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Jan. 13, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
57:33
Rick Rubin (Creating Through Questioning)

Rick Rubin, the legendary record producer behind the likes of Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Adele and Run DMC, joins Russell to chat about his new book ’The Creative Act: A Way of Being’ and for a unique moment of meditation!For a bit more from us join our Stay Free AF Community here https://russellbrand.locals.com/Come to my festival COMMUNITY - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/

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Hello you Awakening Wonders!
Welcome to the Stay Free Podcast where I have an in-depth conversation with great and influential thinkers with wild and fluid minds.
On previous shows we've spoken to Tim Robbins, MIA, Duncan Trussell, Eckhart Tolle, Jordan Peterson and today we're speaking to the legendary record producer Rick Rubin who's of course worked with Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Run DMC, Adele, the Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys, Eminem.
He's got a new book called The Creative Act, A Way of Being.
How's it going, Rick?
Good.
Can you hear me?
Hello?
I can hear you.
I can appreciate you.
It's going in and out.
Do you have any experience operating audio equipment and recording vocals, Rick?
Do you think you'll be able to handle this?
No, sir.
Right.
Well, what it does is the vibrations, as I understand, are travelling down a little pipe.
Now, within there are these signifiers formulated in a pre-agreed set of semantic terms that you and I can use to convey complex and simple ideas.
But we will never know for sure that the intended image that I'm trying to convey is accurately recreated in your mind, Rick.
That is one of the risks of communication.
Understood.
I'm with you on that.
How do we ever know that we're not merely islands adrift in this cosmos?
Do we brush against one another occasionally?
Yes, we are islands adrift in this cosmos.
On occasion, something resonates.
You might say something and it lights up something in me and I think I know what that means and it may have nothing to do with what you said and that's the The closest we get to any real communication.
Language doesn't do it justice.
So do you think that music is sort of super semantic?
It's an opportunity to communicate beyond the limitations of language and perhaps dance and movement.
You know, I was watching something about Chaplin the other day and he was saying that when talkies came in, he said it's less A perfect form of communication than what he was able to achieve through the body.
And I suppose that really what we're looking for is connection.
The point of communication is to create common unity, to create connection.
And I suppose through your life you found ways of enabling artists who by their nature are complex people to deal with To generate and curate the best version of themselves.
With this incredible array of people you've worked with, is it something that was sort of intuitive to you, the kind of sensitivity that must be required?
And is it something that's altered from when you first started producing your legendary work?
I think I said to you at the time, it's the most I've ever understood Paul McCartney.
like right to present day, like, you know, we communicate when you're doing that thing
with Paul McCartney.
And I thought it was there, I thought, I think I said to you at the time,
it's the most I've ever understood Paul McCartney, that like, I've always been drawn to like George Harrison,
'cause I thought, oh, he was spiritual, and John Lennon, because I thought,
oh, like he's radical and anti-establishment.
And then I thought the reason that Paul McCartney doesn't have a kind of a cultural flavor
in the same way as those two Beatles, is because he's purely a conduit, a vessel for music.
He is the music come to life.
He's music personified.
And I got that from watching the joy between the two of you.
So are you able to chronicle your increasing, enhancing sensitivity in dealing with artists?
Is it something you're able to articulate, given that we're somewhat discussing the ineffable by By its nature.
I think it's it's every it's individual case by case.
It's not a any method that works for everybody.
Everything is tuned to who the artist is and I really listen like when you were just speaking.
I was really listening to everything you were saying and I look at you.
I listen to you.
I pay attention to what you're saying and it's rare in our world for somebody to really listen.
And just through truly listening and wanting to understand, I want to know what you're thinking.
I want to know what you're feeling.
I want to know how you see it.
I don't want to tell you how I see it.
I don't want to put my ideas on you.
I want to I'm as close as I can, and I may ask questions to draw you out, to understand who you are.
And through that process, I get to learn who the person is.
And then when we're making something together, there's a sense of, is this true to the person that I'm coming in contact with?
Is this true to who they are?
Because in our minds, We create an idea of what we think we're supposed to do, or what's right to do, and it undermines who we really are.
And to get closer to that true spirit of who we are, and how we see the world, and sharing that is the most beautiful thing.
It's the reason we're here on the planet, is to get to share Who we are and how we see it.
And between all of these different points of view of people sharing who they are and how they see it, we make some sense of what's going on.
It's the best we can do.
To get a grasp on what's happening is through talking to people, hearing how they see it, discussing it, open mind, you know, being open minded and going in, not wanting to change somebody's mind so much as really understand if someone thinks something differently than we do, really understand why do they think that?
