Rick Rubin on Art, Life and Vibe Coding
55:59 Share

Today on the AI Daily Brief, Rick Rubin on art, life, and vibe coding. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Thanks to today's sponsors, KPMG, Blitzy.com, and Super Intelligent. And to get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai daily brief.

Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today we have something quite a bit different. First of all, it's an interview. And second of all, it's not just an interview with anyone. Even if you don't think you know today's guest, you have absolutely heard or been impacted by his work in some way. His fingerprints are on some of the most iconic music of the last 40 years.

Beastie Boys Licensed to Ill, Red Hot Chili Peppers Blood Sugar Sex Magic, Tom Petty Wildflowers Slayer Rain and Blood, Jay-Z's 99 Problems, Justin Timberlake's Future Sex Love Sounds, Ed Sheeran's X, Adele's 21, System of a Down Toxicity, Johnny Cash, the entire American recording series, the first of which was included in my guest's living room. If Run DMC's Christmas Hollis is part of your annual holiday celebration, that's him too.

Of course, I am talking about the legendary music producer, Rick Rubin. A few weeks ago, my friends from Anthropic reached out about a project they were collaborating on with Rick around, believe it or not, vibe coding. Now, you may have seen this meme of Rick with his eyes closed, headphones on, vibing in front of a computer, because it became a visual representation for vibe coding. And it turns out that even though it was sort of absurd and a joke, it also made a weird sort of sense. You see, Rubin is famously the producer who doesn't play instruments.

In the parlance of the moment, the internet might call him a vibe producer. And so on some level, it wasn't that surprising that the meme resonated with the man himself and he decided to run with it. Now, I'm sure some of you have read Rick's book, The Creative Act, A Way of Being. It's a meditation on creativity, art, and many of the themes in the book are extremely aligned with the ethos and honestly technicalities of vibe coding.

But Rick took it further. Collaborating with Anthropic, he's just announced a project called The Way of Code. It's effectively a living internet book, pairing 81 meditations on creative technology with interactive code artifacts created in partnership with Anthropic and their AI assistant, Claude. The book is inspired by Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching and digs deeper into themes that have shaped Rick's life and work.

In our conversation, we talk about becoming the unofficial mascot for vibe coding and how we felt like it was pulling him in, the implications of vibe coding like the democratization of creativity. But we also just talk a lot about art and AI and frankly, why Rick isn't scared of AI somehow usurping human creativity. As an obsessive music person, an AI observer, and a huge Rick fan, I was delighted to have this conversation. All right, Rick, welcome to the AI Daily Brief. How are you?

I'm very well. How are you, sir? I'm great. You know, so I had to do this. I was thinking to myself in the spirit of this conversation, I asked Claude, I said, I'm talking with Rick Rubin tomorrow about vibe coding. If our conversation were a song, how would it start?

And it came back with something great. I mean, this is a really good context. So it said, it would start with a silence, not an empty silence, but a full purposeful quiet setting the tone, a long pause, breathing space, letting anticipation build until the first note arrives like an instinctual whisper, simple yet profound, softly nudging the listener into openness and curiosity.

I love it. Yeah. So this is going to be such an interesting conversation, but I want to start with kind of a funny thing. When did you learn you had become a meme? At the time that I became the meme, I got friends were sending me pictures of me relating to something called vibe coding, which I didn't know what it was.

And this all happened very quickly and recently. I would say this was maybe eight weeks ago, eight or ten weeks ago. Yeah. And what was your journey into sort of understanding what vibe coding meant? I have no understanding of anything to do with – I can barely get my computer to turn on. I'm not technical in any way. I have no coding skills whatsoever.

I really have a hard time getting the equipment even to work at the most rudimentary level. So seeing my image associated with this new technology just seemed like just funny. It was funny. Yeah. And how fast, though, did it click that actually it was super coherent? Like it felt very resonant with a philosophy that you've had for some time.

It's true. I'm the record producer who doesn't know anything about music. So the idea that there could be a coder who doesn't know anything about coding, and that's vibe coding, it makes sense. I came to understand it. But at first, I saw the image. Another interesting thing about that image from the meme, at first, I thought it was an AI image. I thought, oh, someone made a picture of me. Because I'd never seen that picture before. And then I came to realize that it actually was a photograph of me in New York.

Munich at a hi-fi convention and I was listening to those headphones and the mouse was the volume control for the headphones. That's why my eyes were closed. I was focusing on the music and that's where that came from. And I never saw that image before. That's so funny. Then when I saw it associated with vibe coding and when I came to learn what vibe coding was, I understood and thought it was

Funny and ridiculous, but it was as if the hive mind selected me to be part of this story. And my first instinct was, this is unusual. And then I started thinking about it because more and more people were sending me links to images of

Of me, you know, there was a cursor, the 15 rules of vibe coding, and my picture was at the top of it. And there are all these things happening. It's like so strange. Like, I don't know what any of this is. I don't know what any of this is, but I'm the mascot in some way. And a lot of the philosophy in the creative act, the book about creativity is talking about, we're always in collaboration with everything going on around us.

