing the group's first music, had boldly commented, this is the real shit, but I could do it better. And so that level of self-confidence, right? You need that level of self-confidence is mandatory to even approach. So he's like, yeah, not only can I do it better, I'm going to convince Aerosmith, who were again, world famous. They're like operating in a completely different world than Rick Rubin. He's like, okay, well, I'm going to sell both Run DMC and Aerosmith on Walk This Way. So it says Rubin sold both groups on the idea. And once they were together, it was interesting. This is what he says. It was interesting because it was two very different cultures. We were all kids, but Aerosmith was already Aerosmith. They carried themselves in a different way than we did because they were real rock stars and we were college students. It was an awe-inspiring experience for me because I grew up on Aerosmith and I loved them. I also knew how great they were. So I became fairly, and then think about this, how crazy it is. Like I admire them. They're almost like my idols. And yet when he gets in there and running the production of the music, he still applies his excessive, I wouldn't say control because that's not the right word, but it's like his high standards. So he says, so I became fairly demanding with what I asked them to play and contribute. Both sides really didn't know what to make of it. And so this is another example of something that Ruben uses for his entire career. He wants authenticity, just like other humans. Like he wants it to be really simple. So his vision for the music, for what they're doing with Run DMC and Aerosmith, is also the vision that he applies over and over again. His vision was to capture something raw, musical, and ferocious. the music that we liked wasn't glossy and shiny he said it sounded rough and raw authentic it was raw like a documentary so it's like i'm not making a movie i'm making a documentary that's interesting it was raw authentic we use that word raw over and over again it's not glossy and shiny it sounded rough and raw and then on the very next page he continues to elaborate on that perspective The music we were making wasn't slick. There's a homemade and handmade quality to it. So think about that. Because music is a product that gets to scale, right? It's not just one person's listening to it. How many people have listened to Walk This Way over the life of that song? Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people. So I thought that idea was really fascinating. It's a handmade product at scale. A handmade product at scale. So after that, he gets the biggest opportunity, the biggest breakthrough of his early career. And that's when he's going to produce Beastie Boys' album, Licensed to Ill. This winds up being what he's working on. Winds up being hip hop's first number one album. It's the first time it's like, oh, wow, this is the very beginning of an industry that's going to grow even larger. Think about this, 10 years later, Jay-Z is still looking at it. That's why it's so important to like, in my opinion, to go back and study the very beginnings of industries, right? We've done this, you and I have done this together. beginning of Silicon Valley. Not only is like the computer chip industry, the personal computer industry, the software industry. I just did a podcast on the very beginning of the aviation industry. I've done like 13 podcasts on the very beginning of the American automotive industry. There is so many things that just happen over and over again. They're all making different things. Some people are making computer chips. I'm making software. Some people are making planes, cars. Rick Rubin's making hip hop music. It's the same thing. You think it's too late. There's over and again. People are like, oh, you know, it's too late. The ship has already passed. No, these things take forever. So at this point, we're in the story. Ten years later, Jay-Z's like, hey, I can't say that I thought I was going to get rich off rap. All I knew that it was clearly, clearly going to be a lot bigger than it is now before it goes away. And then think about the growth between 1996 when he said that and in present day, you know, 25, whatever, 20, 25 years later, it's still growing. So he was just dead on right about that. So just want to pull out one thing from this section. And then I want to transition. I got a ton of highlights with the book, but I want to go through my notes that I have actually written on all these talks that he gave, because I think I'm going to forget to do that. And there's a lot of valuable things. So maybe I'll just give you like a stream of consciousness of Rick Rubin's ideas, and then we'll jump back into the book. So this is Rubin talking about, and the reason I want to read the notes is because this is something that he talks about over and over again. It's only done when it can't be any better. But once something's done, just like give it the time to be what it needs to be, but then move on. He's got a really interesting way to not have regrets, which I think is very powerful for us because having regrets is so detrimental to you. It's so common in humanity and also detrimental to us. So it says Ruben maintained total autonomy over mixing the