What can I learn from this person who thinks something so different than me?
That's so beautiful, Rick, and such an invitation to being creative and acknowledging spontaneity.
And it seems as well that embedded in what you just said is the acknowledgement of the possibility But all of us live with a self-generated system, the persona, that I bring so much to the world, that I map my reality onto every experience that I have, that I have a tendency to recreate conditions of the past, like that I can re-experience the traumas that I've already experienced because, in effect,
I am projecting reality onto apparently external experience.
And it's only through this sort of genuine commitment to presence that you can experience
a kind of actual transcendent reality.
I know that every conversation that I have, if I'm not careful, I'll just replicate conversations
that I've seen you have or imagine that might be pleasing to you.
I've seen you on Joe Rogan.
I know about your career.
I've seen you speaking at McCartney.
You know, like, I suppose it's because of the conversations that we've previously had and the communications that we've previously had that I feel that I can talk to you with a degree of confidence.
You know, I was struck when you were speaking that in the space of global communication, where we have the potential now for a For almost universal communication.
People can communicate continually now.
We're experiencing censorship to an unprecedented degree.
We're experiencing polemicism and polarity.
People aren't willing to listen to an alternative perspective.
We are siloed into our particular echo chambers and at a time where there could be more communication, more unity, more More unification and more acknowledgement of the likely unitary force that underwrites all consciousness that we are each an individual expression of.
People are more and more infatuated with individualism.
So in this work, The Creative Act, A way of being.
I know from the part I read that you said that by the more we are willing to become our personal selves, our authentic selves, the more we will discover the universal and that there's a kind of a fractal, there's an implication of a fractal reality inferred there that by becoming who you truly are, You will make universal connections.
How's that going to be possible when we live at a time that's defined by surveillance and censorship and conflagration and the amplification of our differences?
I'm referring to the cultural war and the actual war that's taking place now.
And may I ask, Rick, how do you interface with those, let's face it, somewhat political and cultural arguments as an artist and a creator?
Well, it's always been an issue that's been around.
The first time I came in contact with this was in the 80s, living in New York and starting to make music.
Whatever the mainstream forces were trying to censor the type of music I was working in and wanted it not to exist.
They didn't understand what it was, and that was hip-hop.
So hip-hop was originally uh verboten and it was not played on any radio stations and it was uh it was people who did it were unpeopled and it was un-music and whatever it was it was bad and it was evil and now it's the most popular form of music in the world so that gives me some sense of uh assurance
That when people come together to do something good with a positive, you know, the people who are making hip hop, we're doing it out of love for this art form and having something to say.
And maybe these are people who never went to a musical academy or were great virtuoso musicians, but they had something to say and they had an experience of life that was different from others and they wanted to express it.
And they expressed it in a very elegant, beautiful way that if you weren't part of it, you didn't understand.
Now, over time, people have come to understand it.
And now it has taken over the world.
And it's fascinating to see.
And at the time, in the early days, I could have never predicted that rap music
would be what it is today, or that it would ever have even been popular.
Because it was such an underground form of music and reviled.
To see it live where it lives today is, again, reassuring that something good, it comes around.
Like the forces that are trying to hold down goodness They're not strong enough to do it.
They're not strong enough to do it.
Whilst I am excited by your perspective that something that was esoteric, particular, literally ghettoised has become powerful and ubiquitous, my concern is that it became that through a process of commodification and commerce.
When you're dealing in the alchemic What do you feel about the necessity for commodification?
Do you regard things only as a success once they become commercialized and commodified?
Do you think the original art form loses something as a result of that process?
Do you think it becomes sterilized?
The history of rap and hip-hop is one that Its origin felt like a transgressive and dangerous movement that provided a voice to the voiceless, that mobilized a kind of movement that was previously oppressed and invisible, exactly as you say.
But that acceptance is achieved ultimately through financial success, which it seems to me comes with a degree of nullification and neutralization.
It concerns me.
What do you feel about that?
Am I off track, Rick?
I don't think that's the case at all.
I think it's true what you're saying, that as things grow, they become commodified.
But both you and I are practitioners of transcendental meditation.
And transcendental meditation is something that could be taught for free, but you pay for it if you want to learn it.
And Maharishi made a point of saying, if we want someone to take this seriously and to honor it, it has to have more value than free.
And he said, if someone's not willing to pay to learn meditation, what they're willing to pay for a refrigerator, then they're not going to treat it in the same way that they and with the same degree of commitment as they do to using a refrigerator every day.
So there's something about it.
Now, it doesn't have to always be the case.
And yes, when we're focused on commodification, it can undermine everything.
