Rick Rubin joins Joe Rogan under a sky of shooting stars, recounting how his punk band dissolved and hip-hop’s raw club energy at Negril shaped It’s Yours—his first produced record. The 1986 crossover hit Walk This Way revived Aerosmith and Run DMC, proving hip-hop’s legitimacy, while LL Cool J’s accidental "throat-clearing" humor influenced the Beastie Boys. Rubin’s comedy roots with Dice, who thrived on live audience reactions despite studio rejection, mirror his music philosophy: instinct over formula. After 22 years of veganism and poor health, seven egg-white shakes and ice baths dropped 130 pounds, teaching him to embrace physical discomfort as a creative reset. His passion for pro wrestling’s outlaw storytelling—even funding Smoky Mountain Wrestling in the ’90s—reveals how joy drives mastery, not external validation. [Automatically generated summary]
The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day Rick Rubin, ladies and gentlemen It's a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance.
I was in a punk rock band first, and I recorded a couple of punk rock things with my band and liked the feeling of being in the studio.
It was fun.
And hip-hop was just getting started at this time.
And I would go to...
There was a club called Negril on 2nd Avenue in Manhattan downtown.
It was a reggae club most nights, but one night a week it was hip-hop.
And this was when hip-hop was...
It didn't really exist other than in the Bronx, Brooklyn.
And it was this tiny little scene of people playing music in parks, really.
It was not a...
It's hard to explain how small it was, how much of a sub-genre it was in these days.
So the fact that you could see it downtown was a big deal because it didn't really exist anywhere.
You didn't hear this music in clubs.
And there were very few at this time 12-inch singles would come out.
And there would be, I don't know, I don't know if there were more than 30 or 40 rap songs in the world at this point in time.
But there were these clubs where stuff would happen.
And at this club that I went to called Negril, what you would normally only be able to see at a club in Harlem, like there was a club called Broadway International and there was a club called the Disco Fever, was brought downtown and people downtown could see it.
So I started going every Tuesday night.
That's when I was going to NYU. And I just loved the music.
And then...
I would buy every 12-inch single that would come out when it would come out, and none of them sounded like what it sounded like at the club.
It was like DJs and breakbeats, and it was harder...
Whereas the record sounded more like an R&B record, but with somebody rapping on it.
But it wasn't what we know as rap today.
That's not what those records sounded like.
They were live bands.
They were made by people who made other kinds of music.
So they made them the same way they made other kinds of music when hip-hop was really different.
So I started making hip-hop records really with the idea of I just wanted, as a fan, to hear what it sounded like in a club.
So it was almost like a documentarian style.
And I would just start documenting what I heard and making things that sounded more like the energy of a club, which was, again, different than these slick records.
And part of it was because I didn't know what I was doing.
I didn't have any training or skill, but that allowed...
That was what...
What allowed it to be new was it wasn't doing it the regular way.
It was doing it the way of hip hop, which didn't yet exist.
My favorite group at the time was called Treacherous Three.
And they were on a label called Sugar Hill.
They had put out three 12-inch singles that I loved.
Those were the best 12-inch...
They still sounded like R&B records, but they were the best of the rap records you could get at this time.
Those first three came out on Enjoy records.
They had a red label.
And then they signed to Sugar Hill.
And when they signed to Sugar Hill, they put out an album, and it didn't sound—it wasn't good like the ones on Enjoy.
And then one night, Treacherous Three were playing at that club, Negril, and I met them after the show.
Kumo D was the lead rapper, you'd say.
And I went to Kumo D and just said—and again, I don't know anything about the music business.
I don't know anything about what anyone does.
I don't know that there's such a job as a producer.
I don't know any of this.
I just said, you know, I'm your biggest fan, and your new album doesn't sound like what's good about you guys, and let's work together to try to make something that's as good as you guys are.
And he said, well, we're signing Sugar Hill, we can't really do that, but...
You should talk to Special K, another member of the group.
He's got a brother, T LaRock, who's a really good rapper, and you could do it with him.
I was like, okay.
And that was the first record I made was T LaRock.
Clap your hands, everybody, if you've got what it takes.
Cause I'm Curtis Blow and I want you to know that these are the Braves Brakes in a bus, brakes on a car, brakes to make you a superstar Brakes to win and brakes to lose.
Now you haven't really heard that on records yet because it was what would happen live.
The DJs were the musicians, but to people who made other kinds of music, the DJs were only playing back a band, so they assumed the record's supposed to be a band playing.
And my assumption was that's not what it was.
It was the DJ playing a drum machine and playing parts of records that that's what was exciting.
That was the music of hip hop.
The rapping on top could be the same, but the music of it was different.
It comes out of the idea of the break, starting with the break.
The break is, you have a song that has all different parts in it, a traditional song, but there's one little part in it that has a cool drum beat.
Or a cool little percussion part.
And what a DJ would do in those days was they would play just that little snippet of the song, might be four seconds, and they would have two turntables, and they'd play four seconds here, and then four seconds here, and then four seconds here, and four seconds here, to create a longer piece out of this four-second loop.
But there was no such thing as a sampler then, so it only happened through live playing it.
The way it was used in hip hop in the early days, I was saying we would use a snippet of a record and then sometimes we would even create a tape loop.
So you would take a little piece of music on tape and then have it come back around and you'd edit it and splice it.
And there's at least one song on the first Beastie Boys album that uses that technique.
But it was about extending these pieces of music to create something new.
And hip-hop from the beginning was always a form of montage.
It was finding things and making something new out of it.
It wasn't finding things to make it sound like it sounded.
It was finding something and changing it into something new.
That's what was exciting about it.
And this montage process is the basis of hip-hop.
And up until the time of It's Yours, we didn't really hear it on the records because people still were making records using traditional methods, non-hip-hop methods.
It was—being part of it was very exciting, and loving it was exciting, and there was a disconnect between that and the outside world.
Because the outside world didn't recognize it, didn't even recognize it as music, much less something that was good, you know, like that could be good.
I just had the idea of doing the song and recording the song with Run DMC, and then the label said, why don't we reach out to Aerosmith and ask if they would participate?
I was like, that sounds crazy to me, but if they'll do it, obviously I'd love it.
If you really stop and think about all the ripples that came out of that particular song, that song introduced so many people to hip-hop, and I'm sure so many hip-hop fans to rock and roll and Run-DMC. Absolutely.
You know, combining with Aerosmith is like the perfect combination.
Honestly, the whole thing was miraculous because I'm working in this form of music that people don't think is music, nobody likes and nobody cares about other than the 200 people at the Negril Club that I would go to.
And then...
Bit by bit.
The first album I produced was LL Cool J. He was 16 at the time.
And the way I met LL was because of the It's Yours record, the Teela Rock record that we listened to, it had Def Jam Recordings' name and the address, Five University Place, which was my dorm room at NYU. And we started getting demo tapes to the dorm room.
And Adam Horowitz from the Beastie Boys was listening to all of the demo tapes, and he found the LL tapes.
Like, you should listen to this one.
And we listened to it, and it made us really laugh, and we liked it.
And so much of it has to do with humor.
Like, when it's good, it makes you laugh, even if it's not funny.
You know, like the...
The surprise nature of things.
When you hear the unexpected, you laugh.
And it feels good.
It's a good feeling.
And I remember we laughed a lot at LL's...
As a matter of fact, on LL's demo tape, the first thing he said before he started his demo rap was he said, Let me clear my throat.
And then he started rapping.
But he only said that because he turned on the recorder before he started rapping.
But it wasn't supposed to be part of it.
