Rick Rubin & Intuition-Driven Building

`1:34:43`

our industry, plenty of our competitors, which I'm not going to name, that hire a lot of people and promise them a lot of stock, and you look at the chart, and it's down and to the right. And I feel bad for those people because they were promised something they'll never, ever get. So getting back to real, I want to pay people with real money they can actually put as a down payment for a home, pay for the college education for their kids, go on vacation, sock it away, whatever they want to do. This is real cash on an annual basis, and this is all part of a good business with sound fundamentals that has high margins and high profits and is an LLC, so we can distribute it every year. We have to, in fact, you can't leave any money in an LLC. You can, but you've got to pay taxes. Anyway... — I know. — You know what I... Just so, there's some pedantic person watching, you know.

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— The wrong show for this. I want to go back to Rick Rubin and you knowing yourself through this psychedelic experience, partially in your forties. Before you had that experience, what was your inner monologue like? Let's say, when you're running your business, you're 10 years into it, you're 35 years old at the time, did you have a negative inner monologue? — No, I think I was just more aggressive. I don't know how I'm coming off. I try to be pretty steady. — You're definitely not... No, you're like a soulful dude. — Okay, good. Okay. Well, I don't know. Like, I don't know. Sometimes I have a scowl, and — Yeah. — people think... I was probably a lot more aggressive... — No, it's not a scowl. The kids call it — Probably resting face... — RBF.RBF, Resting B**** Face. — oh, yeah. — You should see our photographer, Mike. — Yeah. — He sends me pictures of me, I'm like,

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"I'm happy!" — You're like, "I'm happy!" Exactly. — There are so many times where I'm like, — Yeah. — literally, we're having this conversation, — Yeah. — and this is how I know I'm going to do this for a long time, I'm like, "This is so much fun." "Can I do it again tomorrow?" — Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. — While we're talking. But, like, my face just, like... — I know. Yeah, anyway, I think I was more maybe aggressive, or I don't even... I kind of don't remember myself, actually. I'll just pull it back to something else, then I'll come back to this thing in my mid- thirties, perhaps. But we don't do post-mortems. I don't look back on things. I don't like to look back on things, actually. — Jimmy Iovine sat in that exact same chair, and he said, "I have no rear view mirror." — Yeah, but that's how I feel. — No trophy room. No, just like... — So you're like, "What were you like at 35?" Like, I don't... Probably more aggressive, but I don't really know. And I'll tell you why — Yeah. — I don't like to look backwards. First of all, backwards is a story you're telling yourself about what you remember

`1:37:00`

about something, and it's probably not true, and it's probably perverted in a million different ways. And there are a million different things that have happened to you that cause you to be the way you were. And all the things, like, I don't know what any of them are, and the reason I don't like the post-mortems in business, and I know a lot of businesses do this, they launch something, they spend all this time and energy looking back on it, trying to figure out why it did what it did. And my general sense is you'll have no effing idea why it did what it did. You're going to find some reasons that you're going to believe, but had you done that again, it may have turned out differently. Who knows? One little thing could have been different the world could have been different, the way you said something could have been different, who knows, right? If you want to find certainty, you're going to find it, because you'll convince yourself of it. I just don't have any interest in looking back.

`1:37:47`

I'd rather learn by doing something again, making more things. So if you draw a line, people are like, "Well, you should learn from your mistakes." I'm not sure what you can learn from them, frankly. I think you learn from moving forward and doing something. You learn by doing. You can't redo what you did, you learn by doing. So if you don't like something that you did, and you kind of have it in your head, just don't do that again. Like, that's the learning. It takes one second to know that, and move on, and learn by doing new things. So, I don't like to look back. Now, that's not like absolving myself of things I'm not proud of. That's who I was when I did the things, and that's that. So, I'm moving forward. — So, I want to pull up something. The reason I asked the question about the — Yeah. — negative inner monologue, it's very common with a lot of people.