record and it was in no rush. He says, listen, I would love for it to be done, but the reality of the creative process is it takes however long it takes to be great. Very similar kind of echoes with these fights that Walt Disney would have with his brother. His brother was his partner. His brother's running the money. Walt Disney's obviously making the products. And he says, I'll tell you what it costs when it's done. We're innovating. I don't know why these things pop to my mind when I read these certain sentences. That always draws back to something else you and I have talked about. But that's what I thought of there. He's like, listen, I would love it if it would be done. You know, I clearly don't want to be spending more time and money than it needs to be, but it's not perfect yet. It's not what I'm, I'm not happy with it. And he was right to do that because he held on to it till he was ready and then he releases it and it just opens up opportunity for literally millions of people in the future that's how crazy like that's how we you and i know like if you have founder mentality like you know the world's not static we can push it we can bend it we can actually influence the external world it's crazy at this point he's he's mixing and he's recording this album in a recording studio that used to be a giant old chinese restaurant and it's like this biggest dumpy place because they don't have a lot of money and you're just able even without the best equipment the best resources he's able to make something truly truly great i find that personally extremely inspiring and then before i jump to my notes i just want to read one sentence to you that i double underlined it's i just said listen we're still so so early in all these things in the internet in podcasts and just a million different in technology in general. So it says rap music as recorded work was just eight years old. Okay, so I'm just going to run through a couple, like give you a stream of Rick Rubin consciousness so you can download. These are, I don't even know if these ideas are really related. I just thought they were so interesting that when I heard them, I pressed pause and kept rewinding till I wrote it down. Basically, I'm reading you like, oh, I need to remember this. Like, I don't want this to just to disappear. Like, I want to have record of it so I can go and reference in the future and maybe it gives me an idea. Maybe it doesn't give me an idea today. Maybe it gives me an idea 10 years from now, five years from now, whatever it is. So he has this idea he calls the ruthless edit. Again, his whole thing is you got to do more to get to less, right? Less is better, but you got to do more to get there. So he says, listen, you made 25 songs. You need 10. Do not pick 10. Ask yourself, what are the five that I absolutely cannot live without? And then before you add anything else, ask, what could I add to these five that I cannot live without that would make it better and not worse? So that is the idea of ruthless edit. I love that idea. This was, this might be my favorite thing he said, because I have, I have this like negative internal monologue that I think is absent from Ruben. And I think if I learn how to adapt like his mindset more than my own mindset, I'll have a more, like I'll have more enjoyable experience for the rest of my life. Right. So he says, do you have an engine of constant dissatisfaction? Like, do you have this constant self-criticism that, oh, I could have done better, which is very common that I've heard a lot of people have. But his answer was really surprising. He says, no, I'm pleased with the work that we did. I'm excited to keep working. It's fun. I don't know what else I'd do with myself. I like making things. It's fun. I feel like, oh, this is so good. This is so good. I feel like it's my reason to be on the planet. So I just keep doing it. And he elaborates like, how do you arrive at this where you just don't have regrets? If it could be better, I would have kept working on it. If it could be better, it's not done. I have done everything I can to make it the best it can be. I can't do more than that. So there's nothing to be critical of. And this is his framework for his music, this mental model that I think I'm going to remember and take with me. My work is almost like a diary entry. Everything we make is a reflection in a moment of time. It could be a day. It could be a year. It is a reflection in a moment in time. So it's like, I can't go back. His point is like, I can't go back and listen to stuff I did 25 years ago. Like, oh, I do it differently now because I did it to the best of my ability as that version of Rick Rubin. It is a diary entry. It's not perfection. I like that idea. I think that's actually really, really helpful. And he also says something really, really smart. He just nails regret. It's just a fantastic explanation of why it's something you have to do. You don't want this in your older life or when you're older, rather. And so they're talking about this song that he did with Johnny Cash before Johnny Cash died. And it's called Hurt. And it is a cover of the guy from Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor, wrote the song when he's 20. OK, so he writes the song when he's 20. It's all about