And we just thought it was the funniest thing.
Let me clear my throat.
And then on the Beastie Boys record, we have a song.
We're in the middle of the song.
We stop the song.
And AdRoc says, let me clear my throat.
And it's really based on hearing it, just this funny thing that didn't really make sense.
Complete inside joke.
And so we were making these things that were completely insider, personal, no expectation, right?
You know, there was no expectation that anybody would like any of the things we were making outside of our small group of friends.
It's always been the case that people come to expect, or the audience comes to expect a certain thing, and if you veer outside of those lines, it's often not well received.
An example also, even Public Enemy, when we put out the first Public Enemy record, None of the—at this point in time, there were already stations playing rap music, like Master Mix shows on WBLS and KTU would be like Saturday night.
They'd be playing rap music.
But they wouldn't play Public Enemy.
They would play the instrumental versions.
They wouldn't play Chuck's vocals, because he didn't sound like the other MCs at that time.
And he even has a line on the second Public Enemy album about, some say no to the album, the show, Bum Rush the Sounds, I made a year ago.
It's like, last time you played the music, this time you'll play the lyrics.
It just wasn't what was in the culture at the time.
But often the best things.
I remember at the time that LL came out, another record came out called Roxanne Roxanne by a group called UTFO. And UTFO was a much bigger hit than LL's song.
But over time, the consistency of LL's artistry Bypassed UTFO. But sometimes, like, the thing that catches on isn't the...
One of the things that I found interesting about hip-hop was I can really remember this clearly because the first time I listened to N.W.A., I was on a treadmill.
I remember thinking, like, holy shit, this is popular?
I remember thinking, this kind of music is going to have, like, ramifications on society.
You know, because it was so powerful.
And, like, shocking.
Like, I'd never heard that kind of violence and that extreme lyrics and just their depictions of real life in South Central L.A. And, I mean, it really ignited this completely new branch of hip-hop in a lot of ways.
So when we started doing the stuff we were doing, hip-hop didn't really exist.
And then all of a sudden it got popular.
And once it got popular, it felt like the community changed.
And it wasn't people getting into it out of love for hip-hop or wanting to continue pushing the boundaries of what was creatively possible.
It just started all sounding like records we had already made.
And it just wasn't interesting.
It felt like derivative.
Everything was derivative at this point.
So I started producing other, produced Slayer and Danzig, different kinds of music that felt more challenging to me in that moment, that just spoke to me more.
And then I heard NWA. Actually, it was Eazy-E. NWA hadn't recorded yet.
There was the Eazy-E album, which is the first album from Dre in the sound of what became NWA. Yeah.
And it blew my mind.
And I went to California to meet with them, and I actually visited in the studio when they were recording Straight Outta Compton album.
That's fascinating, too, that this new thing emerges, and then people just imitate the pattern of success, like whatever the successful pattern of that music.
When artists are not successful yet though, it's very difficult for them to find who they are because they're always just trying to figure out what's the path to success.
Where success seems to be the carrot at the end of the stick.
It's like there's always this something, you know, these guys have all this money, these guys have all these cars and these big houses, how do I get that?
We experience that in stand-up comedy where there's these kind of derivative voices where they're kind of like finding what they think other people want to hear and they start saying it because they've heard other people say similar things that are now successful.
I do almost all my working out alone, all the sauna time and cold plunge and writing.
I spend a lot of time just thinking.
And not thinking about what people think about me.
Just thinking about what I like, what's interesting.
I think one of the things that really tempers me or keeps me sane is the workouts because they're so brutal and they're so hard that everything else is easy.
And I think that's something that's missing from a lot of people's lives where you deal with the anxiety of fame and celebrity and just the attention and all the demands on you.
And it's kind of overwhelming.
And if all you're doing all day is like dreading those experiences, like if you're Tom Petty and you're hiding in your house, you're dreading going to dinner or dreading going out.
Then those moments do become too big to deal with.
And then you just want to get away as quickly as possible and go back to your house.
You know, I mean, you see it in people that become famous.
You know, as I've become friends with more and more famous people, you see the...
And they're always, like, asking questions of other people that are also famous.
Like, how do you deal with it?
Like, what is your solution?
And I think my solution is the best one for me.
I think psychedelic drugs help a lot.
It's just these big resets.
These big resets where you're like, okay, this is all bullshit.
Like all this little weird game you're involved in with life and society and culture.
It's fun and it's great and it's meaningful and it's fun for other people, but it's kind of bullshit.
Because the real thing is so much weirder and so much greater.
And it's everything is connected in some very bizarre and unseen way.
And that humbling experience of the psychedelic connection is also a nice way to just check you.
Just put it back into perspective.
But for day-to-day, you can't really just trip balls day-to-day.
It would just be too weird.
So day-to-day for me, it's the workouts.
It's doing things you don't want to do and doing them rigorously.
And then when you get over it, there's also these physical changes that happen.
The endorphin releases and the alleviation of anxiety, which I think is critical to being able to manage those states of fame.
But you also got to have perspective and realize like, hey man, this is just what comes with it.
But the most important thing is like, hey, you're getting to do what you want to do, which for me as a kid, you know, starting out doing stand-up when I was 21, it was like this impossible idea.
The impossible idea was just being a professional.
Like, God, wouldn't it be great to not have a job?
You know, my good friend Steve Graham, who was an ophthalmologist at the time and a flight surgeon, incredible guy that I'm still good friends with to this day, he's the one who talked me into it.
I was just releasing all the gas in the room and everybody would laugh.
And it was like a break from the tension.
And at the time I was like 16, 17 years old.
And then when I was 19, Steve was like, you really should be a comedian.
I was like, come on, man.
You think I'm funny because you like me.
I go, other people are going to think I'm an asshole.
And plus, this is like Boston, conservative, late 80s, early, you know, like the late 80s people were fucking pretty conservative about like what they thought was funny.
And until Kinison came along.
And then Kinison came along in 86. And that was right at the time when I started to consider it because I was, it's a funny story, I probably told this on the podcast before, but I was working at the Boston Athletic Club, which was a fitness club in South Boston.
And I was like a trainer.
I was teaching people how to lift weights.
And there was this girl, I think she was a volleyball player.
She was like big, like she was like 5'11", like really athletic, big personality.
She was hilarious.
She was really funny.
And she worked the front desk.
And she knew that I loved comedy.
And she said to me, you gotta see this comedian.
I saw him last night on HBO. And she takes me outside to the parking lot to tell me, like, because the bits were so outrageous.
She didn't want to do them in the lobby.
She takes me out in the parking lot.
She's like, and this fucking guy is doing this bit.
About homosexual necrophiliacs who are paying money to spend all this time with the freshest male corpses.
And so he's like lying down.
She lies down on the street, on the asphalt in the parking lot.
And she's like, I'm lying there thinking, okay, I'm dead now.
She is making me howl with laughter in a parking lot!
It's just me and her.
She's just reciting Sam Kinison.
And I remember thinking, what?
That is crazy!
And I was laughing so...
And I had to find Sam Kinison.
And so I got a cassette.
I think it was like a VHS cassette.
And I think it was at like Blockbuster or one of them type of video stores.
And I brought it back to my apartment.
And I remember watching it thinking, holy shit.
This is comedy?
Because I thought comedy was Jerry Seinfeld, comedy was Richard Pryor.
I wasn't those guys.
And I would watch Evening the Improv or The Tonight Show and these guys would have the blazers on with the rolled up sleeves and like, I gotta dress like that.
But it wasn't me.