And so much of what the book talks about is ignoring commodification, essentially, in the making of art.
So in terms of in the making of art, we cannot think about commodification.
We cannot think about commercial aspects.
Once the art is made, my interest is for the most amount of people to be able to experience it.
And if they're willing to pay for it, and if they feel good about paying for something that they want, I support that.
But that's it.
That's the nature of the... The commodification doesn't come before.
We're not making things to sell.
We're making things to be beautiful.
And then if it turns out there's a market where people want them, It's fine to sell them.
I'm not anti-capitalism in that way.
It's just when the cart comes before the horse and it only becomes about commodification that, you know, you turn on the TV and there's a bunch of terrible stuff on.
It's because people who are making it are making it with this business idea.
They're not making it with this artistic content.
We want to make the most beautiful thing we can make and nothing else matters.
It's made by committee, what people think will work.
All things that undermine the potential beauty of the art that's being made.
Throughout my whole career, I've only tried to make the best thing that I can make that moves me.
And then in the hopes that if it moves me, maybe it'll move someone else.
But I don't think I'm smart enough to project I'm going to make something I don't really like, but this seems like the kind of thing someone else would like.
It's insane!
And it seems like that's the majority of the output of the mainstream commercial artistic output is just what somebody thinks somebody wants to see.
Yes I think it becomes inorganic at that point because as you say it's a project of commodification.
I suppose I'm speaking about this in particular in an environment that it seems to have been completely immersed in an ideology not just in music but in culture and in sport that we that All of our creative endeavours might be regarded as invisibly undergirded by commercial imperatives that, as you have explained, the artist cannot engage with and consider themselves still to be an artist rather than a kind of trader.
But you used the example of transcendental meditation and that makes sense, the idea of exchange, the idea of valuing, that those ideas, those tools are not necessarily of themselves bad.
But I have concerns about the commodification of spirituality and specifically this, Rick,
that in a sense contemporary spirituality, new age spirituality, which is the sort of area both you and I,
if we're not cautious, could be categorized as operating within,
is a spirituality that in my view is guided implicitly by the principle of meditate,
you will be a better unit in the system. Meditate, you will become a better, you know,
in order that you, there's a telos, there's the presumed telos that you should meditate,
do yoga, take ayahuasca, do whatever it is, so that you can function better in this system.
and this system is...
Isn't, it seems to me, you know, like some of the things we've touched upon the moment, the inability to communicate authentically, the ongoing censorship, polemicism, a stoked conflagration between different groups, the needless cultural war, the constant posing of traditional ideology against progressive, you know, socially and culturally progressive ideologies in order to create hate because of the way that social media has evolved.
Look, spirituality, in a sense, you know, this is the quote I think that helps, we have been taught that freedom is the freedom to pursue our petty trivial desires, but real freedom is freedom from our petty trivial desires.
And that for me, as a person that...
You know, I'm governed by appetite so much.
I am all mouth.
All mouth.
I want, I want, I want.
You know, I become spiritual because otherwise I'm not gonna live.
You know, I'm gonna kill myself.
I'm gonna take drugs.
If I don't awaken, I'm finished.
So like, you know, for me, when it becomes about, you know, learning to meditate ultimately so you can fit within a system better, it concerns me.
So I wonder if there is something necessarily that creates compromise, you know, whether it's in music or spirituality or anywhere.
And I wonder what your thoughts are, perhaps, with spirituality.
He's just said something very interesting, which is your reason for getting into spirituality for yourself had to do with controlling of your appetites.
And I imagine, so that's what got you in.
Now that you're in, is that all that it's about?
I'm guessing not.
I'm guessing you found something that Resonates with you on a deeper level and it's not just about that and I'll tell you I've had a friend who originally used to go to yoga classes because there were a lot of girls in yoga classes and he thought if I go to yoga classes I'll meet girls at the yoga class and then he started doing yoga every day to meet girls and then he became a yogi and he maybe even become celibate because he it didn't matter what got him in.
It's like the seed was planted in him And once the seed is planted, I think when we're young, we think about, I want to be a rock star, I want to be famous, or I want to do this, and then it gets you to start.
But once you start, you realize it's about something completely different.
You realize it's about, one of the things I talk about in the book is when we're making art, it's not even about the end product, that we think it's Most artists think it's about the song I'm recording, or it's about the movie I'm making, but really it's a connection to something outside of ourselves, a greater source of creativity that we're tapping into, that we get to feel part of.
and we're part of this like universal communication that's going on.
When you really get deep into creativity, it's not really us.
We're just vehicles through which it happens.
And in the early days, you don't know that.