regret and pain and all this other stuff. And so Rick Rubin is going to say, hey, coming out of Trent Reznor at 20 is one thing. Coming out of Johnny Cash when you're 70 years old, you're at the end of your life, it has a completely different meaning. And so Rick Rubin just nails regret. I'm just going to read it to you. When you're 20 years old and talking about regret, it's heartbreaking, but it's heartbreaking in a different way because you have your whole life to figure it out. When you're looking back over your life at the end of your life with regret. It's brutal. It's brutal. And I love that he repeated that the way he ended. It's brutal. It's brutal. He said it twice. It's the thing we have to avoid at all costs, because at that point, there's nothing you can do about it. Here's another random idea for you. The first thing that Rick asks when he's working with somebody else is, what's the first thing that got you into music. So understanding of why are you doing what you're doing. It's so important. We talk about that all the time, not only for us to know why we're doing what we're doing, but then to explain that to your customers. Customers resonate. They want to know why you're doing what you're doing. Another great line, this one comes from the documentary. He says, these things that we don't understand and cannot explain happen regularly. And so these things that we don't understand and we cannot explain, they happen regularly. Another great line, negativity is the enemy of creativity. Then he talks about how magical music is, why he thinks magic and pro wrestling, they all combine, they all understand the same thing. And he says, they allow you to understand principles of how there is the surface reality where I think most people spend their time. That's what he's saying. And then there's this whole other bigger story going on behind it. So think of you, think of you watch a magic trick, you see it happen, you can't believe. And he's like, that's what most people are like, oh, I can't believe that. That's what they're focused on. Rick is always focused on like, what's the actual story happening behind it? Same thing when you listen to an album. He knows I had to do that song a thousand times. Wrestling, it's almost like theater, like live theater. Like you're engaged in what's happening in the ring. I'm focused, I'm interested in like, what's the story? How did they, they wrote out the storyboards? Who are the characters? What roles are they playing? What are the psychological effects they're doing? And so that idea, there's always this whole other big story going on behind it. Then he talks about the importance of ignorance, of being naive before you try something. This has popped up over and over again in the history of entrepreneurship. There's so many examples, like the founder saying, hey, if I knew how hard, if I knew what I didn't know, I would never start it. If I knew how hard this is going to be, how long it was actually going to take, I wouldn't have ever started. So he says, the amateur mind possesses a valuable lack of knowledge about rules. When matched with passion and gumption, gravity ceases to exist and new things take flight. That's just fantastic language. When matched with passion and gumption, gravity ceases to exist and new things take flight. So he talks about using what he learned from professional wrestling in the early days of his career as marketing. There's a video they played in the documentary that's happening in 1985 when he's trying to go out and promote the Beastie Boys album. And he's like yelling into he's getting an interview on the streets of New York with a Beastie Boys and a reporter. And he's like super hype. And you hear that. And he's like, people don't realize, like, I was just copying the bad guy wrestler character that I grew up on. He goes, that was performance art as a way of marketing. and so he's yelling he's talking to the um to the reporter it's not like in a rude i mean not really like i mean i didn't take it as like a mean way but he's like oh i'm obviously talking over your head this interview is over because he's like the bc board is the most important thing to ever happen to music you know if you ever watch professional wrestling this like they're over the top like this is the best thing ever happened like this is the most important thing it's completely provocative i guess is the point and the follow-up question to this was interesting they're like well he was asked like using over the top professional wrestling marketing efforts? Did it matter to you that a lot of people didn't understand what you were doing? So people thought, oh, this guy's a jerk. Maybe this guy's crazy. He's yelling, saying he really believes the BC boys is the best thing ever happened to music. You know, how can you say that? There's a Beatles. There's all these other people that existed before that. And so he's like, did it matter to you that a lot of people didn't understand? And he had a one word answer that was perfect. Never. Let's go back to this unbelievable self-belief he had. They interview his college roommate and he said rick was the most confident 19 year old i ever met even if he didn't know he said and did like he knew another thing i love from the documentary