I saw Kenneth and I was like, that's comedy?
And that's when I started to listen to Steve.
I was like, maybe I could be a comedian.
Because if that wild shit could be comedy?
Because I was just too wild.
I mean, I never could keep a real job.
I was super undisciplined with everything other than martial arts.
And all I was doing was I traveled around the country trying to kick people unconscious.
That's what I was doing.
I mean, that's what my life was.
So to me, my life was so extreme and so filled with violence and so wild that this stayed sort of sedate existence of like, did you ever notice?
I remember when I first saw Sam and it blew my mind and I loved him.
I was really a Rodney guy.
I loved Rodney Dangerfield.
Loved Steve Martin.
Loved Monty Python.
All things comedy.
I went through a phase...
After being a little kid of listening to music like British Invasion, Beatles, Monkeys, that kind of music when I was a little kid, then I'd stop listening to music and only listen to comedy for years until junior high school when I started listening to hard rock.
But I remember seeing Sam and being blown away, and I was already doing music at this time and had a label, and I went to find him, and then I found out he already had a record out, and I was so bummed.
He didn't have a record out, but he was signed to Warner Brothers, and I was bummed.
And then I saw Dice, and Dice blew me away.
And...
I saw him, first I saw him on the Rodney, HBO, you know, Young Comedians, whatever it was called.
I don't know what it was called.
And it was just, I don't know, he did 10 minutes or something, and it was insane.
It was a perfect dice set.
And it was another one of those, like when I first saw Sam, it's like, he's not, it's a very different character than Sam, but it's as hard and as extreme.
The Day the Laughter Died, Cassette 1, which is one of my all-time favorite comedy CDs, specials, whatever it is, recordings, because it was so crazy that he did that.
And I would meet him at the comedy store most nights.
And most nights he would be great and the audience would love him.
But certain nights...
Wrong audience.
Mood he was in.
And he could bomb.
Even when he was already dice.
And he would bomb.
And for me and Hot Tub Johnny, I don't know if you ever met Hot Tub Johnny.
Me, Hot Tub Johnny would sit in the back.
And for us, the funniest shows were when he bombed.
Because his reaction to bombing was so funny.
Whether it was...
Pushing harder.
Like he's already doing aggressive material.
And then when he's not getting the response, he goes harder and people like it less.
And it's so funny.
It's because he just seems like a guy having a nervous breakdown.
You know, it's like it's so crazy.
It doesn't feel like comedy at all.
It seems like this other thing.
A guy losing his mind and turning red and sweating and screaming and nobody likes it.
And we just died.
And then in honor of doing The Garden, I remember saying, Andrew, how about instead of recording The Garden...
Let's try to do a set at Dangerfields and let's find out what night would be the least, like the most suburban, like not anyone who likes comedy, people who are just going to a club because they're traveling through New York.
It's like they would vilify him and portray him As if he was hateful when all he was doing was trying to make people laugh and succeeding tremendously in doing that.
And Andrew, when he would go, and I love Andrew to death, being friends with him Was one of the most surreal things at the Comedy Store.
Because I was such a fan when I was a kid.
I never got to meet Kinison.
And I only got to meet Hicks very briefly.
I mean, I literally said hi to him.
That's it.
When I was an open-miker in Boston.
But I got to be friends with Dice.
And I was mostly just doing the store at the time.
And Dice pulled me aside.
And he said, hey, you should do the road.
He goes, you're fucking funny.
You don't need these cocksuckers.
He goes, these people telling you what to do and fucking, you gotta dance for them, do the show.
He goes, you can make a lot of money on the road.
You should be doing the fucking road.
And I was like, I should do the road.
Dice told me to do the road.
I'm gonna do the road.
And I started doing the road.
That's when I started, like, I called my manager up and I said, let's start doing clubs in all these different cities.
So when I wasn't doing news radio, when I wasn't on television, I would go off on the weekends and I would go, you know, do fucking wherever, Houston, Phoenix.
And I started doing the road because of Dice's direction.
Well, the store made me a real comedian, but the road made me a real headliner, because I was doing an hour in these towns, and I was doing two shows Friday, two shows Saturday, and I was getting the feel of different vibes, and that's really when I fell in love with Texas.
It was 97 when I started coming to Texas, 98. And they were just so rowdy and fun and free.
And there was a different, there was a rebellious friendliness to them.
And I was like, God, I love these people.
And the first album I recorded in 99 on Warner Brothers was the I'm Gonna Be Dead Someday.
And I did that in Houston.
And I did it.
Really like the touring and all that was because it dies like that.
That's what really ignited me Ignited my my inspiration to go do that and it is There's too many guys that were just staying in town and everybody at that time In the 90s and it was kind of starting to die off But there was this thing where everybody wanted a sitcom that was the Holy Grail the Holy Grail mean the real Holy Grail was the tonight show if you would be the hope that was out of my reach I was you know in my fucking 20s it was not gonna happen and But the holy grail was getting a sitcom.
Because you could be Tim Allen.
You could be Jerry Seinfeld.
You could be Roseanne Barr.
You could be Brett Butler.
And if you got a sitcom, man, you were the fucking king.
And, you know, they would make a sitcom around you.
So I had had a development deal.
At one point in time, and then I got on this show that was a crappy show on Fox.
And so I was on that path.
And then I got on news radio, which was great.
And then the path after that was obviously get your own sitcom.
But Dice was like, fuck that.
Like, you should, you know, and this is that Dice had his own show, Bless This House.
Al Gore's wife, Tipper Gore, at the time, was the one who was leading this fight against these lyrics.
Because to a lot of these house moms and shit, they would hear those lyrics coming out of their son's bedroom, and they're like, what the fuck is this?
Very different than that, like, I was a giant Cool G rap fan.
I remember listening to Cool G rap when I first moved to New York, and I was like, God damn, this guy's good.
He, to me, is one of my all-time favorite hip-hop artists, and to me, like, the most underappreciated.
I mean, you go back to listen to, like, Cockblockin', that is a...
Fucking great song.
He has so many, the Ill Street Blues, so many great hip-hop songs that I remember listening to them at the time going, why isn't this bigger?
Like, why don't more people know about this?
Why isn't this, like, you know, to this day, you know, people will go back and they'll talk about, like, Nas, who's fucking incredible, but Cool G Rap slips by.
The stars line up at certain times for certain things to happen, and they happen.
And sometimes you can make something great, and it doesn't connect for whatever reason.
I found this out from making a lot of stuff.
Sometimes you make two things that you think are the two best things you've ever made, and one of them connects with the world, and one of them doesn't.
And it might not have anything to do with...
What's in the art?
It might have to do with, oh, it came out the same day as this other thing came out and that got in the way.
Or there was a bigger story at the time or there was some other Who knows?
Or it's not in the cards for that person to have that success.
It's like there's so much to it that we don't understand.
All we can do is make something good and put it out and hope for the best.
And that's all there is.
We never know why things, why does something work?
Even if you make a piece of art, you might, and it works, you may not know why.
And knowing Dice, as long as I've known him and seen so many late night sets, like some of my favorite sets of Dice, Dice would go up in the OR and he would have a challenge he would do where he wouldn't talk.
For as long as possible.
And so he would go in front of the mic and everybody would be happy to see him and he'd go...
He would just stand there.
Just stand there like about to talk and not talk and go like minutes.
Well Chris though, Chris will take a lot of chances on stage too.
And Chris also has this very unusual approach where he will like Purposely try to find the beats and and you know and leave dead air because he's finding these beats and Like stand on stage the comics don't be like what else what else?