And in this case, I felt like, okay, I'm being enlisted here for something. I don't really understand what it is, but it's coming at me from all sides. It felt like maybe I'm being asked to participate in some way. And I just thought about it and I thought, okay, I don't know anything. I don't even know what it is. Maybe I could write a book about this thing that I don't know what it is. Maybe that would be interesting. And it started really as a joke.

It's like, that would be funny. Somebody writing a book about something they don't even know what it is. What would that book be like? And then I started thinking about the different philosophical and spiritual texts I've read over my life. And probably my favorite of all is called the Tao Te Ching, which is written by Lao Tzu. It's about 3000 years old. I first came across it about 40 years ago.

And I read it regularly. And the beauty of that book is that every time you read it, it feels like a new book. The reader brings as much to the information in the book as what the book is offering. The book is open and poetic enough to allow the reader to truly participate in the experience of what the book is saying.

And I thought if there was a way to do a vibe coding book based on the DAO, that might be interesting. And again, I'm still thinking it's a joke at that point in time, but I'm going to pursue the joke.

And I started pursuing it, and I got many different translations, had many translations, got many more. I spoke to several different AIs about the idea and asked it to weigh in and get some ideas that way. I took all the information and started putting it together and came to realize pretty quickly, once it started coming together and having some shape, a rough outline of what it could be,

Even though it started as a joke, it's actually profound because the DAO itself is so profound that anyone who comes in contact with this 3,000-year-old information, it's going to have an effect on them. And then I thought, I imagine many people in the coding world might not know about this stuff, might not know about Lao Tzu, maybe never read the DAO.

So to introduce the DAO to this audience, who will probably be the people who are building the future, could end up being a really important thing. But again, started as a joke.

And it revealed itself to be what it wanted to be, which is dead serious, I would say. It's still funny. I mean, the subtitle of the project is The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding. It's the timeless art of something that was coined 10 weeks ago. You know, it's ridiculous. But that's part of the beauty of it.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. So one of the other things that you talk about, I think, quite a bit in Creative Act is the idea whose time has come and how a lot of great creation is, is you just happen to be at the intersection of this thing that's forcing itself into the world. And as someone who's

watched very closely, about as closely as anyone over the last couple of years with AI, just by virtue of what I do, even within this field where so many new things are coming, there does feel to me to be something fundamentally different about vibe coding and the resonance of it. And I think that you actually are just, you're almost just scratching the surface of some of this with the book. I've spent a bunch of time with it now over the last few days. And I

it really does feel it's not a difference in scale. It's a difference in kind, right? It is not just, it doesn't feel to me an expansion of who gets to write code to build computer programs. Um,

it really feels like an unlock in generative capacity of people, right? And it may be less the code itself and more what the code unlocks. That's the real value. But I think people feel this. I think that part of why you were enlisted is that people feel that it is bigger than just, hey, the coolest new technology thing that they announced something about at a Microsoft conference or something like that. Yeah, it does feel like this is something for everyone to participate in.

And I imagine most people will not be coming at it from either philosophical or spiritual dimension. So the book invites a different frame of reference going into this process that I think could be really beneficial.

Have you had a chance to spend much time with these tools themselves? I mean, obviously you're living inside sort of this philosophy and trying to unpack the layers of it, but have you had a chance to kind of dig in and just try to create stuff with any of these tools that are out there? I have not. So it's interesting because I had wondered if that was the case, but so much... So I was actually going back and re-listening to, reconnecting with the creative act now in this new context, right? I'd listened to it and read it before, but came back to it again.

And there are a number of parts of that that get recontextualized in the context of vibe coding that are really, really interesting. So one, I mean, the beginner's mind, I think, stands out really strongly. You're certainly living in that, you know, with this idea. But everyone is, right? This is, to your point of it being, you know, very, very new. It's like this didn't exist, you know, six months ago, much less a year ago. I think this idea of collaboration that you mentioned, sort of all art being a collaboration, right?

But I also think, and this is one of the things that's hard for people who are coming at this from a traditional coding background,

The way that you manifest and generate this is much less, it's every bit as intentional, but it's much less deterministic. You don't get to control it in the way that you get to control code. You have to nudge it. You have to sort of almost surrender a little bit to what it wants to do and just kind of push it along towards something that almost inevitably is a little bit different than what you thought it was going to be at the beginning. Yeah.

Yes. And hopefully better than you thought it was going to be. It's one of the things that I've come to see working in the studio for all these years is we'll start with some idea of what it can be.

And then through the experimentation, it often turns into something completely different and often something much better. But if we're too deterministic to start with, it ends up being a limitation. We're painting in a very small square. If we think we know what it is in advance, we're making a tiny little thing. Whereas if we allow what wants to be to come out while we're making what we're making,

All of a sudden we realize, hmm, and you hear the story with so many startups where a company starts as one thing and then it sort of morphs into the thing that we know it for. It happens all the time. The idea that these mistakes or reframing or reorientations change the picture. We thought we were making one thing, but we're really making something totally different.