It's something that comes over time and mastery.
The more you do it, the more you see, ah, this isn't really me.
This is not really me.
This is not by my hand.
My hand's involved, but only as a vehicle for something bigger than myself.
And there was something else that you said earlier about worrying about the commodification
And I think about your show.
So your show has gotten very popular now.
I have no fear that you're going to change your show based on what would, in terms of commodification, benefit the message.
In other words, if someone got you to change your message, Because you could make more money doing that.
I don't have fear in you that that's going to be the case.
The movie Network is about that.
I was thinking about that as you were saying it.
You know, the movie Network, Howard Beale has these incredible revelations and he's this wild character and then basically the corporation tells him that's not how the world works.
It doesn't work the way you think it works.
Corporations run everything.
And you're part of that.
And he went along with it.
He didn't stick to his original guns.
In some ways, he was undermined by the corporate interests.
So I don't have that fear with you.
Thank you.
I mean, that's a high praise from you because you are regarded in this culture as almost authenticity personified.
I think you are like a cauldron for it.
You are where people go to be healed.
And this is just like as a voyeur, it seems that that's the relationship that artists have with you.
So I'm honoured that you would say that about me because there are times when I...
Because I talk about subjects on this show, about, like, corruption, about the military-industrial complex's possible incentives in a war that's being portrayed as humanitarian, and of course there is a humanitarian aspect because people are suffering and dying, and the simplification of the narratives around war, and what happened in the last couple of years, the pandemic, and trying to stop short of stuff that's conspiratorial and not underwritten by good information and good data.
Sometimes I, um, You know, because I'm dealing with these things and I recognize I have to convey them in a way that's consumable and accessible and scintillating, I every so often forget this is actually bloody real.
You're actually talking about things that are real.
And there's a sort of necessity for a kind of spiritual hygiene when dealing with these matters, Rick.
And it's sort of challenging because, and I must say, because I'm a person in recovery and because I believe in God, I have to, I keep this at the forefront, I'm fallible.
I'm a fallible, flawed individual and I never let that stray too far from the forefront of what I'm dealing with.
I try never to be didactic.
I try never to... because I know that I don't like people talking to me like they think they're cleverer than I am and I try to remember that and I've learned because of the touring aspect of what I do for a living that most people want to be left People want guidance, people want instruction, but people don't want to be told what to do.
We want to be free.
People want to be free.
Absolutely.
Thank you for the beautiful compliment.
A moment ago, when you talked about this feeling of grace in your work, of knowing that there is something moving through you, can you tell me a few examples that come to you in your working life where you have felt the evidence of that, the bliss, the joy, the playfulness of being touched by Krishna or Christ Consciousness or however you feel it and describe it, particularly in your work?
It happens all the time, and an example would be a band will be playing a piece of music and it sounds ordinary, and it's ordinary for a period of time.
They play it over and over and over again and try little changes, try little differences, and nothing, and it doesn't really change, ordinary.
And then sometimes something happens, and when I say something happens, not because We had a great idea or change something radical where it all of a sudden what's happening goes from pretty good.
Too extraordinary.
And nobody involved knows what's different.
And none of us have any control over it.
It's miraculous when it happens.
And there are certain artists who are able to tap into it more easily.
Red Hot Chili Peppers are an example.
When they play, it's usually good, But they can reach these levels of musical transcendence on a very regular basis.
Like not every time, but a lot, a lot.
And it's wild being in the room for everyone.
We're just kind of looking at each other like kind of dumbfounded because you can't believe what's happening.
I've had it happen in the studio with Carlos Santana where he's playing and It just seems like it's not coming from him.
It's this beam of music that's happening in the room and the people there aren't even playing it.
I've had it happen with Nusrat Fatali Khan where when he's singing His mouth isn't moving in the same way that what you're hearing.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Like, it's like an out-of-sync movie where you're hearing these sounds and his mouth is not making those sounds and it's just this otherworldly presence in the room.
I can't explain it.
It's just, it's stunning.
Neil Young can go into these states of just Disappears in the music where he's gone.
And it's I don't know what to say about it.
So I get to see it on a regular basis and it's magic.
And all we can do is recognize it when it happens, be respectful of it, be thankful, and do anything we can to set the stage to allow it to happen, but never be arrogant enough to think that we can ever make it happen, because we can't.
It's some other energy happening.
You're describing, it seems to me, Rick, shamanism.
And there are some arguments that the entire profession of show business is fueled by our kind's need for an experience of the divine.
And this somewhat loops back to my earlier point.
And believe me, I'm going to be asking what you had in that bottle, because you can't have shit floating around in a bottle like that and not have people inquire about it.