And I'll have it like where he's you know, he's just like Thinking and like the audience is like I'm worried.
I'm ready to see bring the pain.
I'm ready to see you crushing Yeah, like why are you not crushing?
And he, you know, he would even say sometimes, he would follow people and be like, relax, relax, not gonna be that good.
Relax.
Because he was working on new shit.
And when he worked on new shit, he was working.
He was working.
This audience, I know you're here to see comedy and you're happy that Chris Rock just showed up, but Chris Rock was not announced, so it wasn't like this was a big production and he was going to do his very best material.
He was there to try to put pieces together.
And he would have a team of comics in the back.
Guys that he'd hired.
Great comics.
Guys like Richard Jenney, Nick DiPaolo.
And these guys would listen to his material and then they would all talk about it afterwards.
And they would find whatever the embers were.
And they're like, okay, we could fucking fan this and add some Tinder and this could be a bit.
My impression was that I think now he understands that those people, those Hollywood people, are fucking crazy.
They're all in this weird, bizarre cult of actors And Oscars and parties and applause and in this this very bizarre Disconnected world,
you know of these are our heroes and these are the most important people in the world and these people that win these awards and make these films they're the most appreciated most respected and Him getting slapped And then him trying to go back to comedy and seeing Will Smith just meltdown in front of him.
And generally...
That moment was probably the end of how anybody will ever think of Will Smith again as this movie star guy who's like this happy guy with his family who's like putting together all these incredible films and goes on to win the Academy Award that night goes on stage and they applaud him after he just assaulted one of the greatest comedians that's ever lived over the most innocuous roast joke The most innocuous.
You know, I loved you in G.I. Jane.
Like, what?
That's it?
It's so mild.
And I think him seeing that just fired up that fuck you furnace.
We were talking about it, and he was saying, like, it's a great room.
It's a great room for comedy.
But Dave's got that arena timing.
You know, he does a lot of arenas now.
You know, he's...
He knows...
He can take...
Like, we just did Columbus together a couple weeks ago, and he can take a fucking giant room and thousands of people and make it feel like you're just hanging with them in a living room somewhere or in a small club.
He can transform it.
But it's just like the different ways of approaching comedy, it's got a parallel with music, right?
I mean, there's got to be some artists that, you know, they just want to riff.
They want to figure it out on the fly.
They want to do it all, you know, almost off the top of their head.
And then there's other artists where every single word has gone over and meticulously analyzed and pieced together.
It's not uncommon for singers or rappers to hear something and immediately start, like, automatic writing, where they'll just start saying nonsense words.
And, like, we just made two new albums with the Chili Peppers.
The second one just came...
Just coming out now, I think, but the first one came out like six months ago, but two double albums.
And the way Anthony works is he'll hear the music and he'll sing along, but he'll sing along with an idea of a melody, but he doesn't yet have words, and just sing nonsense words, and just sing along, making up nonsense words.
Automatically, real-time, and then listens back and says, oh, okay, this phrase in this spot sounds good, and this phrase in this spot sounds good.
What else goes with that?
And then it's like a puzzle where you fill in the rest.
It's like you don't necessarily have an idea of what the song's going to be about, or you might not even know what the song's about until you finish.
You might not even know after the song's finished what it's about.
You might not know for years what it's about because it's like a dream.
He says he gets really high, and he just makes up words.
He'll make up words to the music, and just try to find how it works.
He's just trying to figure it out as he's doing it.
There's parallels to comedy, I think, because in comedy, you can write things, and I do.
I write a lot of things, but sometimes...
When you're on stage, there's a path that just opens up and you know that this is the way to do it.
It's different than the way you wrote it.
Because the audience is there and you feel it.
Because you only feel it when you're performing.
But with comedy, the thing that's so different is the only way we ever know it's any good.
The only way we really can create.
You can't create in a...
I mean, maybe someone can.
I heard Cosby used to do that.
Cosby used to just write it all out and then he would go on stage or have it out and then not even need to rehearse it, not need to work it out in front of clubs.
He would just do it in front of giant audiences and it would be done.
But most people...
They're creating with the audience.
And until you have an audience, you don't have any idea how the bit really comes together.
There might be a setup that you thought was just a setup, and it gets the biggest laugh of the bit.
It's one of the reasons why it's important to do...
I always call it cross-training.
I'm like, you can't just do arenas.
You got to do little clubs.
You got to do theaters.
You got to do everything.
You got to do clubs where they don't expect you to go up.
You got to do clubs where they know you're going to work on new material.
You got to do clubs where this is a fucking recording.
This is a big one.
You know, ready, polished, set, go.
It's all different, and it all comes alive while you're performing, which I guess parallels with music, but the benefit of music is you can create it in the studio.
You could put it together in the studio, and you can make fucking incredible music almost in a vacuum.
Because you don't need the audience.
It's you.
It's you and the people you're working with, and you put it together.
We had the benefit of working with Dave Foley, who's brilliant.
And Dave Foley was one of the kids in the hall.
And Dave Foley was essentially like an uncredited producer on news radio.
So when we would do run-throughs and takes, Dave had this incredible sense of how a scene should go.
And so when we would do run-throughs, we would go over the script and Dave would go, well, this is...
How about...
How about instead of this?
Why don't you come in this?
Why don't we just cut this part out?
And you come in here and you're just angry because of something that's incorrect.
You're angry because of that.
And then Matthew comes over and says that.
And Lisa comes over and says that.
And then we end it with this.
And then he would just like rewrite the whole fucking scene.
And so the brilliant...
One of the more brilliant things about the producers and Paul Sims, the writer of that show, the head writer of that show, is that he would let you do that.
He would let you come up with a totally alternative punchline.
And then he would sit there and laugh and go, yeah, yeah, keep that, keep that.
Okay, let's do that.
That's the new scene.
And he would let you fuck around with it.
So it gave all the performers all this freedom.
It also allowed the thing to come alive like while performing it the same way you would kind of do stand-up like you would figure out the beats while you were actually doing it and then you really didn't know until the audience was there and Then when the audience said this job lines that I didn't think were good and I would say I don't know do we have a better line for this and they were like just try it just try it I'm like okay I was like didn't believe it and I'd say the line and to get a huge laugh and I'd be like what the fuck I Like, I didn't even think that was funny.
It's got to be this thing where everybody's working towards the same goal.
But when you watch Curb...
One of the brilliant things about Curb is because he doesn't have that script, people are talking the way they talk in real life.
They kind of talk over each other and they pause when the other person is talking and then they chime in and it seems like a real conversation versus like Big Bang Theory.
Or one of those shows that's more formulaic, like Set Up, Punch Lines, where you train monkeys and you're teaching them how to get a piece of candy.
Like, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da.
Ha-ha-ha.
You know, Larry, the way he does it is so different.
And it's one of the best sitcoms of all time.
And if you watch Curb, particularly the early seasons of Curb, I remember thinking, oh, this is why Seinfeld was so good.
The way I describe it to people, I say stand-up comedy is like...
You're making a mountain one layer of paint at a time.
That's what it's like when you're starting.
It's like you go there and if you see Seinfeld, they're like, oh my god, that's a mountain.
It's already there.
I mean, you realize this is one layer of paint at a time.
One, you know, 13 sets a night hopping around, catch a rising star and fucking the cellar and going to all these clubs in New York and then puts it together and then takes it to Boston or takes it to Cleveland or takes it to all these places.
And you put up with having to travel and having to sleep in strange places and all the drudgery of going on the road for that little hit of the excitement to being on stage.