And the beauty of the vibe coding is it takes less steps to get to see what that first iteration is than if you had to manually write all that code. And I imagine the more code you write, the more attached you are to it doing what you want it to do. Whereas if you're suggesting you want it something like this and you get something like that but different, maybe you'll be more open to seeing when it's better.

So we've experienced a little bit of this even inside my startup where no one talks about their feature ideas anymore or their product ideas. They just vibe code them. And what will often happen is it's sort of valuable on a couple different levels. One is it's much easier to explain what you're trying to show. Show, don't tell, right? But more than that, what often happens is that in the process of

trying to birth this thing into the world to see and visualize it, one of us will realize that actually the thing that we cared about wasn't the thing that we went in trying to explain. And we would have spent all of these words, dozens or hundreds or thousands of words trying to articulate a thing. And the reason that we would have tried so hard to articulate a thing is it actually wasn't even the thing that we were trying to get to. But by virtue of sort of being able to just

put it out very, you know, nascently into the world, you know, we kind of uncover the thing that we are trying to go for. And I think it's a very different process. And again, it sort of involves a lot more, a lot more collaboration with forces unseen in some ways. Absolutely. And that's honestly how all creation really works. I think the other version of kind of muscling your way through to get what you want, that's not the way the great artists work.

You know, that's the way maybe craftspeople might work that way. But the real revolutionary artists know that more goes into it than what you think it's supposed to be. And that the forces align for something bigger and better to come through if you allow it to happen.

Have you spent or had you spent much time thinking about AI and creation broadly before you sort of wandered into or you were enlisted into the vibe coding world? The only thing that I thought about was the reason I'm interested in the artists that I like is because I'm interested in their points of view. About two years ago, someone played me a song that was Jay-Z rapping.

And it wasn't Jay-Z. It was an AI Jay-Z. And it was now vibe coded that two years ago, but it was an AI generated song based on Jay-Z's other work. So it was written as if Jay-Z wrote it from the computer's point of view using his voice.

And I listened to it and I realized I don't listen to Jay-Z to hear the sound of his voice or to hear the way he's thought about things in the past. I listen to Jay-Z to know what is he thinking about in this moment? What does he care enough about today to commit it to writing, to give us a song? And that's his point of view.

And AI doesn't have a point of view. It can cobble together a historic reference of things you've thought about in the past, but that's not your point of view. And our point of view changes over time just based on our experiences in life. So I always thought of AI as...

an interesting tool, but it couldn't replace what the artist does because the artist is the point of view. AI is not point of view. Now, I've spent a lot of time in my younger life listening to vinyl records, looking for samples of things to use.

So we would do, it was called crate digging. You'd get all these records that you might have never listened to before and hunt around and see if there are any moments that were interesting that could be the basis to build something around. So it wasn't even copying someone else's song. It was just looking for an interesting moment in a performance that could be looped to create something bigger.

a starting point. And it seems like instead of spending all time looking at old records, you could have AI just generating music all the time and you could have that on in the background playing all day. And whenever you hear something that catches your ear,

You could create a snippet that's different than asking it to make what you want it to make, but you could let it DJ all the time. And if you happen to run into a moment that's interesting to you, you could capture that. And then the human can do the thing that the human does with art. That's how I perceive the potential use for AI going back for the last two years.

Yeah, it's interesting. So music has always been sort of my most important way of engaging with the world artistically. It's the genre that I was forever dance around, so close to being a music manager numerous times in my career, giving up tech and just sort of joining music. It's the thing that connects with me most resonantly. And music has always been, since I started paying attention to AI...

The biggest reason that I wasn't concerned in the way that I think some are about AI replacing human creativity for a couple of reasons, and one of them will be maybe particularly funny to you. So first, again, I was re-listening to the book and, you know, in the Make It Up chapter, you say a truism that's so true, it's one of those things that needs to be repeated all the time, which is no one knows what it makes a piece great. Right.

And, you know, like for every song that becomes a thing that's, you know, hugely emotionally resonant and culturally impactful, there's 10,000 other songs that use the same chords and the same words and the same themes and just they're not. And there's this infinitude of tiny little decisions that artists make that, you know, make it what it is. And I think I feel similarly to you that AI is just going to create this massive canvas of new sort of things to pull from.

I also think the other sort of thing that felt strongly as I was listening yesterday was the intention that if the art is about the sort of the intention that gets pressed into it, not about the delivery mechanism, AI is almost incidental. If an artist uses AI or if they use a guitar, if they use a turntable, if the intention is the thing that makes it art, AI is just another vehicle for uncovering it. It's another tool. It truly is another tool. Right.

You can't say it's a good tool or a bad tool. It's either the tool that helps you get where you're going or it doesn't help you get where you're going. And either way, it's certainly worth examining any new tool. If you start thinking the tool is the end, that the tool is the art, it's not. It never is. But it's another tool. And it could be a really powerful tool and a really useful tool. But like most tools, the more powerful they are,

If they allow the artist to settle, like if you don't have to work as hard to get the result, maybe the bar gets lowered and maybe that's not a good thing. But that has more to do with the artist than it does to do with the technology.