he has i mean this shouldn't be surprised to you and i at this point but he has extensive historical knowledge about his industry so in the documentary shows us like this beautiful library like this two-story library he has in his studio and it contains all kinds of things like artifacts not only is it like uh he takes he's got a lot of old books in there music movies he's essentially taking it using the world as a classroom i guess is the way to think about this use the world as a classroom and then apply like all the ideas you're using to your work and he actually has a copy of the very first record that ever mentions the word hip-hop the industry that he is partially credited with founding and he went down and tracked the record the first time that the word hip-hop ever ever appeared in recorded music was in 1968 almost 20 years before the founding of Def Jam and what I was what I was interested in about that is in the documentary so we already go into like you clearly see he'll constantly ask his artists to go back like he's working with uh Lincoln Park at the time and he's like hey go back and listen to all these records and it's records that were made like 30 or 40 years before and what was interesting is how some people didn't so he's meeting in 2018 with this rapper called Little Yachty. And he's a young kid, so I'm not, like, at the point, I think he's, like, 22 or something like that when he's recording this, so, when he's doing the documentary. So no shade to him, but, like, he blew up real fast in hip-hop and has since disappeared. And it shouldn't make, it shouldn't exactly be surprising that he disappeared, because this is what he says in the documentary. I don't know nothing about the history of rap. I was born in 1997. Why do I need to know about what somebody else did? Why do I need to go research somebody else. And so this idea, which is like, it's normal for humans to fail to learn lessons of history. That's why people that study history, that make it a part of their lives for the rest of their lives, just have a massive advantage. This is a very old idea. Cicero said this over 2000 years, almost 2000 years ago. To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. Little Yachty had remained a child and his career has suffered as a result. Going back to great ideas that Rick Rubin said, he says, all the most interesting things happen when you are making stuff no one else is making. A few more great quotes from this documentary. This says somebody describing Rick Rubin, which I love this line. He's living in four different centuries at once. Another great description of him, kind of this reality distortion field. I don't think that he's backed in reality at all, which is probably one of the reasons he's so successful. And then two more lines from the documentary, which I think is just the perfect mentality to have. My reason, this is Rick talking, my reason to exist is to be of service. And then the last thing, mainly I'm a researcher. I'm always looking for a better way to do everything. And I never accept whatever the accepted version of something is as, oh, that's how it's supposed to be. It is an endless search. So let's go back to the early days. So his early career, he hasn't left Def Jam. He hasn't left New York to go to California, starts like the second part of his career. And so Chuck D, which is the main, I guess, rapper in Public Enemy. And he's like, OK, I got to sign this guy. I got to work with him. And this is really just the value of persistence. Feeling that Chuck D was the next greatest artist, Ruben had to convince Chuck D of all that. This is Ruben describing that. He considered himself a grown man with a family and a regular job. I put his phone number on a post-it note on my phone and I would call it every day and just keep bugging him, saying, we really have to make a record. It's time to make a record. It took six months until Chuck D said, maybe. And think about the alternate reality, because Public Enemy becomes one of the most influential hip-hop groups of all time. They're hugely influenced to all the artists that come after them. And the idea is like no Chuck didn even think it was possible He like you know there no such thing as a career in rap And then not only that it for like young kids I old I got a family I got a normal job And if it wasn't for Rick Rubin's persistence, there's a very real possibility that Public Enemy never existed. And again, I think that's another example of like him transferring his confidence to the abundance of confidence that he has on other people. Like that's just extremely valuable for people to do that. It's almost like a version like an act of service. It's like, I believe in you so much. I'm going to make you believe in you. So at this point, he gets interested in saying, hey, I want to also produce a lot of rock records. This is going to cause a split of Def Jam. But before I get there, it goes back to this obsession with simplicity. He says, it doesn't matter who I'm working with. I apply the same basic forma. Keep it sparse. Strip down the sound to something straightforward but powerful. And so this move by Rubin to go more into rock is actually going to cause a rift. And I wrote, this didn't take long because you figure their