Rick Rubin interviewed by Ian Rogers (Bonus episode)

The hope for the way of code was that the people that would be the first audience would be coders. The people most interested in coding seem to be coders. The tech community and I think of the tech community as being really good at some things and maybe less connected in other ways. The way of code was an opportunity to bridge that gap and maybe turn a more technical audience on to more metaphysical ideas.

Yeah. And then the first thought was, how can I participate in this? Is that a good idea or bad idea? If it's a good idea, what could it look like? And the first thought was, well, I do these daily tweets and in the tweets I share a quote that usually could be interpreted as something inspirational or something thoughtful or something to think about, but it's usually pretty open and poetic purposely because the purpose of it is more of a prompt. It doesn't tell you the specific. It's a prompt to see what comes back. Very vibe code like.

And I thought about it, it's like, okay, what would the prompt be? I want to do a joke tweet. I've never done a joke tweet. I've been doing the tweets now seven years or so at the time, but I'd never done a joke tweet. Thought about hm what would be the joke version of this tweet? It ended up becoming tools will come and tools will go only the vibe coder remains. That was the tweet. So, I tweet the tweet and typically every day the tweets the response I notice that they get between 30,000 views and maybe 90,000 and for some reason I look the next day and the joke tweet has a million views and the next day it's like it's up to like a million and a million and a half like something insane. It's like, hm, someone's interested in this idea. I want to say it was a proof of concept, but there really wasn't any concept. It was like I felt the invitation and the response back from that was seemingly positive. Thought, hm, that's interesting. Just interesting. And I think about so much of the creative act is about this paying attention what's happening around you. Seeing what you see about it that maybe someone else doesn't see. That's what comedians do. If you watch Jerry Seinfeld, he repeats something that you see every day and then he'll say something that shows you how ridiculous and funny it is. But that's being observant. So the observation coming back was there's a reaction and in thinking still in my mind it's a joke. In joke terms what is the funniest thing I can do? It's like well I could write a book about this thing that I don't know about that's funny. It's interesting and I'm curious. That's one of the things I got to learn working on the creative act. I got to learn about things I didn't know I knew or knew but didn't understand and got to deep dive and understand them better.

So all that's going through my head. I start thinking about ideas. What would a book about vibe coding be like? Especially one written by someone who doesn't know what coding is, has never experienced vibe coding. Looking at it philosophically because that's kind of always what I do.

I understand. I don't think of it as creativity. I think of it as before when you wanted to code, you had to learn to code and it was difficult and involved a lot of diligence.

So I understood that when I say iteration back, I didn't think past an iteration back of code. I don't really know what code does. So I wasn't thinking past the idea of people write code. I don't think about why they're writing code or what it does. I know that it's an activity people do and they seem to care a lot about it. People write code and it's a long, grueling, frustrating process. Some people are better at it than others. That's what I know.

That's as much as I know.

because you are speaking to an engineer or an artist or somebody else who is realizing something and you have to become very good at giving instruction and just the right amount of instruction to get something which is maybe directionally correct but also often unexpected. So yeah, I think it is quite incredible that you stumbled into this thing which you talk about it as if it's completely outside of your wheelhouse and there are a lot of reasons that it's inside of your wheelhouse.

So the reasons that it's inside my wheelhouse, someone else recognized it was in my wheelhouse and that's why the meme happened.

But that's not my doing or really understanding. That was someone else's connecting the dots.

Several of the things I thought about from the beginning were the term vibe coding had been coined within weeks of this point in time and it's this meme moment but as you know most meme moments pass fast. They come and they go.

Yeah. And it felt like for this idea to mean anything, for the joke to be funny, it has to be fairly timely. I'm looking at it in a timely way, the project. I don't know if the original tweet, tools may come, tools may go, only the vibe coder remains. If I tweeted that today, if it would have had the same resonance as it did when I did, right? It was of the moment then. It was early then and that feeling of momentum of if I'm going to engage with this in any way, if I don't do it quickly, it's not worth doing. So that was one of the constraints. And again, none of this is the way I normally work. None of the things I make are on a time schedule. None of the things I make are to speak to a moment. I don't do that. I always think about we'll work on it for as long as it takes for it to be great and then that will be forever. And that's fine. Over the entire course of my life, it's been that way. So, this is really outside of my practice.

So, because of the constraint of time, I'm thinking, well, it can't be that long. And I'm thinking, is it a book of poetry? Is it a book of quotes? What is it? And it's very open-ended because again the idea of it's a book about something I don't know about. It's like when we were talking about a problem with AI is that it's the tool that does everything. So it's hard to even know how to approach it. What's the use case? I have the same problem with the idea of a book related to something I don't know about. What does that even look like? So it's really starting from a real question mark. No idea what it'll be other than it's time-sensitive so it can't be too long in my mind and then I think about because I always think about maybe there's a spiritual component maybe there's some aspect of this it's not just the surface there's something below the surface that's usually where the most interesting things are and I thought about different things I've read over the course of my life and the Dao Jing has always been my favorite of all of the spiritual texts I've read over the course of my life. Always felt a connection to it. Probably read it every year for 40 years.