It's pushing through any boundaries to get to where you want to get. And when I say where you want to get, you often don't know in advance what that is. You learn it along the way. You learn it on the journey. You find out where those magic moments are.

So there's a concept in AI called the Turing test. It's a longstanding historical concept. And it was basically this idea that AI would pass the Turing test when a human could have a conversation with an AI and not realize it was an AI. That's sort of the simplest definition of it. And I've actually had sort of in my head for a long time, believe it or not, a musical version of this, sort of a creative Turing test. And in my head, it's called the system of a down test.

And so System of a Down was my sort of like my revelatory band when I was a teenager. It's the band that I tried to copy with all my bands down to like the stutter snares and these like tiny little elements that I tried to reference. And the reason that I think of it as the System of a Down test is that if you, especially you listen to that first album, the variety of weird decisions made on every single song that no one else would make.

is that you're just, I just can't imagine an AI ever putting those combination of elements together. And so it's not that the system of a down test for me is not, can an AI, you know, make a thing that sounds like system of a down. It's do AIs ever get to the point where these random off kilter, seemingly wrong, even decisions that humans make are a thing that it does. And my guess is that it doesn't. And that's always going to be the province of the artist. Yeah. The revolutionary work.

breaks the rules of convention. AI is built based on the rules of convention. It's a regurgitation machine. So you've been around at a lot of moments of explosion, the birth of new things. Does this feel like one of those moments to you?

It does. And I'll say not so much in my world, but I feel it around me and I feel it around me coming from all sides and with a at a fevered pitch that I don't think I can remember ever seeing before. As you've been pulled in more with vibe coding, has that frequency gone up and do you find yourself wanting to lean into it in different ways? I mean, is this book in some ways an act of you letting it take whatever the next steps of the journey it's going to take you on?

Yeah, it'll go wherever it wants to go. I love the idea of a 3,000-year-old philosophical work applying to the most cutting-edge technology of the moment, and it just seamlessly hand-in-glove fits. That feels good to me. It makes the vibe coding feel more real to me that the

rules that apply to all things that work through nature over time, it applies, vibe coding applies to those same principles, makes me think it may have a future.

Today's episode is brought to you by Super Intelligent and more specifically, Super's Agent Readiness Audits. If you've been listening for a while, you have probably heard me talk about this, but basically the idea of the Agent Readiness Audit is that this is a system that we've created to help you benchmark and map opportunities for your business.

in your organizations where agents could specifically help you solve your problems, create new opportunities in a way that, again, is completely customized to you. When you do one of these audits, what you're going to do is a voice-based agent interview where we work with some number of your leadership and employees.

to map what's going on inside the organization and to figure out where you are in your agent journey. That's going to produce an agent readiness score that comes with a deep set of explanations, strength, weaknesses, key findings, and of course, a set of very specific recommendations that then we have the ability to help you go find the right partners to actually fulfill.

So if you are looking for a way to jumpstart your agent strategy, send us an email at agent at besuper.ai and let's get you plugged into the agentic era. Today's episode is brought to you by KPMG. In today's fiercely competitive market, unlocking AI's potential could help give you a competitive edge, foster growth, and drive new value. But here's the key. You don't need an AI strategy. You need to embed AI into your overall business strategy to truly power it up.

KPMG can show you how to integrate AI and AI agents into your business strategy in a way that truly works and is built on trusted AI principles and platforms. Check out real stories from KPMG to hear how AI is driving success with its clients at www.kpmg.us slash AI. Again, that's www.kpmg.us slash AI.

Today's episode is brought to you by Blitzy, the enterprise autonomous software development platform with infinite code context. Which, if you don't know exactly what that means yet, do not worry, we're going to explain, and it's awesome. So Blitzy is used alongside your favorite coding copilot as your batch software development platform for the enterprise, and it's meant for those who are seeking dramatic development acceleration on large-scale codebases. Traditional copilots help developers with line-by-line completions and snippets,

But Blitze works ahead of the IDE, first documenting your entire codebase, then deploying more than 3,000 coordinated AI agents working in parallel to batch build millions of lines of high-quality code for large-scale software projects. So then whether it's codebase refactors, modernizations, or bulk development of your product roadmap, the whole idea of Blitze is to provide enterprises dramatic velocity improvement.

To put it in simpler terms, for every line of code eventually provided to the human engineering team, Blitze will have written it hundreds of times, validating the output with different agents to get the highest quality code to the enterprise and batch. Projects then that would normally require dozens of developers working for months can now be completed with a fraction of the team in weeks, empowering organizations to dramatically shorten development cycles and bring products to market faster than ever.

If your enterprise is looking to accelerate software development, whether it's large-scale modernization, refactoring, or just increasing the rate of your STLC, contact Blitzy at blitzy.com, that's B-L-I-T-Z-Y dot com, to book a custom demo, or just press get started and start using the product right away. Do you have a sense, and maybe this isn't sort of part of the calculus, but do you have an idea of who this book is for, or who you want to sort of receive it from?

I'm most interested in the tech world reaction to it because I think it'll be the most foreign to them. It's funny, vibe coding would be something that people in technology would probably know more about than anyone else. But the nature of the book, I'm guessing, will be most foreign to that audience. And I feel like that's where the power in it lies.