Just a teabag, just simple life.
Spring dragon longevity tea.
Mushroom tea.
Longevity.
Glory unto him that would afford you this long life, Rick Rubin.
When we talk about shamanism and perhaps when we talk about interfacing with divinity It seems that the individual charged with conveying that power needs mostly to get out of the way.
To get out of the way.
I read a beautiful book, and I'll send it to you actually, called The Death and Resurrection Show, which talks about the transition from... It posits that there was a...
When there were settled cultures and there were still nomadic cultures that the relationship between the nomadic cultures and the settled cultures would be the nomads would turn up and perform their shamanic rites and rituals and it talked about how many archetypal components of these rituals are found in show business and it talked about great examples of ambiguity and self-annihilation and self-destruction that are to be found at these Tropes are found throughout show business.
The weary idea of the self-destructive artist being little more than the inability to hold the flame, to hold the power of what is coming through.
The thing you describe casts a shadow, of course, Rick.
You describe the sort of benign aspect of the shamanic performer.
Revealing the transcendent, the universe in young Krishna's mouth.
But the flip side of that is that it burns them and destroys, destroys to have that power.
I suppose you must have experienced that as well.
Absolutely.
It's the way I would interpret it as there's a sensitivity that the great artists have that they feel everything much more than other people.
And it's when you feel something, you're with other people and you feel something strongly and no one else can feel it.
You start feeling a little crazy, you feel disconnected, and it's difficult.
So when you're constantly saying, hey, no, but look, this is happening, and this is happening, and this is happening, and people are like, you're crazy.
What are you talking about?
This level of pain that comes up from either being not heard, being misunderstood, not being seen, And feeling things much stronger than other people.
And people don't, they look at you funny.
You know, they look at you funny and they treat you poorly.
And then when, then in success, it's a reversion because you go from this sort of person who nobody wants to be around to a person who everybody wants to be around because you're successful or famous.
But they still don't understand you, and they still don't treat you for who you actually are.
You know, that's why Kurt Cobain's not here anymore.
It's the pain of being totally misunderstood and not being seen for who we are.
And it's why so many artists, you know, die young from drug overdoses.
Our mutual friend, the publisher, Jamie Bing, I love that guy.
He's a great guy.
I imagine he might watch this.
It was him that first said to me, I think I was writing a self-help book, I guess.
I'm pretty sure that I'm correctly crediting Jamie with this.
He said, all books are self-help books.
All literature is self-help.
Why would you read, you know, Crime and Punishment or Dickens?
It's to illuminate you.
And it seems that what you're saying is that art in and of itself is therapeutic in that it is a connector to the
divine power, that it is relational between others, that in collaborative
art forms you get to feel the transcendent and the imminent simultaneously,
that God is within us and beyond us, God is all things.
This cannot be instantiated with mere words, it has to be experiential and it comes close to that thing that is the
inaccessible subjectivity of my me-ness and your you-ness can be somehow webbed together by great art beyond the
facility of simple language.
And it seems to me somehow, intuitively somehow, intuitively as well as being learned, of course, I'm sure, you've found yourself Operating in this space, and I feel like when there is a success like yours, not that there is much success comparable to your own, that it's an indication that something like that is happening.
That the divine is at work.
That the divine is at work.
That it isn't always just salt and sugar and synthesis that drives popularity.
That there can be magic too.
And it seems like this magic is what you're working in.
And is this the creative act a way of being?
Are you talking about how personal creativity is something that we must access in order to be healed, in order to be whole, in order to be who we are?
Well, it's not something we must access, it's something we're...
That's available to us to access.
I mean, we're creative every day of our lives, whether we're artists, whether we think of ourselves as artists or not.
We see a traffic jam and we find a new route home that we never took before.
That's a creative.
We're creatively solving a problem.
We do it every day.
All of us do it every day.
When being an artist is living in the world, it's not just about the making thing.
The subtitle of the book is A Way of Being.
Living as an artist in the world is...
A way of looking at everything and basically an awareness practice.
That artists are always in an awareness practice at all times.
Taking it, noticing things that others don't notice.
Noticing what's beautiful in the ordinary.
And then maybe finding some way to re-present that into the world in a way that other people can see the beauty that we see.
That's the goal of what we're doing.
We recognize something beautiful.
It's usually right there in plain sight.
Other people don't notice it.
We try to present it in such a way that others can say, oh yeah, wow, that is... I see it every day, but I never thought of it that way.
I never thought of it in that beautiful way.
That's cool, Rick.
It reminds me of two things.
One, something I read about Francis Bacon, the artist.