partnership only lasted, what, three, four years? If that. So it says this shift was an indication of the growing distance between the partners of Rubin and Russell Simmons. And so what he's about to do here by instinct is something that is mentioned a lot of times by people that admire him. Like he had the money, the fame, and the success of Def Jam. Who at almost the peak of the popularity says, nope, you're causing me to compromise what I want to make. So I'll just leave it all. he leaves Def Jam Russell still runs it and so they wind up having a meeting Rick says he can still remember where they went and having this conversation even many decades later and he so he says he asked Russell do you want to leave and he said no and I said okay fine I'll leave Ruben said if I would have stayed it would have been completely different I don't know if it would have been the same successful thing that it is the reason I left Def Jam had to do with mine and Russell's vision of our company growing apart Ruben said that he and Simmons had been stepping on each other's toes a lot and kind of growing apart creatively. They weren't communicating. I felt like my vision was being compromised, and I'm sure he felt like his was too. Reflecting on this time with Def Jam and the label's influence on the hip-hop scene, Ruben said, it really was a wave. We just happened to be in a good spot on the wave. The wave was coming. And that was really interesting because the way he said, he's like, listen, I was just the right person, the right set of skills, the right point in history, but that wave was going to happen with or without me. That's exactly what convinced Paul Allen and Bill Gates to stop focusing on school and going all in on Microsoft. And so there's a fantastic paragraph that's in the biography of Bill Gates called Hard Drive. But it says, Gates and Allen were convinced that the computer industry was about to reach critical mass. And when it exploded, it would usher in a technological revolution of astounding magnitude. They were on the threshold of one of those moments when history held its breath and jumped, as it had done with the development of the car and the airplane. And this is the punchline. This is the most important part. They could either lead the revolution or be swept along by it. So one of the most successful albums that Rick ever produced was the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magic. I just got a couple highlights from this chapter that I think are just applicable to all kinds of great work in all kinds of fields. So the first thing is the importance of differentiating your product. So it says they declared that the Red hot chili peppers have never been part of any movement or any collective thing or any existing category we just try to create our own categories another line from this it says it's not about being this is rick talking about what when he was working on this album it's not about being fancy it's about serving the song it's not about being fancy for our purposes it's about serving the customer and this is the band describing what's like working with rick on this album his participation was incredibly nonchalant he just comes by and chills out sometimes horizontally he's got a pen and paper and is somewhere between a nap and a meditation so that that line's kind of funny it's like some comes by uh sometimes horizontally so there's you'll see this in documentary i saw this in an ad samsung did for jay-z's album like a decade ago where jay-z invites the producers that worked on this album it was like pharrell timberland rick rubin they're all in the studio in new york city and they're playing the album and rick just lays down on the couch and kind of closes his eyes and taps his feet. So that's something he's been doing for a long time. They said he has an incredible head for arrangements. And again, part of that, at this point, he's 20 years into his career, maybe 15 years into his career, how much music has he listened to? How much music has he studied? Again, he has this encyclopedic knowledge, historical knowledge of his industry. And I think it's really important for two reasons. One, no one can, once you establish a space of knowledge, no one can take it from you. And two, it's going to constantly inform that historical knowledge of studying the great work that came before you is going to constantly inform all the work that you do for the rest of your career. And then this is Rick Rubin describing why he refuses to chase fads or trends. This was fantastic. He says, the newest sounds have a tendency to sound old when the next new sound comes along. But a grand piano sounded great 50 years ago and will sound great 50 years from now. I try to make records that have a timeless quality and so one of the things that he did that he helped Red Hot Chili Peppers was was their bassist is probably the most famous bassist in the world this guy named Flea but what Rick is about to say here is I really think it goes back to he was talking about at the beginning of the book the role he plays is like listen every band player every person on the team you know is focused on their role I'm the only one that's not concerned about your role but how your role affects the whole So it says Rubin