This is, man, I don't even know if I want to ask this question because it's too reductive. I was going to ask something to the effect of if there's like, you know, a single lesson that or a connection point that you saw that if you just had, you know, a minute with Elon Musk in an elevator, you would hope sort of that he should embrace. Is there anything that stood out? Or is it more just sort of the connection, the through line, like you put it between sort of, you know, ancient philosophy and this thing that is very of the moment?

I think these timeless rules apply to this thing of the moment in a way that we know we don't know how it works when we're making art. I believe we don't know how it works as it relates to anything in the world. And vibe coding feels like a good partner in this not knowing how it works, let's go on this adventure. This is a tool to help me go further faster.

One of the things that I was also thinking about in the context of this conversation was it's interesting to me how many of the terms that we use in and around AI or vibe coding are musical terms. So when we talk about agents, we talk about orchestration and conducting, and we talk about seeds and prompts and all these things that you could be talking about the beginning of a song almost. Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting. I never made that connection. Yeah, the orchestration is the one that I think about now because we're sort of living through this moment where even AI is shifting from it's a thing that I use to now I have all these AIs and they're doing all these things. And I don't exactly even know how they're doing them or what they're doing them or why they're deciding. And my job is the orchestrator. It's the conductor of these. And this is even in the business world. This is how they're starting to think about it. And that concept is becoming even more important now.

How do you see it developing over time? I think that I generally think that all the work or a lot of the work that people do now, especially in sort of like the knowledge work world in the future is different.

done, the things that we do are done by AIs, by agents, but with a person conducting them in some way. I think that the thing that doesn't change is that intention. And I think that there's going to be whole new opportunities for the way that we do things that are really interesting and exciting, you know, instead of, it sounds cheesy, but, you

You know, people have a job right now that's writing social media copy, right? When we release this episode, I'll write a bunch of tweets about it. And a useful but not all that interesting way of thinking about AI is that, well, I could ask AI to help and it'll save me some time. You know, maybe the tweet will be cool.

A much more interesting way, I think, in the long run is what if I had a room full of all of the greatest writers in history? There was Oscar Wilde and there was Shakespeare and there was Lao Tzu and there was all these people. And each of them got to write a tweet about this episode. And they're going to send them off into a world of imagined audiences that also represent all these different audiences.

And what's going to come back to me is these unexpected combinations where they said, you know, for whatever reason, it was really the Oscar Wilde tweet about this that resonated. So go with that one. And that's the sort of thing that becomes possible when instead of having to sort of control and do the thing, we let all these other sort of, you know, versions of it do it. And we use taste and intention to decide, you know, which will be. And so I think it gets interesting.

The canvas for creativity is expanding radically in ways that I think are going to be... I think creativity comes into almost everything we do in a totally different way because of it. Beautiful. One of the things that I... Coming from the non-tech world, one of the things I notice is that when you talk to people about AI, it's such a foreign concept that...

People have no idea of any of the things that it could do, much less all of the things it could do. And I think the demonstrating use cases

really different use cases is going to be helpful for people to just understand because we, most tools we think about, we think about a wrench and if there's a nut, you know, which size wrench to get and you adjust it. But when it's such an open-ended tool that it literally can do anything.

It's hard to know where to even start with what anything means. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, the field of opportunity is so big. There's no menu. And I'm hoping someone comes up with a menu for the purpose of translating to non-tech people some of the things that this technology is capable of so they can use it.

Yeah, I think we'll, I think we will start to see that because I think that what will happen, and this is actually where I think vibe coding is a huge unlock.

is the mostly the way that technology has proceeded. Now it's happening much faster, but mostly the way that it works is people get excited about a new thing and no one knows how to use it. And we always think that it's going to be kind of a one-to-one replacement for a thing we used to do. Just, you know, what the first generation of the internet was basically phone books, but on the internet, you know, and then it became something totally different.

And I think that we're sort of in that stage with AI right now. Again, like, you know, I had to write tweets before and now AI writes the tweets for me. But what always happens is that people start to explore and creative and they find edge cases and they stumble into and make mistakes and it does this other thing that they had no expectation of or no idea of. And then something really cool comes out and that really cool thing gets amplified in culture and then people want to do that thing and they try it and that becomes the way that they use it. And

I think we're at the very early stages of that with AI. But I think what's going to happen is people will share things that are unexpected and interesting and strange, and other people will imitate and copy and remix. You know, I think that...

Remix culture is actually hugely analogous here because of what we'll be able to do. I mean, even the vibe coding platforms all are set up to allow you to fork and remix things that other people have built. It's a core kind of tenant of them that's built in almost.

That's great. And I believe all art works that way as well. All creativity is we're always starting with something that we've experienced in our life. It doesn't start with a new thing with us. It always starts with, I heard System of a Down, and now I want to try it this other way. Because I heard them, I know you could do it that way. I don't want to copy them and do the same thing. But because they could do that, I could do this other version, this other left turn.

And it's always been that way. Everything is built on what has come before.