He... I read in an interview that the journalist that was interviewing him said that Bacon would not allow people to be neutral and switched off.
He said like that when the waiter brought over their coffee or their drink and people are just prescriptive.
You know, we are on rails.
Most people are on rails.
You think the thoughts you thought yesterday.
You say the things you thought.
Where did these opinions come from?
How did this information get in there?
What is this pain?
You know, that Bacon, like if someone was just switched off, he would vitalise them through his interaction.
He wouldn't accept normal interaction in that way.
Beautiful.
Yeah, it's glorious, isn't it?
And the British artist Damien Hirst A similar thing to what you just said, you know, and of course he's a famous post-modernist and almost situationist artist, most famous for his works like the bisected animals, like the shark in Formaldehyde and all that stuff.
He said that, you know, you will walk past the same tree every day, but if that tree falls over in a storm and crashes across the sidewalk and across the road, you'll be like, oh my God, this tree!
It's amazing!
And a little like, you know, hallucinogenic drugs, that suddenly you realize that we have curated the wonder and awe out of our experience. When I speak to Vandana Shiva, she
talks about re-sacralizing the world.
We have lost the sacred is all around us. We are living in glory and we have been tuned down to the
sort of dour, glum, grayness that happens to us when we are deactivated, when we lose that vitality.
And so I see that what you're saying is that it's an invitation to be awake, to be human.
What is it that separates us from the, you know, instinctual but presumably not self-conscious behavior of most animals?
It's this ability to be creatively aware and present.
Yes, and interestingly, The real work of the artist is to be closer to an animal and to be more instinctual.
Animals don't make mistakes.
Animals do what they do.
And they don't later regret a decision that they made.
They enter a situation and they do what they do.
And that is, and I imagine, I mean, you have experience acting.
I imagine the best acting is like that.
It's like, you're not doing something, you're completely in it and being natural in the moment and reacting.
Not, it's not intellectual.
It's something else.
So much of art is not intellectual.
The intellectual part comes after.
After the thing is made, then you may, hmm, I wonder why this is, why is this thing interesting to me?
But when you're making it, it's not an intellectual process.
It's much more of a body-centered, emotional, feeling process.
And we want to make things that make us feel excitement, peace, love, curiosity.
The most interesting things are the things that we can't believe we're seeing.
You know, when something happens and like you lean forward, is that really happening?
Is that true?
Is that what's happening?
That's the excitement that you can't believe it.
And the best art tends to have that.
And we don't get there through it's being clever.
It's not clever.
It's something else.
It's bigger than clever.
It's really this animalistic, true reaction to what's before us.
Yes.
Gary Shandling said that the entire endeavour of creativity is to capture, create a moment that is real.
We're so used to consuming mediocre art.
It just passes before the eyes, the junk food, like gum.
And then sometimes, often inadvertently, you capture something that is real, that is authentic.
And the fact is, is that these are states, so they are ever present.
And perhaps it is the genius or the great artist that accesses it with more regularity and apparently with more ease.
But as if those invisible threads, as if the sort of the The living archetype is present and able to be vivified, vitalized, that some incantation, some ceremony or rite will bring it forth.
For me, because like, you know, obviously you are a master in the domain of music and for me, I've always had to be, had music brought to me.
I'd like all human beings to enjoy and love music and have heroes, you know, throughout the pantheon of music.
But for me, As an artist, it's always been in the tunes of comedy.
That's where I experience it more viscerally, I suppose, Rick.
The tunes that are in language, in comedy, the ongoing revelation of truth that Comedy can provide people with.
That's where I find it.
And I suppose that when you live in a homogenized and sanitized cultural space that denies us that, it's like we're losing something.
We're losing something.
I feel that all of these great tools that we're being offered, that could be bringing about a utopia, have been negatively charged, that are robbing us of that potential.
And I suppose I enjoy speaking to you because It seems so local and personal and possible to awaken.
It doesn't seem esoteric and Himalayan and impossible.
It seems it's here now.
This is where it is.
This is where it is.
And so much of it has to do with trust.
It's like not second guessing, trusting the moment, trusting your instincts, knowing It can be very simple.
If you taste two different dishes of food and we're asked, which one do you like better?
It's not hard to say which one you like better.
That's all we're doing.
We're just really tuning into our own taste.
What, what, which one tastes better to us?
And trusting the one that tastes better than us, better to us, is the one that tastes better to us.
Because that's all it is.
It's like everything that I'm, I'm, you know, everything I make is, this is the one that tastes good to me.
That's all it is.