described the evolution that occurred. Up until that time, Flea's bass playing was a particular style. He was famous for it. He was considered one of the best bass players in the world because of his style. But when we started working together, that bass playing that made him one of the best didn't necessarily serve the songs in the best way. This reminded me of when I read that gigantic 600-page biography of Michael Jordan. And Michael was a fantastic individual basketball player. but he couldn't get past the Detroit Pistons in the playoffs and he failed year after year. It wasn't until he learned how to be the best teammate, play as a team, not just an individual person that they actually got able to get to the next level. That same process is very similar to what Rick is describing us here. He's like, listen, he's well known. At that time, they thought Michael Jordan was the best basketball player in the league, but he hadn't won a championship because the best players don't win, the best teams do. But when we started working together, that base player, that base playing that made him one of the best didn't necessarily serve the songs in the best way. It was more about the bass being great. It was more about Jordan being great. And the song is more important than the bass. And the team is more important than the player. So that's me obviously trying to tie that all together. Starting with that record, Flea changed the way he played. And so he says, this is what Flea said about that. He goes, I consciously avoided anything busy or fancy. I avoided saying, hey, I'm Flea, the bitchin' bass player. And then he said, he goes, I tried to get small enough to get inside the song as opposed to stepping out. The focus is not on me. So one thing I really admire about studying Rick Rubin was that he doesn't rest on his laurels. He's always looking for the next challenge, right? You could just say, I'm going to produce the same rap records over and over again. I already had some hit rock and metal albums. Let me just do that. He's like, no, no, I need another challenge. I need to keep challenges how you keep growing and adding more skills, right? So in 1994, he's like, I'm going to work with Johnny Cash. And the way he decided to do this is fascinating. So since in 1994, Rick Rubin was focused on a great challenge, resurrecting the career of country music legend Johnny Cash. With Rubin's trademark production by reduction approach, the albums would bring the legendary Johnny Cash his first platinum success in years and showcased a more raw side to him. Rubin explained how he came to work with Johnny. He says, it seemed like it would be a fun challenge to work with an established artist, but I wasn't interested in working with a legend at the top of their game. I'd been thinking about who was really great, but not currently making really great records. What great artists are not in a great place right now? So Johnny and Rick meet and Rick tells Johnny his blueprint. Ruben had a real simple plan. Wherever the magic is, we will follow it. And so this is the first of their hit albums together. It says it was recorded in Rick Rubin's living room. Cash recalled there was no echo, no slapback, no overdubbing, no mixing. It just goes back to the production by production, right? No overdubbing, no mixing, just me playing my guitar and singing. I didn't even use a pick. Every guitar note on the album came from my thumb. And this is just great. I just love that this happened. So it says we had nothing to lose and everything to gain. or excuse me, Johnny Cash had nothing to lose and everything to gain in wearing his heart on his sleeve. I know I'm 62 years old and I've been around twice and now it looks like I might have a third shot at a new audience. He found Rick Rubin helped him find that new audience. So MTV winds up putting Johnny Cash's video for the first song and it becomes really popular to an age group that probably didn't even know who Johnny Cash existed or much less all the hits that he had, you know, 20, 30, 40 years earlier. And the album won a Grammy. And then this is the crazy part. What I mentioned earlier, how Rick can just imbibe, like he can, he could take the confidence that he has. And again, I think it's like, you can clearly transfer your emotions, both good and bad to the people around you. Right. But this idea where you have a legend, somebody that had already got to the top of their profession and still having doubts about their ability. Rick made me have faith in myself again. He made me believe in myself and my music, which I thought was gone forever. He's working with a different band. I just want to pull out one sentence here because I thought it was fantastic. And he's describing, this guy named Williams is describing what it was like working with Rick. Williams described being put to a recording regimen wherein Rick Rubin made us record every track about 50 times each to obtain the good dynamics. That is a main theme that we should take away from Rick Rubin. Less is more, but to get there, you have to do more. He uses that same idea over and over again. I moved ahead to another project. This guy Donovan that's in this band says, what you hear is 14 songs, but there's 86 songs that you haven't heard. Once the