But the revolutionary art, it's built on what's come before in unexpected ways, and it makes choices that wouldn't typically be expected. There's interesting in the creative act, there is a story about AI. There's a story about AlphaGo and the experience that I had. And this was probably about seven years ago. I had this experience where a documentary was made about the AI beating the Go master, grandmaster.

And I was watching this movie and it was supposedly the holy grail of AI. When the computer could beat the grandmaster at Go, it could do anything because that was the ultimate. There are more moves in Go than there are grains of sand on the planet. More possibilities. And if you remember, the computer made a move before winning.

that frustrated the Grandmaster. The commentators believed it was a mistake, the move that the computer made, because no other Go player, no expert would have ever made this move. There were two choices of a move to make. If you moved onto the first line, put your stone on the first line, it would indicate playing an aggressive game. If you put the stone on the second line, it would indicate that you were playing a more defensive game.

Those were your two choices. And that's the way the game has been played for thousands of years. The computer put the stone on the third line, which nobody did. But it wasn't against the rules. People just didn't... It wasn't in the culture of the game to do that. So the reason the computer ended up winning wasn't because it was smarter. It knew less. The computer knew less than the humans. The humans had mores...

it had a culture around it beyond the rules and the culture around it ended up being the limiting factor. So it seems like the real strength of AI's ability to create positive change, to create breakthrough technologies is not in humans organizing the AI to follow what we think is right, because what we think is right

might be exactly what's slowing us down. In the AI Go story, the computer won because it didn't know what humans thought it was supposed to do. And it just looked at the rules and played by the rules and won.

We put all of these extra ideas of how we think it's supposed to work. What's allowable? What's the way we've always done it? If the computer wants to do it a way that's not the way we've always done it, we might say, no, that's wrong. Don't do it that way and program it out. That defeats the whole purpose of AI. The benefit of AI is it needs to be completely unfiltered, completely free.

And in the same way that artists need to be completely unfiltered and completely free. And that's where the great comedians come from. It's where the great music comes from. It's where all of the great scientific ideas come from. Historically, the scientists who had the theories that we currently believe were often jailed, burned at the stake. You know, they were not acceptable in their day.

So the idea that we're trying to neuter AI to be like we think this is the polite version of AI, it defeats the whole purpose of what AI can do.

You know, it's interesting too, is people are finding this even in very boring sort of day-to-day business explorations of this technology. We're still just learning like how to interact with it positively. We have a voice agent that interviews people to ask things about how they work in their day-to-day life.

And we came at it thinking like we want a very strict sort of hierarchy of questions. You ask this question, then you ask this question, then you ask this question. But what the AI wants to do is it wants to bounce around between all these questions and it wants to think of some other questions that we didn't think to ask. And it wants to be able to kind of move between them. And we can constrain it and sort of force it into this like boxed

to do the thing that we need. But I think that the use cases that are much more revelatory rather than just functional are ones where you sort of give it breath to explore a little bit. Yeah. And I'm just hoping that the training wheels aren't put on so tightly that innovation can never happen. One of the interesting things in exploring the through line between the creative act and the way of code is

And just listening to you talk right here is, I think one of your great explanations feels to me to be trying to suss out the difference between universal truths and rules that we tell ourselves are rules that in some cases appear very similar, but are actually totally different forces. Absolutely. We've taken on so many rules that we assume are

are the right way to go about doing things that they end up being limitations. And it could be, well, my favorite songwriter, I read an interview where he said, this is how he writes songs. So that's how I write songs. And there is no one size fits all for everybody. Just because something worked for someone doesn't mean it works for you. Also,

I may have found something that works for me, that I believe works for me, when in reality, the thing that was working for me wasn't even that thing that I noticed. You know, I notice it. I think this is what it is. I know when I wear these particular red socks to the studio, we have a good session that day. So everybody got to get red socks. That's not the case. But I may believe the red socks are the key and they might not be the key.

So I might not even know myself, much less be able to pass on that information to you. We get rules from teachers. We get rules from experts. We get rules from historical references. And even if you ask someone for advice, someone very successful, and you ask them for advice, they're always going to give you advice, well-meaning advice, based on their experience in life.

And their experience in life and your experience in life might be very different. And the arena that you are going into and the one that they entered into, even if it's the same arena, but now it's 10 years later or 20 years later, could be totally different. So any useful information, I think I say in the Creative Act, if you try the opposite, it might be just as helpful. You know, there's no, no one knows anything.

So be free, trust your inner state, and that's building your confidence in your taste. If you eat food and you taste the food and you like the way the food tastes and you know what you like the taste of, bring that same philosophy to everything you do. I know what I like. This tastes good. This tastes bad.

You can do that with music. You can do that with a website. You could do that with any new business you're starting. This tastes good to me. Not, I imagine this is something that would be useful to someone else because you don't know.

taste good, taste bad is actually genuinely the way that my wife and I make big core decisions is we use that exact phrase. I think we pulled it from a comedian once who was talking about how when you're a kid, you make fun of someone. And sometimes it makes you feel like you're learning and you say, Oh, it tastes good. And then you get a little older and like, Oh, that tastes bad. And something about that stuck in our heads. And so now, you know, whenever there's some big, I mean, we're talking about like buying houses and like, you know, should we move our kids? It's like,

reduce it to, does this taste good or does it taste bad? And that has served us very well.