Yes, it's beautiful that it's discerning as opposed to judgmental, you know, and this quality you described of feeling as opposed to thinking, I love analysis, you know, I like to look at things and work out why, I enjoy that process, I always have, but when I've Consider what appear to be some of the shortcomings we're experiencing culturally right now.
Much of it seems, and I spoke to the beautiful Duncan Trussell on this show recently, and he talked about how Ram Dass said to him, we need you to move from here, indicating the head, to here, the heart.
I'm reminded of a time I was told that the Australian Aboriginal culture, the word that they have for the, you know, they say they have three brains, the brain of the stomach, the brain of the heart and the, you know, the cognitive mind.
And the word they use for the cognitive mind is the same word they use for a tangled fishing net.
And we live in, like our culture lives entirely in this sort of Tangled, synaptic, neurotic network of the mind with all of its great capacities.
Our solutions in short, in my opinion, are not going to come from the intellect.
They're not going to come from the rationale.
It's taken us, science, progressivism with all of its wonder, technology with all of its glories, You know, surely they will provide more solutions medically, but these false markers of technology and medicine are obscuring the fact that we have become almost neanderthal when it comes to feeling and heart.
That we've forgotten how, at least behaviorally, we are not practicing the intuitive connections that are available to us Through what used to be called a love of God and Lord alone knows the problems of religion, organized religion, are evident and manifest and the traumas and travesties they have practiced hardly need reiterating here.
But with this loss of a realized and radical God, we are starting to create something somewhat threadbare.
And I suppose, Rick, another concern of mine is that if it's only available to us, I think it's just part of the process.
If art is only available to us in commercial spaces rather than explicitly sacred and spiritual
places, I wonder if we're losing something there.
And are you attempting here in this book to once again conflate or reintegrate spirituality
and creativity?
I think it's just part of the process.
You can't pull them apart.
is a spiritual act.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
It's not separate.
I understand.
It's not separate.
There's no way.
If you separate them, you're working at a tremendous disadvantage.
Tremendous disadvantage.
If you're working without the sacred as part of your process, you're working alone and small.
And, you know, we can only do so much.
But if we allow in what's possible, and if we're open, and also, none of it's us even forgetting the sacred, none of it's us, because all we are is a compilation of the experiences we've had over our lives.
You've seen the things that you've seen over your life, and that formed your opinions of how you see the world today.
And if you came into a situation, it might trigger something that happened to you 20 years ago, and then you would react based on something that happened 20 years ago.
That's all we are.
We're machines that have collected all of this data, and then somehow think that the data we collected is ours.
None of it's ours.
I feel funny about saying that the ideas in the book are mine.
They're not really mine.
They're mine in that if it were raining outside and I point to the rain and I say, look, it's raining, that doesn't mean the rain is mine.
Do you know what I mean?
I wrote the rain.
The things in the book are things I've noticed that just are.
In the man that you've become, can you see threads back to the boy you were, the child that you were?
Can you see, do you feel like that you could, the seed, was it identifiable?
Do you feel that it was there, that there was a sort of a spiritual inquiry that was present in you that has become, that has been unfolding over your life?
Absolutely.
Always.
Always.
I remember I would burn incense in my room as a nine-year-old and Would always read about, I became a magician as a child because I didn't really know where the line was, you know, where is, I was always interested in the unseen world.
And whether that was doing card tricks, or whether that was a seance, or a Ouija board, or hypnotism, that's all part of this, the things that we can't explain.
And I always felt like there was more going on behind the scenes.
And when you learn magic from an early age, you learn very quickly that there are always things going on.
When you learn magic, you learn that there are several principles at work And that's how most tricks work.
And misdirection is a big part of it.
And that there's something else.
Everyone's looking here, so I could do something down here.
And once your eyes are open to that, then you start seeing that when you watch the news.
Everywhere, you start seeing it everywhere.
When a politician talks, you start seeing, oh, this is all just a magic show.
None of this is real.
You know, this is all... I've said before that professional wrestling is the closest thing to reality that we have.
You know, people say it's fake.
It's like, it's the only legitimate sport.
And it's the only legitimate... The way that that is a combination of performance and scripted, and sometimes the real world works its way into the script, and you never know what's really happening.
That's our life.
That's what it is.
Do you think we can do a meditation together and that maybe you'll guide the meditation for us?
Sure, shall we do it with, how about we do a breathing meditation?
We'll do Let's do five slow, deep breaths with our eyes closed.
They don't have to be in unison.
And then when we finish our slow, deep breaths, we'll check in with each other again.
again, okay?
Sign here, we have back up what you can't fix the connector to.
Yes, sir.
Sign here.