project began, I started writing daily. I wrote 100 songs over a period of a year and a half. So again, the public praises people for what they practice in private. They are praising these 14 songs. They didn't see the 86 others that I had to do and never use just to get to the right 14. And then there's just some great stories in the book. Like he decides, hey, I'm going to get together Tom Petty. So there's a fantastic picture in the studio of Tom Petty, Rick Rubin, and Johnny Cash. And so this is the album I think that song is on. They played on the Lex Friedman podcast. I thought it was fantastic. Just to watch Rick listen to it was really interesting to me. So it sounded very different. And, you know, Johnny's known as a country music legend. And yet, because his sound had evolved, he wasn't getting the attention or the support of his industry. And so this just made me laugh out loud. So it says, the music got major airplay on college radio and alternative rock stations upon its release. but no love from traditional country radio. But the rest of America loved the album. Ironically, the album won a Grammy Award for Best Country Album. Celebrating the achievement in the fuck-the-system fashion, Rick Rubin ran a full-page ad in Billboard featuring the classic photo of Johnny Cash, middle finger aimed at the camera, with a caption that read, American Recordings and Johnny Cash would like to acknowledge the Nashville Music Establishment and Country Radio for your support. and so Rick Rubin talks about the importance of selecting the people that you work with you have to make sure you like them you have to make sure you admire them there's no point in working with somebody that you don't like admire or trust and as a result it's not just this is not oh this is business like that's no it's not true this is extremely personal what we're doing is extremely personal and so there's a there's this band called System of a Down and one of the artists in System of a Down talks about like what was it what's it like working with Rick Rubin he gives you his whole self. And so it says production with Rick doesn't mean you're going to sit in the studio. It might mean you go to a record store or you go to a beach or you go for a drive. You bond as people first and then you put these songs. And Rick's like the song doctor. If you play something for him, it's like going in for a checkup. He's like, here, take a couple of these vitamins and see how you feel. And the songs always feel better after his suggestions. And so you do. He's just so easy to be around. That's why people keep going back to him. And so one of the groups that kept coming back to Rick Rubin were the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And so they're building, they're doing the album Californication at this point in the book. And one of the guitarists had left the group and then he came back, but he wasn't playing as much. So this is going to remind me a few weeks ago, I think it was what, maybe episode 240, biography of Mozart that I did. There's a line, there's something that happens in that book that I don't think I'll ever forget. And it's the importance of like, not really trying to find the most efficient way. Like sometimes just exposing yourself to hours after hours of hard work, like that's going to build up skill sets that other people that have not gone through all that time lack. And so he's coming back. I don't know how to pronounce his name, so I'm going to call him F. F felt somewhat rusty. I hadn't spent too much time playing guitar over the last few years, so my hands were weak. They didn't really get extremely strong until we almost finished recording. So that had an effect on my style of guitar playing during the recording. I was playing guitar constantly. I would go home and play for five hours after a 10 hour recording session. But the main takeaway there was the fact that his music, what he's saying is like the music got better, the stronger my hands got. The only way to get your hands strong is to actually put in the hours, right? And so that's exactly what happened to Mozart. There's this some kind of instrument called like the viola or something like that. And if I remember correctly, it needs like extreme right hand strength. And so a lot of Mozart's competitors that practice less than Mozart couldn't actually make the instrument perform to its best of its ability because they lacked the hand strength because they didn't practice. Mozart practiced, Mozart had the hand strength. Mozart then applies that talent that the people that don't practice lack. And he's able to get magic out of an instrument that his competitors did not. And then in just a few sentences, I really feel we get like this kind of blueprint that Rick Rubin, like the blueprint of how Rick Rubin works and that we can then apply to so many other things. And there's four things I picked out. This is how Rick Rubin works. Number one, he works on one thing at a time. Number two, he gives it his undivided attention. Number three, he only works with A players. His job is not to motivate you. A players motivate themselves. And number three, he tries to get his thinking as clear as possible. We found that for us, we need a producer to be devoted to us for a few