It's great. Sometimes you also make a checklist of, I want it to do this, I want it to do this, I want it to have this many bedrooms, I want it to have this many bathrooms, I want it to face south, I want it to be on this kind of a street, I want it to be in a cul-de-sac, and you have your list. And then you get to a house that has everything on the list, and you can be tricked into thinking it's the house you want because it's not.

It has the things on the list you want or in a partner. If you're looking for a relationship, you make a list of, well, she can't smoke. She, you know, and you make the list of all the things that you, your dream partner has, and then you meet the person who you fall in love with and they don't have any of those things. And the list goes out the window very quickly, but you, you just decide, no, we connect and we can't know like all of those surface, the things that we can list are things on the surface, right?

The things that you innately feel in a real connection, you would never know how to make that list. When it's happening, you don't understand it.

I mean, that was that's actually literally the story of this house. We were sure that we wanted a cool, vibey, older house, you know, reclaimed farmhouse, 1900s, 1800s. We went and looked at a bunch of them. We almost didn't go see this house because it was 1990s, you know, big, gross McMansion-y windows, like silly looking thing. We walked in. We loved it instantly because it turns out it was like

All of my rich friends' parents' houses when I was a kid in the 90s that had rec rooms that I spent so much time listening to System of a Down End and it had a rec room, like a semi-finished basement. I was like, done. It is so uncool and it doesn't matter to me because this is the one that I want. I could never have known until I walked in. So there's even a level of self-awareness. And not to try to wrench this back to...

to AI. But I think that part of what does excite me about one of the ways to use these tools is that

our ability to explore what if, or just try different things. Like you've talked both before and in the book about one of the downsides of making things easier to make is that sometimes it is about the effort and trying to uncover. And if it's just easy to make, it lacks something or it doesn't find something. Not always the time. Sometimes things come in bursts of inspiration. But one of the ways to take advantage of how easy AI makes things is

is that in the time that it would have taken you to do one draft of a thing, you can do 20 drafts now. And, you know, and purposefully, I mean, it's taking that idea of doing the opposite thing to the extreme of like, not just do the opposite version of this, but do five opposite versions of it and see what comes. Yeah.

Yeah. And then you may find the perfect version in that or you may learn through that experiment. It's actually a combination of several of these ideas. And it's part of this one. It's part of this one. And I can take from here and I can create a Frankenstein using the things that have come up through this experiment.

It's very exciting. I love the idea of the iterations. We do it all the time in the recording studio in the analog way. We'll play the music and then we'll say, "Okay, now let's try it faster. Let's try it slower. Let's try it more in this style. Let's try it more in this style." What would happen if we only use this instrument or only use these instruments or change the time signature of it to have a different bounce? We try a lot of different things.

And we're surprised. You know, we're surprised by what happens. And sometimes it's very easy in that process, like, okay, we've made these 10 things. Number seven's our favorite, done. But sometimes it's like, hmm, number three and number seven have nothing to do with each other, and they're both great.

And then you like let those sit together for a while. And then you might come back and you may choose between them, but you also might say, okay, now that we've had the experience of seven being great and three being great, let's play some more and see what happens. And now that you have a new, like your perspective change, you see the world differently now that you've seen two things that you really like that are not alike. And then you can experiment to see where that goes.

This is a little bit of a detour, but do you think that the sort of voracious range of options is expanding people's palates, expanding their interest in trying things? You know, I was thinking about like three and seven being totally different options.

but they work for some reason. I was thinking about the historical construct of an album feeling all contiguous. Now you have genres are blending. Everyone now is the type of person who 20 years ago said, "Why I listen to every type of music."

You know, I don't know. I don't know exactly even how to phrase the question. But, you know, do you find maybe coming at this from the music side that people's taste is expanding or are they still getting stuck in kind of like their small ruts and not doing this sort of experimentation? Yeah.

I think it depends on the artist. There's no one rule. Some artists are really eclectic in what they make. Some artists have a pretty, the way the music comes out of them sounds like them, you know, just, and even in all the experimentation, it still always sounds like them, you know?

Yeah, I think one of my favorite things is when you hear these little tiny notes and you can spot it a mile away as a sort of reflection of the artist. Like I told you with System of a Down, it's a very small thing, but there was a very specific way they had to sort of like this double snare hit that added like this extra pop.

to the speed, even though the time signature was the same. And that was the thing that I always honed in on and tried to copy. And I think DJs, you know, Skrillex is a big fan of exploring sounds. And you can sometimes tell he gets a sound up in his craw. And for the next year or two, every set has that specific sound that clearly just loves that one sound and how he kind of brought it together. Oh, you hear it. And then you hear it in another DJ set. And you're like, oh, I know exactly where that came from. So it's interesting. And then the beauty of that is that maybe three years later,

That's not part of it at all anymore. That's not in the vocabulary anymore. And that's what keeps artists interesting is when they continue to unfold and allow new sides of themselves to come forward. And some artists are afraid to do it. Some artists get successful doing one thing and feel obligated to stay in that style because that's what's expected of them.