It's the knowledge that the knowing that you're giving these people an experience.
They're having a moment.
They're having a great moment.
You're When you're entertaining a group of people like that, you're taking them on this wild journey of laughter and ideas and they leave like you just hit them with a drug.
You just fucking BOOM! You just drop this drug on them and they walk out of there feeling better.
You know, and it's your responsibility to do that work so that that can happen again.
And you got to be on point and you got to go over your notes and you got to be prepared and you got to do a lot of sets so that you're polished and smooth and Confident.
You got all the beats in your head and then you also have to be loose and relaxed so that it can flow and then you can adjust to some chaos if something happens in the crowd and it's the best.
In the studio recording, it's similar in that there's a lot of time where nothing good is happening, you know, and it's out of our control where Everybody's playing and they're doing their best, but it doesn't matter for whatever reason.
When you're listening to it, it's just not great.
And it's just really a game of patience, of waiting or trying different things.
One of the things that's most important is the feeling of...
I'll use the word like a protected space where you feel like you could be very vulnerable and it's okay.
A place where you could be naked and it's okay.
So the safety of the environment.
If you feel like you're going to try something and someone's going to tell you that was no good, that wouldn't feel like you want to do that again.
So part of it is like the headspace of less people around, no audience.
Literally, it's set up similar to this, where it'll be the producer and the artist, one engineer, and nobody else.
And if it's a band, it's just this group of people.
The least amount of people, not friends hanging out, not anybody watching.
So there's a sense of we're there to work.
We're there to really do something.
But we're also there to play, and it's free.
And there's no expectation that it has to be good.
And we try to have as far of a...
No feeling of deadlines or we have to do this by this or this is going to be the first single.
Never any talk like that.
It's more let's have fun, make music, let's see what happens, and then down the road we'll look back on it and see if there's anything good there.
Then in terms of the physical location, You want to create a space where it feels like a place you want to hang out and it's a good feeling and sometimes we'll do something like on the first album I produced with the Chili Peppers we recorded it in a house instead of recording it in a recording studio because they had made four albums prior to that in a recording studio and they had told me None of those experiences were good.
Not necessarily because of the studio, but it was just an interesting point.
They had four studio experiences.
They didn't like any of them.
What can we do to do something different than that?
So we rented this big mansion and we recorded Blood Sugar Sex Magic in this house.
And it was a very different experience for them.
So instead of it feeling like the fifth album after four bad experiences, this is the first time we're doing it in a house.
And it was like an adventure.
Just now, a few months ago, I was in Costa Rica recording a new album with The Strokes.
And we rented this house up on the top of a mountain and set up the band outside.
So they're playing.
It's like they're doing a concert for the ocean on the top of a mountain.
It was incredible.
And we did that every day playing out.
I'll show you videos later on.
And they didn't want to leave.
It was like best experience.
So it's, in a way, adding the adventure element, especially for someone who's done it multiple times.
You know, if it's your first time, your chance to go into the big professional studio is really cool.
But if you've done a bunch in a big professional studio, what else can we do that'll spark the feeling of we're doing something new and different?
He doesn't have a way that he works and tries to make us like that.
He's just trying to bring the most out of us for what we are.
He manages to keep his emotional distance from the music and have his objectivity.
Which is, you know, what he has to do.
Especially because we're so completely caught up in a, we run on pure emotion.
That's what we're all about.
And we're making an amazing, amazing, groundbreaking, revolutionary, beautiful, artistically heightened, incredible record.
If Baron von Munchausen had ejaculated the four of us, being the Red Hot Chili Peppers, onto a chess board, I would have to say that Rick Rubin would be the perfect chess player for that particular board.
It's helping to get the best performance, talk about if the material's good enough, how it could be better, create an environment where it's exciting to do what we're going to do, and make any suggestions, not just as it relates to The task at hand, but anything you can do in your life that would benefit the task at hand.
And sometimes it'll be material, like The Strokes had asked me to produce them several times in the past, and they would send me demos, and I listened to the demos, and I just couldn't see a way in.
Like, I didn't have any thoughts.
I didn't know...
I didn't think I had what they needed.
But then they sent me this for the last album, which was the first album I produced with them.
It's called...
I can't remember what it's called.
Um...
They sent me these demos that were probably the worst demos they ever sent in terms of, you know, like a 20 seconds into an iPhone would be at one song.
Like completely bullshit demos.
But I could hear in those, this is going to be good.
Like I can see these little seeds coming.
Or exciting.
And I'm curious to know what is...
I like this little 20 seconds.
What's the three-minute version of that like?
And I'm down to go on that journey with them to discover it.
Then there's a band called the Avett Brothers I worked with, and I remember I met them.
And I just loved them as people.
They were the most beautiful, soulful people I ever met.
If you want to live in a creative way, which will benefit everything in your life, be a better person in your family, be a better...
If you're starting a new business, do a better job of starting a new business.
It's all the same.
I don't really know anything about music.
It's more a way of looking at the world.
And wanting it to be the best it could possibly be and doing whatever it takes to be the best it could possibly be and being true to knowing that no one else knows.
I'm not saying I know, but that everyone's idea is as valuable as mine.
We're all creators.
We all have the chance.
If we can be true to ourselves and show it, At least that's been my experience, you know, because I never went into anything thinking anything was going to be successful at any point in time.
It's always been, I make this thing because I like it.
I'm excited to show it to my friend, you know, a friend or two friends.
And I got to work with Johnny Cash for the last ten years of his life, so the last few chapters of that book was gonna be about my time with Johnny Cash, so he asked to spend a few days with me.
So we hung out, and he asked me a lot of questions, and we listened back to some of the recordings, and I tend not to listen back to things I've worked on in the past because I'm always working on something new.
And I've listened to it a million times when we were making it.
There's no reason to listen back.
So it was interesting to go back and listen with him to answer questions.
And I listened back and I learned through those conversations, I learned about my relationship with Johnny that I didn't know that I knew.
Do you know what I'm saying?
It's like through the questioning...
I had a better understanding of that relationship, and it was interesting to me, and I liked it.
And then I thought, okay, if this is what book creation could be like, where I could learn something, and if I learn it, I could share it, and what can I possibly share that would be helpful?
And I thought, well, I only get to work with a handful of artists every year.
Wouldn't it be great if the things that happen in the studio or this way of looking at the world could be available to other people?
That was the idea.
How do we...
And I didn't know what it was.
I still don't really know what's in the book.
The information is fleeting.
So if you ask me, you give me a hypothetical question, or if I think back to something that happened in the past and a good outcome happened, I would try to reverse engineer why those decisions were made.
In the moment, they weren't made for any thoughtful reason.
They were made out of reactions or trying something.
But they're rarely based on a principle.
So the book was trying to reverse engineer all things that have worked out To see if there were principles underlying that could be applied to other things.
And that's what the book is.
It's all useful tools that have led to good things.
That said, nothing in the book, the book's not about me and there's no example of anything I've made in that book.
It's the principles by which the things got made.
And a way of looking at the world and a way of being in the world, which is the subtitle of the book is A Way of Being.
I started, when I started, I thought it was going to be about how to do things.
And I realized it's how you live in the world.
It's how you see things all the time, 24 hours a day.
How you experience the world is what makes you the artist that you are or the creative person that you are.
And that's what the book shares, that information.
Your experience of life tells you that's a target.
My experience of life is that's the alchemical sun.
Someone else's is that's a circle of people sitting around a fire.
It's a lot of things, but we all see it differently.