It's 81 chapters. Each chapter is typically no more than a page. Sometimes it's a paragraph, sometimes it's three paragraphs, sometimes five paragraphs. It's written in a poetic form. Every time you read the book, you'll interpret it in a new way. It doesn't mean the same thing over time. It was an inspiration for the creative act. One of the things I was hoping the creative act would do would have the same type of relationship to the reader that the Dao has. Because when you read the Dao, your interpretation of the Dao is what you take. And every time you read it, as you change, it changes. It's not changing, but it mirrors your changes. And that's interesting. It also makes it timeless. It's outside of time and space. It's a philosophical understanding of the world. And the person who wrote it wrote it with the same idea of these are the things he's noticed. There are loads of translations of the Dao and there are loads of iterations of the Dao that have been framed around a particular thing. There's the Dao of parenting. It's a book. The Dao of Pooh about Winnie the Pooh. The Dao of physics. So something that has been applied to particular things and it applies because it's universal. It can be applied to the particulars. It's like maybe applying the Dao to vibe coding is interesting. What is that?

I found it just through the original copy of the Dow. There was a bookstore I used to go to in LA called the Bodie Tree. It's not there anymore. It was my favorite bookstore. Probably went there three times a week and would just hang out in there. They had a new book section. I would always look at every one of the new books and then in addition to that just spend time in the space and looking at books and it was like the coolest library in the world.

That'd be amazing. That'd be amazing.

The first step was rereading the Dao and seeing how it could apply. And immediately on looking at it, it felt like it can work. And then at that point, I reached out to you and said, 'What do you think about this idea?' And I think you ran one of the chapters through chat GPT and you sent me a one-page like here's how AI does it. Yeah. And I read that and like hm it's not bad. It's like it proved the concept. And then I got about 14 different versions of the DAO, different translations. And I asked AI to I didn't put anything into AI. I asked AI chapter one of the DAO, how does that relate to vibe coding? What would be a version related to vibe coding? And I did that with six different AI engines, maybe more, because I feel like I had eight. I think I had eight different printouts from AI. All of them were different. plus 14 translations of the book. And that was sort of the working material. And I would read each one. And some eventually as time went further, I realized like many of the AIs what I was getting back ended up not being a consideration. Not not using it, but even the ones that were in consideration, it wasn't like I used the AI. It was like this is an interesting way to look at this part of it. It did something interesting here. That's a good clue. In the same way that I could look at three different translations and say, hm, one guy says it this way, one guy says it this way, this other person doesn't talk about it at all. Right? Then in other cases, you look at 10 versions and they all say exactly the same thing in the same words. It's like maybe there's less room for interpretation in those. It seems like everyone who's translating it sees it the same way. Maybe that's more solid, right? Whereas in some of them, they're unrecognizable. You read the same chapter in two different translations and they're not related at all.

I wanted to be the format of the Dao. So, it was true. Usually, the way the argument is made is done in the same order that it is in the Dao. It's the same sequence of ideas and then just finding the best way to say it. And the best way to say and the version I had before the real version, I'll call it the published version was much more heavy on vibe coding and I read it and it was funnier but it wasn't better. It felt more novelty, right? And I wanted to find the line where the idea is novel and the idea is funny. The idea of writing a book about something you don't know about. And Vibe Coding, as I said, was several weeks old at the time. Basing a book about something several weeks old on a 3,000-year old Chinese text. Right? It's a stretch. I also stopped all other work which I don't do because I'm always working on a lot of things and I have commitments and my days are pretty full and I stopped all of my professional work just to focus on this and I remember thinking the whole thing was ridiculous but I felt this urge or need to do it. Were there any funny conversations in that you had to tell an artist, 'I'm sorry, I can't work on your album. I'm writing a book about a six-week old meme based on a 3,000-year old text.'

There's another collaborative project that I've been working on for about 5 years, which is at sort of a critical point near the end where it's really coming together and it's on me to do a big chunk of work. And I was in the middle of that chunk of work when this happened and I decided to put that on hold. But again, I knew it was a short window in the context of a five-year project. Five weeks taken out of a 5-year project, it's not a big deal.

Yes. And I don't know what that means because I don't really know what coding is or what it does for you. Knowing what you just said means something specific for me. It's totally abstract, right? Means nothing. It's just ideas. Means nothing.

I think that certainly the word vibes and really the term vibe coding since it first came in, it's surpassed a lot of the other terms inside of AI. So I think that this is a notion that's with us now. Certainly the meme will come and go, but you've succeeded in I'm just saying this as a reader. Yeah. Creating something that will be worth reading because it's not full of jargon or

it's the DAO. It comes down to the joke idea changed as soon as the DAO got involved. I involved the DAO as a joke, but very quickly the Dow took over. Right? The Dow's not funny. It may be ridiculous at times. You may laugh at some of the things it says, but it's not a joke. Yeah. You know, it may say things that contradict your world view, but that's its power.

I started with the idea of it's going to have a lot of jargon. That's what makes it the vibe coding book instead of the DAO. But as I was reading it, it felt heavy-handed. It felt like it was somehow pandering to vibe coding. And then I thought about it's like if the person reading it already knows what vibe coding is, the vibe coding idea turns out to be the thing to get the reader in the door and then the DAO takes over. And it all applies. That's the other thing that's interesting about it. The information in the Dao. If you were a coder and you came across the Dao and you incorporated the philosophy of the Dao in your work, your work would improve. Once that was discovered through the process, it didn't have to rely on the jargon so much. The purpose of the jargon was only to get the coder to connect with the material. This was the part that surprised me because I think I went through exactly the same journey of thinking it was funny. Haha. Mhm.

coders will build the future of the world.