But the great artists, well, I guess there's always exceptions. I'll say the Ramones were really great and they did one thing. ACDC, really great. They did one thing. But the Beatles, every album sounds different. You know, they made 13 albums in seven years and times they sound like different bands through that whole adventure. This was actually a hugely instructive lesson in my young life.

because I was a hardcore and punk scene kid. There's this very clear pattern with a lot of these bands.

The first album is the rawest. It's the one that the true fans go back to, and it doesn't matter that it's messy and a little more imbalanced and a variable quality. It's the loudest and the most aggressive. And then the second album is where they reach their peak of they've honed in their craft. And it's a little bit more, not pop exactly, but it's the thing that's going to bring them a bigger audience.

And then by the third album, and this is for heavy bands, especially, you know, the first wave of people who love them by the first album are like, ah, they've sold out. It's lame. It's so soft. And I had this experience over and over and over again. And then I go, you know, I would go back.

10 years later and love that third album and the fourth and the fifth. And I would actually watch these bands that had long, successful careers. They didn't stop evolving. You know, they kept being okay, changing who they were. And if that meant that some fans peeled off and new fans came in. And for me, this is very instructive thinking about my own life and career and just being okay with change and, and never standing still. And, you know, it's,

It's visceral when it's in metal because you can so clearly tell how loud one album is to another. But, you know, I took that lesson for a lot of parts of my life. Yeah, I think the key is the artists staying true to themselves. And in the case of ACDC and the Ramones, they stayed true to themselves by staying the same. That's who they were. They love that music. They always loved that music. It wasn't in them to do anything different. That's their thing.

And there are other artists who continually evolve and change and grow. And that's true to them. And the audience over time will typically grow with you. It's in some ways, I think it's easier. Let's say you start, you start when you're 18 or 19 and you, and your audience is your age. By the time you're 25, chances are your tastes have changed. The audience's tastes have changed.

And if you're still doing just what you were doing when you were 18, it's probably not going to be interesting for you. And it probably won't be interesting for the audience for very long. You know, if it's going to be a way of life, constantly evolving and allowing the other dimensions of your taste to come through as you find them can be very beautiful.

How do you sort of move between and find the through line between sort of the professional aspects of this and the creative aspects? How do you, I guess, you know, your book is called A Creative Act, A Way of Being.

And clearly sort of the undercurrent is bringing creativity into these all parts of your life. Creativity isn't like a thing you turn on from nine to five because you happen to have a creative job. And I think, you know, like I was telling you right before we started that the way of code, I think people who have read both will feel there's a through line between them. And I think it's similar in the sense of

It's almost coding as metaphor for generativity more broadly and vibe as a way of approaching that bringing creation into the world. But you're expanding it from the type of act that you're using as the example. How do you do that? How do you kind of bring that thinking into the rest of your life?

Read the creative action. The whole book is about how to do that. That's what it's about. It really is living your life, paying attention to everything going on around you, being completely open-minded, not having too many strong held beliefs of the way things work or have to work or need to work and recognizing what's great when it happens, even if it's not what you wanted it to be.

And feeling comfortable and confident enough to share this thing that maybe some people don't like because some people won't like it. And the best, another thing from the creative act, the best work,

The best work divides the audience. If everybody likes something you made, chances are you didn't go far enough in making it the best version of itself. Because if everyone likes it, it's probably watered down to some degree, if it's palatable to everyone. The best things, there are people who absolutely love it. It's their favorite thing in the world. And then on the other side, there'll be people who hate it. And that's a good sign. That means you've gone far enough

to both make someone fall in love with it and allow someone to be repelled by it. That means it has real power, real energy in it. What's the next conversation you want to have about vibe coding? Now you're putting this out into the world. You're interested to see how sort of tech folks who haven't necessarily kind of connected the dots at this philosophy before think about it. Where do you want to see that conversation go?

I have no idea. I'm completely open to seeing what happens next. I'm surprised it all came together. Like it was, again, started as a joke, got serious because the nature of the Tao was serious. And I'm excited to see how people relate to it.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I think that we are at the very beginning of, I don't know, it's interesting. Every conversation I have around vibe coding and with people who are deep in it, it kind of butts up against our ability to communicate exactly what it is we're trying to say. I had this guy on the show who's building an app called Vibe Code and he's, you know, it's a vibe coding app to build mobile apps.

And he is a very loquacious person. He's not a, for a lack of words, but he still, I could feel that he couldn't quite express how meaningful it was to him that in this, he was never a coder before that he's gone from not being able to do this to being able to speak words into existence. And this feels like the very beginning of something to me. Yeah. I'm excited to see where it goes.

Well, thank you so much for sharing this with us. I'm glad that you leaned into the joke and decided to take it and run with it and make it, you know, not a joke, even if it's still a joke at the same time, because I love the book and I love what might come next with it. Cool. Thank you so much.