And the more open we can be to the different interpretations allows us to make better stuff because we start looking for connections in the world you'll you'll You'll notice something on your drive that doesn't make sense or someone will recommend something to you that sounds like that's not for you.
In the past, when someone would recommend something to me, it sounded like it wasn't for me.
It's like, oh, okay.
Now, if more than one person recommends something to me, That sounds bad.
I always check it out because like the universe wants me to know about this.
The way it tells me is a couple of people came up and said, why don't you check this out?
That's if we listen to what's going on around us, you can overhear a conversation in a coffee shop.
And it is the setup for an idea that you're talking about, the right way to say a particular joke that you're working on.
You hear a phrase.
It's not a phrase you commonly use.
You hear someone else say it.
My experience is when you are open and looking for these clues in the world, they're happening all the time, and they're happening often right when you need them.
There's a story, there's a song, System of Down song called...
I think it's song Chop Suey, I think.
And it has this big, do you know that song?
It has this big bridge section in it where Serge, the lyric writer, the singer, lyric writer, didn't have words for this one part of the song.
And we're sitting in the library in my old house.
And he said, you know, I don't have words for this.
And we were finishing.
It's like, okay, any ideas?
He's like, he didn't have any ideas.
And I said, okay, pick a book off the wall.
I picked a book randomly off the wall.
I said, open it to any page.
Tell me the first phrase you see.
He opened it.
First phrase he sees.
That's what's in the song, and it's a high point in the song.
And so you had this idea to do it, and then as it's coming together, did it become what you initially thought it was going to be, or did it become its own thing?
But it has more to do with the form because the information was similar.
It just didn't find its best...
One of the breakthrough ideas was in the old version, there weren't sections.
It was just like one long thing.
It wasn't chapters or anything.
And I read that and every time a new subject came up, I gave it a name.
And originally it was 68 areas of thought.
And those were things that came up that I thought, okay, even if it didn't do a deep dive into each of these areas of thought, this is something related to creativity that's interesting.
So I had this list based on an earlier version of the book.
This list of topics, and then I did another round of interviews referring to what the reference was in the old version, and then another set just using the words.
I'll give you an example, because one of the areas of thought is collaboration, and you would think collaboration is about working with other people.
That's not what that section of the book's about.
So if I were to do it just based on the word, I would probably go to collaborating with other people, but when I knew the context, it would be different, because what collaborating is about is we're always collaborating at all times with the universe.
That's how it works.
Like, we're taking in information, we're vibing on it.
I'm looking at this skull, and I'm looking at the teeth, and then if I were to It's not really my thought about this.
I can say, oh, it's cold.
It's this piece.
I'm collaborating with this piece to understand something or to have a point of view into something.
So the collaboration section is about how we're always collaborating with everything we've ever learned in our lives.
You were collaborating with bow hunting by seeing a target.
That's a collaboration with something you've learned.
If you never bow hunted or never shot anything, I don't think that would seem like a target to you.
So we're always like, how we're in the world impacts how we see everything.
Then there's another section in the book called cooperation, and that's about working with other people.
And that section's about having worked with a lot of bands, I see that There's often this friction where, and I'm sure you've seen it in a writing room for comedy, where people are trying to get their idea in.
That's a, that's, that's, um, it's something else.
A real collaboration is when everyone who's there is working together towards whatever is the best thing for the whole thing.
And whether it's your idea or someone else's idea, it doesn't matter.
And if you're invested in the collaboration, you want the best idea to win.
You don't want your idea to win.
And so it's just things that you can, habits you can, things to watch out for and habits you can develop that'll make you better at working with other people in that section, for example.
So when you got the first version, which you said was great prose, but there was something missing, whatever that was, how did you make that determination and why did you decide to try again?
I want every sentence of the book to have to be there.
I want it to be...
The most concise and the most specific, and it's explaining, sometimes it's explaining what I'll describe as technical things.
It's almost like I see things as like a machine, like the world's a machine and the way the gears work together.
So I could look at a description and say, that sounds like the machine, or I could read the descriptions like, well, that's not how that machine works at all.
And then I'm still scampering because crashing into wall, crashing into wall.
And then I end up on the whole opposite side of the house.
Not what I was going for at all.
And I open a window, push out the screen, and by now, because Muriel's been screaming for help the whole time, some neighbors came, and they're outside, and they're like, jump!
Jump!
It's gonna hurt, but you'll live!
And now I'm so happy to be out the window and being able to breathe after not being able to breathe.
It's like, no, I'm fine.
And they're like, you're not fine.
And it's like, no, no, I'm fine.
I can breathe.
And they're like, get out, get out.
And they tell me to climb onto a tree and I climb out.
I breathe a little bit first.
But in my mind, I'm fine because if you go from not being able to breathe to breathe, the world's a good place.
So I climb out.
I hang on to the tree.
And at this point, they find like a six-foot ladder.
I'm 15 feet up.
They bring the ladder around.
They prop it up against the tree.
And then these two neighbor guys climb up the ladder and they grab my legs.
And they like guide my legs down to the top of the ladder.
And I make it out.
And my pulse ox was 82 when I got out of the building.
What's normal?
It's 99, 98. Pulse ox?
You know pulse ox, don't you?
Yeah.
It's like you want to be as close to 100 as possible.
But I felt fine.
I felt like I'm okay.
And then I'm walking and they're like, okay, we can't walk next to the house because the house is really burning.
And they walked me out into the street, and then I said, okay, I have to sit down.
And I just sat down in the middle of the street.
It's in the middle of the night.
It felt like 4 o'clock in the morning.
And I sat there, and in three minutes, I watched this 100-year-old two-story house completely burn to the ground, flames higher than the trees.
And we're talking about art and music and what you'd expect a conversation with me to be about, the only things I know about or care about, talking about.
And long interview.
And in the middle of the interview, he asked me, are you afraid of dying?
And it was completely different than the whole rest of the conversation.
And it was the weirdest question.
And I answered the question, and then I went home and saw my wife, and I said, it was a really interesting interview, but he asked me if I'm afraid of death.
It didn't make any sense.
Non sequitur in the course of this interview.
And then, four days later, this happens.
And then the next day, there's a clip.
The first clip I see from the Lex interview is him asking me that question and me answering about death.
I basically laid on a couch listening to music my whole life.
That was my job and what I did not for my job.
It's what I like to do, and that's all I did.
And I was vegan for 22 years and got very big.
I weighed 320 pounds, 318 at my max, with no exercise.
So it's only just not good.
Huge.
And I went out to lunch with Mo Austin, who just recently passed away, who was He was Frank Sinatra's attorney, and then he ran Warner Brothers and Reprise.
You might have met him through Warner Brothers.
If you were on Warner Brothers, Mo Austin was the chairman of Warner Brothers Records.
Beautiful guy.
He signed the Sex Pistols.
He signed Jimi Hendrix.
He signed Black Sabbath.
Amazing guy.
And he was one of my mentors in the music business.
And we went out to lunch one day, and he said, you know, Rick, I know you watch what you eat, and you...
You take care of yourself, but you're really getting big, and I'm worried about you, and I want you to—I'm going to get the name of a nutritionist, and I want you to go to my guy and do whatever he says.
And I said, okay, I'll do whatever you say, knowing it's not going to work, because I've been overweight my whole life, and nothing ever worked.
I worked out with a trainer that Dice connected me with for the first time and was in—I still was not in good shape, but I was in better shape than at any point prior to that, and that was before I became a vegan.
Well, I was eating chicken and vegetables, and I was healthier then.