Sign there.
Sign up here.
This is all from that.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Beautiful.
Thank you.
Next time we do this, let's start that way.
When we stopped, or at least altered, the manner of our communication,
I became aware that it is raining here, and I could hear the rain on the window.
That was the first sensory experience, the rain.
And of course, with the example you gave, you talked about the rain as being the methods
that you have iterated in your book.
After the rain, then my thoughts come, and the feeling of sadness,
you know, the feeling of sadness that I have been carrying lately.
And then, feelings about the body.
You know, what I notice is, lately someone who helps me, and most of my, as we've discussed before, my personal spirituality is formatted through the folk technology of the Twelve Steps, which I believe to be sort of an American religion, really, of personal awakening.
Someone told me to observe for a day, like anytime you're in a situation and you start to think about doing something else, like you want to change reality, just observe it.
And like that day, I happened to have been eating with some people and I was just happily eating with the people.
And then I noticed I was eating with the people and I thought, yeah, I'd like to leave now.
Right.
And when I observed all of the thoughts, the thing I went back to him and said is every time I think it's sort of I'm not good.
Like it's not good.
I usually think about sort of like some kind of control or assertion, you know, and like with the rain and with the five breaths we just took, and with my meditative practice generally, you know, Bob Roth, who taught me TM for the David Lynch Foundation, Bob Roth always says, notice how easily the thoughts come, but you don't have to ask the thoughts to come.
In the same way like the rain, and Bob Roth always says, in this way we think the mantra, in this way we think the mantra, or observe the breath if it was vipassana.
And yeah, it's nice to experience that while I may experience sadness, I am not that sadness.
While I may experience my thoughts, I am not those thoughts, so I don't need to be governed by them, you know.
What was the title of your last audiobook?
It was Revelation.
I absolutely love that book.
That was a beautiful book and it reminded me of something you just said which was being somewhere that you didn't want to be and I think you told a story in the book about being invited to a party or To a dinner or something, and then weeks in advance you think, oh this sounds great, I'll go, and then weeks later it comes and you're dreading it, and it's the last thing you want to do.
And I just thought, I know that experience as well.
That is because of the technique, Rick, you may be referring to.
If someone asks you to do something, always imagine that you had to do it now.
And then you might recognize whether or not you want to do it.
Because normally for me, I want to be at ease.
I want to be in peace.
I want to be in peace.
Rick, what is your relationship with addiction?
Do you have that tendency?
Do you have obsession?
Do you have addiction?
I don't really know how to answer it.
I've never taken drugs or drank.
So as far as the traditional addictions go, I've never participated in any of those.
I probably have a somewhat imbalanced relationship to food and was very overweight for most of my life.
And that was a big hurdle.
You know, at one point I weighed as much as 318 pounds, which was very big.
How was it to change that behaviour and to change your relationship to food?
It was radical.
And my intentions were always good in changing my... I was never lazy about doing the work to change my diet to lose weight.
I just wasn't successful at doing it because I had so much poor information.
So I was a vegan for 22 years, during which time is when I got my biggest.
And I thought I was doing that both for my health and the health of the planet, and it turned out that that was not correct.
And my body thrives with animal protein and I didn't know that.
So I made myself very sick in trying to be healthy and lose weight and do the right thing.
Yeah, there is some complexity and some bespoke decisions that need to be made.
I'm vegan.
I try to stay away from judging people.
Like with my kids who are vegetarian.
I do explain to them, we don't eat these animals.
What that is, is that is a piece of an animal.
I've kind of made the decision that you guys are vegetarian.
I'm vegan.
I've not pushed them that far.
But I also say people do eat meat and we try not to judge people on that basis.
But there's kind of an expectation that if you're a vegan person that you've got to have this very militant and judgmental attitude towards other people and I don't feel that's very helpful with any ideal.
I don't think that's a good manner to deal with people from, you know?
Agreed.
I was there as well when I was a judgmental vegan.
I was that person and Unhealthy, an unhealthy judgmental vegan.
Yeah.
But I was, I was, I was saved.
Saved, Rick.
You look like the living embodiment of salvation today.
I hope we get to spend some time together in person soon.
I really do.
I find it, what do I find it?
I feel warm and emotional when I, when I communicate with you.
It's, and enriched.
Thank you so much for taking the time and for your kindness.
My pleasure.
I feel a deep connection with you always and one that I honestly would say, while we don't know each other well, I don't have the connection I have with you with very many people.
That's beautiful.
I'm honoured.
You're really beautiful.
I love you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
I love you too.
And I can't wait to see you in person.
Thanks, man.
I'll see you soon.
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