months. That's what Rick does. We've got his undivided attention. He doesn't do any disciplining. We do it ourselves. I love making music and I love writing music and nobody needs to push me to do that. He's not the kind of person that gets distracted or comes to the rehearsal studio with something else on his mind or carrying his personal life into the studio. He is very focused. He's got a clear head about everything going on. So again, work on one thing at a time. Undivided attention, only work with A players, and get your thinking as clear as possible. One of my favorite and funniest lines, it comes from David Ogilvie, talks about, hey, all great companies, all great institutions, they're run by a single formidable individual, and he has a better grasp of language than I do, but he says, search all the parks in your city, you'll find no statues of committees. Johnny Cash is talking about why some of the last albums he ever did were so great. The common theme I see in these albums is they were not made by committee. They were made by Rick Rubin and I. The guitarist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, that guy F I just told you about, together F and Rick Rubin explored another genre of music to find inspiration. Me and Rick would work together every day and he's got, me and Rick would get together every day, excuse me, and he's got these CDs of hits from the 60s. So right now, at this point in book where we are in time, they are using ideas from work done 40 years before they are meeting. That's another one of Rick's standard MOs. He's constantly saying, hey, I know we're working in 1995. I know we're working in 2005. Go check out what was done in the 50s. Go check out what these guys were doing in the 70s. Go check out this other thing. And so we're going to see Rick Rubin use two parts of his philosophy here again, persistence and then production by reduction. and so at this point he's going to do the exact same thing he's like hey who else is was really good at one point is really capable of doing great work but hasn't yet like hasn't shown that they can still do great work so he goes and and tries to work with Neil Diamond and he just does it relentlessly Ruben was eager to work with Diamond and unabashedly described his pursuit of the artist as stalking at first Diamond found Ruben's enthusiasm a little scary I didn't know what to make of it. So eventually the persistence pays off. They start working together. And it says, once they began working together, Rubin insisted Diamond track all of the album songs playing acoustic guitar while he sang. That's exactly what he said. He's like, listen, a person with just strumming a guitar and singing sounded good 50 years ago, just like a piano sounded good 50 years ago. And if it sounds good 50 years ago, it'll sound, if it survived that long, that idea, that format survived that long, it is more likely to survive 50 years into the future. So he's like, We're going to all the other crap that your producers had to do with the bells and whistles. We're getting rid of all that stuff. It's not necessary. And so says the singer hadn't recorded like that since the 1960s. And he was reluctant to try it. Diamond would later concede that Rick was right. Ruben wanted to bring back the Neil Diamond who made those old records great with a stripped down sound. And then the way the way Neil Diamond describes Rick, I'm only including this because it made me laugh. It says, despite his appearance, which can be really intimidating, Rick is a big, lovable bear of a man. The only problem I had was with his habit of hugging. At first, I was taken aback. After a while, I got to like it. He's like Father Earth taking you into his bosom. I don't know why that made me laugh. That's funny. And then towards the end of the book, I just realized as I'm reading this, I was like, oh, he's developed a very personal business philosophy. Rubin wanted freedom and not to have to punch a clock or work in a traditional corporate way. Rubin has always kept a full vision of a project in mind as part of his work. He thought about the artwork, the marketing, videos, brand building, and so on. The panicked music industry may be focused on how to sell music, but Rick Rubin has always been focused on making great music first. He is driven by what is really great. He's very hard to please. Having someone around you like that makes you want to bring something in that's fantastic and not just mediocre. And the effect of this very personal business philosophy is summarized here. Rubin attributes his success to very simple core principles. Try to understand culture as well as music. Surround yourself with people interested in music for the right reasons and be true to the things that you love. His great love and fandom for music has led to honesty and purity in his work. His impact has been felt by a generation of music fans who would credit Rubin with producing the soundtrack to their lifetime. And that is where I'll leave it. I absolutely love this book. I loved going deep on Rick Rubin, the mind and the philosophy of Rick Rubin this week. I'll leave a link down below if you want to buy the book and support the podcast at the same time. That is 255 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.