And then a friend of mine gave me a book called Diet for a New America, and he said, if you read this book, you're not going to want to eat chicken anymore.
And I said, well, I already gave up everything else.
I'd given up red meat.
I'd given up...
Soda.
I used to drink a 64-ounce Pepsi with every meal.
I grew up eating Jack in the Box and McDonald's every day.
I grew up on fast food.
My mom was a terrible cook.
So I didn't have a good relationship with food.
And then I started giving things up when I was in college, and I'm not even sure why.
I don't know why.
I don't know why I decided to give up Pepsi-Cola and start drinking a pitcher of iced coffee instead, which is what switched.
But I didn't know why I did that.
I just did that.
And then I stopped that caffeine and just drank water.
And then...
Gave up red meat, gave up basically everything other than chicken and vegetables, and then I started getting in better shape when I was eating chicken and vegetables.
Then I met Dice's trainer, started training, got into better shape, and then I read this vegan book, became a vegan, and then it all went the other way for 22 years until I got very big.
And I read a book by a guy named Stu Middleman who ran 1,000 miles in 11 days.
And I remember thinking, how can it be?
How can we both be human beings?
And if I walk to the end of the block, I'm exhausted and out of breath.
And there's a human on the planet who can run 1,000 miles in 11 days.
I don't have good information.
I'm doing something wrong.
Because it's not like I was lazy.
I was diligent.
I just had bad information.
It's hard being a vegan.
It was hard being a vegan.
Harder to be a vegan then when nobody was a vegan.
You know, there weren't vegetarian restaurants all over the place.
There was one.
There was real food daily.
It was the only place you could eat.
So I read the Stu Middleman book and he talks about meeting this performance expert, Phil Maffetone, who changed the way he trained and that's why he could run a thousand miles in 11 days.
So it's like, okay, Phil Maffetone is the answer.
I email Phil Maffetone.
I want to become your patient.
And he said he just retired, gave up his medical practice and isn't doing that anymore.
And he gave up doing medicine to pursue his dream of being a songwriter.
And I said, well, I work in music.
Maybe you can mentor me with my health and fitness, and I'll help you with your songs.
We became friends, and he started treating me.
He very much wanted me to eat animal protein, which I wouldn't do because I was a vegan.
He got me to eat fish and eggs as a, to get animal protein, neither of which I liked at any point in my life.
Growing up, I didn't eat eggs and I never liked fish.
So he said, "Don't even think of it as food.
Just think of it as medicine.
You need this medicine." And I started eating fish and eggs.
And he ended up living with me for two years, Phil.
And he was with me all the time.
He trained me.
He got me to do heart rate-based cardio, doing stairs, but still super low level.
I was still big, but still getting my...
My system turned back on, you know, getting my vitality back.
And I got much healthier working with Phil and I didn't lose any weight.
I might have lost five pounds over two years.
And he's living with me and he said, I watch everything you eat.
I watch how you train.
He said...
999 people out of 1,000 who are doing what you're doing, all their weight would fall off.
For some reason, yours is not coming off.
Couldn't figure it out.
And then I was thinking, well, my mom was obese.
It's just a genetic thing.
I've always been overweight.
It's just what it is.
And then the thing happened with Mo, where I was really big.
Now I'm healthier.
But still big.
Go out to lunch with Mo.
He sends me to his nutritionist.
I go to see the guy.
And he puts me on seven protein shakes a day.
Like egg, white protein.
Seven a day.
And then fish, soup, salad for dinner.
Like super low calorie, high protein, no carb diet.
It changed my life more than anything else that has ever changed my life.
And it taught me something.
I've always lived in my head.
I never lived in my body.
I always lived in my head.
And now I started feeling like I had a body to go with my head.
And it was an interesting feeling having never had that before.
And I met...
Laird Hamilton on the beach.
I think I was working with Kid Rock at the time, and Kid Rock introduced me to Laird and Don Wildman and this group of Malibu athlete guys.
And Chris Chelios, the first person I ever went into a sauna with was Chris Chelios, who was really a fanatic.
Sauna guy for 30 years.
And he played in the NHL longer than anybody.
And he blamed Sauna on his ability.
You know, he gave credit Sauna for his ability to play for as long as he was able to play.
So, started doing Sauna with him.
And then Laird invited me to start training at the gym.
Which was like...
Seemed crazy.
But I liked him and was so...
Inspired by him, and he was so different from the musicians I hang around.
I never hung around athletes before.
So, meeting people who are good at anything Is interesting.
And to meet someone who's so good, world class at something so foreign to what the people that I know who are world class at stuff, it's like a different universe.
So I wanted to go to hang out with Laird, really just to hang out with him and see how he thought about the world because he's such an interesting character.
And I started going.
I remember when I went the first day, he said, okay, let's do some push-ups.
And he asked me, and I couldn't do one push-up.
And I said, I can't do it.
I can't do it.
He's like, no, don't say you can't do it.
Say you haven't done it yet.
And he would break up a movement.
For every exercise, if I couldn't do it the full way to start, he would have me do a piece of the exercise.
And then another piece, and then another piece, and then put the first two pieces together, and then put the second two pieces together, and finally put all three together until I could do things.
And with his help, I went from not being able to do one push-up to working up to 100 consecutive push-ups, which was...
I couldn't believe it.
So what I learned through this process of both listening to the nutritionist and listening to Laird in the gym...
I gave over control of myself.
Up till that point, I always thought I knew what was best for myself.
And what I thought was best for myself was being a vegan.
But when I gave myself up to, in this case, other people, I lost weight, I got fit, My life changed and then started doing the ice and sauna was another part of it.
And the ice, I was terrified to go in the ice at first and then worked up to, you know, sometimes we'll do 30 minutes in the ice before even getting in the sauna.
And I definitely gained weight, and I don't feel great about it, but I'm excited now when I leave here, I'm going right back to, I'll probably do shakes now for, to get back to where I want to be, and then I'll go more carnivore.
Really difficult to do, and that's why it took so long.
And as I say, it's elusive.
I can read through the book and read something and like, wow.
I didn't know that.
It's mean now.
I'll still have these epiphanies reading the book because it's heavy stuff and it's not understandable.
We really are talking about magic.
We're talking about Like, the universe conspiring on our behalf if we let it.
And to be in this flow of catching these waves that anyone can catch if you're trying to catch it, you're open to it, you see it coming, you...
You take off on every chance you get, and sometimes the ride happens, and it's remarkable.
It's remarkable how it happens.
And it doesn't come from...
It's not preconceived.
It's not an idea.
It's through the doing.
These things that want to be, that the universe wants to happen now, comes through us.
And if we don't do it, maybe someone else will do it.
Have you ever had that experience where you have an idea for something and you don't do it and then six months later you see that someone else has done it?
It's not because they took your idea.
It's that it's time for that.
And you can act on it or not.
And the best artists are the ones who have the best antenna for this material that's available.
It's coming through.
The best comedians see the best jokes.
They see them coming.
We all live in the same world.
The way you see it, you have the best joke because you see it best.
And one of the reasons I believe that you can see it best is because you don't believe what the structure around you assumes to be the case.
I mentioned before, I grew up watching pro wrestling and I still...
I watch 11 hours of pro wrestling every week, something like that.
There's a lot of wrestling on TV. And I love pro wrestling.
He's the host of the best live television show, the best live comedy podcast in the world.
It's called Kill Tony.
And it's a show where he takes...
Stand-up comedians, he has professionals that come and sit on this panel, and then amateurs will go up and do one minute.
And there's this incredible band behind him.
The band is like, some of the members are the guys that work with Gary Clark Jr., and just these incredible musicians.
And they play along with it, and then these people go up and they do one minute, and then Tony asks them questions and riffs with them, and he fucking loves pro wrestling.
Well also, what you're saying, like people trying to hurt each other, that's not what it is either.
My description of mixed martial arts is high-level problem solving with dire physical consequences.
There's this thing that they're doing where they're trying to achieve excellence in this insanely difficult endeavor.
And through doing that, you create some of the most exceptional people I've ever met.
Because they're the people that can rise and figure out their own bullshit through all this chaos and through these moments and there's so many variables in there like fatigue, mental and physical fatigue, because so much of fatigue is mental.
You know, when you're inspired, you can do more work.
And how do you decide when to turn up the gas, when to hit the gas and when to coast, when to attack, when to defend, when to move, when to lure your opponent into a false sense, when to set traps?
And that was fascinating to me because I didn't understand it at all, what was happening, but it always seemed like He was losing, and then the other guy would give up eventually.
And it was like, I don't even understand what's happening.
Well, that was one of the challenging things about my job when I first came aboard with the UFC is to explain that aspect of it to the casual, to the person that's at home.
Like when someone's, like if Hoist was, I never, I commentated some of Hoist's fights, but later in his career.
The challenge is to explain the jiu-jitsu.
Because everybody kind of understands all that guy who just punched that guy, that guy that just kicked that guy.
That makes sense to people.
That's an impact.
He got hurt.
But when you watch a complicated technique like an omoplata.
Omoplata is a rare move that rarely gets pulled off in the UFC. Ben Saunders and maybe one or two other people have ever pulled it off.
It's a shoulder lock.
It's fairly common in gi jujitsu because of the friction involved in wearing the kimono, but in MMA where it's slippery and there's punches and all this, and it's a technique where...
You isolate a person's shoulder.
You throw your leg over the shoulder and the shin goes across their face.
You rotate behind them.
Your leg is wrapped around their shoulder.
Their arm is pointing.
Their hand is almost like scratching their back.
And through the leverage of your legs and your upper body controlling their body, you put extreme torque and pressure on their shoulder until they're forced to tap.
To explain that to people while that's going on, explain how this person's setting this up and what they have to do next, and to try to explain it in a way that's going to make sense to people that have never felt it, they don't know what's happening, and just to convey my excitement of this very difficult maneuver being pulled off.
A bunch of wrestlers got mad at me because Tony and I were watching pro wrestling.
I was trying to explain how dumb a figure four leg lock was.
Because I was like, he's literally giving up an inside heel hook.
Because an inside heel hook is one of the most devastating submission techniques because once someone gets it, the time you have to tap is so small before your knee gets ripped apart.
And so a figure four leg lock...
You will never see in a jiu-jitsu competition.
Because as someone...
It doesn't work.
So as someone's setting up that figure four, you're literally giving up an inside heel hook.
I mean, unless you're that much better than the guy.
You could say that.
That guy was already done.
Because when that guy goes belly down and he's reaching for his legs, that guy stayed belly down.
He's done.
A guy who is good would go to one hip.
You would immediately go to your side and you would hip escape and you would put a hand on the hip and you would try to get to a defensive position which would either be half guard.
Yeah, well, it's real wrestling, like real actual catch wrestling.
the beginning of pro wrestling.
Catch wrestling was catch as catch can, was like a very brutal physical form of submission fighting.
And these guys like Farmer Burns back in, I guess it was the turn of the century, would go on the road and they would go to carnivals And they would compete with any man who wanted to get in the ring with them.
And they would have these submission matches.
And you could either pin a guy, you could win by pin, or you could win by tap.
Or a guy would tap out from a submission.
And there's a lot of techniques that came from catch wrestling.
That are applicable today, including there's some catch specialists that compete and win against very high-level guys in submission matches and against jiu-jitsu guys, including the Gracies.
One of the best examples is Josh Barnett.
Josh Barnett is the youngest guy to ever win the UFC Heavyweight Championship.
Elite, top of the food chain, professional mixed martial arts fighter, who's also a catch wrestler and a huge fan of pro wrestling and has competed in pro wrestling in Japan, done it in America, does commentary on pro wrestling, is just a huge pro wrestling proponent and connoisseur.
And Josh would use catch wrestling techniques on elite jiu-jitsu fighters and tap them.
Well, it's a very violent form of submission wrestling because wrestlers compete very differently than submission fighters.
Wrestlers kind of go all out and sprint because matches, although you have to have incredible endurance to compete in an amateur wrestling match, there's a time limit.
And these time limits are fairly short in comparison to, say, like Gordon Ryan, who's the greatest jiu-jitsu athlete of all time, who's only 27 today.
Doesn't matter if he's sick, doesn't matter if he's tired, he'll just train less hard.
Trains every single day.
Holidays, birthdays, fuck you, you're at the gym.
And he has...
These no-time-limit submission matches against the best jiu-jitsu fighters in the world.
And people are terrified to compete against him in this because it's a matter of time before he gets you.
And so he has this slow, steady approach where he's slowly ramping up the heat and slowly putting his foot on the gas until the guys start to break and then he gets them.
And he was competing recently against this guy, Felipe Pena.
And Felipe is also elite, world champion, top of the food chain.
And Gordon got him to quit at 45 minutes.
Because he was so on his way to getting defeated.
But his pace was a pace that was set up for time limit jiu-jitsu matches.
Where it's a lot of explosivity, a lot of quick movement, a lot of technique.
But it's also you're recognizing that you can only do this for so long.
Like I can remember one call from a WrestleMania from childhood where one of the Japanese wrestlers would throw some, you know, had a little bit of salt in his palm and throw it in the guy's eyes.
And Gorilla Monsoon was the commentator at that point.
And he said, he just threw about five pounds of salt in the man's eyes.
You know, everything is just insane.
But that's the show.
It's like the show isn't...
It works on this other level where everything is ridiculous and insane, and you're not going to see a fight.
Do you know what I'm saying?
If you reframe it for, I'm not going to see a fight, I'm going to have fun seeing this crazy show.
The real wrestling is really edgy and crazy and like it's outlaw.
And something happened when Hulk Hogan got popular.
WWE, maybe even WWF back then, changed to be more like aimed at little kids.
And when it became aimed at little kids, they were more like everybody was dressed like a superhero and it was goofier.
Whereas the other wrestling was more like Badass barroom brawlers.
So it was different.
One was like a Western, one was like a kids' show.
So when wrestling turned into a kids' show, and WWE was the biggest, the other league used to be called the NWA, and it became WCW, and WCW followed suit, and they started chasing kids also.
So for all of the real wrestling fans like me, nobody was doing wrestling anymore.
Everybody was doing shows for kids.
So, just again, as a fan, I want wrestling, so I funded a league to start in the South that was more like real wrestling.
And then the Attitude Era happened in WWE, and they turned back into being hard wrestling.
If you think about it this way, if someone were to give you two plates of food and say, taste both, and you taste both, and say, okay, which one do you like better?
That's not a hard question to answer usually.
That's all it is.
It's as simple as that.
As like, try to get it down to two choices and say, A or B, which one is better?
You just have to block out any other, oh, what so-and-so's going to say or what this one does or what that other person did or what they're playing on the radio.
None of those things matter.
All that matters is when I hear this, do I want to lean forward?
Do I get excited?
Or do I feel like I want to change channel or I want to put on something else?
That is one of the most insidious things about social media, is that it gives people so many of those what does everyone else think about what I'm doing thing.